the moment I came into the house, a uniformed patrolman in deep conversation with Maureen, our resident card reader, on a couch in the corner. Since they were holding hands and gazing meaningfully into each other’s eyes, I didn’t think Maureen was in any great danger of getting arrested for fortune-telling, so I tiptoed upstairs and fell into bed.
2
To compensate for the late hours, I usually don’t arrive at the office until between ten and ten-thirty. Brass tries to make it by eleven. Normally after I get up and ablute, I make a small pot of coffee and spend the next hour at the old Underwood on the desk under my window, working at my novel—can’t be a novelist without writing a novel. But this morning I stared at the last page I had done—thirty-two—and decided to put aside the manuscript and let it age. Perhaps it would improve with age. It was a slice-of-life story called “So Breaks a Heart—A Saga of Broadway.” It was about a young man who works for a famous columnist and what he learns about life and women and other things and how he has his heart broken by a girl who loves him but cannot be faithful to any man.
It was autobiographical, but it was sappy and it didn’t read true. I think the reason truth is stranger than fiction is that when it is written as fiction, it is not believable.
When a random stranger—say someone you meet at a party—finds out you’re a writer, even a would-be novelist like myself, one of the first questions is always “Where do you get your ideas?” My friend Bill Welsch, a regular contributor to
Black Mask
, claims they are mailed to him on postcards from a fellow in New Jersey named Bodo. The truth is that ideas for plots and characters are constantly flung at you by life, and your job is merely to catch them, sort them, and throw back the ones that are undersized. It isn’t the ideas that are the problem, it’s arranging them in a lifelike and realistic manner within the story. The task is one of selection, organization, and staying far enough removed from the material so that it will read like the truth. Truth in fiction is an artfully contrived facade.
I considered the problems of being a writer as I got dressed, and wondered whether
The Writer
or
Writer’s Digest
would be interested in an article by one of America’s major unpublished novelists.
I washed, brushed, and dressed in a brown single-breasted suit that said, or at least strongly implied, “man of the world,” and had set me back thirty-five dollars, and was headed downstairs, trench coat over my arm, by quarter to nine. I walked along Central Park West, observing the pigeons, sparrows, squirrels, small children and their nannies, and other fauna, and thinking over the state of the world and trying to decide what sort of book to attempt next. Starting a novel is easy. Taking it to completion is, for me so far, a distant goal. Perhaps I should switch to short stories or squib fillers for newspapers. Who knows—I might write the Great American Squib.
My thoughts moved, mercifully, on to the missing Two-Headed Mary. The lady was a true Broadway character of the sort that Damon Runyon might write about. Telling her tale would present certain problems in delicacy and restraint, but Alexander Brass had solved worse. In his coverage of the Hall-Mills case a decade ago, he had managed to convey what the minister and his choir singer were doing in their time alone together with mostly biblical references, and without getting more than a couple of dozen letters from readers whose sensibilities were offended (but who nonetheless had read every word). Theodore Garrett, Brass’s man-of-all-work, had done a montage of those letters, and it hung in the entrance hall to Brass’s apartment.
Brass had two people working for him in his office on the sixteenth floor of the
New York World
building on Tenth Avenue and 59th Street. There was Gloria Adams, his researcher and copy editor, who doubled as the
2
To compensate for the late hours, I usually don’t arrive at the office until between ten and ten-thirty. Brass tries to make it by eleven. Normally after I get up and ablute, I make a small pot of coffee and spend the next hour at the old Underwood on the desk under my window, working at my novel—can’t be a novelist without writing a novel. But this morning I stared at the last page I had done—thirty-two—and decided to put aside the manuscript and let it age. Perhaps it would improve with age. It was a slice-of-life story called “So Breaks a Heart—A Saga of Broadway.” It was about a young man who works for a famous columnist and what he learns about life and women and other things and how he has his heart broken by a girl who loves him but cannot be faithful to any man.
It was autobiographical, but it was sappy and it didn’t read true. I think the reason truth is stranger than fiction is that when it is written as fiction, it is not believable.
When a random stranger—say someone you meet at a party—finds out you’re a writer, even a would-be novelist like myself, one of the first questions is always “Where do you get your ideas?” My friend Bill Welsch, a regular contributor to
Black Mask
, claims they are mailed to him on postcards from a fellow in New Jersey named Bodo. The truth is that ideas for plots and characters are constantly flung at you by life, and your job is merely to catch them, sort them, and throw back the ones that are undersized. It isn’t the ideas that are the problem, it’s arranging them in a lifelike and realistic manner within the story. The task is one of selection, organization, and staying far enough removed from the material so that it will read like the truth. Truth in fiction is an artfully contrived facade.
I considered the problems of being a writer as I got dressed, and wondered whether
The Writer
or
Writer’s Digest
would be interested in an article by one of America’s major unpublished novelists.
I washed, brushed, and dressed in a brown single-breasted suit that said, or at least strongly implied, “man of the world,” and had set me back thirty-five dollars, and was headed downstairs, trench coat over my arm, by quarter to nine. I walked along Central Park West, observing the pigeons, sparrows, squirrels, small children and their nannies, and other fauna, and thinking over the state of the world and trying to decide what sort of book to attempt next. Starting a novel is easy. Taking it to completion is, for me so far, a distant goal. Perhaps I should switch to short stories or squib fillers for newspapers. Who knows—I might write the Great American Squib.
My thoughts moved, mercifully, on to the missing Two-Headed Mary. The lady was a true Broadway character of the sort that Damon Runyon might write about. Telling her tale would present certain problems in delicacy and restraint, but Alexander Brass had solved worse. In his coverage of the Hall-Mills case a decade ago, he had managed to convey what the minister and his choir singer were doing in their time alone together with mostly biblical references, and without getting more than a couple of dozen letters from readers whose sensibilities were offended (but who nonetheless had read every word). Theodore Garrett, Brass’s man-of-all-work, had done a montage of those letters, and it hung in the entrance hall to Brass’s apartment.
Brass had two people working for him in his office on the sixteenth floor of the
New York World
building on Tenth Avenue and 59th Street. There was Gloria Adams, his researcher and copy editor, who doubled as the