Black Maps
I cannot even begin to express how much I enjoy my current reading 'assignment', Black Maps; words fail me largely because I am only 1/3 complete. (I have read enough, however, to know that I will include this novel in the sidebar's list of comparatively unknown and yet highly recommended titles.) Its author, Peter Spiegelman, is no mere Wall Street drop out who sought something other, something different; he always wanted to write. This NY Times article helps explain...
The Case of the Writer Who Left Wall Street
By ALISON LEIGH COWAN
RIDGEFIELD, Conn., July 19 - As a child living in Forest Hills, Queens, Peter Spiegelman invented a superhero whose stories he told in homemade comic books. Packed off to boarding schools as a teenager, he consumed vast helpings of crime fiction to while away the hours and fend off the boredom. Later, as an undergraduate at Vassar, he discovered 20th-century poets like T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens and composed somber poems that snared the college's top poetry prize.
But when it came time to make a living, Mr. Spiegelman did what many graduating seniors do. He 'sobered up and realized I had to pay the rent,' he said, and began a series of jobs that eventually led him to Wall Street.
He spent 19 years there, rising from a computer programmer to a vice president of J. P. Morgan and then junior partner of a company that sold software to big banks. Along the way, he met his wife, Alice Wang, a colleague at J. P. Morgan, and socked away millions when a British firm bought the software company for what Mr. Spiegelman said was a 'high eight-figure' sum.
The financial freedom that followed allowed him to enjoy the writer's life at long last and spend his time turning out crime novels, short stories and poems from his home in Ridgefield. It is a luxury he savors now that his writing is enjoying some commercial success.
'I always thought I'd like to give this a try,' said Mr. Spiegelman, a wiry 47-year-old who does most of his writing in his ground-floor study.
His first book, a detective novel called 'Black Maps,' was published in 2003 and earned a Shamus Award for best first novel from the Private Eye Writers of America. A sequel, 'Death's Little Helpers,'"had just been released. Knopf published both books and has Mr. Spiegelman under contract for two more novels as well.
In addition, a short story called "The Best Part," about a financier on the run, is to be included in an anthology published by Akashic.
Mr. Spiegelman's fiction has Wall Street and New York institutions as a common motif. The protagonist of the two crime novels, a private eye named John March, is at home barging into the offices of Brill Associates, an investigative firm that brings to mind the real-world Kroll Associates, and jumping into town cars to meet the cable television queen at BNN - think CNN - whose on-air sound bites can send stocks to the moon and back.
In his latest book, March grapples with the disappearance of a Wall Street stock analyst whose career crashes along with the technology sector he once championed. He finds a long list of people who might have wanted to wring the missing man's neck, including a well-heeled mistress and a secretive hedge-fund manager. To reinforce the point that the knives are out, the author borrowed the title "Death's Little Helpers" from a poem by Charles Simic.
Clad in a purple Oxford shirt, casual loafers and a plastic $34 watch, Mr. Spiegelman looked back the other day on the nearly two decades he spent catering to traders and investment bankers as a time when he "was, in a sense, under cover."
"There was always a part of me standing back and processing the dramatic potential of that," he said. "Getting to be a fly on the wall was great training for an aspiring crime novelist. Wall Street is a noirish place, between the big money, the big egos, the sweaty paranoia."
Mr. Spiegelman said that he was not exactly sure when he conjured up John March, but that he thought it was during his drives from Ridgefield to the software company's office in White Plains, N.Y. On those trips, he said, he even sketched out a first and last chapter of the first book. By 2001, he had cut all connection with the software company, and he spent the next year writing the middle chapters.
But figuring out how to get published took real detective work, as he put it, and he spent early 2002 looking for contacts who could tell him whether he had any business trying to make his living as a writer. "At that point, I did not even have the lingo and all the taxonomy down," he said. "Is this a detective novel? Is this a thriller? Is it hard-boiled? Is it soft-boiled?"
His search brought him to Susan A. Schwartz, an editorial consultant formerly at Doubleday, who was intrigued enough to introduce him to the woman who would become his literary agent, Denise Marcil. Within a month, as he was packing his family into the Chrysler minivan for a vacation, he got a call that Sonny Mehta wanted to meet.
Understanding that this could be her husband's big break, Ms. Wang remembers it as a "pinch me" moment. Mr. Spiegelman remembers it more like a "kick me" moment, because he did not recognize the name of the publishing legend who runs the Knopf Publishing Group of Random House Inc.
Ms. Marcil arranged the meeting, which took place the following week in Mr. Mehta's Park Avenue apartment. There, publisher and prospective author sipped wine and discussed books "and authors we love," Mr. Spiegelman said, adding that he agreed to do some rewriting and Mr. Mehta offered to edit the book personally.
"Black Maps" sold about 10,000 copies, Mr. Spiegelman said, not enough to make any best-seller lists. But Knopf has big plans for the new book, including an initial run of 20,000. Mr. Mehta said: "That's a good healthy printing for a writer who is still establishing himself and finding an audience. He's got his fans, and he's building, and we're confident he's going to grow into somebody whom we'll be publishing for quite a while."
Mr. Spiegelman's success is also having an impact on those around him. A former colleague at J. P. Morgan recently called to say she had taken early retirement, had received a master's degree in fine arts and was shopping a novel. Ms. Wang, too, has somehow found time between two young sons and her job on J. P. Morgan's fixed-income sales desk to write a novel, "CoolMama," which Ms. Marcil is circulating to editors for some polish. It concerns a chat room for working mothers and the sudden disappearance of one of its regulars.
