A Writer's Tale

3. Though I needed the “Belmore Girls” chapters in order to make the book long enough, I would’ve had to write them anyway because I felt that they would be the essence of the book. To my way of thinking, these were fascinating young women. They had wonderful times together and great adventures and I felt compelled to write their whole story, not just the big finale of it.

I finished Daring Young Maids on November 8, 1990.

Headline wouldn’t go for the title. They needed a title that would shout to everyone that it was a horror novel.

We settled on Blood Games, I’m not crazy about it. Aside from other considerations, Blood Games is the title of several other books and some films.

But what can you do?

If I was a little annoyed about the title situation, I was delighted by the way Headline got behind the book. Among other things, they gave it a full-page color advertisement on the cover of The Bookseller, the U.K. version of Publisher’s Weekly.

Book Club Associates took it on as their main selection for February, 1992, with an initial hardbound printing of 18,000.

While a lot of critics lambasted the book, it sold well. And it is often mentioned by fans, who tell me how they especially enjoyed the “Belmore Girls” episodes. Not only did they like getting to know the gals so well, but many of them were reminded of their own college days.

In the United States, Blood Games has never been published. No foreign language sales, either. Hmmm. Is it laboring under the Ouija board jinx? Or is something else going on something less sinister? Maybe something about the book doesn’t appeal to folks in Russia or France or… ? Maybe somebody’s ticked off because I didn’t kill off Finley. Who knows?

The Headline paperback edition is currently in its 7th printing.

SAVAGE

On May 31, 1990, Bob Tanner was in town and took me out to lunch. He explained that, since my books were doing so well in the United Kingdom, perhaps I should try setting one of my novels in the British Isles or bringing an English character into a story… something along those lines.

I told him that it seemed like a good idea.

However, I had little or no intention of following his advice.

Ann and I had done a tour of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales for about three weeks back in 1978. We hadn’t been back since then. So I didn’t feel that I knew enough about the areas to use any of them in a novel.

After my lunch with Bob, I returned to my work on Daring Young Maids.

And suddenly, a couple of weeks later, an idea popped into my head. Popped? It exploded!

For years, I’d been fascinated by true crime stories. And especially by Jack the Ripper. I knew a lot about him. I knew, among other things, that he had apparently vanished forever after butchering Mary Kelly in November, 1888.

The idea that exploded into my head was this: what if someone happened to be hiding under Mary Kelly’s bed at the time of the murder? A kid. A teenaged boy. And what if, after the slaying, the boy gave chase to the Ripper? Somehow, the kid then follows Jack across the ocean. They end up in America, where he follows the Ripper out west and eventually brings him down.

It seemed like a great idea. The greatest idea I’d ever had. By far.

It seemed to have epic portions.

If I could only pull it off…

The project seemed too big, too ambitious. But the idea seemed like such a natural that I had to attempt it, no matter what. I told myself that, even if I couldn’t do the story justice, it would still make a terrific novel. Done only half-right, it might be better than anything else I’d ever written.

I decided to go for it.

This was to be a picaresque novel in the tradition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, True Grit, The Travels of Jamie McPheeters and even Tom Jones. Early on, I realized that it needed to be written in the first person point of view in the voice of its main character, Trevor Wellington Bentley.

Having Trevor tell his own story would give it a lot of added flavor. And humor.

Also, Trevor would give me some leeway. No matter how much research I might do, I couldn’t possibly find out everything about the world of 1888-1890. Writing in the first person viewpoint, however, I didn’t have to know everything. I only needed to display Trevor’s level of knowledge. The reader would be seeing through his eyes, not through the eyes of a supposedly omniscient author.

If I couldn’t have written Savage in the first person viewpoint, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have attempted it at all.

Since the whole novel would be “told” by Trevor, I needed a special voice for him.