Do the Weird Crime, Serve the Weird Time

OUR NOVEL

Upon my recent diagnosis with Carson’s Syndrome, I realized that it was time to talk about the creation of Wilson Is Not Toast, which has the dubious distinction of being mentioned in every book on the oddball novels of the early twenty first century. Wilson is Not Toast did very well, even being a Mystery Club Book of the Month and having translations into twenty languages and adaptations for the WWW, film, TV and other media. If you are at all a mystery reader, you probably have a copy at home. What makes WINT so interesting is that it had eleven co-authors. Jointly written books seldom do well, but the author list for WINT has several other peculiarities. Firstly all of the authors had had only publishing credit before the publication of WINT, in a regionally distributed short story collection, which was aptly described as “dreadful vanity publishing at its worst.” Secondly despite the huge success of the book only three of the writers went on to publish anything thereafter and their minor attempts were frankly published because of their connection with the successful Wilson Is Not Toast. I was the best published of the three.

I am Moses Gubb, and I on from my success with WINT into a writing “career” of seven mystery short stories and cookbook of recipes by mystery/thriller writers Sleuth Stew. I am very grateful to the editors of Has-Beens on Parade for this opportunity to share these reminiscences from my early career. I know that many people would be offended at being solicited by such a fanzine, but I am not in total denial on my lack of writing success, and I feel that my work in WINT is one of the most satisfying of my life.

First let me tell you a little about myself. Not that I was born and so forth, you probably have a good idea about that, no I want to explain the late twentieth century to you. Everyone wanted to be a writer, because a good deal of effort in the craft seemed to have been removed. My mother had told me with horror that in her first job she had a manual typewriter. It was one of those tales of “how bad it was” that ranked up there with the idea of a TV without remote control. There were all kinds of software in those days that helped you write. They formatted the text, they prompted you with both words and plot, and they even encouraged you if you stopped writing due to some from of block. I remember when the first time my computer got the (as it was then called) World Wide Web. It was as much of a breakthrough then as doing away with keyboards had been a few years before.

My job1 or as we said then, my job, was a manager of a video store in Austin, Texas. It was the “cool” video store next to New Atlantis, which was a used bookstore, and a bar called the Decline of West. It didn’t pay for shit, but it did bring in a steady group of artistic people. Austin was sort of a writers’ colony in those days. You couldn’t spit without hitting a published author. I know because I spit a lot, mainly just at the people walking by into Violet Crown Videos. My girlfriend worked for me and made even less. We considered ourselves to be as cool as our videos. But we had one tragic secret. Unlike our clientele, we hadn’t achieved in any art form. Now we were smart enough to see writers don’t have any money, or they wouldn’t have grumbled so at the dollar a day late fee on their DVD’s (I’m guessing that the readership of HBOP is historically savvy enough to pick up on most of my quaint terms. If they ain’t that’s too bad because I’m not being paid for this). But everyone was working on something. Neal, the stock boy, was working on a screenplay, Susan on her novel and Tagi on an opera. Belinda, my girlfriend, had done some painting that we used to fix a whole in the roof of our garage. I had learned to play “Stairway to Heaven” on the guitar, and even worked in a band that got to play at a couple of parties, until some drunk guy threw our drummer into the river. But we began to get the wannabe spirit.

How tough could writing be? After all, New Atlantis was filled with it, clearly most of it turned out by people less smart than us, if not in fact less talented. I asked Mary Denning, a founder of the Contrarians, a school of Austin writers, what her secret was. “Persistence.” She said. I figured I could try that awhile, at least until it got boring. Picking what to write was the next hurdle. I asked all the writers that came in, what sold, and they all said mysteries. So I got some mystery writing software, and I took off. My first novel was entitled The Woman with Three Breasts. I thought my grand climax was stunning, “She gazed horrified at one of three breasts. It was made of wax.” It took me months to write and despite my sending it to three or four publishers I couldn’t sell it. Therefore, I decided to try my hand at short fiction. That way I wouldn’t spend so long at creating the thing.

