Scribblers (17 page)

“I think that they are very helpful to people like me who are not exactly brand names, because it gives readers a way to try my work. The people who go to those kind of stores are avid readers. Oftentimes, they'll pick up a new author, and they'll find they like that author, and they'll go and buy all their books. So, to me, it's an advertising thing. Some of the people who read romance read five or six books a week. They're just amazing! And they'll buy new books, and they'll buy used books—they'll do both.”

Toward the end of our conversation, I make an error of definition when I try to trace Jill's career. “You started out with three historical novels, then went to mainstream romance. Lately, it seems you've gone to gothics. Are you just trying out different styles?”

“Now, I do not write historical novels. None of my books are historical. They are about contemporary people that get involved with a secret from the past, whether the secret's about Emily Brontë or a magical perfume.

“But you've hit my Achilles heel, and I'll tell you why. If you're a genre writer, you really need to be consistent in doing kind of the same thing over and over and over. And I did, the first three. But one thing kind of morphed into
another, and it was a mistake for me to do that, because after nine books, I had gone from romance with a historical aspect to suspense novels. And that's where I really would like to be. I never did see myself as a romance writer so much, because I like romantic suspense.

“Pocket Books has just asked me to write straight suspense now, so I'm pretty happy about that. It's still genre, it's still commercial fiction, but I'd rather be a suspense writer than a romance writer. It took me nine books to figure that out.”

“We had our honeymoon out here, the bride and I. And then we were coming two or three times a year, and eventually spending weeks at a time.”

Randy Russell is telling me how he came to settle in the North Carolina mountains.

“I find it's the perfect place to … I hesitate to say ‘be a writer,' because that's kind of limiting. But it's a community where it's pretty well accepted that many people are interested in things other than their day jobs.

“My wife and I had a fellow put roofs on the front and back of our house so we could build decks under them. I work at home, so I was here when they were working. One day, I went out, and they're both on the roof, about to finish it, and the fellow in charge turned to me and said, ‘Randy, you know, I'm really an artist. I'm not a carpenter.'

“In Asheville, that's normal. That's more than normal. It's what just about everyone will tell you.”

I know Randy from editing a couple of folklore collections he put together for my company. But I'm more
interested in what he did before he came to us—the series of genre mysteries he wrote for Bantam/Doubleday around 1990. I want to know how he got his shot at the big time, and why he ultimately fell out of the running.

“I started out in poetry. While I was still in school, I had the
Paris Review
take two poems. It was the highlight of my life, and I got thirty-five dollars. At one point, I just sat down as I was getting out of school and started thinking, ‘I've got to learn what book-length writing is,' and that's when I decided to write a mystery, because that was something I enjoyed reading.

“My editor at Bantam, when he saw my first manuscript, rejected it based on three or four problems. And I addressed those and sent it back to him, and he took the manuscript. Now, I think part of that was my willingness to follow his suggestions. I think he honestly believed in and improved the book.

“The first Rooster Franklin mystery was first person, and my editor said, ‘This is fun. This is an interesting character, but it's not a series character.' So for the second book, I wrote an entirely different character, another set of circumstances. It was still set in Kansas City, and I wrote it in third person. As that was going through production, the first book got a really nice review in the
New York Times,
and they reprinted it, and it got an Edgar nomination. And so the publisher decided suddenly that the only thing that anyone would be interested in reading was the same character again.

“Now, I'd completed this book and turned it in and been paid for it, and I got the phone call: ‘We want you to change this to Rooster Franklin and take it back to first person and
make it your second Rooster Franklin book.' And being a cocky kid, I said no. So they let me keep the advance and killed the contract on that book. But at the same time, I'd been working on a third one, and I sent that in, and I got a contract for two more. So my third one actually became my second one, and the one they had rejected I went ahead and switched back to Rooster Franklin. They bought it, but they had to buy it again.

“To tell you the truth, to have a fiction manuscript accepted—I'm sure you might sympathize with this—and have them say, ‘Change the main character, and change it from third to first person,' to me was writing a whole new book, so that's mainly why I said no.

“Steve, these people don't care about ten, fifteen thousand dollars. Do you know what I mean? At the time, I thought, ‘Boy, I'm something. I taught them a lesson.' But it's not anything they probably spent more than ten minutes thinking about. It's funny.”

Randy knows about
funny.
He's a big man with a big, rich laugh that he employs frequently. His mystery hero—Alton Benjamin “Rooster” Franklin, GED—bears the name of one of his best real-life friends, though that friend doesn't share the fictional Rooster's penchant for car boosting, gun play, and womanizing. Other friends appear, dressed and undressed, under their actual names, too. But being Randy's buddies, they don't particularly mind.

“To Steve, another obscure title for your home!” reads the inscription on my copy of one of his mysteries.

My favorite Randy Russell story involves the time he was mistakenly booked as a dog psychologist on a live,
hour-long radio call-in program in Kansas City. Not learning of the error until he was on the air, he decided to fulfill his obligation, figuring that dog psychology isn't much different from human psychology—another subject he admits to knowing little about.

“Either your roommate or your dog must go,” he advised one caller. “And we both know dogs are unable to pay rent elsewhere. Besides, your roommate doesn't jump on your bed and lick your face in the morning, does he?”

He told an attorney to get on all fours to commiserate with his cocker spaniel. “Try wiggling your rear end a little bit. That's a sign of confidence among dogs. And don't be afraid to show your teeth.”

One caller expressed concern that her dog was afraid of birds.

“He should be,” Randy opined. “Didn't you see that Hitchcock movie? Lots of dogs did.”

A woman complained that her dog had a habit of drinking from the toilet. “My husband never puts the lid down,” she said.

“What lid?”

