Egomania

  For a young woman, survival was a tough business. And because of that, Krista had been forced to continue living in her mother’s home, even after the woman’s death. She wanted a place of her own, but couldn’t af-ford one.

  Then one night alone with her step father, Krista was taught the brutal truth about life, men and sex. Now no longer a virgin, she was forced to survive on her own; even if that meant using her body like a high-class whore in the flashy modeling business.

  It is, also, a romantic story, almost a Cinderella tale of a girl who finds a way up through the nasty sink-hole around her and into the arms of the one man who has the power to….

  Oh, sure, another one of those romantic fantasies. But it was written for a publisher who was releasing original books that were supposed to have been written elsewhere in the world. Apparent translations.

  Now that’s a horrid professional confession, a look behind-the-scenes of the writer’s life. If you want to make a living putting words to paper you find a way to get them arranged in such a manner that pleases the publisher and those readers who buy the book.

  BLUES FOR A DEAD LOVER

  Blues for a Dead Lover was written early in my career, and based on a nightmare idea!

  It all started when I was engaged to my future wife, and she returned to Germany to visit her family. It was our first real separation. What if she never returned? After all, marrying me would mean living in America, iso-lated from her family. It was a serious move. What if she decided to stay there, and never come back to me?

  That haunted me. I ended up considering it a great concept for a book. Well a germ, anyway.

  Just shows you the evil twist of a writer’s mind. Even nightmares turn into story ideas. Heck, writers use every sense and awareness and experi-ence as basic food to mentally digest into story plotlines.

  Well, back to the nightmare.

  What if Brigitte never returned to America?

  Of course, said my ego, it wouldn’t be because she didn’t want to? So, of course, she would want to return.

  But: what if it was beyond her control? What if…what?

  Well. She might be killed! Why not consider that kind of nightmare possibility?

  Are there no limits to the imagination? No shame? Apparently I’d rather have her dead than happily somewhere else in the arms of another man!

  Yes. Come to think of it. I suppose that was my attitude. Better dead than thrilling to another lover’s touch!

  Horrid thought, that!

  I needed to write a book about it all. Get the bitter images out of my mind! And so I did, somewhat scrambled and changed and all that. Naturally. I wasn’t about to create real-life events, I wasn’t interested in offering up some kind of bio-material to the vast public at large.

  But in re-reading the book I realized I had used some real-life touches in the story. Brigitte was there in the opening passages; there are elements of real-life events. But, of course, hidden within the story background.

  I had devised a leading character who was not a writer but a jazz musi-cian.

  I focused the question in my mind: What does a person do when they lose the most important thing in their life?

  This, of course, was the theme of the story.

  Then I offered up the background and setting: A story of a man’s jour-ney through hell to happiness set on a stage of show business and Las Ve-gas in the ’60s. This was the town of the Sands and the Clan and the big swingers. Glamour USA!

  Next came the details:

  Bill Carter’s life was the world of jazz, blowing a trumpet, and his ca-reer was blooming, and soon he’d be married. Everything looked wonder-ful, at last.

  Then the accident happened, and his life was crushed, career, and eve-rything went down the tubes in a rush to escape the pain.

  It is also the story of his rediscovery of love, and how he ended up re-building his life.

  To me this is a story based on a romantic notion and a nightmare and a sense that life does, and must, go on in its own fashion to bring about the healing process. Life is full of blues for lost loves, for lost people, for lost elements that were and remain so very important to our living experience.

  BORN TO BE LOVED

  This is the story of a young man seeking a second chance in life; a new beginning. And when his uncle Ben offers him a job in Hollywood, he leaps at the chance.

  That is basically the concept that I started out with in writing this book.

  For some reason I especially liked the opening of the book. It is a scene where we meet our hero, and learn something about his background and attitude towards women.

  The setting is a small motel at a tiny wayside gas-stop, in the middle of the California desert. There’s a coffee shop and a lonely young waitress tossed in for good measure.

  The young lady is a prime example of the girl trapped in a nowhere place, desperately isolated and hungry just to be held, cared for, loved.

  What would happen when the two met?

  Like I suggest, this is a scene that sets up the character of Johnny, our hero. Nothing more.

  James Dean and the young Paul Newman were big in films around the time of the book’s original writing. Not that the Johnny in this book was anything as dynamic as either of these actors in real or imagined life. But I kind of think that Johnny might have thought of himself in that way. Lean, attractive to women, young and old. He is, in reality, somewhat of an “es-cort” for hire, when the story opens. And he wants out of that gig!

  So he comes to Hollywood to get a fresh start, after years of living off lonely widows as their paid lover. This was a new beginning; and he is de-termined to make the most of this chance for a new life, a new beginning.

  But, of course, life isn’t all that simple.

  And so the complications begin!

  Things might have worked out, if his uncle’s young wife, Laura, hadn’t wanted him as a lover. He instantly realized this was another trap!

