MY MOTHER, MY aunts, my grandfather, and his mother and grandmother all told stories. Some of them were even true. I still remember the awesome tales about dragons, magic trees, and fearless princesses my mother told me when we were in jail.
My grandfather Vili, like many good Hungarians during Communist times, had also spent time in jail. He used to tell me long, historical stories set in past centuries, starring members of our family who seemed to be more interested in brandishing swords than in writing, but he believed their stories lived on in the telling. I had always sensed that the time would come when I would write about him and his strange tales—that book was The Storyteller—but in the early eighties, I was not yet ready to deal with my grandfather’s tales. His death was too recent.
Instead I wrote a murder mystery, set in the book business, starring a Canadian journalist and her childhood friend, a publishing executive in New York. It was territory I knew well and one I enjoyed skewering. The two leads were loosely based on people I knew, as were some of the dead bodies whose demises were investigated by my team of unlikely detectives.
I had so much fun writing the book that I had quite forgotten one of the basics of mystery writing: you have to know, in advance, who the culprit is, so you can tie up the loose ends in the end. I was close to four hundred pages when I realized that no one in the book could possibly have been responsible for all the murders. Ken Lefolii read the manuscript, and while he enjoyed the writing, he noted that it was important I should present a plausible killer and plant hints throughout. Mystery lovers did not like some new character sprung on them at the last minute. They needed a chance to guess who had “done it.” I had to go back to the beginning and rewrite the entire manuscript! The lesson I learned was that the author always had to be in on the secrets, even if she chose not to show her hand.
After I had rewritten it, John Irwin published Hidden Agenda in 1985, another wretched year for Jack at M&S, but he sent me an enormous bouquet of flowers, even though he suspected that at least one of the victims was based on him. My editor, John Pearce, was able to sell rights in some fifteen countries. I was presented with two copies of the Japanese edition at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
When I began to write my second mystery, Mortal Sins, I knew who had done the deed and why. That made the process less exciting for me, since I knew where the story was going, but it was easier not to have to guess what the end would be.
Both mysteries feature a journalist and a book publisher. The journalist is a little like Marjorie Harris. I even used Marjorie’s Annex neighbourhood street in Toronto. The character is also a little like me. I used bits of my own life, such as the scene where Judith sits on the floor between her two children’s beds, making sure they are breathing.
The publisher, Marsha, is a little like Carole Baron of Dell-Delacorte and a little like I might have been, had I accepted Marc Jaffe’s suggestion and moved to New York. I admired Carole because she fought hard for her authors and never backed down even when her bosses insisted she should stop being pushy. Marsha attends the kinds of sales conferences I went to in New York when I was with Seal. She works in corporate offices not unlike Bantam’s and tries to persuade her tougher-minded colleagues on Fifth Avenue (yes, that’s where Bantam’s head office was) that books are more than just “units” and the author is more than just one of the “elements” that make a saleable “product.”