One caller wanted to know how to stop her dog's barking.

“Dogs respond to positive rewards much more effectively than they respond to punishment. Whenever your dog isn't barking, give him a cookie.”

Randy didn't get a return engagement.

“Why did you stop writing mysteries?” I ask him. “Too much deadline pressure?”

“No, they didn't sell well enough. My editor went to take over the Book-of-the-Month Club, and I got tossed to
another editor. But it was mainly just because there wasn't money for the publisher. Four books is a pretty good test run, and it didn't climb the ladder. When my editor left, there was nobody left to support me, nobody in the accounting department who was going to show up at the board meeting and say, ‘Keep publishing the guy' And that's commercial fiction. That's a whole different approach from an editor who is grooming a major literary talent, and they know they're not going to make a lot of money off of them. But when you do commercial mysteries, they sink or swim, and most of them sink, financially, for the publishers.

“That's part of it. The whole trend in mysteries at that time was, though I hate to use the phrase, the
female sleuth.
Romance writers were moving over to mysteries and finding success, and all these little mystery bookstores were opening up, which generally were catering to women. People started finding out that women bought most of the books.

“The reason I can't say hard-boiled hit a wall is because the top guys kept selling. I mean, Elmore Leonard doesn't have any problems.”

“So that was the end of the line?” I ask.

“I had an offer to do a police procedural—a bunch-of-cops type of story. I started to work on that, and I had no interest in it whatsoever. And of course, I was thinking I could do something else that I was more inclined to do and sell that instead of doing what they'd asked me to do. And I kind of quickly learned that when publishers ask you for something, your best bet is to go with it, if you want to continue to publish with them.”

Now, Randy writes what he likes to write, and at a pace of his own choosing.

“I was thinking when I turned fifty, I'd write another mystery novel—I mean, a basic crime story. I do still consider myself a writer. I live a writer's life of the mind. I live a life of my own mythology, which I probably spend more time creating and honing than I do anything I've written or will write. The environment here and the people both contribute to that. I find it easy here. But I don't think I'll return to mysteries. Lots of people I've met have made very good livings doing it, and a lot of friends starved doing it.”

His day job, such as it is, involves researching Southern antiquities and attending estate sales and auctions. He acquires personal artifacts and then sells them through direct contacts or via the Internet.

“That's where I concentrate in my historical antiques—my life that actually makes money. Prominence is about the only thing I care about. Southern estates, basically. There's rewards for research into these area, let me put it that way.

“Any antique that's a hundred years old, if it's just sitting on a shelf, has a certain value. But if you can learn who owned it and where they lived, and then perhaps find a photo in their photo album of them with that object, it's worth three times as much.

“And part of it is that stories become attached to artifacts, and I think people enjoy that. I know I do. When I sell something, I think I'm selling a story. And so that's what I do when I go to estate sales and hang out at auctions. I'm actually in some sense robbing the dead, because a lot of that stuff comes to auction when people pass away. I do
collect people's lives that way. You know, there's a couple of university collections here in North Carolina that have benefited from my efforts.

“When I go to the barbershop and the barber says, ‘What do you do for a living?' it's like I can't think of a thing to tell him. And the only answer I've come up with, which I have not had the courage yet to speak to a stranger, is to say, ‘I collect people's lives.' ”

I have doubts about contacting Bill Brooks. Has he heard about the writers' group tiff? Is it right for me to turn around and ask him for help now?

Since I wrote about him in the writers' group minutes, I've met Bill at an autographing and had him sign one of his books for me. He's also submitted a portion of a novel to my company. We rejected it, but no ill feelings ensued. In fact, he wrote us a classy note thanking us for our time.

I feel my manuscript would profit from another genre writer's input, and I'd be a coward not to pursue Bill: that's what finally decides the issue. He can tell me to kiss off if he wants.

When I finally get hold of him, he couldn't be more accommodating.

“You're up to, what, eleven titles now?” I ask him.

“Well, I have ten published, and I have five more that'll be coming out in the next nine months,” he tells me.

Bill came to the area from Arizona. His father's family's roots are in Knoxville in eastern Tennessee, so moving to Asheville “was kind of like coming home for me.” In Arizona, Bill worked as a guide, taking tourists into the
mountains in a Jeep. His principal career before taking up teaching and writing was in health care. He began as a respiratory therapist and later set up cardiopulmonary departments in hospitals. “Before that, I had done all kinds of jobs—shoe sales, shipyards. Typical writer's background.

“From the time I was a kid, I always had a vast interest in Western culture. Of course, back in those days, there were a lot of cowboy movies. I found the history of the West from about 1800 to the late 1800s to be pretty fascinating because of all the famous and infamous characters of that period.

“When I decided to become a writer back in eighty-nine, I had no idea. They always say, ‘Write what you know,' and at that point, I didn't think I knew hardly anything worth writing about. And I did a little research and found out that genre writing was still the easiest way to get published. And then it dawned on me that I did know something, and that was American history. So I thought, ‘Well, I'll write a Western.' And I did that, and actually sold it to the second publisher I sent it to.”

Bill's first nine books were genre shoot-'em-ups, after which he decided to make the leap to mainstream literary fiction with a Western bent.

“I was just getting tired of writing that stuff. And I'd always been fascinated by Billy the Kid. I did a little research and found out more books were written on Billy the Kid than on George Washington. So I knew that if I was going to take on that subject, I had to have something unique. And the mystery of Pat Garrett's death was a real hook for the editor.”

Pat Garrett was the sheriff who ambushed Billy the
Kid in 1881. But since the killing took place in a darkened cabin, and since the speedy burial prevented a careful identification, it has long been speculated that someone other than Billy was the victim that night.