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~ . . . the home of the bean and the cod, not to mention liberalism, history, the "shot heard 'round the world"–and holding it together after the Boston Marathon Bombing.

Back in Boston

Category Archives: Writings and writing

Harlan Coben and me

21 Friday Mar 2014

Posted by Virginia Smith in Back in Boston, Humor/humour, Writings and writing

≈ 6 Comments

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Harlan Coben

Harlan Coben on a book tour for Missing You

Me and Harlan.  I’m hoping all my success will rub off on him.  He gives a great shoulder rub.                                        

So New York Times bestselling author Harlan and I were hanging last night in a Boston-area bookstore, chewing the cud, shooting the sh**, talking about books and publishing, you know, like old writing buds do whenever they get together.

He’s in Boston tonight, and of course he called me a couple of weeks ago to say that I had to come to his interview at a local theatre, and then to a book signing across the street. I brought my mother and best friend with me so he’d sell at least three books.

He’s just written a new thriller, his 25th.  Given that he’s written so many, maybe this time he’ll get it right.  Keep hope alive, I always say.

Harlan knows that I’m an expert on getting great publicity, so he asked me for my ideas about how to promote his book.  Then he suddenly clapped his hand on his forehead like he was a total dummy and said, “Your blog!  The perfect place!”

He’s quite right, of course, considering I have over 4 kajillion readers.  Maybe with my help he can get on better bestseller lists than the one in the Paducah shopping mall, or the one on the site, “I really like this book,” which I believe goes to around 30 people in the quilting circle at Shepard of the Hills Lutheran Church in Duluth, Minnesota.  There’s only so much I can do, but we can hope!

He said he couldn’t do this without me, but hey, I like to help aspiring writers, especially ones who work as hard as my friend Harlan.

I happened to mention to him that I needed to find a new agent since my previous one, the wonderful Bob Lescher, passed away, and he of course said I should try his agent, so I told him that I queried her two weeks ago and was waiting to hear back. He told me that she turns everyone down, even writers he recommends to her.

I didn’t want to say this to him, but of course she turns down writers he sends her way! But what I was thinking was that his agent doesn’t know ME (yet) and I’ve got talent up the whazoo, but of course I didn’t say this since he’s such a nice guy and, as I said, he works so hard.

Did I already tell you that he’s a mensch?

Harlan has just published Missing You, which I haven’t read yet but will soon.  He said it’s darker than his previous books, and righteously scary.  The protagonist is short and female;  in his previous thriller the protagonist was tall and male.  He likes to mix things up, he says, do the opposite of what he did before.

Well, whatever.  Try the scattershot approach, and maybe something’ll hit, is all I can say.

If he ever hits the big-time I’ll tell him he’s got to upgrade his wardrobe, get out of the oversized shirt, jeans, and Keds without laces and into a nice pair of Dockers and a dress shirt so he looks like a real writer.

Missing You by Harlan Coben

One thing he said in the interview is that the thing that all writers have to have is empathy. I know, I know!  If there’s anything anyone would say about me, it’s that I have too much empathy! Just thinking about how it is for Harlan to struggle so much with his books just makes my heart bleed for him, and if that’s not empathy, I don’t know what is!

Harlan also mentioned in the interview that he really loved his parents, who died relatively young.

If you read his Myron Bolitar books, you’ll see a man who lives in his parents’ basement and adores his mother and father.  If you have kids yourself and/or if you’re just overflowing with empathy like I am, you will find this almost unbearably heartwarming that your kids might one day feel this way about you!

A mensch indeed.  Go buy his book.  Believe me, it’ll thrill him like nothing else! And tell the bookstore manager that I sent you.

My next job is to try to help another writer, Lee Child.  He’s been stumbling around for quite a while, but I’m sure I can get him on the right path.

Okay, I have to admit:  he and I had a little “thing” a couple of years back.  We kept it pretty hush-hush, but I guess he couldn’t keep his emotions in check when he signed my book:

What Lee Child wrote to me.

What Lee Child wrote to me.

