Novel Journey Interview with Eric Lerner

What book or project is coming out or has come out that you’d like to tell us about?

My novel Pinkerton’s Secret will be published by Henry Holt & Co. on March 4. It is the great detective’s own story, told as a memoir in his own voice, based almost entirely on actual events. It is also a love story and it is set during the Civil War. The cast of characters surrounding Allan Pinkerton include Kate Warne the first female detective, the Abolitionist John Brown and even Abraham Lincoln.

Tell us about your journey to publication. How long did it take before your novel was published?

I think my journey to publication may be unique. It is entertaining, at least in hindsight, so it is worth telling in all the details.About ten years ago I found a new biography of Pinkerton at my public library. I’ve always read as much history as I do fiction. I became engrossed in his life story.

The name conjured up images of wraiths in long black coats hunting down Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and crushing striking steel workers in Homestead, Pennsylvania.

What I discovered instead was a man who contradicted the myths, but whose life created one of those tantalizing historical mysteries that can only be unravelled in the imaginative realm of fiction. Pinkerton, I learned, was not just America’s original Private Eye, nabbing forgers, railroad thieves, and confidence men, he was a political radical who was passionately involved in the cause of Abolitionism. In the 1850’s his home in Chicago was a station on the Underground Railroad, and he counted John Brown and Frederick Douglass among his close friends.

When Kate Warne walked into his office in 1856 and he hired her as the first female detective, the biographer casually dismissed “the rumours at the time of anything but a professional involvement between them.” I dropped the book and laughed out loud. I had one of those rare and precious I have a story moments.

At that time, however, I turned my stories into screenplays for a living. Among my credits were the hit movie Bird on a Wire, starring Mel Gibson and Goldie Hawn, and a serious film, Kiss the Sky, starring William Petersen (now of CSI), which I wrote and produced.

I pitched Pinkerton’s story to a major studio, over the telephone no less, and they loved it. I was signed to write the screenplay, but before I’d even finished the first draft, as often happens in the movie business, all the executives involved in the project got fired. My script sat in a drawer for years through successive regime changes until the rights finally reverted to me. By that time I was ready to put my Hollywood career behind me, or vice versa--age catches up quickly to screenwriters, and nearing the age of fifty I had few fellow working contemporaries. I wanted to return to my first writing love—novels.

While many novelists dream of seeing their work on the silver screen, I had spent twenty years compressing the novels in my mind to fit that tight frame, and now I could finally restore to my work what I had so professionally deprived it of—a narrator’s voice.

To me, of all the differences between movies and novels, this is the one that most clearly defines each medium. A movie is a play, and the story is told through the actions and words of the characters. Using a voice over is a device of last resort. A novel, however, is a story told to the reader, and each novel’s identity arises from the unique quality of the narrator’s voice.The particular problem I confronted in the unusual conversion of Pinkerton’s Secret from a play to a novel was finding the right voice to tell the story.

My initial attempts at a third person narrator sounded stagy and false to me, like a stuffy period piece. I knew this story had the potential to engage the reader in a kind of emotional mystery, but I still didn’t know how. I couldn’t hear it.Then one night I was awakened at three a.m. by the voice of Allan Pinkerton. I had read that late in his life he suffered a devastating stroke, and here is how he described it to me:

Most people don’t think being paralysed hurts, because they can stick people pins in you and you don’t feel anything. But as I’ve made abundantly clear, most people are utter morons.

It was the voice I had encountered in his letters and the directives that poured out of the office of The General Superintendent of The Pinkerton National Detective Agency, a voice that brooked no opposition or tolerance for anyone who did not understand, as he did, the difference between right and wrong. And was willing to fight for it.

Fortunately, he kept talking to me for several years, because it took that long to finish the novel. Before anyone prescribes an anti-psychotic, I submit in my defense the fact that I spent 20 years writing screenplays, which are all about dialogue, and I was hearing voices the whole time. Maybe that’s no defense.

Now, all the while I was having another extreme reaction to 20 years of screenwriting—which is a painfully communal process. When I would finish a draft of a script, rarely would 48 hours pass before I was listening to feedback on my work—in the form of instructions to change it! I began to think that I wrote in invisible ink that disappeared before it dried.