"Who knew these banker types all had stories to tell?" Mr. Spiegelman said.
The Case of the Writer Who Left Wall Street
By ALISON LEIGH COWAN
RIDGEFIELD, Conn., July 19 - As a child living in Forest Hills, Queens, Peter Spiegelman invented a superhero whose stories he told in homemade comic books. Packed off to boarding schools as a teenager, he consumed vast helpings of crime fiction to while away the hours and fend off the boredom. Later, as an undergraduate at Vassar, he discovered 20th-century poets like T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens and composed somber poems that snared the college's top poetry prize.
But when it came time to make a living, Mr. Spiegelman did what many graduating seniors do. He 'sobered up and realized I had to pay the rent,' he said, and began a series of jobs that eventually led him to Wall Street.
He spent 19 years there, rising from a computer programmer to a vice president of J. P. Morgan and then junior partner of a company that sold software to big banks. Along the way, he met his wife, Alice Wang, a colleague at J. P. Morgan, and socked away millions when a British firm bought the software company for what Mr. Spiegelman said was a 'high eight-figure' sum.
The financial freedom that followed allowed him to enjoy the writer's life at long last and spend his time turning out crime novels, short stories and poems from his home in Ridgefield. It is a luxury he savors now that his writing is enjoying some commercial success.
'I always thought I'd like to give this a try,' said Mr. Spiegelman, a wiry 47-year-old who does most of his writing in his ground-floor study.
His first book, a detective novel called 'Black Maps,' was published in 2003 and earned a Shamus Award for best first novel from the Private Eye Writers of America. A sequel, 'Death's Little Helpers,'"had just been released. Knopf published both books and has Mr. Spiegelman under contract for two more novels as well.
In addition, a short story called "The Best Part," about a financier on the run, is to be included in an anthology published by Akashic.
Mr. Spiegelman's fiction has Wall Street and New York institutions as a common motif. The protagonist of the two crime novels, a private eye named John March, is at home barging into the offices of Brill Associates, an investigative firm that brings to mind the real-world Kroll Associates, and jumping into town cars to meet the cable television queen at BNN - think CNN - whose on-air sound bites can send stocks to the moon and back.
In his latest book, March grapples with the disappearance of a Wall Street stock analyst whose career crashes along with the technology sector he once championed. He finds a long list of people who might have wanted to wring the missing man's neck, including a well-heeled mistress and a secretive hedge-fund manager. To reinforce the point that the knives are out, the author borrowed the title "Death's Little Helpers" from a poem by Charles Simic.
Clad in a purple Oxford shirt, casual loafers and a plastic $34 watch, Mr. Spiegelman looked back the other day on the nearly two decades he spent catering to traders and investment bankers as a time when he "was, in a sense, under cover."
"There was always a part of me standing back and processing the dramatic potential of that," he said. "Getting to be a fly on the wall was great training for an aspiring crime novelist. Wall Street is a noirish place, between the big money, the big egos, the sweaty paranoia."
Mr. Spiegelman said that he was not exactly sure when he conjured up John March, but that he thought it was during his drives from Ridgefield to the software company's office in White Plains, N.Y. On those trips, he said, he even sketched out a first and last chapter of the first book. By 2001, he had cut all connection with the software company, and he spent the next year writing the middle chapters.
But figuring out how to get published took real detective work, as he put it, and he spent early 2002 looking for contacts who could tell him whether he had any business trying to make his living as a writer. "At that point, I did not even have the lingo and all the taxonomy down," he said. "Is this a detective novel? Is this a thriller? Is it hard-boiled? Is it soft-boiled?"
His search brought him to Susan A. Schwartz, an editorial consultant formerly at Doubleday, who was intrigued enough to introduce him to the woman who would become his literary agent, Denise Marcil. Within a month, as he was packing his family into the Chrysler minivan for a vacation, he got a call that Sonny Mehta wanted to meet.
Understanding that this could be her husband's big break, Ms. Wang remembers it as a "pinch me" moment. Mr. Spiegelman remembers it more like a "kick me" moment, because he did not recognize the name of the publishing legend who runs the Knopf Publishing Group of Random House Inc.
Ms. Marcil arranged the meeting, which took place the following week in Mr. Mehta's Park Avenue apartment. There, publisher and prospective author sipped wine and discussed books "and authors we love," Mr. Spiegelman said, adding that he agreed to do some rewriting and Mr. Mehta offered to edit the book personally.
"Black Maps" sold about 10,000 copies, Mr. Spiegelman said, not enough to make any best-seller lists. But Knopf has big plans for the new book, including an initial run of 20,000. Mr. Mehta said: "That's a good healthy printing for a writer who is still establishing himself and finding an audience. He's got his fans, and he's building, and we're confident he's going to grow into somebody whom we'll be publishing for quite a while."
Mr. Spiegelman's success is also having an impact on those around him. A former colleague at J. P. Morgan recently called to say she had taken early retirement, had received a master's degree in fine arts and was shopping a novel. Ms. Wang, too, has somehow found time between two young sons and her job on J. P. Morgan's fixed-income sales desk to write a novel, "CoolMama," which Ms. Marcil is circulating to editors for some polish. It concerns a chat room for working mothers and the sudden disappearance of one of its regulars.
"Who knew these banker types all had stories to tell?" Mr. Spiegelman said.
posted by David M Gordon | 11:43 AM
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