Resume Speed and Other Stories

Author’s Foreword

Resume Speed.

And other stories.

You know, I get that far and suddenly I’m at a loss for words. On the one hand, I’ve said it all. On the other, well, what is there to say?

I’ve been trying to find a common element uniting the seven works of fiction in this book. There would seem to be three: I wrote them all, they’re all comfortable under the broad canopy of crime fiction, and until now they haven’t been collected. The earliest story was written in 1960, which is 58 years ago as I write these lines, and could slip even further into the past by the time you read them. Another came three years later. A third was written in the 1990s, lost for twenty years or more, and first published in 2016. The other four were written and published within the past several years.

So why don’t I take them one at a time? A little trip down Memory Lane, undertaken while I still have some of my memory available to me, might be of some interest.

Hard Sell. Craig Rice was a very interesting woman, and an inventive and highly idiosyncratic writer. Her name at birth was Georgiana Ann Randolph Craig (although rumors advanced several other possible birth names for her, my own favorite of which was Craig Craig). She was born in 1908 and died in 1957, and there’s plenty more I could spoon-feed you, but in this miraculous era of Google and Wikipedia I’m happier letting you dig it out on your own.

I never met Craig, but she was represented by Scott Meredith while I was working there, and I heard stories about her and was close friends with the late Lawrence Janifer (then Larry M. Harris) who knew her and wrote a continuation of her John J. Malone series — The Pickled Poodles — after her death. (He got a byline on the book; earlier, when Craig wrote novels serialized in magazines, and failed to deliver the last chapter, he finished what she had started, but anonymously.)

Craig had a powerful thirst, which explains the undelivered final chapters and the short lifespan. After her death, Evan Hunter completed a book of which she had written about half, with no note to indicate where she planned to go with it. Evan thus had to solve the mystery in order to write it, and did so; the book, published as The April Robin Murders, bore the joint byline “by Craig Rice and Ed McBain.”

Meanwhile, Larry Janifer went to work on The Pickled Poodles, published in 1960. And that was the same year that I was commissioned to write a John J. Malone short story, to be published in Ed McBain’s Mystery Magazine. “Hard Sell” was the result. It appeared in the first issue of the magazine, and another story of mine, “Package Deal,” was in the magazine’s third issue. There was, alas, no fourth issue.

Years later, “Package Deal” found its way into a collection of my earliest crime stories, One Night Stands and Lost Weekends. I might have included “Hard Sell,” but it was still known to be a Craig Rice story, and wound up in Murder, Mystery and Malone, edited by Jeffrey Marks and published in 2002 by Crippen & Landru. I let C&L know that I’d written “Hard Sell,” and the word has been spread since then in various bibliographies. So, now that the cat is out of the clear plastic bag, it seems appropriate to tuck the story into a collection of my work.

Dead to the World. I was living in a suburb of Buffalo when I wrote this story. It owes existence to a fact I’d come across. That works very well at times; within a very short span of time I learned two interesting facts — that there were some individuals who did not sleep at all, perhaps because their hypothetical sleep center had been somehow rendered inoperative, and that there was still a Stuart pretender to the English throne. (The last reigning Stuart monarch was Anne, who died in 1714. The Jacobite cause essentially ended with the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie at Culloden in 1745. But, well, you never know.)

Those two facts would appear to have nothing much to do with one another, but my having happened on them at around the same time evidently had an effect. In time I came up with a fellow whose sleep center had been destroyed by North Korean shrapnel, and who spent his sleepless days and nights as a passionate devotee of lost causes, including that of the Stuart pretender. I named him Evan Tanner and wrote a book about him, The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep, and seven more books followed at irregular intervals.

Back to “Dead to the World.” The idea that gave rise to it was the dangerous synergy of alcohol and sedative drugs. I wrote the story, a short-short, and by the time I’d finished it I’d decided that it wasn’t much of an idea, and that I hadn’t produced all that much of a story.

So I came up with another idea, this one for what you might call a marketing plan. I retyped the first page, changing the byline from Lawrence Block to Sharon Wood Jeffries, and sent it off to Henry Morrison, who was then working for Scott Meredith, of whose agency I was a client. (Some years earlier I’d been an employee myself, spending my days reading over-the-transom manuscripts, one worse than the next. I learned a great deal at that job. Some of what I learned was about the writing of fiction, while much was about the practice of chicanery.)

A few days later Henry called to say that he’d read the story, that he didn’t think all that highly of it, and who the hell was Sharon Wood Jeffries?

“A schoolteacher,” I said, “or possibly a librarian. She’s never had anything published, so it’s a perfect opportunity to submit it to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Their Department of First Stories might be receptive to a story that’s a little weak — judging by some of the ones they’ve run.”

Henry took a deep breath, and then another one. “No,” he said. “We draw the line at that.”