Meantime Belinda was trying a more social approach she had joined a group of people that wanted to write mysteries called People Who Want to Write Mysteries (PWWtWM) or as they affectionately called it, “Pootem,” The group brought famous people in the field of mystery writing to Austin—agents and publishers and such—which would surely snap up some of the locally produced delicacies. So we both attended and shelled out money for workshops. We watched other people being published left and right. In fact at out first workshop the woman who had set to the left of me and the man who had sat to the right of me, both sold a mystery novel in a month.

Was there some cosmic conspiracy against us?

I wrote many short stories in those days,” The Dairy Queen Murders,” “The Jell-O Slayer,” “The Pork and Bean Menace.” But none of them sold. One was even returned to me with a thin pencil scrawl “It’s the food guy again.” I would show them. I tired writing about drinks.

About this time Horace Greenslau came on the scene. Horace appeared in the form of unsolicited e-mail (or as we called in those halcyon days “Spam.”) Horace presented him self to the brethren and cistern of Pootem as a wily old publisher with many tricks up his ink stained sleeves. He pointed out two facts. Fact number one: the second sale is easier to make than the first, so if you want to be a published author, the best thing you can be is already published. Fact number two: you don’t have to pay dead guys anything but respect. His emails to Pootem just talked about these ideas, he said he just kept thinking about them.

So one day I sent a note to this list saying why not put them together? You could put a book that was half stuff by dead guys that you didn’t have to pay any money to, and half by living guys that were first time writers.

What a great idea! Wrote Greenslau.

It became his project at once. He had spots for eleven writers, to mixed with eleven classics of detection. It would be called Mystery Classics. He had some has-been guy, D. B. Bowen, author of The Cellophane Fawn Trilogy, on hand to write an intro for five hindered smackers. He would mention the twenty tales one by one and thus give illusion that the new guys ranked up there with Chandler, Borges, Doyle, and so forth. The classics were great from literary to hard-boiled, impressionistic to great logic tales. There was only one rub.

Money.

He didn’t want to do it as a vanity press, no that was evil. He simply needed each of his writers to buy—say—two hundred copies. They could easily sell them to libraries, specialty shops, their friends and relatives. What proud momma wouldn’t buy a book that listed her baby son after Agatha Christie? He would sell the rest.

I know what you are thinking. Well it’s easy to think things like that when fame isn’t around the corner and some guy is telling you that can sell two hundred books.

Belinda and I figured it this way. I could put a display of the books for sake at the store, plus I could take a suitcase full of them to our family reunions, then when the store sold off its used videos at the flea market in the spring I could sell a few more copies then. Before long we could sell our four hundred.

So we coughed up the cash and we wrote out tales. Mine was “The Butcher Wore Red” and hers was “The Video Store Murders.” Nine other people in Pootem likewise coughed up the cash.

The books took a long time to materialize. Since we had never met him in the flesh, we began to wonder if we had been scammed.

When the books did show up, they were as nicely produced as we had imagined for the rather hefty price we had put out. Belinda and I had visualized them as leather bound with gilt lettering and quaint illustrations (at least for the real classics). Greenslau had also asked each of us for a black-and-white photo. I guess he had merely asked for his collection, there weren’t any picture in the book.

Bowen’s introduction was little weird too. He had very perceptive things about the classic tales, but made fun of us. For example, “In Moses Gubb’s ‘The Bucher Wore Red’ we see an interesting attempt to turn a food obsession into a tale of detection. Although the astute reader will have guessed the identity of the killer long before the end of the tale, his obsessive writing will have a special appeal for a certain type of reader interested in the workings of the authorial mind.” Sad to say, mine was not the worst.

But it was a book. It had an ISBN number. It, for the most part, spelled out names right, and it was a hardback, not something easily recycled. It would live on in libraries and bookshelves of our friends.

To my surprise and initial glee, I was listed as the editor. Greenslau had sent a note when everyone’s book was delivered reminding him or her it had been my idea.

The local paper reviewed us. The reviewer liked all the things the dead people had written. It called the editor “only half bad.”

