Monday Night Zoom Boys: Guest Post by Charles Salzberg

Charles Salzberg:

 

When the pandemic hit and we were asked, then told to shelter in place, most people’s lives changed dramatically. Not mine. Having been a freelance writer since the age of 28, when I suddenly and, in retrospect, foolishly quit my three-month job working in the mailroom at New York magazine, I’ve worked from home. 

I took to apartment life like a (add your favorite aquatic animal here) to water. I didn’t have to be anywhere at any particular time. I could go to sleep when I wanted. I could wake up when I wanted. If the weather was bad, I didn’t have to go out in it. If the apartment got too hot, I’d take a stroll by the river. A pair of shoes, or in my case sneakers, had many months added to its life. Sweaters, too. And if I didn’t go out much, I didn’t have to do laundry much. Excuse me. I’m getting all misty-eyed and nostalgic just thinking about it.

 

I was alone, but far from isolated. I had other freelance friends I could meet for coffee (we couldn’t afford much more than that), or talk on the phone. My good friend from New York days, Roy Hoffman—he worked the photostat machine in Milton Glaser’s art department—and I spoke practically every day, Monday through Friday. There was only one hard and fast rule: Roy’s sister was one of the directors of All My Children, and days when she was directing the show it was off-limits to call between 1 and 2 p.m.

Life, if you don’t count barely having enough money to pay the rent and eat two, full meals a day, was good. It was especially good because if I ever got down on myself—no work, no one to call or hang out with—I’d just think about all those suckers out there who were stuck in an office all day. Every day.

I found out how lucky I really was when I was very low on work (none) and thought I’d have to get a full-time job or die of malnutrition. I was asked to try out for a position as an editor at a popular women’s magazine (at the time, I was doing a lot of writing, mostly celebrity profiles, for magazines like Redbook). They had me come in for a week (yes, they paid me for it), which consisted of rewriting other people’s articles and talking to P.R. people. I once had to call Elizabeth Taylor’s publicist and ask the question “What is your favorite place to spend the Christmas holidays?” for one of those horrid list articles. Their question, not mine. So, I called the publicist and I was supposed to ask, “What spot was Elizabeth and Richard’s (she had been married to the great English actor Richard Burton, but he’d already passed away a year or two earlier) favorite Christmas vacation destination.” I swear I could hear a “huff” sound. Finally, after what seemed like minutes but was only seconds, she said four words. “Richard. Burton. Is. Dead.” Now remember, I knew it’s a stupid question. And I knew Burton was dead. But the question was past tense “where did they used to like to go?)” And I wasn’t working for the New York Times or The New Yorker. I was working for a women’s magazine. Anyway, I could sense that the p.r. woman was going to hang up on me, and even though I couldn’t see her, I was imagining her hand, holding the phone, going in a downward direction, heading to end the call. But before she could cut me off, I slammed the phone onto its cradle. Several of the editors were standing around my desk, smiling. One of them, the smiliest, said, “did she hang up on you?” 

“Nope. Because I think I was quicker to hang up on her before she could hang up on me.”  

Anyway, it only took a day before knew this wasn’t for me. I mean, when did people have time to have a life? Go to the bank? Do laundry? Talk on the phone? At the end of the week, I was offered the job, but I turned it down. I learned my lesson. The freelance life was for me. Tra-la.

 Enough strolling down memory lane. Let’s get back to that vicious bug from Asia, that was keeping everyone was home. Suddenly, and without being asked, everyone was leading my life. 

At first, it was, “welcome to my world!” But after a week or so, when I realized I wasn’t so special anymore, my attitude was properly adjusted. Now, instead of a cheery “Welcome to my world!” It was “Get the hell out of my world!”

I live alone, and as the days dragged on, even I began to hunger for some kind of human contact. And then the world discovered Zoom (or they discovered us). At first, I used it to maintain a weekly lunch with my good friend and fellow writer, Ross Klavan. And then, a couple times a week I used it to teach my writing classes. But still, something was missing.

Turns out that something was contact with other like-minded people. I missed my crime writing friends. I missed going to crime writers’ conferences. 

I didn’t have too much time to feel sorry for myself. An invitation (no, not the kind that announce weddings) came from my friend Reed Farrel Coleman (Long Island, way out on Long Island) to join a weekly Zoom with four other crime writers, Michael Wiley (Jacksonville, Florida), Matt Goldman (Minneapolis, Minnesota) and Tom Straw (Connecticut). By the way, between us we’re edging embarrassingly close to double-digit losses of the Shamus Award (Okay, Reed is far from a total loser since he’s actually won it more than once). I already knew Tom and I knew of Matt and Michael, but I’d never formally met them. 

