The Specialists

Read The Specialists Storyline:

I suppose it’s fair to say that I’m most often identified as the creator of series characters. My two active series, concerning a bookselling burglar named Rhodenbarr and a sober drunk named Scudder, are the ones people are most likely to know about. Readers with a wider range may be familiar as well with a series of seven novels about an insomniac named Tanner. And there have been four novels each about a horny kid named Harrison and an introspective killer named Keller. Hardly anybody, asked to name all of my series, would come up with The Specialists. A fat lot they know. As far as I’m concerned, The Specialists is unequivocally a series novel. As it happens, the series is only one book long. But I figure it’s a series just the same. In the spring of 1966 I moved into a big old house on a small old lot smack in the middle of New Brunswick, New Jersey. I set up an office for myself on the third floor. I had a massive old desk, and the movers couldn’t get the thing up the last flight of stairs. It wouldn’t fit. Most desks of that vintage disassemble, but not this sucker. They had to cut the hind legs off it. I propped up the back of the desk with two short stacks of paperback novels, plopped a typewriter on the top of it, and went to work.Three and a half years later, when we moved to a place in the country, I left the desk right there, and I left the books to keep it from tilting. By that time the desk didn’t owe me a dime, because I’d sat at it and written a whole slew of books. I’d already written the first Tanner book in Racine, Wisconsin, but I wrote the other six in New Brunswick, along with After the First Death and Such Men Are Dangerous and more pseudonymous work than I’ll admit to at the moment. I also wrote The Specialists at that desk. My then agent (and still friend) Henry Morrison suggested I might try to come up with a series, and he liked the idea of a troupe of guys working together, in the tried-and-true manner of A League of Gentlemen. I hadn’t read the book in question, but I got the idea. And I wrote a couple of chapters and an outline and pitched the idea as a series to an editor at (I think) Dell. Whoever she was, and wherever she was, she thought it sounded good, and I went home to my desk to finish the first book. I finished the book without a problem, and Henry liked it, and he sent it over to Dell. While I’d been breezing along on the book, the editor who’d liked the idea had gone somewhere else, and her replacement didn’t like the idea, or the book, either. Henry took it back and sent it to Knox Burger at Gold Medal, who liked it just fine. I signed a contract, and then I got a call from Henry. “Knox was wondering,” he said, “if The Specialists is the first volume of a series. Shall I tell him yes, and that you’re already hard at work on the next installment?” “God, no,” I said. “Huh?” “Tell him it’s complete in and of itself,” I said. “But I thought—” “So did I,” I said, “and it turns out we were both wrong. Because I like the book, and I sort of enjoyed writing it, but when I finished it I realized something. I don’t want to write about those guys again, ever. I liked them as characters, and it’s the kind of book I like to read, but it turns out it’s not the kind of book I like to write.” There was a pause. Then Henry said, “That’s really strange.” “I know it is.” “I was sure it was going to turn out to be a series.” “So was I, and we were right. It’s a series. But it’s a very short series.” “Just one book long.” “Just one book long,” I agreed. “But a series nonetheless.” And that’s what it is. I hope you enjoy it. And who knows? Maybe someday I will want to write about these guys again. . .