So when I sat down to write my novel, I closed the doors, drew the blinds, turned off the phone and shut my mind to any thoughts of people who might resemble producers and studio execs. I didn’t think of “the marketplace,” or genres, or what was hot or not at the moment. I didn’t try to contact agents or anyone in publishing while I was writing.

And I had a very enjoyable and creative couple of years.

The finished product was idiosyncratic and I was quite satisfied with it. At that point I went looking for an agent. I deliberately avoided using my Hollywood contacts. I didn’t want my work confused with a screenplay in the making.

I carefully put the novel in the hands of a couple of people whose taste I trusted who were connected to the publishing industry. I was reassured by their enthusiasm for the manuscript that it would then pass on to like minded people at the next stage—literary agents.

Even though the time span to get a response to my work seemed phenomenally long to me compared to Hollywood where scripts are devoured (and discarded) overnight, only three agents had to read it before one bit. She took the manuscript on because she loved it for what it was, and thus she was able to put it into the hands of publishers who she felt would respond to it.

Well, that took a little more doing. In the end, though, she found the perfect editor, Jack Macrae at Henry Holt, who was described to me before I met him as “a living legend.” He worked with me for a full year. He finally gave up trying to make it fit a “genre” but in the editing process a much tighter book emerged.

And it only took, as I said, ten years. What mistakes have you made while seeking publication?

I don’t think I did. I avoided what I would consider to be the only fatal mistake—taking my eyes off my work and trying to divine from the “publishing world” what would make my manuscript more “saleable.”

What’s the best advice you’ve heard on writing/publication?

My agent began our relationship by lecturing me on how important it is as a writer/author to make the people at your publishing house think working with you is at least a pleasant experience and not a nightmare because you are telling them how to do their job.

But I already knew that. I’d survived in Hollywood for twenty years, where writers can’t afford to piss anyone off, except for two weeks after a hit movie they have written is released.

What are a few of your favorite books?

The Jewel in The Crown, John Updike’s Rabbit books, The Great Gatsby and my entire collection of cookbooks.

What other piece of writing have you done that you’re particularly proud of and why?

The screenplay to Kiss the Sky. I was also the producer, and not just in name only, so everything on the screen is my creation, a rare thing. And I like the finished product.

Can you give us a view into a typical day of your writing life?

As much solitude as I can beg, borrow or steal. And the rest of the day taking care of pleasant mundane activities such as making dinner. Do you have a dream for the future of your writing, something you would love to accomplish?

I have done lots of things in my life, but I have been a writer first for almost 40 years. Every morning I wake up and wait until the first thought of what I want to put on paper arrives in my head and dispels the anxiety that no thought will come. My only dream is that the new thoughts keep coming.

What is your favorite and least favorite part of being a writer?

My favorite is entering the world of imagination. My least favorite is leaving it.

How much marketing do you do? Any advice in this area?

I will only be able to give advice if it works.

The business of publishing and the marketing of books seems to me to have become as chaotic as, well, Hollywood. Once the editing of my manuscript was completed at Henry Holt, I realized I could not just sit back and wait for my residuals.

I looked at a lot of author and book websites and I wasn’t satisfied that the medium of the web was being fully utilized. I felt that while it was easy to “excerpt” a book on a site, just putting up a big block of text wasn’t a very tantalizing invitation to buy it.

My 24 year old son, Sam, is an unusual web designer. He designs, programs and is an impressive visual artist and musician in his own right. He wanted to replicate the experience of a movie trailer, and he had already created several web based projects that combine text with visuals in a pretty unique format. So we built the site together, presenting excerpts in a way that we hadn’t seen before, to create a multi-media experience of the book. The result ishttp://www.pinkertonssecret.com/

Author's Bio:

After graduating from Harvard College with a degree in Sanskrit and Indian Philosophy, Eric Lerner spent several years traveling and living in Buddhist monasteries and communities in Asia and America. He wrote a memoir about his experiences, Journey of Insight Meditation.

For several years he edited Zero, a journal that presented Buddhist thinkers alongside original work by Allen Ginsberg, John Cage, and the Pulitzer Prize winning poet John Ashbery, among others. This arcane background served him well during his subsequent twenty year career as a screenwriter and producer in Hollywood. His films include Bird on a Wire, starring Mel Gibson and Goldie Hawn; Kiss The Sky, starring William Petersen and Terrence Stamp; and Augustus, starring Peter O'Toole and Charlotte Rampling.

Pinkerton's Secret is his first novel.