Travels by Michael Crichton Page B

name?”
    “I didn’t ask.”
    “Jesus,” my father said. “What published information did you get?”
    I showed him the pamphlets and brochures.
    “Well, that’ll be enough. You can write the story from that.”
    When I got home, I wrote an article and sent it in. And the
Times
bought it and ran it. I was ecstatic. I was a published writer! Years later I discovered that the travel editor, Paul Friedlander, lived near us and his daughter Becky was in my class at school, so he probably knew a kid had written this article, and he was probably amused to publish it. But at the time I thought I had sneaked past the system, and had done a grown-up thing, and it gave me tremendous encouragement to continue writing. After all, I had been paid sixty dollars, which in those days was a lot of money for a kid.
    I began doing other journalistic writing. I covered high-school sports for the town paper; I was both reporter and photographer, and was paid ten dollars a week. And in college I wrote for the Harvard
Crimson
, where I was book-review editor (free books) and sometime movie reviewer (free theater passes). And I covered sports for the
Alumni Bulletin
, which paid about a hundred dollars a month.
    So, with this history of writing, it was natural for me to think of writing to pay for the cost of medical school. My father had three other children in college at the time, and he couldn’t pay the cost of school. I had to make money in some way.
    Clearly I couldn’t make enough writing free-lance articles, so I decided to write novels. In those days James Bond spy novels were popular, and I read a lot of them. I decided to write novels like that.
    By then I was married, and my father-in-law knew somebody at Doubleday. He sent Doubleday my first novel. Doubleday said that they wouldn’t publish it but Signet might. Signet bought it as an original paperback and called to ask who my agent was, to negotiate the deal.
    I didn’t have an agent, but my father-in-law arranged for me to meet some. I met three. The first agent represented many famous authors and intimidated me. The second told me how I should write and annoyed me. The third was a young girl who had been an agent’s secretary and was just starting out on her own. She said she wanted to represent me. Since she was the only one who had said she wanted to represent me, it seemed like I should sign with her, so I did.
    For the next three years, while I went to medical school, I wrote paperback thrillers to pay my bills. Of course, there wasn’t much time for writing, but I did it on weekends and vacations. And, with practice, I learned to write these spy thrillers quickly. Eventually I wrote one in nine days. But I didn’t take any particular interest in this work. It was just a way to pay the tuition bills.
    Then, slowly, almost imperceptibly, the writing became more interesting to me than the medicine. And as my writing got more successful, the conflict between writing and medicine became increasingly awkward.
    Under a pseudonym I wrote a book called
A Case of Need
. It had many lightly disguised references to people in the Harvard Medical School. When the book was published, there was a lot of talk about this author, Jeffery Hudson, who seemed to know so much about Harvard. I joined right in: Who could this Hudson fellow be, anyway? What a mystery.
    That was fun. Then the book was nominated for an Edgar for the Best Mystery of the Year. That was fun, too. Then the book won, which meant somebody had to accept the award.
    Suddenly it was not fun any more.
    I knew that if anybody found out I had written that book I would be in a lot of trouble. At Harvard, in your clinical years, you were given grades according to the informal opinion of the people you worked with. If these people found out I was writing books, my grades would fall precipitously.
    I went to New York and accepted the award with dread. But I needn’thave worried. There wasn’t much publicity, and I was