The Weekly Screed (#728)

Sour grapes

By David Benjamin

“Never hurts to give us a crack at something… but we’re not going to publish a book narrated by a dog who ‘discourses on human/dog relations and canine theology while debating dog ethics with a poodle named Cupcake.’ That’s just not us…”

— Charles Ardai, editor, Hard Case Crime

The first query I sent for my new novel was to Charles Ardai at an offbeat publishing house that specializes in hardboiled noir. I’d been an Ardai fan since he started the imprint. While declining two of my manuscripts in the past, he’d been prompt, personal and courteous. I thought The Voice of the Dog well-suited to Hard Case Crime, because it contains a serial murderer and enough bloodshed, violence, profanity and misogyny to make Mickey Spillane blush — right up Ardai’s alley. Right?

Not quite. In less than two hours, Ardai apparently managed to digest my almost 7,000-word query, which included an obligatory cover letter, an artfully concise synopsis, the usual author bio and my first two chapters.

I rarely reply to a rejection. They’re pretty much water off a failure’s back. But my disappointment, with Ardai’s obvious haste to dismiss me once and for all, triggered an intemperate urge to talk back not so much to him, but to a publishing establishment that has enslaved itself to a set of formulae and literary cubbyholes that generate cash, shortchange readers and exasperate ink-stained wretches like me — sometimes to a point where we cry out in self-indulgent anguish.

Mr. Ardai:

I persist in believing that you’re a nice guy. This is despite your lightning rejection of my query about The Voice of the Dog. I suspect, actually, that you didn’t read anything beyond my synopsis — which I thought was a model of economy and compression that any professional editor would approve.

Your rejection summoned to my mind a host of familiar considerations. Perhaps the arbiters of publishing have always been genre-specific and pathologically vertical in their view of the market. I certainly can’t argue that this outlook is not shared by many readers, among whom I circulate more than you do. One of my frustrations is the frequent encounter with an allegedly “avid” bibliophile who intones to me the grave announcement that he or she “never reads fiction.”

In my experience, however, readers as a class are not nearly so narrowly focused and arbitrary as editors who insist on manuscripts that are not only easy to pigeonhole, but which are written intentionally to fit into pigeonholes. You favor authors, in essence, who have compromised their imagination in order to reflect the limited imagination of market-driven “literary” gatekeepers who themselves can’t, don’t or won’t take on the terrible risk of writing.

Of course, we both know that you have on occasion violated your pattern when the violation served to feather your nest. In my query to you, I cited two novels, The Colorado Kid and Memory. Each is a thoughtful, non-violent story far less true to your Hard Case, hardboiled formula than my ms. of The Voice of the Dog. Indeed, in Memory, there are no crimes or criminals, no private-eye or police-detective protagonist, no easy women. Just a brain-damaged man muddling through a haze of lost memories in search of a life he can never recover. It’s a heart-rending tragedy that you would never have considered were the author not Donald E. Westlake.

In the case of Memory, you wisely chose — based on the author’s notoriety — to break your own rule and follow a rule that’s been largely forgotten by a publishing establishment in which you were once a maverick, but where you’re now a burgher in good standing. For Westlake (and Stephen King), you conceded a principle that’s implicit among most rank-and-file readers: “A good story is a good story.”

People who read me — and there are a few — don’t know what to expect from one book to the next. Even when I work within a recognizable “genre,” I tend to deviate from formula, partly because the constraints of the formula are inconsistent with my definition of good prose, partly out of sheer orneriness.

Long after Jack Scovil took me on as one of his clients, I wondered why he had done so. After all, I’m a horizontal, eclectic writer in a business that has gone increasingly vertical, categorical and conservative (as you have done.)  The answer I arrived at was that Jack was a comfortable man who could “afford” me. He had enjoyed great success in his career and, as he grew older, he represented a few writers, regardless of their quirks, because he liked their work. He probably agreed to represent me not because of my commercial potential but despite it. I flatter myself with the belief that Jack regarded me as a writer with a unique talent and style whose very uniqueness would always pose problems for him as a salesman. He knew that, without an advocate, I would always face offhand rejections, like yours, from editors for whom a good story, well-told and unpredictable, has ceased to be the first priority.

But Jack had nothing to lose.

He never made much money on me. He might have broken even. But he read a lot of good stories and he gained two friends  — my wife and myself — who loved him to the end. Publishing used to have a little room for things like that. 

I won’t trouble you again. You needn’t reply. I do wish you well.

Peace,