April North was the first book I wrote for Beacon Books, although it may or may not have been the first title of mine that they published. A Diet of Treacle (which Beacon called Pads Are for Passion) was also published in 1961 and went to Beacon after several other publishers had passed it up. I don’t know the order in which they were published, and, now that I think about it, I can’t imagine why anyone would care.
I can’t say I remember much about the writing of April North. Now I have a copy in front of me as I write these lines and I could read it and refresh my memory, but I’m not going to do that. I mean, I wrote it. Why would I want to read it?
That reminds me of a story. Some years ago, a book tour led me to the Left Coast Crime Conference, held that year in Scottsdale, Arizona. Robert B. Parker was also in attendance, and I sat in on a program in which he fielded questions from the audience. Bob didn’t much like to give speeches but was comfortable with a Q&A, and he charmed his audience as effortlessly as his hero Spenser charmed them in print.
One of the questions concerned Bob’s view of his own work. What was his favorite Spenser novel?
“Oh, hell, I don’t know,” he said. “I let go of them once I write them. I never read them once they’re published. Does anybody?” He’d evidently spotted me in the rear of the hall, and called out, “Larry, do you ever read your own work?”
“I read nothing else,” I replied.
Well, it got a good laugh. In point of fact I do sometimes reread books of mine. But I find it virtually impossible to look over my very early work. I’m not sure what it is that puts me off. It may be that my writing ability has—thank God!—increased over time, and that the work of my less skillful earlier self seems amateurish, clumsy, and wooden. It seems just as likely that it’s the young author I don’t want to look at, that the glimpses of my younger self that the work affords embarrass me with revelations of callowness and vapidity. Or perhaps I’m just afraid to open those several closets for fear of what I might find there.
Never mind. I’m not going to reread April North just so I can natter on about it to you. I mean, you’ve already read the book. And it’s not Finnegan’s Wake. You don’t need to have me explain it to you.
Which won’t put me at a loss for words.
You know what I’ve always liked about April North?
The title.
Which is to say that I like the protagonist’s name. Beacon must have liked it, too, because the company didn’t change the title. As a publisher, the company could be a pain in the ass, not so much because their editors changed titles but because they were apt to change everything else. A team of editorial hirelings went through every manuscript Beacon bought, and if they didn’t make changes on just about every page—just arbitrary rewording to no apparent purpose—then they weren’t doing what they’d been hired to do and risked losing their jobs. But I didn’t realize they were doing this until I’d already published three books with them and had moved on to other things.
One thing we agreed on, though, was the title. I still like it. It sounds, I dunno, classy. And I came up with it while trying to work a variation on a theme.
My friend and colleague Hal Dresner wrote several books for Nightstand Books as Don Holliday. (Only a few, after which he leased the name to ghostwriters.) One of the ones he wrote and showed to me featured a blowsy dame whom he called June East—as a play on Mae West.
Hence April North, who had nothing else in common with either June East or Mae West. But I have to say I still like her name better than either of theirs.
The other thing I can tell you about April North—still without my having to read it—is that because of it I was threatened with a lawsuit.
By this time—late 1962, early 1963—I’d moved back from New York City to Buffalo, or more specifically to 48 Ebling Avenue, in the township of Tonawanda. The house had a full finished basement attractively paneled in knotty cedar, and I’d tricked out an alcove down there as an office where I wrote a little of this and a little of that, but nothing at all for Beacon. A couple of other writers were playing Sheldon Lord for me, and in return for the entrée my name afforded to Beacon Books, I was getting a little off the top. Two hundred dollars a book, if memory serves.
My agent found these writers. I never knew who they were and I’m not sure they knew who I was. But one fellow who ghosted one or two books for me was my friend Peter Hochstein, who had been my occasional college roommate. He was between jobs in the advertising business, which he professed to loathe, so he set up shop in a hotel on Broadway and Sixty-Ninth Street and knocked out a couple of books as Sheldon Lord. Then he decided he missed office life and gabbing at the water cooler, and went back to Madison Avenue.
But in the interim he did one thing he wasn’t supposed to do, which was tell the world about our ghostwriting deal. The word got around to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where we had both gone to school and where April North is essentially set. (The town in the book is given as Antrim and Yellow Springs is mentioned as being nearby, but although Antrim’s fictional, it might as well be Yellow Springs.)
Well. There’s a character in the book called Danny Duncan. And in Yellow Springs a Martha Duncan learned of the book, got hold of a copy, and was outraged that her son’s name had been used in the book. Now I didn’t know Martha Duncan, or Danny Duncan, either. I’d once met a Judy Duncan, who turned out to be Martha’s daughter, but the meeting was brief and unmemorable—I think I sold her a guitar—and I didn’t know she had a brother or a mother or, really, anything in the world but a thirdhand guitar.
But evidently Peter had known Martha Duncan, although not all that well, just well enough that Martha felt betrayed because Peter had gone and put her son in a book—and a marginally obscene book at that. So she wrote a letter to Peter, whom she of course believed to be the book’s author, and she sent a copy of that letter, along with a letter from her lawyer, to the folks at Beacon.
Who sent the letter to my agent, who sent it to me.
I was rattled. What concerned me most was that Beacon would now know that I’d run in a ghost. That knowledge, plus the threat of a lawsuit, might well prompt them to wash their hands of Sheldon Lord altogether. I wrote to Martha Duncan at length, telling her that I’d written the book myself, and that I didn’t know her or her son, and that the description of the book’s Danny Duncan (“a tall rangy senior who played first base on the baseball team and second-string end on the football team”) didn’t seem libelous to me.
I probably pointed out that the book was published in 1961, when Peter was still finishing up at Antioch and her son had not yet become either tall or rangy. In any event, I heard nothing further of or from Martha Duncan. And, mirabile dictu, my relationship with Beacon remained as it had been, with various ghosts writing various books. When they did, I got my two hundred dollars.
I still like the title.
—Lawrence Block
Greenwich Village
Lawrence Block ([email protected]) welcomes your email responses;
he reads them all, and replies when he can.