It Takes a Psycho ...

On the heels of interviews with both James Reasoner and Robert J. Randisi, the Western fiction blog Saddlebums now ropes in the ubiquitous Ed Gorman. Most of the conversation has, naturally, to do with this author’s American frontier storytelling, but I enjoyed his answer to a question about how he broke into book publishing:

I want to talk a little about your publishing history, what is the first novel you published? Was it a long time coming, or did you hit print pretty quickly once you decided to write it?

I wrote a lot of stuff for men’s magazines in the Sixties and Seventies. I could never come close to finishing a novel until I met Max Allan Collins who gave me two great pieces of advice--look at each chapter as a story and never look back until you’ve finished the book. Then worry about revisions. I finished Rough Cut and shopped it around. Agents felt that the narrator was more psychotic than the villain. I sent it to St. Martin’s Press where it was fished out of slush and bought. This was 1983.

You can read all of this Saddlebums piece here.