>I think you've already read the best of Browne, but you
might like THIN
>AIR. Browne spoke at the Monterey Bouchercon a few
years ago, and he told
>some great stories about his writing life, including his
years as editor of
>AMAZING STORIES and FANTASTIC. Anyboy remember the
one about how he came
>to write a story as "Mickey Spillane"?
Pray forgive the errors
and yes i know this is huge.
From Incredible Ink, Howard Browne, 1997, Dennis
McMillan:
When they finally did get moved to New York in 1951, I
went, too, and Davis gave me a raise and made me the boss of
all their pulps, since Palmer had resigned. I had never been
happy with the pulps we had-almost immediately I tried to get
them to change the make-up of the magazines and go to the
digest size. Amazing was to be a slick, but the Korean War
intervened, and we ran into paper problems, as we had before
in WWII, when we had to keep cutting the page count down. I
do think that the first two issues of Fantastic were
as good a magazine in that genre as has ever appeared (being
modest, which I rarely am). We had writers in there,
boy! Raymond Chandler, Roy Huggins (which was me, in this
case! but more on that later), Truman Capote, Steven Vincent
Benet, Evelyn Waugh, Ray Bradbury, John Wyndam, Theodore
Sturgeon, Fritz Leiber, Cornell Woolrich, Samuel Hopkins
Adams (!), William McGivern, and Frank M. Robinson (who was
our office boy at the time and later co-wrote The Towering
Inferno).
After we'd brought out the first issue of
Fantastic in the summer of 1952, Bill Ziff called me
down to his office and said, "Why don't you get a story by
Mickey Spillane?" Well, Spillane was at the hottest point in
his career at that time.
I said, "Mr. Ziff, Spillane is a detective story writer, and
he gets the kind of money that pulp magazines don't
dream about."
"Well, okay, it was just a suggestion." Now, when the boss
makes a suggestion, you try to figure out a way to pull it
off, if you can, to get in good with him. So I called up an
agent I knew and asked him who Spillane's
agent was. He replied, "By a strange coincidence, I am-I
just recently signed him."
"What would he charge to write a fantasy story for me?" He
said, "Howard, you couldn't afford it-this man gets a
tremendous price. However, Spillane wrote a fantasy story
that's been turned down by everybody in the business-I have
to tell you this."
I said, "Let me see it." "Look, it's not very good." "Let me
see it."
So, he sent it to me. It was one of these stories where a
guy is sitting in his study, and there's a picture on the
wall with a draw-drape over it so you can't see it, and he
tells his friend this story: a woman he met, and on and on
for 6,000 words. At the end, he pulls the curtain and the
woman has green skin-the title of the story was "The Woman
with Green Skin." He gave away his story in the title! It was
just awful-it didn't even read like Spillane, but he'd
written it.
I went down to Ziff's office and told him I'd gotten a story
by Spillane. 'Jesus, that's great!" he said.
"You're going to have to read it before we talk any
further." By page four, he had gone as far as he could.
I went back upstairs and called the agent and asked him how
much he wanted for the story. "Jesus, Howard, I couldn't let
it go for under $ 1,000."
"I'll give you the $1,000-if you'll send me a letter to the
effect that I can make any editorial changes I think
necessary."
'Jesus, I don't know if Spillane'd like that ... you know,
he's pretty funny . . . "
I said, "Well, I'll pay the thousand if you'll do it."
Cupidity got the better of good judgement, and he said all
right. He sent me a letter to that effect, I sent him a
thousand bucks, and I threw the manuscript in the waste
basket. I went home on Friday night, and Sunday morning I
came in with a 15,000 word Mickey Spillane story, "The Veiled
Woman." I think I killed fourteen people in it. And at the
end he shot the woman in the belly for killing his wife. You
got your 25 cents' worth!
The magazine hit the stands on a Tuesday, and on that
Thursday, we started getting telephone calls and telegrams
from the distributors-"We want more, send us more!"
I called Ziff, told him what was happening, and urged him to
print up another 150,000-200,000 copies-we could clean up! We
had a big meeting at which the circulation manager, Harry
Strong, was pretty weak. He said, "Let's take the money and
run-" (we'd sold 300,000 copies in three days) and that
scotched that.
Then the agent called me at home, terribly upset-Spillane
had called him up and just raised hell. He (Spillane) was
going to release the information to all the news services-and
they would've put it on the wire, too, it being Mickey
Spillane. He had been insulted, etc. A girl once told me that
she loved to take a Spillane to the beach because if the wind
blew the book twenty pages one way or the other it didn't
make a damn bit of difference. I said to the agent, "Look,
let me see if I can smooth it over."
I called him up at his home in Newburgh, NY, and said, "Mr.
Spillane, this is Howard Browne, and I understand you're
upset with me," and put down the receiver. I'd never heard
such a barrage of profanity in my life. It was full of
fascinating cuss words that I'd never heard before! It went
on and on and on-finally he began to repeat himself. I got
back on the line and said, "I can understand how upset you
are by all this-now let me tell you my side of the
story. We bought the story in good faith, I loved the story
(god forgive me!), we were going to run it, but I happened to
pick up a copy of Life magazine shortly after we
bought it, and it had a five or six page spread of you
telling the story, 'The Woman with the Green Skin.' So, we no
longer had first rights to the story- you'd already told it
to a national publication." I had seen this magazine just
before we published my version of the story, and I knew I had
my ace-in-the-hole if it ever came to it, which it did!
I said, "We tried to reach you, but you were with some cops
somewhere," (his agent had told me that he was a cop buff,
always riding around with them, etc., and had been doing just
that at the time in question) "so, in desperation, I sat down
and wrote this thing myself, doing my best to match your
inimitable style, and I did the best I could."
He said, "Well, it stunk! It was horrible . . . " I said,
"Well, I've done some writing, and I figured-"
"What'd you ever write?"
"Well, I wrote under the name of John Evans-"
"You wrote the Halo books?" (My fame goes far!) "Yeah, as a
matter of fact-"
"I've got a couple of 'em on the shelf here."
Now we were two pros talking, you see. It made a big
difference. "Well, I'm sorry it happened this way," he said,
"but I had no idea the story would sell when I did the piece
for Life, it'd been around so long. Let's just forget
it." Our lawyer was listening in on the other line and gave a
silent whoop of joy.
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