Of Mangled Mice and Dead Men

My first novel, Secret Dead Men, exists because of a contest.

And because I wanted to impress a girl.

The contest was the annual “Set in Philadelphia” screenplay competition (which is still around, btw), and somewhere in the summer of 1994 I decided to write a murder mystery set in my hometown. I was fairly new to the genre, and only started reading Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain and David Goodis within the past year. So of course, my idea was heavily inspired by all three writers. From Chandler, I lifted the wise-ass dialogue and observations. From Cain, the Postman Always Rings Twice-style “love rack.” And from Goodis, the courage to set my story on the streets I knew. I called the script Nobody Knows, which is a seriously awful title.

Even Cain would have scolded me. “There is only one rule I know on a title,” he once wrote. “It must sound like the author and not like some sure-fire product of the title factory.”

This was after Cain had suggested Postman as his title, and Alfred Knopf responded with For Love or Money, which Cain thought was one of those meaningless and “roving” titles like Hold Everything or Hell and High Water. My shitty title was very much along these lines.

Anyway, I spent the rest of 1994 cranking out the script pages on a used PC I bought at some Center City Philly company getting rid of their older tech. It cost a month’s rent, and the computer’s brain was heavy as a cinderblock, but that monster would serve me well over the next three years. By December 1994, I had written something that vaguely resembled a screenplay—inane, vapid, soul-crushing title and all.

A month later, early January 1995, I had a visit from a friend I hadn’t seen in nearly six years. I say “friend,” but I mean “a young woman I rather fancied.” We’d met in high school during a jazz band competition, and wrote actual letters to each other for the next couple of years. (We lived two hours apart.) To impress her, I would mail short horror stories I’d written. This was my version of seduction, much like a cat will bring its favorite human a mangled rodent corpse. Fortunately, she didn’t call the FBI or other law enforcement agencies.

After many years of silence, I reached out to say hello. To my utter surprise, she offered to pay me a visit in Philadelphia. I was happily astonished, and realized I needed to up my seduction game.

Thankfully, I had a screenplay with a hideous title under my arm!

So in January 1995 I handed her a fresh photocopy of Nobody Knows. I think I wanted to let her know I wasn’t just some dipshit fact-checker at the local magazine; I was a dipshit with ambition! Some optimistic part of my brain thought I could use my script to do both: win the contest, win The Girl.

Neither of those happened.

Because the screenplay needed a lot of work.

And The Girl was other otherwise entangled.

However…

Three years later, in the summer of 1998, my sad little life was completely different. I was working as an editor at a national magazine, living in New York City, and married… to The Girl! (What can I say? She eventually came around.) And by that summer, I was tired of writing chunks of novels that I would eventually abandon. So I vowed to finish a full-ass novel, or at least something that resembled one.

My daughter Evie in November 2011, standing in front of the Brooklyn apartment where I wrote Secret Dead Men. Back in 1998, we lived in the basement unit.

But I needed a plot to hang it on. Something I knew had a beginning, middle and end. All of which were super-important to have in a novel (or so I’d read).

I dusted off my floppy disk containing the Nobody Knows script, used a scalpel and chainsaw to surgically remove the murder mystery plot (which I thought was solid), and then grafted it onto a new idea I had about a guy who kept a hotel full of dead people in his brain who helped him solve crimes.

I also found a new title, one I’d been keeping in my back pocket ever since reading it in a tabloid: Secret Dead Men.

The resulting novel wouldn’t be published until January 2005—weirdly, exactly ten years after I tried to woo my future wife with a shitty screenplay. And even then, it sort of came and went without much fuss. The imprint (Point Blank Press) folded like a poker table. Every so often, I’d hear from a kind reader who somehow found the novel and dug its cross-genre approach. But it bugged me that this one disappeared without a trace. I had planned a number of other books set in the same universe—the world of the “Collective Detective.”

Which is why I’m absurdly happy that Secret Dead Men will be reprinted by Titan Books next month in a fancy 20th (ish) anniversary edition!

Kirkus was kind enough to review the new edition:

“Swierczynski’s brisk pace and light comic touch often resemble vintage Donald Westlake...A delicious comic thriller with a science-fiction twist.”

(Friends, the comparison to Mr. Westlake made my week, let me tell you.)

And as the subtitle implies, there will be more in the “Collective Detective” series, mashing together all sorts of subgenres: crime, horror, science fiction, fantasy, even westerns, soft-core porn¹ and spy stories. (Hell, the one I’m writing now is sort of a cross between James Grady’s Six Days of the Condor and David Cronenberg’s Scanners.)

So I hope you’ll take a chance on my first baby when it is republished on September 24th, and available at finer booksellers everywhere! I’ve made a few tweaks here and there, but for the most part, this is what poured out of my brain back in 1998².

Team Evie’s $21K for 21 Fundraiser

This past July 15th would have been Evie’s 21st birthday, and in her memory, we’ve been running the most ambitious campaign of the Team Evie Foundation: raising $21,000 by September. All proceeds fund our annual book drive (benefitting the Literally Healing program at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles).

We’re off to a great start, thanks to so many of you generous folks. But we still have a long way to go, and we’d be crazy grateful if you were able to give or spread the word.

WHO THE...!? You’ve signed up for a newsletter from writer Duane Swierczynski, who has written more than a dozen novels, hundreds of comic books, a fistful of screenplays and audio dramas, and other violent entertainments. He works out of a tiny private-eye style office in Old Pasadena. Learn more at gleefulmayhem.com and linktr.ee/swierczy.

1. I included this subgenre mainly to see if my wife was paying attention. But hey… as my clueless 22-year-old self would say, nobody knows.

2. And here I want to thank my editors Allan Guthrie (at Point Blank), and Rufus Purdy (at Titan), who both helped craft that brain slurry into something readable and possibly even entertaining.