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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Early this evening, I grabbed drinks with Dan, an agent with Writers House. We sat at the bar at The Drunken Horse, where my late, great friend Randy House and I met once a week (see this post).
I first engaged Dan to rep branded book properties spun off of the Funbrain and Poptropica properties I managed.
He did a terrific job, placing our Galactic Hot Dogs series (launched on Funbrain.com) with a great team at Simon & Schuster.
Galactic Hot Dogs is terrific—funny, thrilling, imaginative, everything! It sold well but why it never cracked the bestseller lists I’ll never understand.
Then Dan placed our Poptropica book series with one of the business’s best editors, Charlie Kochman at Abrams Books. Those Poptropica books did hit the New York Times bestseller lists.
Dan now reps my son, Max, so it’s always good to grab a drink and catch up on business and family.
But today we caught up on murder. Seriously. Unbelievably. Déjà vu. I had the second-weirdest conversation of my life within 48 hours of having the weirdest conversation of my life (with Liz Hammer).
Dan immediately caught me up on the death of one of their agents, Orlando. I had heard. It was awful. Orlando jumped off the roof of the London Terrace apartments in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. Suicide, apparently.
“What’s odd, and scary,” said Dan, “is how Orlando died in the same way and at the same place as a character in a manuscript that been submitted to him.”
I had no idea what he was talking about, “Huh?”
Dan took a deep breath and dived in, “After Orlando’s death, his assistant walked into our management team’s weekly meeting and said, ‘I have to tell you something.’”
It turns out that the assistant had reviewed a manuscript which featured a character just like Orlando – an agent at Writers House, with the same name, who commits suicide by jumping off the roof of, get this, the London Terrace apartments. But it wasn’t suicide. It turns out it was murder. He was pushed.”
London Terraces Towers rooftop; it’s a long way down (20 stories).
“Holy shit,” I exhale, “that’s so—”
“It gets weirder,” he waved to Moon, the bartender, for another round of drinks, “the story gets to be about you.”
Drunken Horse interior; Dan and I sat at the bar this evening, as Randy and I once did
“No, no fucking way.” I’m thinking back to lunch two days ago with, you know, Liz.
“Yep, the writer used your name for a character who has a book publishing blog—"
“And,” I cut Dan off, “I’m the murderer. Right?”
“You know about this?”
“No, but sort of,” and I told him what Liz had shared with me about the submitted manuscript that exactly echoed Tom Hoza’s death. And how the manuscript fingered me as the murderer. Then I asked, “any chance the submitted manuscript is still around?”
Dan ate his martini’s olive. “Police asked the same thing, but nah, we toss them.”
“When did the manuscript arrive? Before or after Orlando’s death?”
“The submission’s cover note was dated a week before his death. The assistant remembered because that date was her birthday, it stuck with her.”
Dan and I paid Moon for our drinks and called it a night.
On the way home I stopped for a pack of smokes. It’s been a long time, but this shit...
Tomorrow: Speaking of drinking and smoking and wanting to get back to blogging about publishing