Let it Ring. Oh, Big Mistake!

But it was his mother-in-law.

It was a Saturday in the Michael Connelly household, the day when his wife Linda usually talked to her mother back in Florida. He was a reporter for the LA Times and struggling to sell his first novel, Black Echo.

But on this Saturday, Linda was running errands when the phone rang. Thinking it was his mother-in-law, he let it ring. From across the room, he heard Philip Spitzer, James Lee Burke’s literary agent, leave a message that he wanted to speak with him. Connelly was stunned, kicking himself for not grabbing the phone sooner.

“I’m sitting there listening to it. I thought it would be rude to answer: ‘Here it’s me! It’s me!’ so I waited 15 minutes and called back, and he took the book.”

The two did not meet until after Spitzer sold Black Echo. Connelly ventured from Los Angeles to New York City to find Spitzer’s office on 11th Street in Hell’s Kitchen. Having read Spitzer had subsidized his agent’s income as a cab driver, Connelly was suspicious he was being played.

“I think generally I’ve been paranoid about stuff—the story behind the story. I think that might have been amplified because I was a reporter,” Connelly says.

But after their initial meeting, Connelly quickly felt at ease with his new agent. Spitzer told him he “was sure he could sell” Black Echo. And he did. Connelly went on to become one of the most successful crime novelists in the world.

Inadvertently playing hard to get. Is this a trend?

Decades ago when the The New Yorker reached Floridian Randy Wayne White to pen a piece on the Everglades, he turned them down. The Outside magazine columnist and fishing guide was in a foul mood. It was the height of the fishing season, and he had enough work on his plate. Besides, he said at the time, what else can be written about Florida’s endangered swamp land that hadn’t already been written?

He wasn’t trying to play hard to get, but it didn’t seem to hurt one bit. White heard from his buddies in New York literary circles that the editor he turned down was telling others chumming for talent that Randy was a big catch. “Randy White’s pretty good, if you can get him,” she told people. Note to other writers: Maybe playing hard to get is the way to get published! (Might want to sleep on that one.)

Randy went on to write dozens of novels, many NYT bestsellers. His most famous novels are part of his “Doc Ford” series about the adventures of marine biologist Doc Ford on Sanibel Island on the Southwest Florida coast.

We met at his restaurant, Doc Ford's, on Sanibel Island, not far from my Florida condo, and we had a long conversation about his beginnings, and book and magazine publishing in general. He’s what you’d envision of a fishing guide. Muscled, tanned and a bit of Hemingway in his manner. And a damned good writer.

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Rick Pullen is the author of the best selling thriller Naked Ambition, its sequel Naked Truth, and a stand-alone thriller The Apprentice.

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