SUITE: Tell me a little about your books and what genre they are
DAVID: I have been a mystery fan, a reader in the genre and writer of mysteries since I was a kid. My first two novels were mystery novels. The first was written when I was fifteen, the second when I was in my early twenties. Neither was published. I also have written a mystery play that is unproduced. My published novels have been what one could call "tough guy"; fiction. Only my latest book, The Fat Lady Sings, could be called a pure mystery, though all of my books have had elements of "noir" fiction. My first novel, The Quarterback, was about a professional football player. It was chosen by Robert Lypsite of The New York Times as one of his sports books of the year. My second novel was Paradise Road. It took place for the most part in Las Vegas and dealt with gamblers, hookers, and gangsters. It won a Mark Twain Journal award "for significant contribution to American literature," an award I later learned had been won by Ernest Hemingway for The Sun Also Rises. My third novel was Kabbalah, which is a kind of dark chase book, a thriller in the mode of Graham Greene's Brighton Rock and Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, two books that critics have compared it to. In that sense, Kabbalah is a detective book. Skyline, my last novel before The Fat Lady Sings, was an attempt at epic story telling, melding fictional with historical characters. It covered a period in America between 1920 and 1970 and dealt with prizefighters, gangsters, politicians, and business people.
SUITE: When did you first start writing? First start publishing?(short stories, books,etc)
DAVID: I hate to tell you how long I've been writing! As I said before, my first novel was written when I was fifteen. It was a mystery, strongly influenced by the Belgian novelist Georges Simenon's "Inspector Maigret" books, as well as James M. Cain, Ellery Queen, Sherlock Holmes, S.S. Van Dine, Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, and Dashiell Hammett, writers that I devoured as a kid. My second novel, also a mystery, Jake Baker Makes a Mistake, again was an attempt to establish a Maigret-like franchise. I was now in my early twenties and had read that Simenon wrote his books in two weeks so I wrote Jake Baker in about three. I couldn't get it published. I didn't give up on old Jake Baker (who was shabby, shambling, and rambling before Columbo!) and revisited him in my play, Jack-in-the-Box, some thirty years after he had made his mistake in that early, youthful novel. The play, which has a Sleuth-like intricacy, never caught the fancy of producers, despite the fact that I had had some success as a playwright. I'm beginning to think that perhaps Ol' Jake Baker doesn't have the right stuff, even though I am desperately fond of him. My first published work began to appear in the early 1960's. I landed a job-don't ask me how-writing pulp stories and soft-core pornography for men's magazines. I worked for an outfit called "Countrywide Publications" and they had a line of some seven or eight magazines including such gems as Adam, Dude, and Gent. They paid by the word, some ridiculously low fee-I don't know, was it a penny a word? Don't remember. But the only way I could earn a living was by writing an astounding number of stories. I became very adept at it. I had developed a code and perfected a technique, which permitted me to grind these stories out in astonishing abundance, while also satisfying the publishers needs and my own desire to keep sacred my dream of being a serious writer. It went something like this: I would never spend more than two and- a-half-hours on a story and would never re-write a word. The editor-in-chief would phone me with a title. I would swivel from the phone to my Remington portable and start banging the story out. I never had the foggiest idea of where I was going. All the stories were 2500 words and ran ten typewritten pages. At about page eight or nine, I would realize that I needed to come up with a snapper at the end and my unconscious would inevitably fling one up at me. My hallmark in those rags were stories of great color and energy, always with a smashing O'Henry end. I never used my real name, but wrote under a dozen or so pseudonyms. Often whole issues of the magazines were written by me under various names. My favorite was Osgood Scott-my middle name and my mother's maiden name. I'm eager to resurrect it and probably will some day. There's a script of mine that recently completed filming and from what I hear its just turkey enough to goose me into bringing back Osgood Scott.
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