Man For Rent

Lawrence Block remembers:

"Back in the 1960s, when I was writing erotic novels for several publishers, I trauned and employed several ghostwriters. The first, William Coons, was recruited by my friend Donald Westlake; MAN FOR RENT is half his work and half mine, and here's what wrote about it in my memoir of those early years, A Writer Prepares..."

This happened fairly early in Bill's ghosting career, when he was living with his wife and daughter in Washington Heights-but not too early, because it was after Nightstand had upped their order to two Andrew Shaw titles a month. I'd let myself be lured back into the game. So we were each writing a monthly book, and you'd think one of Hamling's editors would have to have suspected something, but if so he kept it to himself. Bill and I wrote our books and the checks kept coming.

And one day I gave him a call. "I wrote three chapters of a book," I said, "and I just went dead on it, and I hate it, and I don't want to write any more of it but I hate to let sixty pages go to waste. Why don't you read what I've done, and if you can see a way to go on you can write the next three chapters, and then we'll alternate until we've got a book. And Henry can submit it as our collaboration."

"By Andrew Shaw and Dell Holland?"

Dell Holland was the pen name Bill had chosen for his own non-Shaw work.

"Sure," I said. "And we'll each write half the book and take half the money."

That sounded fine to him, so I got on the A train and took the three chapters uptown. "A sow's ear," I said. "Make some kind of a purse out of it. It doesn't have to be silk."
Then the two of us went out for a beer. Maybe two beers, or even three, and then I got back on the subway and headed home.

And he returned to his apartment. His wife had come home in the interim, and saw the stack of sow's-ear manuscript on the table where Bill had left it, and she was just finishing the last page when he walked in the door.

"This is really good," she told him. "You're really improving, honey. This is far and away the best thing you've ever written."

One of the best things about the story-and one of the worst things as well-is that Bill chose to tell it on himself. The fellow was not without a sense of irony. And he did in fact write the next three chapters, and we shuttled the manuscript back and forth until it was done, and Henry sent it to Nightstand and in due course it was published. Not by Andrew Shaw & Dell Holland, Nightstand never used dual bylines, but as Man For Rent, by John Dexter. (That was a house name, fastened at the editor's whim on odd books and extra books, and this was both.)

And who wrote which chapters, and how do they compare in quality? I leave that decision to you, Gentle Reader.