Parker’s editors at Houghton Mifflin heard a choir when hisfirst typescript arrived in the slush pile. Quite likely they greeted it with the same jaundiced eye they brought to my Motor City Blue six years later, as a nice neat potboiler worth gambling a token advance on but no commitment beyond that. A tombstone advertisement in the New York Times and advance reading copies sent to the usual suspects for comment and review would probably have been the extent of the promotion, possibly with some signings at Boston-area bookstores. Full-page screamers, multiple-city tours, and guest spots on national TV talk shows are for established performers who hardly need the push.
Yet the reviews were excellent—quotes from the earliest still appear on his dust jacket flaps—and sales were sufficient to justify bringing out a second entry, Mortal Stakes . I worked with some of the same staff at Houghton Mifflin later, and I’m happy to report they were patient and willing to let a writer who showed promise find his audience. This was the last generation in publishing that bought bestsellers in order to subsidize books they wanted to publish, which was a good working premise for more than a century. When it was abandoned, and each title was expected to pull its own weight, the first tiny fissures appeared in the foundation of an industry that is still tottering.
This willingness to take a chance in the publishing world was vital to Parker’s success, since I think the series didn’t really take off commercially until Looking for Rachel Wallace in 1980. The gender-equality issues had hardened into a solid theme, and Spenser’s desperate obsession with finding and rescuing the eponymous heroine swept critics and the public along on a wild ride at a pace usually confined to globe-trotting thrillers in which the fate of the world is at stake. Word-of-mouth had caught up with Spenser. From then on, he was an institution.
For which I’m grateful. By this time, the series had moved to Delacorte, and probably some at Houghton Mifflin were regretting having let it go. It was in this mood that my Motor City Blue came in over their transom, with a brand-new private eye starting his career in the even more outlandish city of Detroit.
Meanwhile, private eye fiction’s fortunes had changed. A tide of new readers had carried in a boatload of new titles from as far away as Australia, and an organization was founded to promote the interests of writers of private detective stories, who only a few years earlier could have held their convention in a telephone booth. From out of this new wave came Sara Paretsky and Sue Grafton. They weren’t the first to showcase female private eyes—Marcia Muller had beaten them to it, and there were a few even in the heyday of the pulps, usually created by male writers—but they were a far cry from the slinky femmes fatales and helpless ingénues of the testosterone-fueled Golden Age, when an inordinate number of scantily clad women appeared bound and gagged on lurid magazine covers. Surely Parker’s strong female characters, and Spenser’s willingness to acknowledge their strength, helped prepare the readership for this new direction in literary evolution.
Sadly, it’s uncertain whether today’s bottom-line publishing requirements would have given the Parker-Spenser collaboration the time it needed to develop. Many houses—forgetting that few of the longest-running franchises stayed at one place—won’t take on a series dropped by a competitor, believing that where one enterprise failed another cannot succeed. There’s no telling how many promising properties have been left adrift by this notion, abandoned by their creators or stranded in the ghetto of self-publishing, which rarely leads to success or respect.
Some years ago, Sara Paretsky protested an insider’s decision that a first novel had to sell 15,000 copies or the writer’s contract would be dropped. She reminded the party that the first
Yet the reviews were excellent—quotes from the earliest still appear on his dust jacket flaps—and sales were sufficient to justify bringing out a second entry, Mortal Stakes . I worked with some of the same staff at Houghton Mifflin later, and I’m happy to report they were patient and willing to let a writer who showed promise find his audience. This was the last generation in publishing that bought bestsellers in order to subsidize books they wanted to publish, which was a good working premise for more than a century. When it was abandoned, and each title was expected to pull its own weight, the first tiny fissures appeared in the foundation of an industry that is still tottering.
This willingness to take a chance in the publishing world was vital to Parker’s success, since I think the series didn’t really take off commercially until Looking for Rachel Wallace in 1980. The gender-equality issues had hardened into a solid theme, and Spenser’s desperate obsession with finding and rescuing the eponymous heroine swept critics and the public along on a wild ride at a pace usually confined to globe-trotting thrillers in which the fate of the world is at stake. Word-of-mouth had caught up with Spenser. From then on, he was an institution.
For which I’m grateful. By this time, the series had moved to Delacorte, and probably some at Houghton Mifflin were regretting having let it go. It was in this mood that my Motor City Blue came in over their transom, with a brand-new private eye starting his career in the even more outlandish city of Detroit.
Meanwhile, private eye fiction’s fortunes had changed. A tide of new readers had carried in a boatload of new titles from as far away as Australia, and an organization was founded to promote the interests of writers of private detective stories, who only a few years earlier could have held their convention in a telephone booth. From out of this new wave came Sara Paretsky and Sue Grafton. They weren’t the first to showcase female private eyes—Marcia Muller had beaten them to it, and there were a few even in the heyday of the pulps, usually created by male writers—but they were a far cry from the slinky femmes fatales and helpless ingénues of the testosterone-fueled Golden Age, when an inordinate number of scantily clad women appeared bound and gagged on lurid magazine covers. Surely Parker’s strong female characters, and Spenser’s willingness to acknowledge their strength, helped prepare the readership for this new direction in literary evolution.
Sadly, it’s uncertain whether today’s bottom-line publishing requirements would have given the Parker-Spenser collaboration the time it needed to develop. Many houses—forgetting that few of the longest-running franchises stayed at one place—won’t take on a series dropped by a competitor, believing that where one enterprise failed another cannot succeed. There’s no telling how many promising properties have been left adrift by this notion, abandoned by their creators or stranded in the ghetto of self-publishing, which rarely leads to success or respect.
Some years ago, Sara Paretsky protested an insider’s decision that a first novel had to sell 15,000 copies or the writer’s contract would be dropped. She reminded the party that the first
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