It was kind of hocus pocus from a magician to a writer because I didn’t quite realize it was happening, I didn’t have an aspiration to write in the beginning at all. In high school I was a very skilled magician and I was giving shows and in college I put myself part of the way through college giving magic shows.
I traveled with a magic show, I was in vaudeville and so forth. And I discovered a certain knack for inventing magic tricks and so forth. And I began writing them up once and I had a thin little book and in the world of magic, we have our own publishing industry, publishing books just for magicians, secrets and so forth.
I sent one of these publishers this book and it was accepted. And I was offered $50, not even in cash, in trade. I grabbed it. I was 19 when the book was published, I wrote it in high school, I was 19 when it was published. That was an awful long time ago, that was more then half a century ago.
And that book is still in print. Now I sold all rights for this $50 so there were no products involved, but I really wish that the book would go out of print because I could write a better magic book then that today. And when I saw that book and saw my name on the jacket, spelled right, which is a miracle, it ticked something off in my head.
I thought that’s kind of exciting and I wrote another magic book and I wrote five magic books, almost in a row. And then I realized you’ve got to invent the tricks and all and so I began writing short stories, the O’Henry type of short stories that had those trick endings, that the Maupassant stories and the O’Henry stories, they were like magic tricks to me.
And then I thought well, a mystery novel is just a magic trick, you know, how did the murderer get away with it, but the authors
they’re nice people, they explain at the end, magicians are rats, they don’t explain it, that was the only difference.
I wrote a mystery novel and published my first novel. And a friend of mine just bought a copy on the internet, it cost him $60, it came out (unint.), that’s really what started me writing.