Lawrence Block

 

runyon_colorhimdeadI can remember two writers by name whose work I discovered in Scott’s slush pile. Charles Runyon was one; his first submission was a novel, and it looked to me like a natural for Gold Medal...

 

When I started working for Scott Meredith in the summer of 1957, I was an Antioch student on a co-op job. Come October, I was scheduled to return to Yellow Springs, Ohio, and begin my third year as a student at Antioch College.

Of course I hadn’t mentioned this when I applied for the job. I was an innocent, God knows, but not a complete moron, and I wanted the job. And I hadn’t been there for two weeks before I realized I wanted it a lot more than I wanted a college diploma. I was learning more every day than I could pick up in a month in Yellow Springs.

I said as much to my parents, and told them I wanted to drop out of school. I thought I’d have a fight on my hands, and was surprised by their ready acquiescence. They’d both always been very supportive of my intention to become a writer, and I think I must have picked a good time to drop out; I don’t think my father was dismayed at the idea of not having a tuition bill to pay that year.

So I settled in as a fee man—which is what John Dobbin and I were called. Two kinds of manuscripts turned up in that office, pro scripts (from professional writers whom Scott represented on a straight commission basis) and fee scripts (from unestablished writers who paid Scott a fee to read their work). I read the fee scripts, and wrote fee reports to their authors, and that made me a fee man.

It was, you should pardon the expression, a scam.

Like every viable con game, it looked good to the marks. For the small sum of $5 (plus another $1 per thousand words, up to a max of $25 for a full book) they got their efforts read by Scott Meredith himself. There was a chance (a real one, but much slimmer than they might have assumed) that Scott would accept their story (or article, but a good 95 percent of what came in was fiction) and sell it to somebody. There was also the chance he’d tell them how to improve it, and then take it to market.

Failing that, he’d tell them at considerable length just what was wrong with their work. His letter, single-spaced with narrow margins, would begin a third of the way down an impressive piece of letterhead, and would fill all of a second page as well. (Unless, of course, they’d written a longer-than-usual manuscript and paid a larger-than-minimum fee. The fee report for a novel ran clear to the bottom of page four. Always.)

Now that’s a lot of words for what wasn’t that much money even in 1957. So it doesn’t sound like a bad deal, does it? So where do I get off calling it a scam?

Well, for one thing, they weren’t getting the considered opinion of a prominent literary agent, his signature at the bottom of the second page notwithstanding. (They weren’t even getting his signature. Scott never even saw the letters. Brother Sid saw them, and signed Scott’s name to them.)

The ones who read my fee reports were getting the thoughts of a kid who’d just turned 19 and just sold his first story. Worse yet, they weren’t getting my real thoughts, which more often than not were that they couldn’t write their names in the dirt with a stick, and should give some serious consideration to dental school.

Of course I didn’t tell them anything of the sort. Like everyone else who wrote fee reports, I had nothing but good things to say about the way our fee clients wrote. I always praised the writing and disparaged the plot. Fundamental structural flaws made the story unsaleable, I told them, and thus it couldn’t be rewritten, and the author’s only recourse was to start fresh with a new story and send it to us—with, of course, a new fee.

But let me walk you through a day at the office…

Once I’d walked in at nine or close to it, I’d hang up my jacket. (We wore jackets and ties to the office, but took off the jackets. I don’t think it ever occurred to me or to anyone else to show up without a necktie. At one point I acquired a black shirt with a button-down collar, and took to wearing it with a white tie. Henry, visibly embarrassed at the task forced upon him, took me aside on one such sartorial occasion. “Larry,” he said, “Scott doesn’t remember Mark Hellinger, and he’s seen a lot of gangster movies, and, um, well, maybe you could not wear a black shirt and a white tie to the office.” “Oh, okay,” I said, and the next day I showed up with the black shirt, pairing it this time with a black tie. Nobody ever said a word. And, thinking back, I wonder why we wore ties in the first place, because we had no dealings whatsoever with the public. Nobody ever saw us. Any visitors—and there weren’t many—passed directly from the waiting room to the offices in the rear, bypassing our bull pen altogether.)

But I digress.

Once settled in, my first order of business was to walk over to a file cabinet, where the top drawer was filled with fee submissions, arrayed in the order they’d been received. The schedule called for a two-week interval between our receipt of a submission and our reply—long enough so they could believe Scott had been able to give their effort due consideration, but not so long that they’d feel neglected.

Each manuscript was in a file folder, and if the author of the manuscript had had prior dealings with us, all the letters he’d written would be there with it, stapled to carbon copies of our replies. If this was our first crack at him, there’d be just the new story and whatever letter he’d sent along with it.

It didn’t take me long to learn to cherish these new people. They were so much easier to reject.

There was a formula, you see, to the rejection letters it was my job to produce. Scott Meredith had written a book, Writing to Sell, and in it he’d channeled Aristotle and presented what he called the Plot Skeleton: a strong and sympathetic lead character confronts a problem, his initial struggle to overcome it only deepens his dilemma, and at last through his own admirable efforts he brings things to a satisfactory conclusion.

That’s a quick version; in the letters that went out over Scott’s signature, we often got half a page out of the plot skeleton. The more space we filled detailing the plot skeleton, the less we were required to say about the story.