I hope he’s gotten over me!  He really needs to concentrate on his writing, not pine for me.  Maybe, if he works hard enough, his books will take off.  Who knows what might happen, in this crazy business of writing and publishing?  I wish Harlan and Lee all the best.  As I said, I’ll do all I can for them.

Bob Lescher, my literary agent, R.I.P.

09 Sunday Dec 2012

Posted by Virginia Smith in How we're coming along, Writings and writing

≈ 21 Comments

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Bob Lescher, Bob Lescher literary agent, Robert Lescher, Robert Lescher literary agent, Robert Lescher RIP

Courtesy, New York Times

Courtesy, New York Times

There was a half-page  obituary for Robert Lescher in the New York Times this morning.  Bob was my literary agent;  he’d been ill for over eighteen months and was no longer actively working on my behalf but still, his death was a shock.

Bob was one of the “grand old men” of literary agenting.  Many of the authors he represented were people who changed the American landscape:  Robert Frost, quite possibly the best-loved American poet; Dr Benjamin Spock, America’s most trusted pediatrician;  the artists Andrew Wyeth and Georgia O’Keeffe;  Madeleine L’Engle, author of young adult classics including A Wrinkle in Time; thriller writer Thomas Perry; the Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer;  the humor writer Calvin Trillin; the food writer M.F.K. Fisher, the children’s author Judith Viorst, whose Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day is an American children’s classic.  On the international front, he represented the English jockey/thriller writer Dick Francis, the English literary biographer Michael Holroyd, and the Dalai Lama, whom Bob took on as a client because, as he said, “Jesus was unavailable.”

Bob was a throwback to a more gracious, literary, and literate publishing world.   “Courtly” was the word I used when describing Bob to my friends;  “courtly” seemed to be the word many people, including the New York Times obituary writer, used to describe him.  When one of his oldest and most revered clients died, Bob went to the funeral.  I spoke to him the next day.  “That must have been very sad for you,” I said.  Bob, uncharacteristically, said nothing. He was too much of a gentleman to say the actual words:  the person was a force, and not in a good way.

He had a gently wicked sense of humor about everything he did, including getting editors personally invested at an early stage in his projects.  Rather than send an entire manuscript directly to editors, he would first send a brief email, describing the book in one or two sentences, then saying, “I would so love to share this new author with you.”  By securing the editors’ request to see the manuscript he was, as he said, “making them complicit in their own demise.”  As he said this, he would catch your eye and grin.

Bob was eighty-three when he died, and had worked in publishing since his early twenties.  As a first-time editor at Henry Holt, he’d gone to the London Book Fair and had come back with only two projects.  His boss said something along the lines of, “Only two?”  Both became bestsellers in the US.  I don’t remember the first, but the second was Dick Francis, whose posthumously co-written books still hit the bestseller list.  By age twenty-five, Bob had become Holt’s editor-in-chief.

Bob came into my life shortly after my father died in 2007.  I had written a thriller that was deemed too “edgy” by at least fifteen New York literary agents, and I was looking for an agent who believed in me, and my ms.

I decided that I would look for a young, edgy New York City literary agent who wouldn’t be put off by an edgy, New York City thriller, but on a whim, I sent my manuscript to Bob Lescher.  I’d never met him, but he was one of the few agents that the publisher and editor-in-chief at HarperCollins, where I had worked as an acquiring editor, had spoken of with unadulterated respect.

Bob read my manuscript over Easter weekend, and called me on Easter Monday.  He loved it;  he wanted to represent me.  I asked if the other half of Lescher & Lescher, his wife Susan, had also read it.  She had, and she’d loved it, too.  I happily accepted his offer, and became part of his stable of authors.  There was no contract to be signed;  he said that contracts weren’t necessary between people of good will.

Finding Bob was propitious in many ways;  I needed an agent, and I also needed a father-figure.  This was just after Easter, and my own father had died several days earlier, on Good Friday.  My mother and I were with him to the end during a torturous year-and-a-half of hospitalizations, rehabilitations, more hospitalizations, more rehabilitations.  At least once a week my dad would ask, “Have you found an agent?”  My getting an agent was clearly very important to him in the small amount of time he had left.  Three days after he died, I had an agent.  And not just any old agent;  I had Bob Lescher, an agent’s agent, the sort of agent you could only dream of having.  And, coincidentally, who had daughters named Katherine and Margaret, as did I.

