Most of the class of spring ’77 have demonstrated versatility, but these four are especially adept at writing novels in different genres.
Bruce Ducker has followed a somewhat unusual career track—the opposite of the stereotypical author who writes a “personal” first novel, then succumbs to his agent’s or editor’s temptations to write glitzier fare. A lawyer by profession, he started out writing tales of big money, law firm intrigue and corporate malfeasance. In the late ‘80s, the legal thriller became a popular commercial genre, but Ducker went the other way. He took a “literary” turn, and wrote of family and relationships. The shift in subject matter has been accompanied by a shift from large publishers to small presses.
Ducker was born in New York in 1938. He got his B.A. at Dartmouth and earned Master’s and law degrees from Columbia. In 1964, he began to practice corporate law in New York. In the ‘70s he moved to Denver, where he was one of the founding partners of a small firm where he continues to practice. In a 1995 interview, he told the Rocky Mountain News, “I think people who write full time have a seriousness of purpose that’s reflected in their work, but I like the law.” He added that his books haven’t sold well enough for him to write full time. He has published stories in journals, including Hudson Review.
Ducker has published seven novels. The first two, set in the business and legal community of an unspecified Midwestern city, were about comparative innocents dragged into a world of greed and corruption.
The third, Bankroll, concerned a lawyer who abandons his career and transforms himself into a con artist. Ducker told the Rocky Mountain News, “I think you write for the same reasons you do therapy, except it’s cheaper.” He may have been working out some personal issues in this book, because a change of course followed. He didn’t quit the law and become a con man, but he did change his fictional subject matter, and perhaps his ambitions. In the same interview he said, “I don’t think I write books that will appeal to a large market. At least, none of them have so far, and publishers say that to me so much that I believe it. So I’m content with the way things are, most of the time anyway.”
With Permanent Press, he found a publisher whose prime motivation wasn’t commercial, either. Leaving the cut-throat law and big money environment, he wrote stories about marriage, family, midlife crisis. In 2004, he told Page ONE that he had completed a satirical novel and a collection of stories and poems, but neither has been published yet. In addition to novels, he has published poems and stories in literary magazines. He has taught at the Aspen Writers’ Festival.
Novels
Rule by Proxy* # Crown 1977 “Ducker…has hit upon a pay lode of dramatic material for his business novel….The book solves nothing but raises some rather haunting questions.”--American Bar Association Journal
Failure at the Mission Trust* #Freundlich/Scribner 1987 “highly readable, off-beat” –Library Journal
Bankroll* Dutton 1989 “Ducker writes an intricate and absorbing tale about the development of a con man.” –Publishers Weekly
Marital Assets * #Permanent Press 1993 Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize “Ducker surveys the landscape of love and betrayal.” –Publishers Weekly
Lead Us Not into Penn Station* # Permanent Press 1994 Won Colorado Book Award “Ducker maintains a delicate balance in his narrative, penetrating characters’ complex thoughts and emotions while never losing the feeling of a summer break in a simpler time.” –Publishers Weekly
Bloodlines* # Permanent Press 2000 “suspenseful, well-crafted, riveting” --Library Journal
Mooney in Flight* MacAdam/Cage Publishing 2003 “Rich and meaningful…Bruce Ducker has managed to create a character that inspires hope rather than pity.” –Colorado Advocate
*Available from Amazon.com
#At St. Lois County Library
.
Main sources: pageonelit.com “’Penn Station’ shines spotlight on author’ by Alan Dumas, Rocky Mountain News
Contemporary Authors
Quotes from Ducker:
“Ducker is indeed a romantic, almost unfit to drive in traffic. A dose of lay schizophrenia allows him to pass in the business world….” Pageonelit.com
“[Y]ou have to divorce yourself from a book’s reception, because you’ll almost always be disappointed. You have to write because you want to.” –Dumas interview
Robert Mayer is a successful journalist turned author of popular nonfiction and fiction books, a combination generally assumed to be golden, based on the example of Tom Wolfe, among others. Though Mayer has scored several successes, his books haven’t sold well enough to satisfy New York publishers.