Our relatives did buy copies. But our friends couldn’t afford them. Local specialty shops like Adventures in Crime and Space were willing to buy a couple, but the look of pity in the eyes of the owner didn’t make us feel very good.

You know, nobody buys expensive anthologies at flea markets. But some people did ask us on advice on how to get published. Then I started getting little nasty notes from my fellow authors. They had all laid out nearly three thousand dollars apparently for the purpose of loosing closet space. Nobody blamed Greenslau; everyone remembered that I had thought it up. Your most noble moments may be like the seeds of a dandelion, but e-mail lives forever. (Well at least it did in those uncivilized days).

A year passed. We did our best to sell copies. One of our members a dentist did sell his off to his clients, but he offered them a price break on his services. The few books we gave away as review copies showed up in used bookstores around town, anchors in the cheap bins. I lost my friends in the group. I lost Belinda for other reasons, but when she left me her copies of the book stayed in the garage. Fine. I made a pile of them and propped up a roof beam.

I became guilty. I felt that it was my fault. The least I could do was buy up the cheap copies of the books around town. They usually went for one or two bucks. I made a game of it, wearing dark glasses and pulling a hat over my face, I would go out and bag a few on nights of the new moon.

I don’t know how many copies I had bought before I discovered that there were variant editions of Mystery Classics. One night I opened one up. There were tales by the eleven masters and eleven people I had never heard of. There was an introduction by D. B. Bowen for eleven writers—all of whom lived in Houston, Texas.

So I went out in my garage. The books looked the same on the outside, but close inspection soon reveled that I owned the Santa Fe, Dallas, and Anchorage versions of Mystery Classics. I drove to the copy shop and began shooting copies of the alternate title pages. Each edition had its own editor, some fall guy (or in the case of Anchorage fall gal) that had had the same “brilliant” idea that I had had. I spent all night addressing envelopes. I wanted all the Austin writers to know. To know that I hadn’t done it. To know that somewhere Mr. Greenslau was traveling from town to town raking the dough from would be writers. I had to use snail mail; they wouldn’t take my calls anymore.

At first my fellow writers weren’t concerned. Most of them apologized to me. We talked a little about contacting the other victims, but mainly we were embarrassed. Most of us had had friends that had warned us that the whole thing smelled like a scam, and we were embarrassed. But Belinda changed all that. She set up a mailing list for us all and she wrote a really impassioned letter about how I had been screwed over. She told them that I had paid for her books, and that I had bought all the copies, and that I had taken all their abuse (including hers), and that I had let them know what had happened. She was really mad at Greenslau, and when people realized that I was out over six thousand dollars, they got mad to.

I think it was Dr. Ellison, the dentist, who suggested that we should get our revenge. We agreed early on but we didn’t know how.

Belinda began researching the place that had printed all the books it was in Polk City, Iowa. Other than printing Mystery Classics, they did Bibles in Spanish and menus. Their equipment was old, and the CM line kept them going. They were very friendly, and were glad to give her a list of cities that had had CMs made up. We looked it over. Greenslau had neglected New Orleans. We couldn’t guess why, maybe he thought the bunco squad there was too good. So we got a local ISP and we made a group Crescent City Crime Writers. We got us a webpage, we took out some ads in the New Orleans Picayune, and we mentioned our name on a few mystery news groups. We had people that wanted to join of course, but we told them that we had already filled our meeting space—some unspecified loft on Canal Street and that it would be a while before we were taking members, but they were free to chat. We adopted pseudonyms, we chatted, and we even learned some things about the city of New Orleans and its rich mystery tradition. Eventually someone made the observation that it is sure to easy to get published if you already are published. His name was Reds law. Mr.Redslaw went on to tell us that the reasons dead guys are reprinted is that they sell and you don’t have to pay them.

Therefore, I went on-line as Mr. Phineas Thibodaux, an honest but poor man of the parishes with a great marketing strategy....

Mr. Redslaw thought my notion of an anthology of half classic and half virgin talent was nothing short of genius. He said he could get a has-been writer, a Mr. D. B. Bowen, author of The Cellophane Trilogy, would write an introduction.

