Deadline

Introduction

A FELLOW I KNEW ONCE asked how long it takes to write a book. I thought he was kidding but I told him anyway.

It takes as long as it takes.

The Holland Suggestions and Looking for Ginger North took about six months each. But that was long ago and they were first novels. I didn’t fret much then about the stuff I didn’t know, being happily unaware how much of that stuff there was in the world.

Denver took eighteen months. This was a multi-layered historical novel with fifty characters and two major false starts. One of these snipe hunts ate up 300 pages. Once it got rolling, the book was written in 139 consecutive workdays—Saturdays, Sundays and Allegheny River Days all included.

Booked to Die took two years. Even then it didn’t want to work until I sank all the way into despair, threw out the central idea and took up with a second-string plot.

The Bookman’s Wake was three years on the fire. This was a trek through hell, full of false middles and bogus characters who appeared suddenly to muddy it up and were ruthlessly cut in later drafts. There were long interruptions, and the ending seemed to hang forever out of reach.

And then there was Deadline, the sweet little thing you hold in your hands.

Forget literary vanity—this isn’t conceit talking. Deadline was a sweetheart because it was so free and easy, so author-friendly, that it was almost indecent. There was no struggle: it started in the right place and unfolded like a roadmap, leading straight to what then seemed like the inevitable conclusion. There were no fits and starts, no dips into hell, no groping around for True North. It took six weeks, start to finish, and remained for years the only book its author ever sold straight out of the typewriter, without having to suffer the agony-of-defeat known in the writing business as Rejection.

If I could do it again, and teach myself to do it on demand, I could maybe get rich. As a radio comic once said, you could bottle that and sell it to Rexall. It arrived like a new girlfriend comes to a teenager, unexpected and gone before he can stop and figure out what happened. Today, fourteen years later, I know how it happened. But I still don’t know how to do it again.

A writer whose process has evolved into what can only be called slugging it out in the trenches cannot help being suspicious of a gift like that. I’ve always felt a little like a thief when I thought of Deadline. I want to hand it over with an apology, though I still run into readers who remember it as my best book. I have not re-read it in all these years, though I think of it often. There is always a temptation with a reissue to make changes. I know that, for starters, I’d be tempted to change the name of the heroine. I’d probably make her a Mary or a Rachel the way everyone else does when they write about the Amish. I know (and knew then) that Amish fathers do not name their daughters Diana. Amish daughters do not do what this one does. But I also know that the surest thing about people is that they are wonderfully unpredictable. Individuals will always rise up and counter the flow of the tribe, no matter how hidebound and pious that particular tribe may look to an outsider. Jacob Yoder is, first of all, a man. And yes, there are runaways from that closed society, and a few do find what they’re looking for and never return to that world they came from.

John Gardner once wrote that to change a character’s name from Jane to Cynthia is to make the fictional ground shudder beneath her. Touch even this one thing, and I would have a different book: I would have turned this happy novel into a pit of snakes. So I’ll tell you a few things about the process, then I’ll let it go and be happy that this new edition is finally here.

A book needs hot fuel to propel it. Books written out of anger are sometimes the easiest to write and can be—if the author avoids heavy-handed preachiness—potent and effective work. Deadline and its predecessor, Denver, were written with the same bile-dipped pen. Both grew out of my experience at the Denver Post, where I arrived in 1966 on a wave of idealistic excitement. I soaked up the reporter’s life: I was always turned on, it was like food and water, and I ate it up. Journalism is a marvelous career for a young man, and the Post was in every way my university. But it’s a young man’s game, and those who let themselves grow old in it risk becoming the cynical reporters of movies and books. Their salaries lock them in bondage and their alternatives are few. They can behave themselves, make friends of the right people and move up in management, where they quickly become—in the eyes of their former friends—part of the problem. They can move on to public relations, cheerfully promoting the interests of the villains they once tried to get indicted. They can wake up at forty simply dreading the prospects of another St. Patrick’s Day Parade, another rubber-chicken luncheon speaker with a Ph.D. in boredom, another lady with a two-headed peacock. A few drop out and write books, a career that (I’m here to tell you) is not for the fainthearted or the guy with an addiction to regular paychecks.

