BESTSELLERS & BEST FRIENDS
My book publishing blog, with murder mysteries woven through it.
If this is your first visit, be sure to start with “1. Let’s do it!”
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HOLD ON! Going to pause for a few before getting to Erle Stanley Gardner. Here’s what happened since I last posted.
I woke at 1:43 a.m. I remembered! Tarrytown! That where Tenna said she ships Allan Jatos his books.
Then I woke at 2:05 a.m. There was a Graham family in my hometown of Ligonier (PA). They owned the Buick dealership. My dad bought all his cars there. There was a beautiful Graham girl by the name of Anna. That’s right, Anna Graham. And that got me to thinking about anagrams along with my already thinking about Tarrytown and the buried loves-a-book guy, Lajos Antal.
So I opened up my computer and plugged “Lajos Antal” into an online anagram generator and up came “Allan Jatos“ – the name of my favorite author who lives in Tarrytown. Holy hell!
Then I woke again at 3:54 a.m. To pee.
I couldn’t get back to sleep. On one hand there’s Allan Jatos, my favorite author, who ends all his books with “vége” and apparently lives in Tarrytown (his books get shipped to there).
And on the other hand there’s Jatos’ anagram cousin, Lajos Antal, who apparently owns an expensive-looking house in Tarrytown. And yet he’s dead and buried under a book-ish headstone, with “vége” inscribed on it.
Coincidence? Come on!
Something’s up, but I can’t spot it.
By 6 a.m. I figure, the hell with it all, I’m driving up to that address in Tarrytown. To see what I might see.
Oh, and Erle Stanley Gardner? You’re going to love this.
Early in his career, Gardner — author of scores of books, the creator of Perry Mason, and America’s bestselling author at the time of his death — was paid by the word to write for pulp magazines.
The longer the story, the more he was paid.
When Gardner’s editor asked him why his heroes were such lousy shots, always killing the villains with the very last bullet in the gun, Gardner said, “At three cents a word, every time I say bang in the story I get three cents. If you think I’m going to finish the gun battle while my hero has got fifteen cents’ worth of unexploded ammunition in his gun, you’re nuts.”
Tomorrow: Tarrytown