Who Knows What Novels Lurk ... ?

I’ve read parts, but not yet all of Paul Malmont’s new debut novel, The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril, which follows rival 20th-century pulp scribes Walter Gibson (creator of The Shadow) and Lester Dent (creator of Doc Savage) as they compete in 1937 to solve real-life mysteries: the supposed murder of H.P. Lovecraft and a killing in New York’s Chinatown. However, I may have to carve some time out of my schedule for that book, after reading Bookgasm’s delightful interview with the author. My favorite part, guaranteed to yank at your heart strings, is Malmont’s answer to a question about when, with a full-time job in advertising, he finds time to write:

Well, I don’t. I do it when I get up. I used to be a 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. writer, but when our son was born, I had to give that up fast. After about a year, he got into a groove where he would wake up at 5 a.m. consistently, and I’d get up with him so my wife could sleep before I went to work. After about a couple of weeks, I saw that my laptop wasn’t doing anything so I thought I’d sit down and write Chapter 1 just to see how it would come out. If it matched the idea I had been kicking around in my head for a couple years, I thought maybe I’d keep trying. Because I had never written a novel before.

I didn’t even tell my wife I was doing it. I had involved her in too many crazy schemes already, so I just kept it secret and wrote from about 5:30 to 7:30 a.m. Finally, after a year, I gave her the title page on Mother’s Day. She looked it at and said, “You’re writing a book?” And I said, “No, I already wrote it! It’s finished.” Before I had thought about making it into a screenplay, but that’s the wrong kind of medium for telling this story. I’d have to give up too much. But I finished it in May 2004, had an agent in October, sold it April of 2005 and it just came out in May.

Lucky bastard. And he says he’s working on a second novel now, again featuring a prominent historical author: Jack London. “In some ways, he was the first writer to become a huge success because of the magazine industry,” Malmont explains. “It was a new mass media and he sold and sold and sold and made a lot of money. So in researching these writers and their macho manly adventures, I found they all had their roots in Jack London, who had done it first and better. ... So I’m going to tell the story of his last year. Here’s this incredibly famous man--the first writer celebrity--and [he] makes a fortune, loses a fortune, and is dead at the age of 40. Today he’s mostly known as “the wolf guy,” but he wrote science fiction, fantasy, sports tales--he was a Socialist with an agenda, and I think there’s a great love story to be told there.”

I look forward to finding out.