by Steve Hely
Exquisite material but it took a lot out of me. So I’d take long breaks. I’d go down to the store on the corner and tally the total number of pornographic magazines (eighteen varieties, eighty-four total magazines, with Shaved Sluts in especial abundance). I’d walk to the only newsstand in the Somerville area that sold Take Five bars, and I’d listen to the half-witted proprietor monologize about the Yankees and Israel (both enemies of his). I’d study the movement of squirrels, name them, and choose favorites based on temperament and style. I read the Boston Globe every day, from cover to cover, including “Mallard Fillmore” and the death notices and the names of all the racing greyhounds.
During one of these readings, I came across an article in the business section:
FOR AUTHOR DREW, BIG BOOKS ARE BIG BUSINESS
He talks about branding, market saturation, and revenue margins. But Tim Drew didn’t make his fortune cooking the books—he made it writing them. And his profit margins would humble those of most CEOs.
“I see myself as a content sourcer, delivering a content product just as Nissan supplies cars or Papa John’s supplies pizzas,” says Drew, a 54-year-old Harvard MBA who gave up a financial career for a literary one. “I establish and maintain reliable delivery streams of entertainment.”
It isn’t the typical image for a writer. But Tim Drew isn’t your typical writer. He’s a one-man empire. His latest thriller, The Darwin Enigma, earned him an estimated $25 million from paperback sales, international and movie rights, and franchising.
But Drew says the secret to his success is straightforward. “I’m an entrepreneur who makes literary product. And that product is easy to make. A Tim Drew book starts with a handsome and talented protagonist, like Dr. Drake Hartbeer in The Darwin Enigma, who slowly unravels a conspiracy. Then I tie the conspiracy in with something big. In The Hieroglyph Nexus, it was pyramids. In Leviathan’s Rage, it was whales. In Valley of the Bent Spear, it was those stone spheres they found in Costa Rica. In Darwin Enigma, it’s the human brain and Buddhism. You throw in a woman whose skills the protagonist needs, dark secrets, lots of action, and you’ve got a book.”
The accompanying picture was Tim Drew poolside at his house on Kauai. He was wearing sandals and sipping a smoothie with the Pacific shimmering below.
The view made Preston Brooks’s pad look like a decrepit shanty. This Tim Drew was worth studying. An inset photo showed some serious-suited types in a boardroom, gazing at a blowup of the cover for The Darwin Enigma.
In the course of describing this “new model of literary capitalism,” the article also mentioned Pamela McLaughlin. Not only the mystery novels but The Trang Martinez Guide to the Mysteries of Dating & Sex, The Trang Martinez Cookbook, a Trang Martinez–themed empowerment seminar, and Pamela McLaughlin’s line of wine coolers were all arms of a multimillion-dollar empire. Pamela didn’t even write the books herself anymore; she farmed them out to a battalion of free-lancers before slapping her name on the cover. “The results are hard to argue with; McLaughlin owns her own Caribbean island, which she accesses via her personal helicopter.” The article mentioned that the manager of her personal hedge fund gives talks to business school students about the challenges of such an enormous portfolio.
This all made a tremendous impression on me, having just paid for an Egg McMuffin with quarters.
Maybe with a literary novel, I was aiming too small. Compared to these titans of the writing con, Preston Brooks was like a street-corner shortgamer in a patchy sportcoat hustling three-card monte.
What was most magnificent about Tim Drew was his unabashed commercialism. He didn’t even bother thinking up pretentious quotes or pondering the beauty of the newts he found. He told you what he was selling, people bought it, and the Boston Globe business section gushed over his joyous capitalist spirit.
The Tornado Ashes Club now seemed all wrong for me. I imagined guests at the airport heading to Polly’s wedding, passing a huge stack of Pete Tarslaw paperbacks at Hudson’s. They’d hardly be surprised when I arrived at the nuptials in an Escalade—or one of those Lexus hybrids; keep it tasteful—and deposited some high-ordnance gift like a Sub-Zero fridge or a Bose stereo that would prove in the most material fashion my clear dominance and James’s inadequacy as a mate. Ten years down the road, I could be BlackBerrying money managers from my villa on Lake Como as starving MFA students hacked out the latest “Pete Tarslaw Presents” novel.