This is all well and good but where, you ask me, did the anger come from? Without belaboring the point, let’s say that there were one or two people in management at this otherwise fine newspaper who thought they had the right to kill investigative or critical stories when the controversy involved their friends. Angry? You bet. I still carry it a quarter of a century later.

But they were boss and I was not. I was gone.

Still, it was an experience. Henry James said that a young writer should try to be one of those people on whom nothing is lost, and here was a rich caldron of life simmering on the front burner. I was ready to write it, and I settled on an historical framework first for various reasons. In the 1920s the Post was steeped in yellow journalism. Its owners, Frederick Bonfils and Harry Tammen, were full of hell and willing to do most anything to sell newspapers or ad copy. The central focus of my novel Denver was to be the takeover of the state by the Ku Klux Klan, but the hero was a reporter for the Post who struggles against this evil stupidity and in the process must overcome a raft of personal problems and professional obstacles. It should be noted that, historically, Bonfils and Tammen were minor heroes in the Klan controversy. Bonfils crusaded editorially against the hooded bigots, and it was largely through his efforts that Mayor Ben Stapleton was exposed as a Klansman and subjected to a recall election, which failed. But it’s easy to crusade against politicians and bad government. It’s a different story when your advertising interests are on the line, and if history teaches us nothing else about Bonfils and Tammen, it tells us this: whatever else they did, they always operated with the economic health of their newspaper foremost in their minds. They would kill a reporter’s Klan story, not for political reasons but because he had uncovered a membership roster that revealed most of their advertisers as Klan sympathizers.

Fair game, I decided. But when I wrote the finished scenes, the picture playing in my head was not of Tom Hastings, my hero, sitting in that Post newsroom in 1923. It was myself I saw, bucking the same brand of odious management in 1969. One scene in particular unfolded almost literally from life, exactly as it happened to a friend of mine and was later described to me. Instead of Chamber of Commerce kleagles from the 1920s, the villains were auto dealers of the 1960s, white-collar grafters who had been caught rolling back the odometers on their used cars. In fiction and life the results were the same: neither story saw the light of day, but by then my newspaper days were over.

Denver was a tough book to write. I say it took eighteen months, but in a sense I had been at it for the entire five years I worked on the newspaper and I’d been thinking about the newspaper parts of it during all the years since then. Now it was finished. I shipped it to my agent, Phyllis Westberg, in New York, and settled in for the uneasy wait. The next morning I came down to my workroom because this is what I do. I get up at 4:30 and if there’s nothing to write, I sit at my desk. I was deep in the clutches of postpartum blues, at loose ends but full of restless energy. Suddenly, without idea or direction, without a character named or developed, I began to write a sketch for Deadline.

I still had the anger, the hot fuel to drive it. Even a book as big as Denver had barely skimmed the foam off the top of that volcanic kettle.

The following month, to my great amazement, I had a second book virtually ready to send to New York.

There’s a principle that writers sometimes talk about when they gather in pubs or mingle with each other at cocktail parties. John Williams, who won a National Book Award for his novel Augustus, described it to me this way. You break the book’s back. Call it what you will—getting a bead on it, seeing it at last for what it really is, finding the path to True North and having it all slip into place—whatever you call it, there’s not a writer on earth who has not had that experience. You struggle with concepts big and small for weeks, months, years, and then it breaks and you see so clearly how it needs to go. How long it takes to reach this point is what determines the answer to the question that started this essay a few pages ago. The silliest inconsistencies hang you up forever. The smallest obstacle creates a ripple effect when you tinker with it, and the more you tinker with it the bigger the impact on material already written and yet to come. It can cascade back through the book with the power of a tidal wave, washing away your underpinnings and eroding your foundations. When this happens, you do what people along the Mississippi do every other year or so—you pick up your soggy stuff, rebuild your house and go on with it. If Jane simply must become Cynthia, with devastating consequences for Robert, you suck it up and let her do it. If Robert then jumps off a bridge, you follow that line and see where it goes. You follow your people into their various scenes knowing that every incident has its opposite possibility. The same thing could happen in another place, or between different characters, or with different results. Indecision and doubt ride with you day and night. The alternate worlds that can rise up in any one novel are terrifying as you contemplate working up yet another one. Your hero takes a turn and you can’t know if it’s right until sixty pages have passed and the trail has petered out in a box canyon. John Fowles, in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, wanted Charles to turn left and go back to town; Charles went right instead, down to the dairy to meet Sarah. Charles is motivated by something Fowles can’t yet understand, but it works. If it had not, I believe Fowles would tinker until it did.