To be honest, I was a little skeptical as to how this would work out. What would we talk about? Would we get along? Other than crime, what did we have in common? Did I really want to spend every Monday evening for who knows how long talking about the virus and politics? I. Don’t. Think. So.

Turns out, I had nothing to worry about. After our first session, it was like we’d known each other all our lives. And I don’t think I’ve ever met four more interesting people (all crammed into my iPad screen). Before writing crime novels, both Matt and Tom were very successful Hollywood sit-com writers—shows like Seinfeld, Night Court, Nurse Jackie, The New Adventures of Old Christine. And although it happened that at one point both of them worked on the same lot and they knew a lot of the same people, they didn’t know each other before our Zoom. As a magazine journalist, I’d interview some of the people they’d worked with. Besides, as someone once said, “everyone has two businesses. Their own and show business.” Hence, there was also plenty to talk about. But Reed, Mike and me held our own. Reed didn’t plenty of interesting jobs while he was writing and publishing novels. Mike is a college professor, but he’s originally from Chicago, so you know he’s got plenty to offer.

We have no ground rules, per se—although I’m sure it’s in everyone’s mind that if we don’t deliver something interesting, wise, witty (and remember, we’re in a Zoom with two guys who got paid big bucks to write comedy for hit shows) or worthwhile for too long, we’ll find ourselves searching in vain for that Zoom link. We’ve talked about everything and anything but thankfully I don’t think politics has come up once as a subject for debate. Nor do I ever remember any talk about the pandemic, unless it was to report who got it.

There’s surprisingly little talk of sports. I mean, take five guys and put ‘em in a room and I think the over/under is that only eight minutes will pass before no matter what else they were talking about the subject turns to the Knick score last night. But for some reason, even though most of us are big sports fans and certainly have our opinions, it rarely comes up as a serious topic of conversation. Perhaps it’s because we’re all living in different parts of the country and thus don’t follow the same teams. But I’m pretty sure it’s not that. Let’s just say we’re far more evolved and interesting than your average guy of our age and experience.

But there is plenty of talk about books we’ve read or are reading, movies we’ve seen, streaming series we’re watching. I don’t know about the others, but I keep a pen and notepad net to me to jot down recommendations (or warnings).

At some point in the call, one of us is likely to throw out the question, how’s the writing going? And then each of us will state our case and I’d say we’ve rarely spent more than three minutes discussing that. No gloating. No complaining. No guilt. It’s an entirely informational question.

And yes, we do talk about “the business.” How could we not? Put five writers in the same room and the topics of publishing and publishers, other writers, the ones we like, the ones we don’t like. For the record, sorry to disappoint you but I have to say the “don’t like” list can’t even go beyond the fingers of one hand. We complain about the state of the business. We talk about how hard it is to get people to invest twenty to thirty bucks in a book. Okay, let’s face it, writers are, on the whole, experts on complaining. I’d like to think that we’ve earned that right since we genuinely do have so much to complain about.

Come to think of it, we do have one hard and fast rule, we’re all under the “cone of silence.” What’s said in the Monday Night Zoom Room stays in the Monday Night Zoom Room.

Which is why I’m writing this in invisible ink.
             
P.S. When we were all well-vaccinated, we took a Monday Night Zoom Boys trip together. And now, even though the pandemic is pretty much over, we still meet, though we should change our name to The Every Other Monday Night Zoom Boys.

***

Charles Salzberg is an award-winning crime novel writer who resides in Manhattan, New York. He teaches writing in New York City, is a Founding Member of New York Writers Workshop, and is on the boards of PrisonWrites and Mystery Writers of America-NY. His upcoming novel, Man on the Run, will be available this April.  

Why I Write What I Write: Guest post by Charles Salzberg

CHARLES SALZBERG is the author of the Shamus Award-nominated Swann’s Last Song, Swann Dives In, Swann’s Lake of Despair (re-release Nov. 2016), Devil in the Hole (re-release Nov. 2016), Triple Shot (Aug. 2016), and Swann’s Way Out (Feb. 2017). His novels have been recognized by Suspense Magazine, the Silver Falchion Awards, the Beverly Hills Book Award and the Indie Excellence Award. He has written over 25 nonfiction books, including From Set Shot to Slam Dunk, an oral history of the NBA, and Soupy Sez: My Life and Zany Times, with Soupy Sales. He has been a visiting professor of magazine at the S.I. Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University, and he teaches writing at the Writer’s Voice and the New York Writers Workshop, where he is a founding member.

Charles Salzberg:
Why I Write What I Write

For me, a novel rarely begins with plot or a character, or even a particular crime. Instead, it begins with a simple question. What if? Hopefully, that question, if compelling enough, propels me into a story that examines an important idea or theme.