In the living room, I dug up my copy of The Darwin Enigma. I’d read it over the course of eleven toilet sittings that followed the week after I ate some bad shrimp pad thai delivered by a dubious Thai place called Prik King and I, which has since closed and been replaced by a tanning salon, so my memory of the book was hazy. But although it had, according to the Globe, made Tim Drew into the world’s forty-fourth largest economy, I recalled that its prose would embarrass an even modestly gifted fourth-grader. I opened to the first page:
A frigid November wind blew off the Potomac, hitting the face of Dr. Drake Hartbeer like a fistful of icy broken glass. But Drake kept up his intense pace in sheer defiance of his screaming thighs, aching pecs and throbbing triceps. Defiance and intensity were scripted into Drake’s DNA. After all, you didn’t make it from the docks of Seattle, where arguments were settled at knifepoint, without a big helping of both. Defiance had kept him alive through bare-knuckled scrapes along Puget Sound, where he learned to keep his eyes sharp and his fists clenched. Defiance had sent him surging across the football field, on his way to winning a scholarship to Princeton, where he bashed heads with the prep school boys on his way to the Ivy League championship.
But defiance wasn’t enough. Drake also had intensity. It was intensity that had carried him beyond, through Yale Medical School, as he studied the intricate channels of the brain. It was intensity that had landed him at his current post—Head of Neuroscience at the National Institutes of Health. Not bad for a scrappy kid from a devoutly Irish Catholic family of longshoremen, where communion wine and whiskey were both familiar tastes by puberty.
Finishing his daily ten miles at a solid clip, Drake puzzled mentally over a challenging section of Bach’s “Goldberg Variations.” He enjoyed classical piano. Like his other passion, rock climbing, it diverted him from the torturous mazes of his research. But Bach was tricky, even for his nimble fingers.
Slowing to a trot, Drake bent down. Picking up a rock, he flung it over the river and watched it sail in a graceful arc almost to the far bank. Not a bad analogy for a neuron firing an impulse along an axon, he thought, thinking of the electrical pathways along which the brain sends information. He flexed his most well-developed muscle, his cerebrum.
Suddenly, his balance was disturbed. He saw his research assistant, F. Jansen Teat, trotting his bulky frame along the river path. “Dr. Hartbeer! Dr. Hartbeer!”
We learn that Drake—on the verge of a breakthrough discovery that will revolutionize our understanding of the brain—has been visited by two shadowy monks from a mysterious Tibetan Buddhist order. They reveal that the discovery he’s about to make is nothing new. In fact, they’ve known about it for centuries. But to make it public would shatter humanity to the core.
The rest of the novel is Drake running around the world, piece by piece discovering that, for centuries, certain humans have had superevolved brains that allow them to bend space-time. Jesus and Buddha are two prominent examples, both of them blessed/cursed with genetically warped brains that allowed them to walk on water and such. But a devious secret society has conspired to keep this all hidden, lest superbrains undo the order of the world.
It turns out, in the book, that Charles Darwin discovered all this in the nineteenth century. It was just evolution’s course. Darwin left clues around the globe before the secret society silenced him. One of the clues, for instance, is carved on the shell of a very old Galapagos turtle. Drake Hartbeer discovers there’s one of these hyperbrain kids in Russia, and he and a beautiful Russian scientist race to save him. Over the course
of this mad pursuit, Drake’s abilities as a classical pianist and a rock climber both come into play (when he’s wooing the Russian lady and when they have to scale the wall of Chartres cathedral).
But what I took away, from my brief review of The Darwin Enigma, was that this kind of writing is easy.