On a far more common level, I can tell you that none of these acts of literary tightrope walking occurred in Deadline. Maybe I was wrong but I was never in doubt. The book came to life in a few hours and I broke its back that first morning. I quickly saw where it needed to go and what had to happen. I had little to lose—I still thought of it as a time-killer, an amusement to relieve my anxiety over Denver. I knew it would crap out against the big blank wall, probably by the weekend, so I could have my way with it for now.

I devised the plot from a clip file I kept, newspaper and magazine stories I had found interesting. I sat at my desk and began to deal out these articles like a poker player. I was attracted to items with no obvious links to the others—since this was for my own entertainment, I could make the long reach and take the big risk and the consequences would be a few wasted hours. I had a Christian Science Monitor wire story on the Amish. I clipped it out because people who cling to tradition in the midst of unrelenting progress interest me. I had a feature article from Dance magazine, of all places, on the Rockettes of Radio City Music Hall. It was mainly a profile of Russ Markert, the man who created, recruited and trained this celebrated dance group. I don’t remember if I laughed as I shoved the Rockettes and the Amish into the same little pile. What the hell, I was having fun.

I had a Rocky Mountain News piece about a young woman who had been killed by an unknown assailant. The woman herself was never identified and was buried in an unmarked potter’s field grave. Other bits of business filtered in. The Patty Hearst kidnapping was still a hot topic. Student radicals hadn’t yet been relegated to history. Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers would play into it. And I knew I’d need some FBI people, who in their opposite extremes would represent good and evil.

Now I needed a hero, a man of the press to tap in to that hot fuel and drive the book.

Enter Dalton Walker, a guy I still think of as a close personal friend. Walker would be, first of all, a strong writer with all the national awards to back him up. Nothing impresses certain people in management as much as awards. I remember the day Bob Jackson visited the Post. Bob had taken the picture of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald and had won a Pulitzer for that millisecond of glory. The story was laughingly told that a Post editor almost broke a leg chasing him down the hall to offer him a job, without first finding out if he knew a Brownie from a box lunch (he did, by the way, but he never blended in, and his Post tenure was brief). Like Jackson in real life, my fictional reporter had won the Pulitzer. To newspaper people, this is the equivalent of ascending the steps to the throne and sitting at the right hand of God. He is loved by management but secretly resented by the rank and file. His presence pisses them off mightily, and he becomes, of necessity, a loner. Walker would be so good that he could write his own ticket at the newspaper. He would do only the assignments that interested him. He’d be frequently on the outs with the city editor and would not be afraid to jump the bones of the bigger brass if he felt strongly about a point of contention. In other words, everything I’d like to be.

There was still something lacking somewhere. I looked again at the clippings about the unknown woman in potter’s field and it sparked a memory of a much older case, similar, yet strikingly different. A few years earlier I had been struggling to make a living as a freelance magazine writer. I read the instructional books of one Max Gunther, a highly successful nonfiction writer whose work in the Saturday Evening Post and other periodicals I had admired. In one of his books (I’m going by memory here) Gunther had told a story that he had carried around for years and now knew he would never write. In the early 1940s, a circus tent had caught fire and some people had died. A small girl was among the victims, but her remains were never identified or claimed. The story haunted him. Who would bring a kid to the circus and not show up to identify her?

