Kill Your Darlings Read Free

worth reading.”
    That was generous of him.
    “Do you have your room key, Mr. Kane?”
    “In my pocket,” he said, getting it. “The Mick’s worth reading, too, but don’t tell ’im I said so. And John D. And Culver’s good.”
    “Yes.”
    “And me. I’m still worth reading.”
    “I know you are.”
    “And so are you, kid. You are, too.”
    I smiled, and felt some ambiguous emotion stir in me; I wrote mystery novels myself, in no small part because I had dreamed of being as good as this man one day. I certainly didn’t deserve being listed in the exalted company Roscoe had mentioned; and Roscoe knew it—he was just being nice, or as nice as that cantankerous old bastard was capable of being.
    Still, hearing him say that felt like getting an A from your favorite teacher—even if your favorite teacher did happen to be dead drunk.
    “Thanks, Mr. Kane.”
    “G’night, kid.”
    That was the last time I saw him alive.

2
    I was on my way back down to the bar, to see if I could drink enough to lose the sad taste in my mouth, when the elevator doors slid open on the fourth floor and Tom Sardini, wearing an off-white shirt and dark slacks and a preoccupied expression, climbed aboard the otherwise empty cubicle. As usual, youthful, handsome Tom (handsome in a baby-face way he tried unsuccessfully to mask with a beard, the mustache of which never seemed wholly grown in) had a glazed look behind his black-rimmed glasses, as if even now he was working on his latest story.
    Which he probably was. Sardini, at thirty years of age, was the current Fastest Typewriter in the East, turning out crime novels and westerns and an occasional spy novel (under various pseudonyms), as well as his “top of the line” books about private eye/ex-boxer Jacob Miles (under his own name), at an alarming rate. He worked so fast and wrote so much that writer friends of his told him to slow down, pretending (to themselves as well as Tom) to be worried about his health, while envying his productivity. Tom, meanwhile, sat at his typewriter in his Brooklyn home, writing, collecting royalty checks, quietly turning into a corporation.
    “Okay, then,” I said, “
don’t
speak.”
    “Mal?” he asked, brightening. “I didn’t recognize you!”
    “I don’t mean to be a pest or anything. You probably got a book to write between here and the ground floor.”
    He grinned and I grinned and we shook hands.
    “It’s been a long time,” he said.
    “It was another Bouchercon in Chicago, as I recall,” I said. “Many moons ago.”
    “You had longer hair then, and a mustache.”
    I gestured toward his own ever-scraggly mustache/beard and writerly unruly hair. “I looked around and noticed that all the old men had long hair and facial whiskers, and the kids were wearing short, punky hair.”
    “So you got a haircut. What else is there to do in Port City, Iowa?”
    The elevator doors slid open and we walked toward the nearby lounge.
    “I keep busy,” I said. “I know you New Yorkers find it hard to believe a writer can actually get ideas in Iowa.”
    We walked into the lounge; Pete Christian and Tim Culver were gone, and Brett Murtz had hopped to another table, where he and several people I didn’t recognize had cornered William Campbell Gault, giving him an eager, fannish interrogation. Gault, a dignified but unpretentious man in his early seventies, was the author of a number of fine tough-guy mystery stories, though he was also noted for his sports-oriented young-adult novels.
    Tom and I found a table, and the same barmaid who’d helped Roscoe Kane stay knee-deep in Scotch took our orders; I was drinking Pabst from bottles, and Tom was, too, since I was paying. The barmaid was trying for another five-buck tip.
    “You know,” Tom said, picking up on the Iowa motif, “I somehow can’t shake the image of you sitting in a cornfield, ascarecrow looking over your shoulder while you perch on a crate writing stories on lined paper with a