You invent the awesomest hero you can think of, pit him against dark, mysterious forces, and let a secret spill out as he crisscrosses the globe. You write about something that people know is important but that they don’t really understand, and you make it seem diabolical. You don’t bury your action under a lot of nuanced characters or artful prose. Then you buy yourself a pimped-out Escalade, triumph at your exgirlfriend’s wedding, and retire to Hawaii.
Here’s the challenge I set for myself: with a baking timer and one of Hobart’s Lascar Pharmaceuticals notepads in front of me, I sat at the kitchen table and resolved to spend one solid hour seeing if I could come up with an idea for an airport thriller.
LIST OF BESTSELLER IDEAS
• It’s July 1776, and George Washington and Ben Franklin and all those guys are in Philadelphia. There’s a murder, and the local authorities turn to the only man they think might be able to solve it: Thomas Jefferson. (Ties in to the always popular Founding Fathers, plus murder.)
• A Border Patrol officer in the Texas desert discovers that some al-Qaeda guys are sneaking across from Mexico. He tries to warn the folks in Washington, but they don’t believe him. So it’s up to him and a tough but beautiful lady rancher to stop the terrorists from hijacking a train, filling it with chemicals, and blowing up the Alamo. (Might prompt a tie-in cover story in Time: “How Safe Is Our Border?”)
• A Hollywood actor filming a jewel-heist movie has to stop thieves who try to purloin the real jewels that are being used as props. (Maybe Clooney or somebody would play himself in the movie?)
• A lowly but handsome US Department of Agriculture inspector discovers a vast conspiracy to sterilize American men through poison in food. (Relatable: everybody eats food. Another possible Time story: “How Safe Is Our Food?”)
• A lithe and athletic former gymnast/archaeologist in Central America stumbles across a long-lost city and translates some inscriptions that reveal a diabolical secret: the ancient Maya discovered how to make nuclear weapons. Pursued by deadly guerrillas and shadowy CIA agents, she has to race through the jungle to stop the technology from falling into the wrong hands. (Anything Mexican/Central American would probably make for a popular Spanish language translation.)
• A fetching young computer programmer discovers that a Japanese video game company has implanted a code in their game that makes kids kill their parents. (Could market a tie-in video game.)
• A handsome geologist and a beautiful former ballet dancer/penguin expert in Antarctica discover a sinister oil company plan to destroy the icy continent. (Penguins are sellable.)
• A CIA agent discovers the Chinese are secretly training an army of genetically engineered dragons.
• An American college guy on a Rhodes Scholarship discovers a code in Shakespeare’s plays. The code leads to a secret about the Bible.
• A yoga instructor/marine biologist discovers that dolphins have a code in their DNA. (Put there by aliens? The Catholic Church? Oil companies?)
• A hip modern Londoner discovers she’s under a zombie curse that’s followed her family since her sixteenth-century pirate ancestors. She’s helped by a reggae singer who also teaches her how to relax and let love happen.
• A New York City cop discovers that some Hasidic Jews have found a long-lost eleventh commandment that changes everything.
• Pharmaceutical companies are poisoning everyone’s brains.
The last thing, I realized, wasn’t my idea. It was something a homeless guy had shouted at me as he was stuffing newspapers into his shirt.
Let’s say each of my ideas was worth $500,000 in royalties, plus $1 million in movie rights, and an additional $1 mill in franchise fees and such. That meant the paper in my hand was worth $32.5 million. I decided to cut that in half, to be conservative, but still.
Maybe it was thinking about the stern faces and strange symbols on dollar bills that gave me one last idea as the baking timer went off.
• A newly elected idealistic president discovers that the history of the United States has been guided by a cabal of aliens and a secret society of their human collaborators.
This was the one, I knew it. People love reading about presidents, and I could pack in the Monsters of BestSelling Nonfiction: Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt. A suitably epic title occurred to me: Angels in the Whirlwind.