  Uncle Ben was a dangerous and violent man, with underworld connec-tions.

  In desperation to break free of Laura, he becomes involved with one of the strippers working for the club, then more seriously with a struggling young actress who has made the wrong kind of films—for his uncle!

  But Laura won’t stop making demands on him, and all hell breaks loose when Ben discovers the truth!

  A novel which exposes the terrible price that life can inflict on people desperate to have a second chance.

  SEX IS MY BUSINESS

  Small town, U.S.A. has been picked on and torn apart, rendered low-class, snobby, closed, narrow-minded, sometimes religiously conservative and sometimes called Hicksville by the city folk that looked down upon them.

  I’ve done my subtle—and not so subtle—knocking at the edges of the-se types of closed societies. I’ve let some of my characters rave and rant about Small Town, USA, as they did in One Summer of Happiness.

  In this book I offer a different view on middle America. It takes place in a town filled with social climbers.

  Originally this story was left half-complete in my files, then one day I got a phone call from a publisher wanting a book and remembered this one, pulled it out and found myself captured and intrigued. It was all fresh, now, in my mind. I really wanted to find out what happened next. A prime quality of any story: the desire it inspires in the reader to move to the next scene in an effort to learn more about the characters and conflict and mystery of it all.

  Ah, this was going to be fun to complete, I realized.

  I had as a central character James Haden, who is trying to make it in Kilman Enterprises, run by the man who all but owns the town. People are willing to sell themselves out to the highest bidder and if necessary seduce those in power to help them up the ladder. Even marriages are calculated career makers. The only place love had in their lives was the power it brought into their hands.

  And somebody is willing to do anything necessary to protect their own slice of success, even, perhap
s, commit murder!

  That’s the background. The complication that starts things out is the discovery of the dead body in the Kilman home. It is a shock that shoots through the town like wildfire.

  The police suspect foul play; and only the police are able to sort things out.

  Against this background James Haden is in love with, and is deter-mined to marry, his boss’ daughter, Janet Kilman. This budding romance is suspect, not only by her father, but everybody else involved. But other power players have their take on this matter and their own counter-plans.

  The company manager, Gordon Fuller, for one, wants Janet for himself.

  And the boss’ new young bride, Irene, is determined to keep her place secured at all cost. And at the same time make a play for James as a lover. She had married to gain social status and power, and made no effort to hide that reality to anybody that got in her way. Ol’ Man Kilman had wanted a young woman and she made her deal to be his toy-bride. And nobody dared to challenge that position. She was a very powerful player all on her own, and needed to be catered to, on her terms.

  Sex is My Business exposes some of the wicked and damning things people will do to get to the top—and stay there!

  SYNDICATE WOMAN

  There are many ways of getting ideas for a story. Some writers wait for inspiration. Others find ideas diving in at them from all directions, drown-ing their ability to pick one idea over another. Some wait very, very long periods of time for that momentary instant when the mental light bulb pops brightly in their creative well and inspires another masterpiece.

  That latter choice is not used by a full-time freelance writer. Well, sel-dom, anyway!

  A very famous song writer stated that his answer concerning “where do you get your ideas” was when the phone rings. Meaning, simply: he didn’t worry about such matters until somebody called to give him an assignment for a new song.

  Well, the free-lance writer is in much the same position. When the phone rings it is best to be ready with a number of ideas. Or be able to in-vent one on the spot, based on the publisher’s immediate needs.

  I had a simple trick I used under almost all conditions when I sat down to writing: find a destination, a concluding point, then make a list of char-acters and then begin writing the opening scene. I would start with a couple of people who in their conversation and action reveal to the reader the basic plot issues that will drive these people down a road that won’t end until the last period of the story. I started by writing a neat, well-rounded narrative hook, a paragraph or so that catches the reader’s attention and hooks them with a cute little snapper.

  In this case I had an opening that set things up and I knew exactly, gen-erally speaking, where I’d be heading and then I let my characters be pre-sented on the set—paper—and let them do their thing.

  The woman had been murdered in her bedroom. And Robert Bradley was determined to find those responsible! He came to Hollywood to learn the truth.

  To his shock he learned that the dead woman had said:

  “Hollywood is a horrible snare for young women like us. If you get in the right crowd you sleep your way up to fame. If you get in the wrong crowd, you sleep your way down into the gutter. If you’re lucky you get some permanent relationship like mine. And what happens? It’s a trap, too. The worst kind of trap. Because you can’t get out; you can’t get what you came to Hollywood for in the first place. So I’m a high class little prosti-tute. That’s what all of us are!”

  Into this world Robert Bradley probed until he became a danger to powerful men. If he got too close they would kill him, too.

  Murder, revenge and passion mix to expose the call-girl racket and strip it down to its raw bones—a nasty look at the beautiful, expensive young women and the price they pay as high-class prostitutes that only rich men can afford.

