DONIS CASEY: Write Errant

I am so happy to welcome as my April guest the ever-so-witty Alan Gordon. As Allison Montclair, he has written the Sparks and Bainbridge series: The Right Sort of Man [ALA Reading List Council’s Best Mystery of 2019], A Royal Affair, A Rogue’s Company, The Unkept Woman, The Lady From Burma, Murder at the White Palace (DorothyL’s Favorite Mystery of 2024), An Excellent Thing In a Woman, and more to come. As himself: The Fools’ Guild mysteries, starting with Thirteenth Night; as well as the Southern paranormal Where Werewolves Fear To Tread; and numerous short stories. On top of that, Alan is also a Kleban Prize-winning lyricist-librettist for several musicals, which have been performed or workshopped across the county. He lives in NYC.

The Skulls on the Spines
by Alan Gordon
AKA Allison Montclair

The library in my town was over the fire department, with a long set of wide, shallow stone stairs that seemed to take forever to climb. I still have a particular memory of the scent of the place, a peculiar yet somehow pleasant dusty smell. I was a voracious reader, and once I discovered a book I liked was part of a series, I would read every one the library had. The Stratemeyer Syndicate was made for kids like me, so I would devour the Hardy Boys, the Bobbsey Twins, and the like.

I was fortunate that my parents encouraged reading without censorship. And when I say without censorship, I remember them having me read the “Major Major” section of Catch-22 to them on a family trip when I was still in second grade. I read Kurt Vonnegut in third grade, and was given The Hobbit by my maternal grandmother that same year. The elementary school librarian, Mrs. Elliot, another encourager, showed me to the large hardcover copy of The Fellowship of the Ring, and the trilogy became an annual reread each summer.

Both my parents were readers. My mother favored mysteries, and my early exposure to Agatha Christie’s were cheap paperback editions, usually slightly swollen in the lower right corner because she would read them in the bathtub (her “office,” she called it) before passing them on. I had already gone through Sherlock Holmes and Encyclopedia Brown. I was ready to expand, so my mother said to me as sixth grade began, “I think you’re ready for Kafka.”

By a stroke of great fortune, the county built the new county library in our town. It lacked the musty, comforting smell of our town library, but compensated with shelves stretching up and beyond what I could read. I regarded that as a challenge. I would bike over in the afternoons, and head to the sections where the spines of the books were marked with small, red skulls. This was in the Seventies — there was no internet directing me, so I read indiscriminately, only guided by the lure of the tiny skulls, although my parents’ discoveries continued to be passed on. I discovered more authors I loved — Ross MacDonald, Nicholas Freeling, John D. MacDonald, Georges Simenon, Wahlöö and Sjöwall, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy Sayers, the great Tony Hillerman — and absolute hacks who I nevertheless binged on because they were there (John Creasey and his many variants, for example).

But the idea of writing mysteries was not in my sights yet. There were other writers out there, and my malleable adolescent mind was open for further expansion. I found it in a pair of Toms: Pynchon and Stoppard. Gravity’s Rainbow came out in 1973, and I read it like a fever dream. My mother dropped Rosencrantz and Guildernstern Are Dead in my lap which introduced me to Stoppard. Then his play Travesties came to Broadway. I was sixteen, and went in with a friend and a couple of student rush vouchers to see it. I emerged thinking, “I didn’t know you could do that with the English language.”

My ambition was to become some combination of Pynchon and Stoppard. The problem — they were encyclopedic in their knowledge and talent, and I wasn’t. Yet. So my goal in college was to acquire that knowledge and talent, and then I would write the Great American Novel.

Ah, I see you’ve been there as well.

A spasm of pragmatism sent me to law school after college instead of a career in literature. I kept reading in the breaks, filling in the gaps only to discover there were more gaps beyond them. I graduated and got a job, thinking I would write in the evenings. And that’s when I realized I still didn’t know enough to write the Great American Novel. So I thought, naively and arrogantly, let me start by writing a mystery. Those are easy.

Reader, they are not.

My first attempt at a mystery novel took me three years. To print out a completed chapter would take an entire night on fanfold paper coursing through my dot matrix printer. It never sold, it never will be sold, and I will never show it to anyone again.

But I learned from doing it. By this point, I had sold several short stories to genre magazines. An idea that had been lurking since college resurfaced: What if I took the characters from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night many years later, killed one, and made Feste, the jester, the detective?

This would require a realistic Medieval setting. Problem: I hadn’t studied Medieval History. But college had at least taught me how to learn. The research and writing took three and a half years. A short story, “The Jester and the Saint,” helped me nail down the character’s voice. Its inclusion in an anthology of historical mysteries led me to Keith Kahla, an editor at St. Martin’s Minotaur who agreed to read the book. And that’s how Thirteenth Night came to be published, followed by many more.

It was Keith who suggested I look into a real life marriage bureau started in London by two women in the late 1930’s, thinking it would be a nice match for my acquired historical research skills. By the time I got to the subway after that lunch, Iris Sparks and Gwen Bainbridge had formed and were chattering away inside my head. I moved the timing to the post-WWII period, which I found fascinating, and The Right Sort of Man was born. I’m now working on the ninth book in that series, and the ladies are still talking to me.

The Toms have apparently retired. I read Pynchon’s last book, saw Stoppard’s last play and loved them both. My hometown library was moved long ago to a new building by the Town Hall. But I still remember that dusty smell and the long climb up those stairs.

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visit Alan’s site at https://www.alan-gordon.com/)