Here is where we made our move. We said that we wanted to meet him, Mr. Bowen, of course. We had figured out that much.

At first there was reluctance. Redslaw told us that Bowen was reclusive, alcoholic, etc. We stuck to our guns, and Belinda had a brilliant idea. She researched Bowen. He had written five avant-garde novels in the eighties. The CTT had been marginally successful. He had been on the list of several critics as the young writer to watch. He had speaking tours, was a minor TV celeb, but each novel got stranger and the readership declined. He even tried vanity publishing with—you guessed it—the Menu House in Polk City.

So in addition to our wanting to see him, we began to say good things about his work.

There isn’t the writer alive that doesn’t believe flattery. The entire strange cursed race thinks that someday their scribblings will have a place in god’s eternal bookshelf.

Our plan was a little vague. We thought that we get him in a hotel room and then just confront him and in some magical way he would pay us back the money he had sucked away.

We choose an older hotel in the French Quarter called the Roosevelt. We rented the big penthouse that had looked over Mardi-gras for almost a hundred years. It was bleak December. We told him to meet us at eight on a Wednesday night. We dressed well, and those of us who had concealed weapons permits from Texas were packing. We had no intention of killing him, just scaring him into the straight and narrow.

Belinda had a tape recorder so we could catch any confessions that might boil to the surface.

He was fifteen minutes late. We were sweating and uncomfortable. We heard the old elevator make its way to our floor. Belinda and a woman named Chandra Lee escorted him to our suite. He was older and thinner than we had thought. We had our chairs arranged in a circle, his was in the middle. He laughed when he saw it. We guessed he wouldn’t be laughing soon.

After he had set down, we all reached under our chairs and pulled out a copy of Mystery Classics, except for me I pulled our five copies—one of each of the editions I had bought. We were expecting fear or guilt.

We were disappointed.

He just asked, “So which group are you? Shreveport? Dallas? No I guess it’s too long for it to be Dallas.”

I said, “We’re Austin and we want our money back.”

“Oh that’s original,” he said, relaxing in his chair, “About as original as your fiction.” Then he laughed.

“Look Bowen, we’re not fooling around.” Said Dr. Ellison.

“Of course you are,” said Bowen, “That’s all you’ve ever done. You’re jerk-offs. What do you want from me? You said you wanted to be published. Well you got your book. It’s big, it’s fat. I bought all of you have discovered the great utility it has for propping things up. You should be as happy as a pig in slop. But no, what you wanted wasn’t to pay three thousand dollars so that your useless names would be printed along side people that would sneer at your ineptitude. But you wanted more. You are disappointed that I am not Satan. You wanted to sell your souls for fame. Well, you don’t have soul, or you could have written something worthwhile. You don’t got shit.”

“No Bowen,” I said, “We’ve got you.”

“You think your first the group that has pieced this together. You’re not, and you’re not the last. But everything I did was legal. I knew this was a confrontation when I walked down here. Night meeting in an old hotel in the French Quarter, the same old clichéd stuff that keep your fiction from selling. I just wanted to see your pathetic faces, look at you, all dressed up, all proper; does it make you feel powerful? Your little chairs all in a circle. Well I’m going now, and you can go back to your lives and tiny dreams.”

“Do you think you are a good writer, Bowen?”

“I’m no Rex Hull, but I’m OK. I’m third-rate, but my ambition is too great. So I look for eighteenth-rate scum to support me.”

He rose.

“No.” said Dr. Ellison, “We are not done with you.”

“Why what are you going to do kill me?”

“Yes.” Dr. Ellison said, “We are. Just because you aren’t expecting it. It is a sign of the triumph of our poor imaginations.

We were on him in a minute. Eleven people can over power a man in his sixties easily. Killing him is easier still.

Taking a corpse through the French Quarter is not a difficult matter when he is small. You simply stand on either side of him and tell on-lookers that he has too much to drink. In fact as we took him to my car, we passed another fellow in the same straights. Perhaps he too was dead.