And, while the plot was always the ostensible reason for returning the story, it rarely entered into the equation. A writer could copy a plot from Chekhov, and he’d still get the story turned down on the ground that the plot was faulty. (And, on the very rare occasion when someone pointed out that the plot we’d condemned had worked just fine for Irwin Shaw or Damon Runyon or O. Henry, we’d have an answer. We always had an answer.)

Now I’m sure many of the stories I read were inadequately plotted. But I generally knew, before I’d read more than a single page, that I was reading something unpublishable. There were times when I stopped after a page or two, wrote two-thirds of my fee report, then scanned the rest of the story to find some particulars to note in explaining why his plot fell short. I made my initial decision and wrote most of my report in the basis of the clunky prose and wooden dialogue, but if I said anything about the writer’s style it was to praise it. You’re a fine writer, we assured them, one and all. Soon as you come up with a sound plot, the Pulitzer people will be knocking on your door.

Once in a while I provided a suggestion relating to writing technique. I might confide that the writer might do better to have his characters say, for example, rather than assert, interject, comment, and otherwise exhaust the writer’s overburdened thesaurus. I was more apt to trot out a tip of that sort with writers who kept coming back for more, who’d already received a full dose of the Plot Skeleton.

(Although that didn’t necessarily stop me from refreshing their memories. “Let me take a moment to outline that plot skeleton again, Fred, because I just can’t stress it too often…”)

And every fee report began by thanking the mope for sending the story, and every one ended with the hope that we’d see new work from him soon, with the complimentary closing of "All best wishes."

My friend and colleague Larry M. Harris (whose name was to become Laurence Janifer, and who deserves a Memory Lane remembrance all his own) summed up our mission in a classic French verse form:

Unlike the Ainu and the Manx
We hide the fact that we are vicious,
Starting our letters off with Thanks,
Ending each one with All best wishes.
Further evolved than bugs and fishes,
We are polite to nuts and cranks;
Starting our letters off with Thanks,
Ending each one—O Nature’s pranks!
Ending each one with All best wishes.

I worked Monday to Friday from nine to five, with an hour off for lunch, and I spent those working hours reading stories and returning them to their authors, every last one of whom I encouraged to send us their next effort. I was expected to go through 40 stories a week (or their equivalent; a $25 book counted the same as five $5 stories).

For this I was paid $65 a week, plus an additional dollar for each additional story. (Once, just to see what I could do, I took stories home and worked evenings as well. I wound up making $125 that week. I paid $65 a month for my hotel room, so that wasn’t bad.) We were all paid in cash; every Friday Scott’s brother-in-law, the odious Murray Weller, trotted four blocks down the avenue to Manufacturers Hanover, and we got little brown envelopes holding our after-tax earnings for the week. I never did need to open a bank account, and of course nobody on the planet had a credit card yet.)

I was in the rejection business, and it was quickly made clear that I wasn’t expected to enthuse over much of what I read. If I did in fact pass a story to Henry, and if he approved it for marketing, I got the same work credit for writing a three-sentence congratulatory note to the author as I’d get for filling two pages. But if the story came back, a heavy dose of disapproval accompanied it, and I was given to understand that I ought to raise my standards.

For all of that, I did move a very few stories from my desk to Henry’s, and for the most part they didn’t come back. I can remember two writers by name, whose work I discovered in Scott’s slush pile. Charles Runyon was one; his first submission was a novel, and it looked to me like a natural for Gold Medal. Henry agreed, and so did Dick Carroll at Gold Medal, and Scott signed Runyon as a straight commission client, so from then on I only got to read his work after it was published.

A little later on, a pair of confession stories landed on my desk. The form was one I didn’t have much feel for, but I could tell pro-caliber work when I saw it. I passed them on to Henry and one sold that afternoon. The other took another whole day. The woman’s name was Barbara Bonham, and she, too, was offered, and accepted, straight commission representation, and went on to have a solid career.

There were some others, but not many. I wasn’t there to find gems on a manure pile. I was there to shovel the stuff back where it came from, and beg for more.

But nobody out in the world realized that. Here was a big-time New York agent reading their stories and giving them tips, all for $5 a pop. Why would he do that? Why, for the reason he stated in his ads and brochures—because he wanted to discover and sign up promising writers for professional representation. After all, he couldn’t make money on $5 reading fees, could he?

The hell he couldn’t. He was keeping almost $4 for each story, and there were two fee men in the office and one or two more who picked up scripts and worked at home, and the money was good enough for Scott to run a full-page ad every month in Writer’s Digest. And he sent out a lot of direct mail as well. If you submitted an unagented story to Manhunt, which he edited, you got a brochure, accompanied by a note from Scott himself: “One of your recent magazine submissions was close. This is to express interest in your material.”

Same thing if you sent your story to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Scott had a cozy arrangement with someone in their office, and the empty envelopes that had held submissions came to us every week; Joan, our receptionist, filled her empty hours typing address labels to express interest in their material.

Neat, huh?

Oh, it was a pirate ship, all right, but serving as cabin boy was the best possible job for me. And in the next leg of this hike down Memory Lane I’ll tell you what was so great about it.

End of Part Two

 

This article first appeared in Mystery Scene Holiday Issue #122.

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