When I first met him, he was living and working in a brownstone on East 84th Street. Over lunch, he told me stories.  One was about editing Alice B. Toklas, life companion of Gertrude Stein.  When he showed up for the first time at her apartment in Paris’s Left Bank, he knocked on the door and saw it slowly open.  He looked out, but no one was there.  Then he looked down (Bob was quite tall), and there she was, “a tiny woman with a moustache.”

Over the course of five years, he visited Alice in Paris for one week every year to edit the fifty pages she’d written during the previous year.  Slowly, slowly, he helped her craft her autobiography, working in her apartment under a gallery of Matisses, Cezannes, Juan Grises, and Picassos.

During our lunch, Bob mentioned that his first wife had written a memoir in which he figured. He said, with some humor, that she had referred to him as “B.”  From the way he spoke, it was clear that “B” was not short for “Bob.”

With some trepidation, because I didn’t want to find out about reasons not to like my agent whom I liked very much, when I got back home to Boston I Googled “Robert Lescher,” but found almost nothing about him.  He was under the radar.  Finally, I was able to discover that his first wife was Mary Cantwell, whose essays in the New York Times I had loved. I bought her book, hoping there wouldn’t be much material on “B.,” but what I learned was that, up until the end of the marriage, he was a magnificent husband and continued to be an excellent father to their children.

When I last saw Bob, in June 2011, he’d just moved from 84th Street on the Upper East Side to West 21st Street in Chelsea.  His landlord at 84th had so liked having Bob as a tenant that he or she (I can’t remember which) brought Bob with him/her when he/she relocated to Chelsea, never having raised Bob’s rent in all the time he’d been a tenant.  Bob had been offered the garden apartment in a gorgeously renovated brownstone.

I took the train from Boston to hand-deliver my second manuscript.  It was a swelteringly hot day.  Bob proudly showed me around his new office, his bedroom at the front, a small lawn at the back, and a lot of room in between for him and the two terrific women who worked with him, Carolyn Larson, also an agent, and Barbara.  In the hour I was there, several of his clients and friends stopped by to congratulate him on his new digs, and he chatted amiably and offered them a brand of fruit juice he’d just discovered, seeming to derive an immoderate amount of pleasure at introducing his visitors to this elixir of the gods.

He took me to lunch at his favorite restaurant, his arm through mine as he walked unsteadily to a cab.  Upon arriving, we were immediately ushered to a table in a clearly desirable corner of the dining room. He ordered a large glass of wine,  downed it in one gulp, handed the wine glass to the waitress, and asked for a refill. That amount of wine, consumed so quickly, would have flattened a lesser man.

He told me about his weekly poker group with several men of his generation, mystery writers and the owner of a mystery bookshop.  I told him about spending my summer after college at the house of John Wain, Oxford professor of poetry, and finding a letter from Philip Larkin in his bicycle basket, and he told me more about finding Dick Francis and publishing him for the American market.

We went back to his office, then he walked me to 7th Avenue and hailed a cab.  He opened the door, kissed me goodbye, and promised to read my manuscript at his soonest opportunity.  I watched after him as he walked slowly back down 21st Street.

A week passed, then two, then three.  Finally, I screwed up my courage, and called.  Carolyn said that he hadn’t been able to get to my new manuscript, but that he would, soon. I was at the top of his list.

Another call, and word that Bob had fallen, and was in rehab.  It was clear that this fall hadn’t happened recently. Then another silence;  Bob was unable to get to the phone but I was still at the top of his list.  I feared the worst.   And then came the word from Carolyn that Bob had declined to take on my new manuscript.  By then I had suspected that we were over;  that most likely, he was over.

Last spring, while I was living in Cambridge, England, I read a post on the internet written by one of Bob’s other authors that his agent, the very kind and welcoming Carolyn Larson, had died.  I emailed the office, and several days later, heard back that Carolyn, only 70, had died in her sleep, a complete shock to everyone.  It must have been devastating to Bob.