The novels I’m interested in writing have to be about something and in the act of writing that novel I hope to able to learn something about myself, about the world I live in, and about the people who live in it with me. The novel has to examine something either I didn’t know, something I’m confused about, or something I want to know more about, usually human behavior. Hopefully, by the end of the novel I’ve answered at least some of those questions while at the same time entertaining my reader.

Here’s what I mean.

Devil in the Hole, was published a few years ago, but the seed for that novel was planted more than thirty years ago when I came across a front page story in the New York Times about a man who killed his entire family, wife, three kids, mother, and the family dog, then disappeared. Sad to say, these kinds of stories aren’t all that rare, but there was something about this one that was special, something that fascinated me, something that grabbed me and wouldn’t let go.

This did not seem to be a crime of passion, nor did it appear to be a crime committed in a moment of madness. It was so meticulously planned out that the perpetrator managed to give himself almost a month’s head start on the authorities by making sure no one in the upscale community where the murders took place would miss his victims. He stopped the mail. He called the school and told them his kids would be visiting relatives for a month. He left all the lights on in the house so people would think the family was still home. He might have suffered from some kind of mental illness or delusion, but he wasn’t insane in the way we think of madmen who typically (if there is such a thing) commit mass murder. If he wasn’t just stark raving mad, he had a reason to commit these murders but I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out what that reason could possibly have been.

I knew instinctively, I guess, that whatever it that “reason” was it might well say something important about the human condition. And so for years, this crime stuck with me. Every so often my mind would drift back to it, even as the years passed and the murderer still remained on the loose. wanted to write about it, but until I could wrap my mind around how someone could plan such a heinous crime, I couldn’t begin to write. I had to, in my own mind, come up with some kind of rationale for the murders because mere madness was not of any interest to me.

It took years, but finally a possible rationale for murders occurred to me and only then could I begin to write the novel. And so, Devil in the Hole did not become a book about a mass murder but rather a book about failure and shame and the inability to attain the elusive American Dream, something probably every one of us has grappled with over the course of our life.

A writer rarely knows if he or she is successful in doing what they set out to do but in this case I got a hint at the answer quite accidentally. I was speaking to a college class out in Long Island that had been assigned the book. A young woman raised her hand and said, rather sheepishly, “I’m ashamed to say this, but I have to admit that by the time I finished reading the book I kind of started feeling sorry for the killer.”

That’s exactly what I wanted to hear. It’s not that the killer was a hero, not by a long shot. And it’s not that he didn’t commit a heinous crime and deserved to be punished. But rather what this young woman was saying to me was that after reading the novel she could understand how the average person might, under certain circumstances commit such a violent horrible act. And how we all can share the same feelings, even though, thank goodness, most of us don’t act on them the way this man did. The book was about something, and it wasn’t about bringing a murderer to justice.

I’ve just finished another novel called, Second Story Man. Briefly, it’s about a lifetime master burglar named Francis Hoyt (based on two real-life master criminals). Hoyt, smart, arrogant, athletic, considers himself the best at what he does: breaking into people’s houses and stealing their valuables. Not only the best working now, but the best ever. He’s never been caught in the act. And although he’s earned more than enough money over a lifetime of crime to quit, he can’t. Why? Because he has an almost pathological need to succeed, to be the best. And when he’s challenged by two men, one a Miami police detective, the other a retired Connecticut State Investigator, he’s invigorated and spurred on not only to taunt the two hunters, but continually prove he’s smarter than they are.

Thus begins a cat and mouse tale of three men all trying to prove they’re the best at what they do. I hope I’ve written an entertaining crime novel that will keep readers guessing as to what will happen, who will come up the winner in this contest of egos, but what’s really more important to me is that I was able to examine for myself this what I think of as a uniquely American trait of having to be the best, making everything into a contest where there must be a clear winner and a clear loser. And the phenomena of never being satisfied with what we have. don’t have to look far to see signs of this today. It’s not good enough that Donald Trump won the presidency, he has to prove to himself and us that he won in a landslide, that he not only won the Electoral College but also the popular vote. Why do the enormously wealthy never have enough? What is it about us that creates this dynamic and more important, what is the downside of this compulsion?

That’s what I had to find out and at least for me, that’s what I did by writing this novel. Obviously, I can’t answer all the questions I have, but for me writing a novel is a start.

What's in a Title: Guest post by Charles Salzberg

Today I welcome award nominated mystery writer Charles Salzberg.

Charles Salzberg is a freelance writer who's work has appeared in New York, Esquire, GQ and The New York Times. His novel, Swann's Last Song was nominated for a Shamus Award for Best First PI Novel. The sequel, Swann Dives In was published last fall and was just released as an e-book, and the next in the series, Swann's Lake of Despair, will be published next year.  His latest novel is Devil in the Hole. None of these titles came easy for him.He teaches writing at the New York Writers Workshop, where he is a Founding Member.
 