He was born in 1939 in New York City and earned a B.A. from City College and Master’s from Columbia. He worked for several large eastern newspapers, becoming an award-winning columnist. In the ‘70s, he did something many media folk have done since: moved to Santa Fe, where he worked as an editor of the Santa Fe Reporter until 1997. Since then, he has devoted himself full-time to books and magazine articles.
Mayer’s first novel did not get lost in the shuffle. Superfolks was a send-up of comic books, about a superhero who retires to ordinary life in the suburbs, then is forced to make a comeback by a global crisis. It was widely and enthusiastically reviewed. The novel continues to resonate with comics fans; it’s the subject of a Wikipedia article. It was reissued in a limited edition in 2005. It sold “respectably but not spectacularly” in Mayer’s words.
Authorial folklore says that the danger of a first-novel success is a sophomore slump. Mayer’s second-novel, The Execution, came out at the same time as Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, and Mayer thought that the title similarity worked to the disadvantage of his book.
He has published five other novels, all but two initially in hardcover editions from big New York publishers. They vary from family comedies to suspense to a “memoir” narrated by JFK from beyond the grave. Mayer said he was proud that he never repeated himself, but thought publishers saw him as difficult to market. The books, he said, sold 6 to 7 thousand copies.
This is not, apparently, good enough for major publishers. Mayer has not been able to get a novel published in more than a decade. “[Publishers] do book scans where they look at every book you’ve sold. They think they can’t really take a chance on a book that might sell only 6 or 7 thousand copies,” he told the Albuquerque Journal. But in fall 2006, a lucky break came his way, thanks to an unexpected link to a bestselling author and the bookselling opportunities of the internet.
In 1987, Mayer published The Dreams of Ada, a nonfiction book in the fact crime genre. It was his best-selling book (10,000 in hardcover and 140,000 in paperback), and it won an Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America. Nineteen years later, John Grisham wrote a nonfiction account of a crime that took place in the same small Oklahoma town. Grisham used Mayer’s book, and arranged for it to be republished, with a blurb from him on the cover. Mayer took great pleasure in tracking the book’s rise up the bestseller list of Amazon. Com. (Buyers who buy both Grisham’s and his book get a special discount)
Looking back on his career in November 2006, he said he had shared the belief of aspiring novelists that “getting a book published is the launching pad to the-rest-of-your life success.” In fact, his career has been more a peaks-and-valleys affair. At the time, he
was hoping it might be heading for another peak. His agent was trying to sell a completed novel, and he was planning a fact crime book.
Novels
Superfolks Dial, 1977*# (republished St. Martin’s 2005) "sharp, funny, and ultimately moving, with_a_plot that could be_the R-rated version of the current hit movie The Incredibles" –Kirkus Reviews
The Execution, Viking, 1979#
Midge & Decker, A & W, 1982*
Sweet Salt Mariposa l984*
The Grace of Shortstops Doubleday,1984 *
The Search, Doubleday 1986*#
I, JFK Dutton 1989 #* St. Martin’s pb 1990 * “wildly inventive, outrageous, even blasphemous” –Library Journal
Main sources: “Santa Fe Writer Gets Grisham Endorsement” by Polly Summar in Albuquerque Journal Nov. 11 2006
Contemporary Authors
Rod Townley’s first novel was also his last—for adults, anyway. About 25 years later, he turned to a new genre, young adult fiction, and found his greatest critical and popular success. A very versatile writer, his nonfiction bridges the scholarly-popular gap.
Born in New Jersey in 1942, he earned his BA from Bard and his MA and PhD from Rutgers. He taught literature at Passaic County Community College and won a Fulbright Fellowship to teach in South America. He also worked for TV Guide. For a long time he has been a full-time writer. He lives in Kansas City.
“I like the idea of writing in various literary genres,” he told LJ in 1977. He has continued to be eclectic, publishing literary criticism, poetry, translations, and travel articles, as well as a book titled The Year in Soaps 1983. That book and another nonfiction title were published by large New York houses; small presses and academic presses brought out his collections. His articles have appeared in the New York Times and Village Voice.