We took him to my cousin’s restaurant. We sat outside until closing time. My cousin and I had an agreement. He did not ask about things that he didn’t want to hear the answer to, and I treated his life the same way.

We made Mr. D. B. Bowen into jambalaya. The other men butchered him, while I prolapsed the rice and sauce as per the recipe in my story. He was ready at dawn, and we filled up our containers with him and took him to our homes in Austin. Just before we took off, Belinda said, “Well he’s toast now.” I most emphatically denied that he was toast, and took offences at the slighting of my culinary creation. “OK,” she said, “He is not toast.”

We were prepared to be each other’s alibis when the law came by.

It never came.

Bowen did live alone. He was the alcoholic recluse he claimed to be. Eventually the residence hotel he lived in Washington must have noticed that their tenant had not returned.

The others had swore off writing, but I turned out a few tales afterward—some of which sold. I felt my fiction getting better, and attributed it to some endorphin released after revenge.

About six months later, Belinda was listening to Bowen’s speech in the Roosevelt Penthouse. She called me and said that it was very dramatic. The whole thing would make a lovely crime novel. So we broke it into eleven chapters. Each of us did our best. And unlike most of our scribbling before and after, our best was finally good enough. Sure the novel sold as something of a curiosity like Naked Came the Spy, but it did sell. We had a few minutes of fame—woefully short of the fifteen minutes that a man named Andy Warhol had promised our parent’s generation.

The success of the book, plus my modest sales before its publication inspired everyone to try writing again. We had all felt the writing we did on WINT had been smooth and beautiful. We were all able to get agents on the strengths of WINT’s sales, and we were busy turning out novel proposals. But something was wrong.

The quality left our writing. At first we hid this each from the other. All right at first we hid it form ourselves, a writer cannot bear to acknowledge that his best days may be gone—especially if his best days were about a month in length. However, by the time the movie of WINT came out, our writing was as bad as it had been in Mystery Classics; we didn’t know what had happened. Had the crime been enough to stimulate our moribund muses?

Dr. Ellison suggested a different explanation. Over half a century before, certain experiments on planaria learning had suggested that cannibalism lead to the exchange of knowledge. The planaria, a type of flatworm, were tested with a maze and their times recorded. Then the planaria were ground up and fed to a new generation, who could solve the maze in less time than their predecessors. It was speculated that their was a transference of knowledge—probably in the messenger RNA strands of the planaria The experiment was later discredited, as some researched believed that the mazes were contaminated by the smell of the flatworm’s passage and that was the guiding force. However, certain people believed that the experiments were discredited to keep universities form turning into professor-hamburger stands.

Hoc est corpus meum.

Maybe we had eaten Bowen’s talent. Unlike him we were not jaded nor overcome by a desire to be known in a limited genre—we were just people with a burning desire to write, but perhaps nothing to say. Our desire plus his RNA got one more novel out of him. It was sad that he never got the fame, which he like us, had craved. The RNA material must have peaked in us about nine months after the deed and receded nine months afterward.

Our reaction to Dr. Ellison’s theory varied. Some of us were glad at our one shot at fame and parlayed into little victories like my cookbook. Others drank themselves to death like Belinda, who could face the fact she had no talent. Of course the best known case—the one you’ve been reading this interview to see if I would mention—see I still have a few mystery writer tricks even if I am eighteenth-rate—was Dr. Ellison. One of the good dentist’s clients was Vernon Ghosh, a well-know writer of techno-thrillers. Ellison gassed him when he was in for his yearly dental visit and then cut up his body with an eye to making lasagna from it. The unfortunate visit of a young mad with a chipped tooth exposed Ellison’s attempt at cannibalism.

Ironically it lead to new interest in our work and a re-release of WINT, which has remained in print since. We all denied any understanding of his actions, and if in our black hearts we had been thinking of a similar deed, we abandoned such evils schemes.

Although not quite the youngest of our little group of wannabes I am the last to draw breath, and I will not do so for much longer. I enjoyed sharing our story for Has-Beens on Parade.