CHARLES SALZBERG: 
WHAT'S IN A TITLE

For many writers, me included, writing is a snap when compared to finding a good title for your novel.

Sometimes you’re lucky. The title pops into your head almost immediately, perhaps even before you start actually writing. But for me, at least, that’s the exception rather than the rule. I have friends who have gone through lists of possible titles that grow exponentially as does their frustration at getting just the right one, the one that not only reflects what’s between the covers, but will also make the reader pick up that book and eventually buy it. One friend actually sent me a series of half a dozen emails, each containing at least half a dozen possible titles for her book. In the end, I don’t think she went with any of them.

One of my favorite book title stories was told to me by one of my heroes, Bruce Jay Friedman. In the 1950s, a lot of aspiring writers came to New York City and found work in the magazine industry, especially the old men’s adventure magazines. Bruce was editor of one of them and working under him was a fellow named Mario Puzo. One day, Puzo came to Bruce and said, “Bruce, I’ve just finished this novel about the Mafia. What do you think of The Godfather as the title?” Friedman shook his head disapprovingly and said, “no, too domestic.”

My second favorite story comes from a former student of mine, Joel Chasnoff, who was working on a memoir in my class. He grew up a middle-class kid in Chicago, but he always idolized and dreamed about joining the Israeli army. To make a long, funny story short, at 25 he emigrated to Israel and, after much trouble, managed to join the Israeli army, where he found that instead of training with the soldiers who raided Entebbe, it was more like a bunch of 10-year old Keystone Kops. He graduates army school and finds himself on tank duty on the border with Lebanon. His job was as a spotter. It’s late one night and through his night goggles he spots movement hundreds of yards ahead of him. “Hezbollah,” he shouts, and the gunner aims the artillery in that direction. Suddenly, Joel sees the figure squat down on the ground and start licking itself. “Stop,” he yells, “it’s a dog.” Too late. They fire, demolishing the poor animal. The name of his book: The Unluckiest Dog in Lebanon.

I thought it was a terrific title, but when he sold it his editor at Simon and Schuster didn’t like it so much. “They think people will think it’s a book about dogs,” he told me. “You should only be so lucky,” I said, knowing that dog books sell incredibly well.

They changed it to The 188th Crybaby Brigade.

I still prefer the original, and who knows how many dog lovers would now know everything about the Israeli army.

I have a writer friend who’s in advertising who likes the idea of one word titles, but that’s putting a lot of pressure on just one word. Some authors go to poetry, or to song titles, or to the Bible, not only for inspiration but for catchy titles.

For me, it’s always been difficult, except when it’s not.

My first detective novel came pretty easily, especially once I came up with the name for my skip-tracer protagonist—Henry Swann. The novel had him following all the clues to find a killer but ultimately finding that the murder was simply a random crime, and so his world of rationality, of everything making sense if you put the pieces together properly, is rocked and he quits the business. Hence, Swann’s Last Song.

It was meant to be a stand-alone, not part of a series. But when it was nominated for a Shamus Award and I lost, I was inspired to keep going. When I started a sequel, it was called Bad Reception, a title with several meanings since when the book opens Swann has quit the business and has a new career installing cable TV. And when he’s sucked back into the world of crime, his reception is not a particularly good one. But halfway into the book someone pointed out that if I were planning on keeping the series up, I’d have to brand the character and keep using his name in the title. Fortunately, that wasn’t difficult, and Bad Reception (which I fell in love with so I used it as a chapter heading) became Swann Dives In. Next year, Swann’s Lake of Despair will be published, and now I’m working on Swann’s Way Out.

That’s pretty easy, until, of course, I run out of catch Swann titles.

My latest book wasn’t that simple. A novel based on a true crime wherein a man murders his entire family and disappears, is told through the eyes of numerous narrators. When I started the book, several years ago, the working title was Rude Awakening. But as I got further and further into the book, that didn’t seem right. In getting into the mind of a murderer, I was trying to show that any of us, given the right circumstances and the right frame of mind, might be able to kill someone. And so, I changed the title to Skin Deep.

But I was never happy with that. I kept thinking of it as a good title for a porn film.

Just before I was ready to send it out to my agent and editor, I was walking down the street, plugged into my Ipod shuffle, when Tom Waits came on singing the theme from The Wire, “Way Down in the Hole.” There it was: Devil in the Hole. It was perfect. I sent the manuscript out and two weeks later, it was scooped up, and I’m convinced the title had a lot to do with it.