Boo!
Did I scare you? Probably not, though I scare myself sometimes. Looking in the mirror, I see a ghost. Not the white-sheeted Casper kind of ghost, but rather the literary variety, a specter of a different sort – in fact, a struggling mid-list author trying to support himself.
I first became invisible, so to speak, in 1986 when my agent phoned me one day and asked me to fly to New York. He’d set up a meeting with Walter Zacharius, the owner of Kensington Publishers, to discuss a new comic mystery series that would be written supposedly by Steve Allen, the famous TV celebrity . . . only the series would be written by me, if I were interested. “Oh, it’ll be easy money!” said my agent slickly. “And Robert, believe me, you could write these stories stoned!”
So I boarded a big silver bird from Northern California, where I was living at the time, and the following day found myself in an impressive Manhattan office, a corner suite high in the midtown sky, with floor-to-ceiling windows occupying two walls. Walter Zacharius, the publisher, sat importantly behind his huge desk, while my agent and I and several senior flunkeys took up various positions in the room facing him. Mr. Zacharius had read my novel of the moment, THE LEFT-HANDED POLICEMAN, a mystery with a comic bent, and he thought I was just the right person to pretend to be Steve Allen. Sadly, though Steve Allen possessed a most illustrious name and many talents, he did not possess the particular talent required to write fiction, so it was necessary to find someone to perform this task in his place.
Meanwhile, my agent had already built me up as someone who could pass muster, stressing the fact that I had grown up in a Hollywood family and knew Tinsel Town inside out, all the eccentricities and mating habits of the stars. (Well, I HAD grown up in Hollywood, that was true. But I’d left Los Angeles years earlier, running for my sanity. Still, I could imagine the mating habits of movie stars well enough; fortunately with human beings, the possibilities of intercourse are somewhat fixed, despite one’s position in life.)
We soon got down to details. The series would be written in the first person from Steve Allen’s point of view, and the main characters would be, in fact, Steve and his glamorous wife, Jayne Meadows. In each mystery, Steve and Jayne would run about in mad-cap fashion and somehow manage to solve a show biz mystery. For the first novel, it was proposed that Steve would be asked to be the guest-host of a late-night TV talk show – The Tonight Show, only I was to change the name, and during his first night on the job, one of the celebrity guests was to drop dead on-camera, mysteriously murdered. Steve, of course, would solve the crime.
I remember Walter Zacharius, the great publisher, leaning back in his huge chair with a thoughtful expression on his face. “The first murder,” he said dreamily. “The one that happens on-camera. I’d like the victim to be killed by drinking a glass of poisoned Cajun-flavored pepper vodka. And for the ending . . . I’d like Steve to solve the crime at Chasen’s restaurant.”
I had a pad and pen and wrote down dutifully, “Cajun-flavored pepper vodka . . . Chasen’s.” And that was all I got, the rest was for me to imagine and write. The result was MURDER ON THE GLITTER BOX, my first Steve Allen novel, and the only one that was half-way decent. I did the thing in three months and gave it my best shot. Unfortunately, once the book was finished, it was sent to Steve himself, who gave it a quick edit and added an occasional anecdote. By 1986, Steve Allen was no longer as famous as he had been 20 years earlier, and all the anecdotes he inserted were designed to remind the reader that he had been the original host of The Tonight Show. That didn’t bother me; I’d grown up surrounded by aging celebrities and I know how terribly they hated to be forgotten. The problem was that Steve generally inserted his anecdotes at exactly the wrong moment. Typically, I’d have a place in the story when Steve and Jayne were about to find a body in a darkened house on a stormy night when Steve would stop the action cold with several entirely irrelevant paragraphs that always began, “That reminds me of a time when I was the host of The Tonight Show . . . .” I assure you, as a writer I wanted to murder the guy for mangling MY mystery! But of course, it was his name on the cover, not mine, so he had the final word.
