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Edgar Awards

Donald Westlake

When Joe Gores asked an English professor at Notre Dame about his chances for becoming a writer he was told he had the requisite talent and drive and that experience would come. The professor, in fact, passed along a formula: "Go to a big city and get a little room with a bed, a table and a chair. Put your typewriter on the table, put your butt on the chair and start typing. Ten years later when you stand up you’ll be a writer."

Gores got the message about focusing on the craft but wisely came up with his own  formula that involved actually earning a living while he honed his writing skills. Now the man who remembers the names of at least five other students at Notre Dame who were better writers than he can look at the row of his acclaimed mystery novels — including A Time of Predators, Contract Null and Void, 32 Cadillacs — that line his office in the hills of San Anselmo, California, and share his own life lessons on how he made his dream come true.

If the tips sound useful, however, keep in mind that fellow mystery writer Donald Westlake, notable author of such gems as The Hook and The Ax, calls his friend Gores "real and loony at the same time."

Lesson one: Listen to your mother.

Between his sophomore and junior years at Notre Dame, Gores decided to take his mother’s advice to heart. "Don’t dream — do," Mildred Gores told her son when he wanted to drive to Alaska over summer break.

So off he went to Alaska over break. After graduation in 1953, it was on to California; a couple years later he took off for a year in Tahiti on a freighter with his friend Earl, an architect who "had this vision in his mind of dusky maidens dropping their sarongs." Then, after a stint stateside in the service, Gores headed to Africa with his Mennonite friend John and taught for a couple years in a program that preceded the Peace Corps.

Gores doesn’t give his supportive parents, Mildred and Joseph, all the credit for his earlier vagabond existence. As he wrote in his 1999 novel Cases, which fictionalizes his after-college odyssey to San Francisco (following that "big city" tip from the professor), "You went, you watched, you learned, until you knew, like Hemingway said, that you had something to write about."

Perhaps that’s how Gores saw it. But a review in The New York Times Book Review sees Gores’ adventures differently. "[W]riting is what the writer does to give himself an excuse for living."

Lesson two: Get a wickedly colorful job.

In his dedication to the wildly successful 32 Cadillacs, Gores writes: "This book is for my beloved Dori who helped me snatch a Cadillac from Mafia hitman Jimmy ‘The Weasel’ Fratianno on our first date."

Now there’s a first date to write home about. It wasn’t illegal, either. Gores was just doing his job. (And getting the girl; Dori and Joe have been married 24 years.)

For a while, Gores thought about going into teaching. After his teaching stint in Africa, he gave up the idea. "You have to give part of yourself to the kids," he says, noting that to do otherwise would be to cheat the children. He decided to keep job-related and other commitments to a minimum in his youth.

So in 1955, when he’d started working on a master’s degree at Stanford, he got the private eye job. "I didn’t have to give of my creativity to do it," he notes. In fact, the work of private detecting, which often included repossessing cars, was one, Gores soon realized, that would give him time to write. It also gave him some fine ideas and plots for mysteries.

"In the detective business, an awful lot of the stuff you end up doing is funny," he says. From that job came the Dan Kearney & Associates File novels that brought Gores a firm standing as a mystery writer and a reputation as a worthy heir to hard-boiled authors Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

Lesson three: Quit your colorful job, put your butt on the chair and type

One year in the late 1950s, while he was concentrating on short stories, Gores got 300 rejection slips. When the slips came in another story would go out. Eventually, however, when the stories went out, back would come those wonderful acceptance letters. Plus cash. Like the $65 he got for his first published story "Chain Gang," sold to the magazine Man Hunt.

As the acceptances came rolling in, Gores made a big decision. In 1966, he quit his job as a full-time private-eye . "I loved detective work, I truly loved it," he says.

But it was time to trust himself — and his dream.

So, Gores put his faith and financial future into a typewriter and hoped that a living would roll out.

"I was only writing short stories then," he says. Those stories were getting published, however. After one of them appeared in Ellery Queen magazine, Gores got a letter from an editor at Simon & Schuster: "She said that if I did a novel, they wanted to see it."

Now there’s an invitation demanding an RSVP. So Gores did the smart thing. "I immediately sat down and wrote a novel."

The payoff came in 1969, when the Mystery Writers of America awarded Gores an Edgar for best first novel (A Time of Predators) and an Edgar for best short story ("Good-bye, Pops"). An Edgar is the prize to get for U.S. mystery writers. Even today, Gores sounds nonplussed about his double win: "I was just so astounded that I sort of couldn’t believe it."