I do not know what will become of Lescher & Lescher without Bob and Carolyn. I can only hope that perhaps one of his three daughters will take it on, because it is a fine name that is worthy of continuing.  I will always feel honored that I had the privilege of being one of Bob Lescher’s authors.  I so miss that rich, cultivated voice over the phone, choosing his words so carefully, and his wry, sometimes wicked, sense of humor, and the knowledge that he would do absolutely everything in his power for me.

 

New York, a love story, 11 years later

12 Wednesday Sep 2012

Posted by Virginia Smith in How we're coming along, Uncategorized, Writings and writing

≈ 5 Comments

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9/11, falling in love with New York, New York City, Upper West Side of Manhattan

Photograph courtesy nycfoto.com

There are two places in the world that I love above all others:   my parents’ village in the Peak District of England (at top)–and New York City (above).  Go figure:  it’s very schizophrenic, one a beautiful English village where my family has lived for generations, the other a frenetic US city where I knew no one when I first moved there. But somehow, this dichotomy works for me.

New York was in my thoughts yesterday, the 11th anniversary of the attack. It put me in mind of an essay that I wrote soon after 9/11 which was published in my local Boston newspaper.  Since no link is available, I’m putting it here, in a slightly abbreviated version.

New York, A Love Story

November 8, 2001

On the Sunday before the Tuesday of September 11th, 2001, I went to a wedding in Montclair, N.J.  As I drove home to Boston, I automatically took the exit for New York.

“We live in Boston!  Boston!” my companion called out.  I yanked the steering wheel to the right, knowing that more than anything, even after four years of living in Boston, New York was still home.

Like the most passionate love affairs, my love for New York was first borne of hatred.

In 1982, on a hot, steamy, late summer afternoon, I emerged from the subway at 103rd Street and Broadway into what was surely one of the circles of hell.  The city stank of rotting food, urine, and exhaust fumes.  The noise was unbearable:  everything was too fast, too loud, too frantic.  I was in my 20s and, like many transplants, I had come for a job.  If you worked in book publishing, New York was the only place to be.

Manhattan was in the midst of a huge real estate boom.  The rental market was extremely tight, the vacancy rate was almost nonexistent, and there was a lot of money to be made.  Stories circulated about one person who rented space under a grand piano, another who rented a bay window.  When I told a colleague about the apartment that I had found through a Village Voice want ad that I shared with two roommates–2,000 square feet, three bedrooms, three bathrooms, maid’s room, two living rooms, dining room, kitchen, western exposures over the Hudson River–an entire elevator full of people fell silent as we traveled from the lobby to the 42nd floor.  The only other time an elevator ride was so quiet was when Jackie Kennedy Onassis, an editor at my company, graced us with her presence.  One time I was racing quickly–too quickly–to the Xerox room and ran flat into Ms. Onassis, who was turning a corner.  She said, “Yoiks,” so now you know what she says when she’s unpleasantly surprised.

After a while I began to wonder how I had lucked into such an incredible apartment–no one I knew at my income level had anything like my living situation.  One of my roommates finally enlightened me:  the previous tenant had been bludgeoned to death in our living room.  The market was so tight and I’d never get anything at all like this, so I stayed, but I never again went into the living room.

I and my two roommates, strangers, got along well despite our differences:  male, female;  gay, straight; Catholic, Protestant, Jewish; Italian, English, Russian;  from New Jersey, Chicago and England, Australia.  Then the apartment went coop.  The two people on the lease–my two roommates–could buy cheaply, sell high.  Wanting the apartment for himself, my male roommate embarked on a crusade of terrorizing us and threatening to kill us.  With my roommate and me gone, he flipped the apartment, buying it for $217,000 and selling it the same day for $487,000–a fortune in those days.  It’s now worth well over four million.

My work situations were no better.  My first New York boss wrote me love letters.  Another boss grew despondent over impending layoffs in our division, and for two months I spent every morning trying to talk him out of jumping out the window.