The image of mammoth stacks of copies of Angels in the Whirlwind at Costco, of movie posters and readers’ guides and tied-in National Geographic specials appeared so clearly that I couldn’t wait to make it a physical reality. I rushed to my computer and started typing.
What I discovered that afternoon dramatically shifted my understanding of entertainment’s economics.
Writing a thriller, a Hawaii beach-house personal-helicopter-level blockbuster, is damn near impossible. That’s why Tim Drew can give away his secrets for free.
It’s easy at first, describing your hero’s monumental chin and iron-core integrity and so forth. But slowly you discover it’s like a complicated math problem, or assembling a bookshelf. You have to keep track of dozens of tiny parts, which good guys will turn out to be bad guys, and which cars will get blown up by which helicopters. And you know your readers will have no patience. They’re demanding entertainment, so every page has to be interesting and full of guns and veiled threats and snappy retorts. It’s exhausting.
With literary fiction, on the other hand, you can just cover everything up with a coat of wordy spackle. Those readers are searching for wisdom, so they’re easier to trick.
I put Angels in the Whirlwind aside. I still think it’s a decent idea, and if anybody wants to pay me to finish it, call my agent.
But that afternoon I went back to The Tornado Ashes Club.
I Google’d CALVADOS and learned that “the region known as Calvados, home to the eponymous apple brandy, is bordered on the north by Baie de la Seine and on the east by the Seine River.”
I looked up at Preston Brooks, shoeing his horse. I knew I could beat him.
7
Luke gazed around the stout knotted walnut table at his new comrades: azure-eyed Marcel, Guillaume of the quizzical smile, Lavroche with his cheeks seared by knife wounds. But as he raised his glass, and felt the subtle, awakening wafts that filled his nostrils, Luke felt himself transported as if by a zephyr. He felt himself float away to the orderly orchards, flowering avenues of apple blossoms that threaded the dew-glazed western bank of the Seine.
He allowed himself that, a flight around the distant blossoms, and let his eyes linger half closed for one more moment before opening them again.
Guillaume spoke.
“Mis-tair Luke,” Guillaume said. “We are always in danger here. The Germans, they march about on our streets. They tramp through our fields. They have captured many of us. They have tortured many of us. And they have killed many of us.
“But for us,” he said, “the fear, the danger—it is nothing. Because we are in our home. And we fight for our home.”
He poured, let the amber run into Luke’s glass, playing the bottle against the candlelight.
“You have come to us,” Guillaume said, “from far from your home. But because you fight with us, because you drink with us, because you are our comrade, this, too, Normandy, will be your home.”
Luke lifted his glass. Perched it just beneath his lips.
“Let us drink then, mon ami,” he said. “Let us drink to home.”
—excerpt from Chapter 3 of The Tornado Ashes Club by Pete Tarslaw
Picture this preview—which by now I’d fully formed in my head—and tell me you wouldn’t go see this movie:
First, the logo for Miramax or Fox Searchlight
.
Then the logo for my production company. Either: a turtle swims up and imprints his hand on the screen over no-capitals lettering that says turtlehand films. Or: thousands of CGI snowflakes fall, and then superfast zoom in on the intricate pattern. “Snowflake Films.”
Then sonorous piano chords. A woman’s voice, soft and distant like the sound of a dusty music box you open on your great-aunt’s dresser: There are memories burned in the human heart.
The screen fills with a falling shape against a night sky, shot through one of those filters that make colors distinct. (Probably a young guy from a small stylish country like Iceland or Estonia would be directing. Or else some sharp-eyed kid who’d done a Regina Spektor video or something.) It would take a second to realize what the image was: a parachute. An American soldier (Luke, played by a slightly unshaven but all-American actor, the guy from Prison Break maybe. Or: Christian Bale) descending into an apple orchard along a French river.
There are secrets we hide from each other. Now we’d see Silas (Paul Giamatti–type but handsomer) alone in his office, with the lights of Vegas glistening through a window. A gunshot.
He turns his head. The camera follows him as he walks down the hall and finds an artfully posed dead body.
