Meg Gardner Discovers America

Is Stephen King the Christopher Columbus of books?

Meg Gardiner was living with her family outside of London when she began her first crime novel, China Lake. She found a British agent and publisher and her book sold well, but her agent couldn’t break into the American market.

Her writing career thrived in the next four years with four more books in her series with protagonist Even Delany, but still no American publishers showed interest.

Days before the launch of her fifth novel, mega-selling author Stephen King was getting ready for another book launch of his own. He was going through his shelves at home looking for a book to read on a flight to London where one of his European book launches was scheduled.

King shared Gardiner’s British publisher, Hodder & Stoughton, which had been flooding him with free copies of many of their authors’ books in hopes King would review them. King would shelve what he considered the promising ones, keeping them in his “Someday Books” collection––books he might read someday. He chose China Lake and read it on his seven-hour flight to London.

Why hers?

“He thought the type was nice and easy on the eyes,” Meg says. “He thought he would not get eyestrain on the red eye to London.”

“That was the true deciding factor,” King wrote in an Entertainment Weekly column three months later.

After he landed, “My first question to the nice publishing people who met me at the airport was why an American woman writing thrillers set in California was living and working in England?” King wrote in his column. “They didn’t seem to know. I next asked how many of the four Evan Delaney books…had been best-sellers in England. The answer was none. This staggered me. Then I asked who publishes her in the U.S., and the answer was no one. That floored me.”

Three months after her book launch, Megan was on her way to a Colorado family vacation. She had a layover at Dulles International Airport outside of Washington D.C. when her editor called and told her King had just published a column about her book in Entertainment Weekly. She raced around the airport buying every copy she could at newsstands before jumping on her flight.

Once on board she began reading. King urged Americans to go on Amazon and buy China Lake from her British publisher. At first, she was ecstatic. “Then I realized he was writing this because no one in America was interested in my book…The rest of the flight I think my husband was ready to jump out of the plane because I was so antsy…By the end of flight, I just figured keep one foot in front of the other.”

She awoke in her Colorado hotel room the next morning to learn fourteen American publishers suddenly wanted China Lake, the book they didn’t want the day before or for the past four years. She signed with Penguin, which bought American rights to her entire backlist.

“I’m eternally grateful to Stephen King,” Meg says.

Since that day in Colorado, China Lake has won the prestigious Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. It became a Publisher’s Weekly and Barnes & Noble bestseller. And how did it do with American readers? Penguin sold hundreds of thousands of copies of a novel nobody wanted. Go figure. She has since become a New York Times bestselling author.

Meg Gardiner had finally discovered America. But more importantly, America had discovered Meg Gardiner.

I’m Rick Pullen, former investigative reporter, magazine editor, and author of the best selling thriller Naked Ambition, its sequel Naked Truth, and a stand-alone The Apprentice. I’m also a magazine columnist and feature writer.

Literary Agent Terrie Wolf of AKA Literary Management represents my work and is currently shopping my next crime novel and a non-fiction book about many of the authors who appear in Idol Talk.

Thanks for reading Idol Talk! Subscribe for free or support my work with a paid subscription. — Rick Pullen