I ended up writing eight Steve Allen mysteries. Seven, to be honest. For the final novel, I was busy with my own Howard Moon Deer mysteries, with a 4-book contract of my own, and my wife Gail wrote the last Steve and Jayne romp, MURDER IN HAWAII. She was the ghost of a ghost, and I was very grateful to her. In all, the books got worse and worse as I grew increasingly disgusted with the business of ghost writing. I insisted to my agent that I needed to alternate one Steve Allen book with one of my own – for I was ambitious in my own right to be the best writer I could be, fulfill my creative talents, and all that. So generally I would toss off a Steve mystery in three to four weeks, then spend the rest of the year on one of my own books. I would have given up the ghost business entirely, except it paid a whole lot better than my own work. Without Steve, I’d have been back in some restaurant washing dishes.
Eventually, Steve grew old and died, as people will do. I picture him in some Hollywood heaven for forgotten celebrities where he’s saying to St. Peter, “You know, that reminds me of when I was the host of The Tonight Show . . . .” Meanwhile, my own career wasn’t exactly flourishing, sales-wise. In 2003, Penguin Putnam cancelled my Howard Moon Deer series, saying they all liked my writing but, alas, my books weren’t making money . . . and of course that’s the bottom line for huge global corporations like Penguin Putnam, money. I was fine with this, really, ready for new frontiers – literally, some serious travel in store with my wonderful wife Gail. China, Egypt, Southeast Asia, South America . . . the world was our oyster, a very interesting oyster indeed.
To support ourselves overseas, Gail taught English and I tossed off a few “novelizations” for my old editor at Signet – that is, various Hollywood studios gave me movie scripts which I turned into novels of a sort, using their dialogue and camera directions as a starting point. Generally I had precisely 3 weeks to complete these projects, and they all turned out badly: THE MEXICAN, INSOMNIA, and, worst of all, THE FINAL CUT. I beg any of my readers who may have chanced his or her way onto this website: Please do NOT even THINK of reading any of these ghastly books!!
And then one day in 2004, my agent phoned and asked if I would consider ghost-writing a thriller for Jack Anderson, the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. Jack was sick with Parkinson’s Disease, unable to fulfill his contract, and Tor/Forge, the publisher, was looking for someone like me to do the actual writing. At just that moment I was trying to write a huge, sprawling, “serious” novel that was going nowhere, and this seemed like a welcome diversion. So I said yes. I ended up having a good time with the book, which was first called OILGATE and later became THE SAUDI CONNECTION.
Tor/Forge sent me a one-page story idea but other than that, I was free to do what I wanted . . . with only one required story twist that was to cause me trouble: toward the end of the tale, Ron Wright, the protagonist, was to sneak into Saudi Arabia and make his way to the forbidden city of Mecca. With the help of an article in an old National Geographic I was able to fake this well enough so that one reviewer has praised Jack Anderson for his “immense knowledge of Saudi Arabia.” As for Jack, I had a single phone conversation with him, but he was too sick to be involved with any of the writing and I’m certain he didn’t even have a chance to read the book before he died in 2005. He was a sweet man, however, and I’m grateful to him. I’m sure it was Jack’s doing that Tor/Forge decided to put my name on the cover along with his.
I sense my ghost writing days are finished, which is just as well. In many ways, it was an interesting experiment to write for other people, subduing my own ego . . . and, best of all, not having to worry about taking the heat. For you’re always in the hot seat, vulnerable to criticism, when it’s your name on the cover.
And now, ironically, both Jack Anderson and Steve Allen are dead, bless them. They are the ghosts, not me.
I doubt if either of them now would mind my divulging our small secret. I remember them fondly, Jack and Steve, and smile when I think of the strange business we shared. Is ghost writing honest? Of course it isn’t, but it’s a very common ploy these days in publishing. I won’t be the one to name names, but I’d strongly advise any intelligent reader to question the authorship of current books that are supposedly written by well-known personalities. Even books by famous authors who may have written their own material at the start of their careers, but now are willing, for reasons of greed and laziness, to have their names turned into a franchise. The corporate media, of course, deserves some share of discredit for this sort of marketing deceit. But in the end the blame lies with the reading public who have accepted the culture of celebrity, where brand names and fame itself have become more important than either talent or quality.