My secretary was the victim of domestic abuse, her brother, a drug addict, was dying of AIDS.  Her husband made kamikaze visits to our office;  he was convinced that his wife was having an affair with my suicidal boss.  The company put a guard on our floor, in case he ever came with a gun.  Then the layoffs came, and I, one of the sole survivors, spent the next year telling distraught authors that their contracts were cancelled and helping the company dodge their threatened lawsuits.

If the halls of the workplace were vicious, the streets were no better.

A mentally ill homeless man terrorized my neighborhood of West 98th Street, throwing chunks of cement, bottles, and garbage cans at women and children (never at men).  He would be taken away for several weeks, but would always return.

Grass grew long in Central Park, rats ran over city playgrounds, and racial tension flared.  A gang of youths from Harlem were charged (wrongly, as it turned out many years later) with raping and beating a female jogger in Central Park;  the media picked up the phrase “wilding” and drove the city into a panic.  Crown Heights tore the city in two.

Outside Carnegie Hall, a man lunged at me with a knife.  On Park Avenue a homeless man urinated on my shoes.  One of my authors, seven months pregnant, was stalked and accosted on the subway by a crazy man.  Two months later she saw him on the news:  Colin Ferguson, who had just murdered four people on the Long Island Railroad.

The streets had become home to the walking dead.  Men showed up at the church I attended in Greenwich Village, grew thin, then were seen no more.  The prayer list went on for pages.

By 1990, the year that more than 2,000 people were murdered in New York, all I wanted to do was leave, but my job, under a new, but also troubled, boss, kept me there.

In February 1993, the World Trade Center was bombed.  I looked out of my office window down Fifth Avenue to see plumes of smoke rising behind the Pan Am building.  It seemed as if the world had gone insane and I felt that my heart would break under the strain.

Then something miraculous happened–or two things, only one of my making.

William Bratton, the new police chief brought in from Boston by Mayor Rudy Giuliani to take control of the escalating violence, started to show results.  To the amazement of everyone, the crime rate started plummeting, dropping from 2,000 murders a year to around 500.

Slowly but surely a sense of control was returning to the city.

And I had a baby.

The love I felt for her was indescribable.  And I found that I had fallen in love, not just with my child, but with my city.

I found that with a baby in tow, the friendliness that had lain dormant came to the fore.  Countermen gave my daughter bagels, cookies, grapes;  store assistants spoke to her, strangers on the street patted her head.  She had her first taste of watermelon from a taxi driver’s lunch, and wherever we went there were people to talk to.

As I traveled this very different city, everywhere I went I saw touches of kindness and connection.  When I returned to the deli next to my old office in Midtown two years after I had left my job, the counterman broke into a big smile and greeted me with, “Provolone on a roll, tomato, lettuce”–my regular order.  One morning I saw a girl around 11 or 12 who was crying on the M107 Broadway bus.  An older woman left her seat, put her arm around the girl, stroked her head, and murmured in her ear for blocks.

In the past weeks since 9/11, New York has shown that incredible goodness of which it is capable:  the people who refused to leave strangers in the World Trade Center and who perished with them when the building collapsed;  the men who carried a woman in a wheelchair down more than 60 floors in the smoke-filled inferno;  the firefighters who selflessly raced into a doomed building to save others.

But my Boston friends ask me: why would I want to return to a city that has undergone such destruction, that would be in continuing danger?

I think:  would I really want to return to sit with my friend Steve on his sofa on the Upper West Side, watching CNN obsessively while reliving his experiences as the World Trade Center crashed and burned a few blocks away, and where two of his former colleagues died?  Would I truly want to visit my friend Alyson in Brooklyn and smell the stench of burning flesh from the fires that still burn two months after the attack?  Or be with Dan as he mourned the deaths of 60 people from his Upper West Side temple;  or with Joan, who lives an hour out of New York and lost 15 members of her church?  Would I really want to return to this place of horror, where such evil has been done?

Don’t get me wrong:  I love Boston, its history, its architecture, its coast, the fact that people pull over for ambulances and stand on the T for women and children.

I have made friends here and I like it a lot.  And I know it’s better for my young children to continue living here among their friends, living the life they enjoy, the only life they remember.  But as for me?  I’d return to the city I love in a New York second.

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