liked it, but pointed out that it didn’t have an ending, and that it rather needed one. If I could come up with a twist ending, a snappier ending, he’d like to see it again. So I found a newsstand that carried Manhunt, bought a copy, read it, and wrote a new ending, one which at least proved I’d read O. Henry’s “The Man at the Top.” (My narrator ends with the triumphant boast that his ill-gotten gains are due to increase dramatically, because he’s just invested the whole thing in some gold mine stock. Or something.)
I sent this off, and it came back with another note, saying the new ending was predictable and didn’t really work, but thanks for trying. And that was that.
Then several months later the school year was coming to a close, and I was due to head off to Cape Cod and find a co-op job on my own. One night near the end of term I couldn’t sleep, and I lay there thinking, and thought of the right way to finish the story. I went home to Buffalo to visit my folks, drove out to Cape Cod, and wrote a new ending for the story. The acceptance process was slow—Manhunt had what we’ve since learned to call a cash-flow problem—but, long story short, they bought it. Paid a hundred bucks for it.
My first sale.
I LEFT THE CAPE after a month or so and wound up back in New York, where I got a job as an editor at a literary agency, reading scripts and writing letters to wannabe writers, telling them how talented they were and how this particular story didn’t work, but by all means send us another story and another reading fee.
I lived in a residential hotel on West 103rd Street, where my $65-a-month rent was again a fourth of my salary. And, nights and weekends, I wrote stories, which the agency I worked for submitted to various magazines. Most of the stories were crime fiction. I hadn’t yet decided I was going to be a crime fiction writer—I don’t know that that’s a decision I ever made—but in the meantime I read extensively in the field. There was a shop on Eighth Avenue off Times Square where they sold back copies of Manhunt and other digest-sized magazines (Trapped, Guilty, Off-Beat, Keyhole, Murder, and so on) at two for a quarter. I bought every one of these I could find, and I read them cover to cover. Some I liked and some I didn’t, but somewhere along the way I must have internalized the sense of what made a story, and I wrote some of my own.
They sold, most of them, sooner or later. Sometimes to Manhunt, but more often to its imitators. Trapped and Guilty paid a cent and a half per word, so they were the first choice after Manhunt passed. Then came Pontiac Publications, at a penny a word. (Their magazines had titles like Sure Fire and Twisted and Off-Beat, and every story title had an exclamation mark at the end. I longed to call a story “One Dull Night” so that they could call it “One Dull Night!”)
After I’d been a month or so at the literary agency, it was clear to me I was learning more than I’d ever learn in college, and that I’d be crazy to stop now. So I dropped out and stayed right where I was. In the spring, I decided I’d learned as much as I was going to at the job, and that a student draft deferment was, after all, better than a poke in the eye with a sharp bayonet. I went back to Antioch.
By the time I got there, I was writing books. “Sex novels” was what we called them, though they’d now get labeled “soft-core porn.” I wrote one to order the summer before I returned to Antioch, and the publisher wanted more. So that’s what I did instead of classwork. And I also went on writing crime stories. At the end of that academic year, in the summer of 1959, I dropped out again, and this time it took. I started writing a book a month for one sex novel publisher, and other books for other publishers, and from that point the crime short stories were few and far between.
WHEN DOUG GREENE AND I discussed bringing out a collection of these early stories, he brought up the subject of an introduction. “You can read through the stories,”