I opened my file of newspaper clippings and the answer stared up at me. There was an article about the FBI hunt for Katherine Ann Power, last of the fugitives from that 1970 Boston bank robbery. The FBI couldn’t find her and they never did, until she came in under her own steam in 1993.

Kathy Power walked into the room, touched me on the shoulder and said I’m your gal. I’ll play the role of Joanne Sayers.

What did I know about Katherine Ann Power? I had no way of knowing what her life was like, where she was hiding or what kind of person she might be. From nothing more than her situation Joanne Sayers grew, providing the counter-drive that carried the book to a finish in forty-two workdays.

Bang, it was done.

Deadline was published in 1981 as a Fawcett Gold Medal paperback original. A hardback was published the following year by Gollancz in England. The book was a runner-up for the Edgar award, if that means anything. Some people think it was filmed under the title Witness, but that 1985 Harrison Ford movie was wrought by other hands. It must’ve been a good idea whose time had come.

John Dunning

Denver, Colorado

April 1995

One

WALKER THOUGHT OF HIMSELF as a hardened man. He had seen enough death in his time—riots, executions and later Vietnam—but now, coming suddenly upon death on a busy New Jersey street, he was shocked. On a dirt lot behind a shopping center, a circus tent was on fire. There wasn’t anything to be done. If there were still people inside, they were goners, plain and simple. Still, he pulled the car to the curb and wrenched open the door, taking himself with long strides toward the burning canvas. The first of the fire trucks had arrived, but the tent already had crumbled in around its two main poles. It went up like a sheet of paper, reminding him of those old Hindenburg pictures with the people rushing out of the flames looking like ants scurrying away from something they couldn’t quite understand. Rescue units came past; another large pumper came by in a shock wave of sirens. So much death, so much pain, and all in the few moments it took him to stop and cross the street.

It drew him until he could feel the heat on his face and arms. He was a kid again, covering his first fire, with a young man’s fascination for the wailing siren. He had been around the world ten times over, had won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, and still he was drawn by sirens and smoke.

The tent belonged to one of those tiny traveling circuses, the kind his dad had known when the world was younger—the kind of circus kids used to run away to join. They didn’t have many like that these days. The big tent had held three thousand people, no more, and now many of them lay moaning and writhing on the brown grass at the fringe of the parking lot. Two firemen brushed past, and one of them thrust the head of a stretcher at Walker. Here, buddy, take this. Walker gripped the poles and looked at the man on the other end. A sad face by nature, infinitely sadder now over the tiny burden he carried. Walker looked down and saw a small body covered by a sheet. A kid; five, maybe six years old. Some poor little kid, here with his dad to see the circus. Walker wasn’t a crying man, but he wanted to cry for that kid. He looked up as the sad fireman, with a nod of the head, directed him out of the lot to a small circle of rescue vehicles. They laid the stretcher on the ground and almost immediately a coroner came and peeled back the sheet and worked over the kid for a few minutes. It was a little girl, Walker now saw, a lovely child with dark hair and pale, almost milky skin. Her face was unmarked: it was so often smoke or the feet of the mob that did the damage. Her hand hung limply over the edge of the stretcher, the fingers dangling in the mud. Her other hand was folded across her middle, clutching a tiny bear, the kind you win at the booths. The coroner tried to pry the bear loose, then gave up and covered the pale face with the sheet.

Walker picked up the loose hand and folded it across the stretcher. He stood over the little body, feeling helpless and very much alone.

Her face haunted him. Maybe it was a quirk of the trade, but Walker always thought in terms of story. If a thing moved him, he assumed it would move his readers as well. Sometimes you got rid of something by simply letting enough time go by, and sometimes writing about it was easier and faster.

He remembered a story the Des Moines Register had done some years before about a fatal car accident. Some reporter had reconstructed the lives of all those kids, right up to the moment when their cars came together in that crossroad. Helluva story. His kind of piece. Driving through the Jersey streets, he thought of the little girl in those terms. Interview some survivors, maybe take them through their day. Not many, just four or five. No, three. Three was perfect. Probably have to interview twenty just to get the ones he wanted. Start tomorrow with the little girl: her