Lesson four: Always depend on the kindness of friends

"I’ve always been very lucky because people helped me along without me expecting it," the self-effacing Gores says modestly.

The first major kindness happened when Gores was in the Army at Fort Lewis, Washington, facing the dismal prospect of typing up what appeared to be about two million 3-by-5 cards. He sent a "Help!" postcard to a friend, who happened to be a member of the Atomic Energy Commission, bemoaning the assignment.

A short time later, Gores got orders to report to the Pentagon, where he was assigned to the news branch. Good-bye mindless typing; hello to the real and sometimes fun assignment of researching and writing biographies of Army generals.

Another unexpected angel showed up in 1975 when, Gores says, he was "sketchily making a living as a writer." His early Dan Kearney & Associates File novels, Dead Skip and Final Notice, and other novels were being published to great reviews and sales, but even in the early 1970s, writing novels wasn’t a high-paying endeavor.

Then Jack Laird, producer of the TV show Kojak, called, and told Gores he liked his dialogue. In fact, Laird said, he wanted Gores to write for the TV show.

For once, Gores didn’t jump at the opportunity. "I’m scared to," he says he told Laird.

Laird, unfazed, offered to teach Gores how a teleplay was done. "Jack helped teach me by phone and mail," says Gores.

The lessons took. In 1976, Gores won his third Edgar, this one for best one-hour teleplay for a Kojak script called "No Immunity for Murder." For the next 10 years, with a short break to write another DKA File mystery, Gone, No Forwarding, Gores started earning a lot more than sketchy money for his teleplays, including scripts for Columbo, Magnum P.I., Mike Hammer and Remington Steele. "My commercial success probably started with TV work, because you make so much," he says.

"I think he and Jack Laird did the best Kojaks over the nine-year run of the show," says Henry Morrison, Gores’ agent. Gores says he was fascinated by the craft of writing for video venues and also did some screenplays, including a couple based on such novels of his as Interface and Hammett.

But time and the Hollywood youth culture eventually took their toll. "It’s hard to get a job in television after about age 40," says the man who didn’t even start writing for TV until he was 40.

Lesson five: Wow ’em

In the 1990s, when Hollywood decided Gores was too old for them, he returned to books. However, notes Donald Westlake, the televison work Gores did took its toll on his mystery series: "Spaces and silences mean it’s hard to build a readership."

Fourteen years after his last installment in his DKA series, Gone, no Forwarding, Gores confounded that view with his 1992 installment, 32 Cadillacs.

The book drove critics and readers wild:

The funniest crime novel of the year – Los Angeles Times

Terrifically inventive and outlandishly funny – Chicago Tribune

Exceptional. A fast and funny romp – Playboy

Gloriously entertaining; a boisterous caper; totally original; Gores at his best; hilarity unbound; a madcap romp; a rare treat; a delight to read – newspapers across the country.

"The whole thing is just like grand opera," says Morrison of 32 Cadillacs. "It’s one of those books that every writer does on occasion – a flash point."

Final Lesson: Say aaah

Gores is clear about what he does: "Writers are con men, trying to get your attention."

Like any con, the game takes some planning. Gores also is clear about how plodding that process can be. "I’m not a fast writer because I rewrite so much," he says. "My first drafts are horrible."

While the self-effacing Gores says he’s "still learning," he also notes that an ego is necessary to survive. Not, however, a personal ego, he quickly points out, but enough of an ego to say "I can do this." It an ego about the work, he explains, and an ego that keeps you working.

"I’m not a best-selling writer," says the author whose personal ego seems well in hand. "I try to write the kind of books I want to read." In some ways, he adds, "It’s a dedication, it’s a sacrament."

But if he won’t praise himself, others will. "Let me put two words together that don’t normally go together," says Westlake about Gores: "dogged and brilliant."

Being dogged means Gores muscles through the writing tasks that may not come easily to him. Being brilliant, adds Westlake, means the final result shines.

Morrison agrees about the work he gets from his client: "The manuscript seems effortless because I’m reading the final product."

Effortless it is not. But the loony, dogged, brilliant Gores still gets a frisson of satisfaction when he starts a new project. He sits in front of his computer, in the freestanding office that offers a pleasant view of shrubbery-covered California hills, and says to himself: "Aaah, wow, here we go." And then he starts to type.

Photo by Dori Gores

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