This was astonishing information, because I’d been under the impression that Scott Meredith didn’t draw the line at anything. Henry said he’d try the story a couple of places, and we left it at that. The first place he tried it was Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. AHMM and EQMM have been under a single roof since 1975, but back in the day AHMM was the creature of a company called HSD Publications, based in South Florida. Henry had sent them several stories of mine, and they bought them more often than not, and they bought this one. He may have told them it was my work, or he may not have bothered, even as he hadn’t bothered to change the byline. At any rate it appeared in their issue for June, 1963, with Sharon’s name on it — but they’d somehow excised her maiden name. She was now plain Sharon Jeffries.

And this was her first published story — and, sad to say, her last. By now I feel certain she’s retired from that school or library. Perhaps she’s living in Florida, not far from where they used to publish AHMM...

Never mind. I’d have collected “Dead to the World” before, as I could surely have found a place for it in Enough Rope, but I lost track of it entirely. Then I thought about it and asked about it, having remembered the byline even though I’d long since forgotten the title. Somebody sent me a photocopy, and I thought I ought to be able to do something with it, but that would require typing it up to get it in electronic form. So I put it in a box of stuff and forgot about it all over again.

Some hours ago, I came across it while I was going through that very box of stuff. “Oh, what the hell,” I said, and sat down and typed it up.

And here it is.

Whatever It Takes. Here’s another lost story, which I must have written in the late ’80s or early ’90s. It was certainly before I started using a computer, because I found a typescript of it in another box of stuff, along with a photocopy. That’s what I would do then, type my work and get it copied before delivering the original to my agent. (Not too many years before that I’d have made a carbon copy. Do you remember carbon paper? Does anybody?)

If I’m going to lose a story, I generally wait until after it’s published. But I lost “Whatever It Takes” before any editor got a chance to see it. Instead of taking it to my agent, or sending it somewhere on my own, I put it away — and completely forgot about it.

And then, twenty-plus years later, I was going through boxes of old manuscripts with an eye toward selling what I could to collectors. And there was my photocopy of “Whatever It Takes,” and so was the original, typed on high-quality white bond paper.

I scanned the manuscript and sent the scan to Linda Landrigan at AHMM. She liked it, bought it, and found a home for it in the December 2016 issue.

Then I turned around and sold the manuscript to a collector.

I Know How to Pick ’Em was written for Dangerous Women, an original anthology edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois. I’d have included it in my 2013 collection, Catch and Release, but the deal with the anthologists kept me from publishing it anywhere until a year after their book came out. I did ePublish it after an appropriate interval, and it got mostly nice reviews, although I see now that a couple of readers absolutely hated it.

This was my second contribution to a Martin & Dozois collection. Earlier, for Warriors, I turned to Kit Tolliver, about whom I’d written three short stories; she’d already begun a career as a robber and serial murderer of her sexual partners, and in “Clean Slate” we get her backstory, and she gets her mission in life — to hunt down the five ex-lovers who’d escaped with their lives, and, um, kill them. By the time I finished “Clean Slate” I realized I was four chapters into a novel, and that I was crazy about Kit and wanted to tell her story in full.

The novel was Getting Off, and it was great fun to write. I rather doubt that there’ll be more about the narrator-protagonist of “I Know How to Pick ’Em.” But one never knows.

Autumn at the Automat. A couple of years ago I got a compelling idea from out of nowhere: an anthology of stories inspired by the paintings of Edward Hopper. I came up with a title, In Sunlight or in Shadow, cajoled a magnificent troupe of writers to pick paintings and write stories, and thought I really ought to pick a painting and write a story myself.

Hopper’s work is wonderfully evocative. He’s not a narrative painter, and his paintings don’t tell stories. What they do, and more than any other artist I know, is suggest that there are stories to be told.

So I let Google Images show me more of his paintings than I’ll ever have the chance to see on museum walls, and many of them spoke to me, but none of what they said seemed to me to be the stuff of fiction. Which is to say I didn’t get any story ideas out of them.

And then, looking at Automat, I got a whole story in a rush. I knew exactly who that woman was, and what she was doing in that restaurant. That was the story I wanted to write, the story I had to write, and there was only one problem. Another writer, Kristine Kathryn Roush, had already selected Automat.

At the time, my wife and I were on an extended Holland America cruise of the North Atlantic. The ship had good Wi-Fi, and I emailed Kris, explained my situation, and asked her how far she’d gotten on the story. If she’d started writing, or if she had a compelling story idea, I’d find another painting. But if she was at all tentative about it—

She replied very graciously, saying she’d picked Automat because she’d had to make a selection, but she was by no means committed to it and could as easily choose something else. (And she did, turning in the magnificent “Still Life 1931,” a powerful story of a civil rights activist years before the term existed.)

Meanwhile, I sat down in my cabin on the Veendam and wrote “Autumn at the Automat” in two days. That was in August of 2015, and sixteen months later Pegasus Books published In Sunlight or in Shadow, and in the months that followed my Automat story was nominated for just about everything short of a run for a Senate seat. Time after time I got to tell myself that having been nominated was honor enough, as that’s what you’re supposed to tell yourself when someone else wins, which is what kept happening. But in April 2017 I sat at the Pegasus table at Mystery Writers of America’s annual awards dinner, and was gobsmacked when my story won an Edgar.