  JEAN

  This has a number of things I like. It was originally titled Illicit Beds and had a cover by my father on it. But that has nothing to do with my liking the book. This one had to do with a Mr. Winter, who is a character in the book. His name, first of all, is a combination of my wife’s maiden name, Winter, and my uncle Carl’s first name, given the German version of Karl.

  It is common for a writer to use people they know as characters in their stories, altered enough to never reveal their true identity, even to them-selves. Generally I attempt to avoid basing my fictional folk on real-life people I know. But in this case it was too much of a temptation to capture something which was rather delightful and fitting.

  A short explanation.

  My uncle Carl was my father’s older brother, and old enough to have been my grandfather, as it turns out, and in many ways he filled that role in my childhood. He was in his eighties when he died “the ol’ man of the mountains” as he had once called himself. For many years he lived in Lake Arrowhead, a mountain resort not far from Los Angeles, which now and then would even get snowed in during the winter. It is a popular place for skiers.

  That is of little import concerning my using him here. It just happens that I needed an elder man, who would be likeable and able to tell a very important story that was to become a basic element of the book’s theme. It is about second chances and, even more importantly, not missing out of something important because of social pressures pushing you to do so.

  So I devised this fella who told a story about his experiences as a young man in Germany. Why Germany? Because, like many others, I’m German by descent. And thus Uncle Carl was very Germanic. But more important-ly, fencing has always been a sport that fascinated me. German saber fenc-ing was at one time, and maybe even today in a limited sense, a standard challenge for some upper class males. In fact, they fought with naked blades with the idea of literally drawing blood—though not on a dangerous level. It was considered a kind of badge of honor to have a scar on one’s cheek. A rather cheeky kind of honor, has always been my somewhat doubtful thinking concerning the matter. But that’s the way it was. And I used this as a part of the story that Karl Winter told a bunch of eager young listeners. He was based a lot on my memories of my uncle, a charming, in-telligent story teller, very much like the one in this book.

  I wanted to examine the following issues:

  We all make the mistake of running from ourselves, or simply refusing to act positively on events we live through and end up losing the most im-portant things in our lives.

  Escape had been Jean’s life theme, and now she was running again, not facing reality, not facing what she was, not even knowing, for certain, if she was normal or.…

  It was ironic, Jean realized. She had gone to New York with the pur-pose of forgetting Al Gordon.

  Three years in New York had become a worse kind of hell. Loneliness was followed by a sordid, perverted affair—and now she was returning home in a desperate effort to prove that love could come to the kind of woman she had become.

  This is a story that probes deep into the torment of a woman’s mind and emotions as she attempts to escape a past she wants to forget. She runs from one sordid affair into another kind of passionate web in the arms of a man she hardly knows!

  NEVER IN HER ARMS

  I just happened to like this title, for it implies so much. If the story lives up to those implications I don’t know. But it was one of those books which kind of wrote itself.

  What we have here is one of those contemporary tales about people try-ing to climb from nowhere to success. And it shows how there are different kinds of love. Some which are positive and others dangerous nightmares.

  This is a study of how a woman can totally capture a man’s hunger and feast on his soul to satisfy her own selfish needs.

  Paula Martin becomes an obsessive object of desire to our hero, Peter Scott. To make things worse, she’s his bosses’ sister-in-law, and has the power to make or break his career.

  To me, as a writer, that’s interesting enough. I’ll confess: I’d hate to have a lovely lady like this tossing herself into my arms and saying
: I’m yours, luv, no questions asked. Let’s have some fun!

  One can’t blame any man finding her attractive and desirable; and thus it is easy enough to understand my hero’s attraction to her.

  Never in Her Arms reveals how obsession can shatter relationships and create havoc in the lives of those it touches. It is, also, a story of romance and ambition, for it tells the story of an ambitious young man in love….

  Peter, for the first time in his life, was facing great changes and chal-lenges. A new job, and what seemed a wonderful future with Joanne Nes-tor, a sweet enough woman he’d known for years. She was a nice compan-ion and caring lover and they planned on someday getting married.

  But, of course, nothing is that simple.

  Paula had ideas of her own. When she met Peter it was instant desire. The overwhelming attraction ran both ways. After their first night together he knew what had been missing with Joanne: wild, unrestrained passion. Paula was like an addictive drug, and a dangerously unstable female. And once her claws had sunk deeply into his soul he was lost in a whirlpool of crazed hunger that wouldn’t let go.

  Escape would come at a terrible price! And murder could follow!

  When tragedy struck, Ann Fenneran, his secretary, became an excep-tionally caring person. And it was soon obvious she was in love with Peter.

  Now tell me, what else does one need to read on?

  THE BODY MERCHANTS

  Maybe I shouldn’t confess too much about this book. Other than, of course, admit it was my first novel. But there’s a long story that goes with it, for the book originally came out one way, then another that cut some material and added some, and much of that was returned in this version. To say that much of those alternative editions had more to do with editorial policy than the author’s personal desires should underscore that this edition could be called: the author’s cut!