In his late 50s he ventured into a new genre, YA, under the name Roderick Townley. His first book, a metafiction that blurs real and fictional worlds, was well received, and his publisher, Atheneum, has continued to bring out sequels and one-offs at a steady clip.
Adult fiction
Minor Gods St. Martin’s 1977 “A jumble. Superficially a drama about reporter Jamie Lauren’s investigation of cancer deaths caused by his brother Claude’s giant Philadelphia chemical company, in fact it is a study of the brothers’ strange childhood.” --Library Journal
YA fiction
The Great Good Thing Atheneum 2001# S&S Aladdin (pb) 2002 * "This clever, deftly written first novel gives life to Princess Sylvie and her cohorts, characters from an out-of-print and rarely read fairy tale, by having them cross over to the dreams of readers…as much a romantic paean to reading and writing as it is a good story.” –Publishers Weekly
Into the Labyrinth Atheneum 2002* # “Princess Sylvie… returns to adventures old and new in this brilliantly imagined sequel.”—Kirkus Reviews
Sky Atheneum 2004* “Readers are treated to the story of Alec Schuyler and his obsession with jazz piano in 1959 New York City.”---School Library Journal
The Constellation of Sylvie Atheneum 2005 * # “As clever and captivating as its predecessors.” –Kirkus Reviews
The Red Thread Atheneum 2007 *
Nancy Zaroulis writes historical fiction for a popular audience.
Born in Chelmsford, Mass. circa 1945, she attended Suffolk University and worked in entry-level positions for Boston publishers for a few years before publishing her first novel. She has lived in Massachusetts all her life, and set all her fiction there. Aside from collaborating with her husband, University of Massachusetts professor Gerald Sullivan, on a book about Vietnam war protestors, and one family novel with a contemporary setting, she has concentrated on historical fiction.
Zaroulis’s name was all over the national news in 1979, when her second novel was acquired by a tyro Doubleday editor named Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. If it was a bit annoying for an author to be upstaged by her editor in this way, Zaroulis was well compensated. That book became a Book of the Month Club alternate, and Zaroulis enjoyed a longer relationship with Doubleday than most of her ’77 classmates did with their publishers. They went steady through the ‘80s; then, in a familiar pattern, there was a shift to a new publisher for a “big book,” and when, presumably, the big book did not sell up to expectations, a long hiatus, lasting through the ‘90s. With the millennium, Zaroulis returned to her old publisher with a new genre, a history-mystery series.
Novels
As Nancy Zaroulis
The Poe Papers Putnam 1977 *
Call the Darkness Light Doubleday 1979* Signet 1980* Soho pb 1993 “engaging potboiler” –Library Journal
The Last Waltz Doubleday 1984* Zmass pb 1986 *“Two hours after reading a romance novel, you’re hungry for something else to read….So it is with…a saga of Boston Brahmin life in the last quarter of the 19th century.” --New York Times
Certain Kinds of Loving Doubleday 1986 * Ivy pb 1987“A simple story, simply told, this book will appeal to a wide audience.” –Library Journal
Massachusetts Fawcett Ballantine hc 1991* “Zaroulis tries to do for the historic Bay State what Michener did for Hawaii, Texas, and other places….this has the potential to be a best seller, and not just in Massachusetts.” –Library Journal
Beacon Hill Mysteries
As Cynthia Peale
The Death of Colonel Mann Doubleday 2000* Dell pb 2001* “Peale brings to life Gilded Age Boston in her first foray into the burgeoning field of historical mysteries.” --Publishers Weekly
Murder at Bertram’s Bower Doubleday 2001 Dell 2002
The White Crow Doubleday 2002 Dell 2003 “This gaslight thriller, the third and last to feature the brother-and-sister team of Caroline and Addington Ames…delivers some notable frissons, even if it never quite embraces the supernatural.” –Publishers Weekly
Main sources: “The Bay State Saga” by William Davis, Boston Globe, May 14, 1991
“Victorian Boston Adds Character in Mystery Series” by Michael Kennedy, Boston Globe, April 18, 2000