So here it is.

Gym Rat. Jonathan Santlofer, who somehow manages to operate with sheer virtuosity as both a writer and a fine artist, is also a good friend. Now and again he’s written stories for my anthologies and I for his. He works closely with the Center for Fiction, an extraordinary resource in the process now of relocating from East 47th Street to downtown Brooklyn. But they hadn’t yet begun the move when Jonathan invited me to participate in a project.

It had a couple of parts to it. First, I’d read two stories written by participants at the Crime Fiction Academy, a project of the Center for Fiction. I’d pick one of them. Then I’d write a story of my own, and it would be combined with the story I’d chosen and published as an ebook. The Center for Fiction would get half the net income, which is nice, as they’re a good cause. I’m a pretty good cause myself, and I’d get the other half.

I read the two Crime Fiction Academy finalists; both were excellent, but “The Murder Club” by Matt Plass was my choice. Then I forgot about it — do you notice a pattern here? — until Jonathan reminded me that the deadline was looming. I found myself thinking about some of the fellows I’d noticed at my gym, where I go as often as possible to raise and lower heavy objects to no apparent purpose.

And an idea for a story emerged. And I started writing, and the story took root and grew, until it came it at over 10,000 words. So I suppose it would be okay to call it not a story but a novelette. What I called it was “Gym Rat.” In tandem with “The Murder Club,” it was ePublished in December of 2016. And every now and then I get a check, which is always nice.

I probably could have sent it to a magazine, but, well, I never got around to it, so its sole existence has been electronic. How nice to be able to tuck it into a book!

Resume Speed. I see I’ve nattered on a bit about the way ideas for stories are generated and develop. And that serves as a good lead-in to this volume’s title story. I know exactly when the germ of the idea was planted.

Well, almost exactly. 1978, I think, but I could be off by a year. It would have been a Sunday night, though, because there was a group that met on Sunday nights, and it was at one of their meetings a fellow told his story, of which I remember almost nothing.

Nothing but this: He had for years led a peripatetic life, moving frequently from one locale to another. And one morning he awoke with no memory whatsoever of the last few hours of the previous evening.

This was not unusual. He was a heavy drinker seven days a week, and blackouts were a frequent result. But this was different, because he woke up convinced he must have done something horrible. He’d never in his life done anything significantly bad, and yet on this occasion he was consumed with dread. Surely he’d transgressed in a major way, surely he’d said something irretrievably nasty, surely he’d disgraced himself in ways he could not even imagine. And, since he had not memory of where he’d been or in what company, he didn’t have a clue as to whom he owed an apology, or for what.

So he packed his suitcase and left town. He’d been employed at the time, but his boss never saw him again. Neither did his circle of friends. He was outta there, and he never looked back.

I loved the story, though it didn’t occur to me to do anything with it.

Until 38 years later, when I was on an Amtrak train returning from Bouchercon, a sort of floating crap game for mystery writers and readers, held in a different city every year. (Not, I should stress, because the conference disgraces itself, although some of the participating writers very well may. It moves on because anyone who hosts the conference needs years to recover from the experience.)

This was October of 2015, and the host city was Raleigh, a burg well worth a visit for the Laotian restaurant alone. I was traveling alone, and for God knows what reason I thought about Mack, who’d told that story all those years ago. (That was his first name, Mack. He was a tall man, and a beefy one. And that, alas, is absolutely all I know about the fellow — beside the fact that he woke up from a blackout and hightailed it out of town.)

There’s a story there, I thought for the very first time. I came home, and before very long I started writing it. Initially I’d been thinking in terms of a simple short story, perhaps 3–4000 words long, but I got into the story and into the character, all the characters, and I let the story tell me how long it wanted to be. It wound up running a little over 20,000 words.

Amazom took it for a Kindle Single, in which capacity it’s done quite nicely over the years. And Bill Schafer of Subterranean Press loved Resume Speed and published it in hardcover, in both a signed limited and a trade edition. Both are out of print.

And Bill Schafer of Subterranean Press loved Resume Speed and published it in hardcover, in both a signed limited and a trade edition. Both are out of print.

Another novella, Keller’s Fedora, had a similar history, and after a few years it occurred to me that it might work as a paperback. I self-published it in that form, and it’s regularly my top-selling paperback. Could I do the same with this novella?

Well, I could do it, but I might have a tough time getting people to buy it. The Keller novella was longer by several thousand words, and had the commercial advantage of being about a popular character. Hmmm. Maybe if I found some other hitherto uncollected stories to fill out the volume...

And this book you are clutching, Gentle Reader, is the result. Seven tales, running to just under 50,000 words — surely a respectable length for a paperback book.

Not to mention that this introduction of mine has somehow added another 3300 words to the count...