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Death at Charity's PointReviews"A gripping story,
enlivened by the author's wit and his descriptions of locales he obviously
knows intimately." "William Tapply
does for the private eye what Len Deighton did for the secret agent. His
Brady Coyne is quiet and wry and vulnerable and given to asides that make
you chuckle out loud. . . . The characters are all real people, the locale
is so vivid you can smell the sea." "William Tapply's
first novel is honest with the audience...It is this sense of quiet proportion
that gives Tapply's debut its authentic ring. The teachers at the prep
school, the tough-minded mother, are all nicely drawn characters, and
in the end we hope to meet most of them again." |
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Excerpted from
the Foreword to The Poisened PenPress re-issue: Brady Coyne was born on July 15, 1981. I remember the date, because it was the day before my own birthday, three years before he appeared in print. That morning I had uncharacteristically awakened with the birds, which sing early and loudly on a New England dawn in July, unable to sleep, convinced that I would not be able to write this novel that I had been sparring with for nearly a year. If I couldn't write it, I had no right to call it a novel. There is no word for a novel that preoccupies the mind of someone who had never written a novel. A man who had never written a novel had no right to think of himself as a novel-writer. Twenty-five false starts. I had written damn near a book's worth of pages, all of them failed beginnings -- first chapters, prologues, opening lines, fragments of scenes, snatches of dialogue, in two cases a string of four or five chapters -- and they'd all petered out, gone nowhere. Into the Box of False Starts. On the morning of July 15, 1981, while the birds sang outside and my family slept upstairs, I rolled yet another sheet of paper into my portable Smith-Carona and wrote: "About twenty miles northeast of Boston as the bluefish swims . . ." Different words, but familiar terrain. I'd already invented the high cliff overlooking the ocean, the place that I was calling Charity's Point, the scene of the crime. But as I wrote, something happened. I typed the word "I," and I realized that this "I," this first-person voice, was telling my story. I had never done that before. It had not occurred to me. Who the hell was this "I"? The lawyer, I figured. My so-called story had a lawyer in it named Brady Coyne (I have no idea where that name came from). He had not been a central figure in my twenty-five failed attempts. Okay. The lawyer. But what's he like? Where does he live? Married? Education? I had no biography to follow, and I had no inclination to stop writing to invent one. I knew nothing about him except that he was telling the story and for the first time it felt right. People ask me: Is Brady you? I answer, conventionally: Well, sure, sort of. He's my alter ego, whatever that means. When a friend asked Flaubert how he was able to render a woman so believably, the author replied, "Madame Bovary, c'est moi." Brady, c'est moi. He talks like me. He's got my sense of humor, my view of the world. But all my characters are me. The villains, the victims, the women and children. I crawl into their heads, and I become them. I don't know any other way to do it. Oh, Brady's a lawyer, and I am not, and he says and does things that I have never done and probably wouldn't do if I ever found myself in the situations I put him in, things that I wish I'd have the courage and wit to do and say. So, okay, Brady's my alter ego, too. As the words gushed from my fingers that July morning when Brady Coyne was born, and on the subsequent mornings that summer when I wrote obsessively, now spewing out this story that had frustrated me for a year, his character took shape. I got to know him. He was the kind of guy I knew I'd like. I could spend a lot of time with this man. I invented facts about him as needed. I wrote up to the point in the story that required him to be in his office, so I had to create it, place it somewhere, give him a secretary, decorate it for him. Then he had to go home, so I had to figure out where and how he lived. I made him divorced because I wanted him to have adventures with women. It would be fun to write about that. But I gave him a complicated relationship with his ex wife, because that interested me, too. Brady was Everyman. Smart but not gifted, brave but no Super Hero, adventurous, a little bored, a little lonely, suffering from his own version of a mid-life crisis, although I don't think the phrase had yet been invented in 1981. He was a lawyer. My story required that. I was not a lawyer. No problem. I knew that in the real world, most lawyers spend little time in courtrooms. Mostly they negotiate with other lawyers, consult with clients. My story did not need a Perry Mason. Just a tenacious man on a mission for a client. I made only one absolutely calculated decision about Brady: He would emphatically NOT be a gourmet cook. Boston had enough gourmet sleuths already. He liked Dinty Moore's beef stew, from a can. Or the various leftovers from a take-out Chinese dinner, all mixed together in a frying pan, eaten off the coffee table while watching a Red Sox game on TV, and washed down with Schlitz beer. His turf had to be my turf: Boston, its suburbs -- all of New England, in fact. I knew I could not write well about anyplace I did not know. I also knew that New England offered everything I'd ever need -- the full cycle of seasons (we New Englanders recognize at least six) and weather and climate, cities and wilderness, oceans and lakes and rivers, shopping malls and toney restaurants and homeless shelters, and every ethnic neighborhood and socio-economic-religious group imaginable. Charity's Point was a fictitious place. Other than that, I didn't need to invent. The real places were already there. * * * I wrote the book that summer. It was, I recall, the only thing I thought about that summer. My friend Rick Boyer read it, offered good suggestions. I revised it and sent the first three chapters to Scribner's which, I'd read somewhere, was receptive to novels from unpublished novelists. And I waited. I had no expectations. Actually publishing a novel seemed to me to be the most amazing, wonderful, unlikely thing that could happen to an ordinary person like me. I began writing another novel, this one about a rare postage stamp, and Brady Coyne told that story, too. After a couple of chapters I stopped writing. What was I thinking? There was no sense writing this one if the first one was rejected. I fully expected rejection. Months passed. Then came a phone call, an editor from Scribner's named Betsy Rapoport. "We'd like to see the entire manuscript." Unbelievable! I sent it the next day. And prepared myself to wait. I didn't wait long. "We sort of like it," Betsy told me on the phone. "We can't offer you a contract, but if you'd be willing to make a few revisions . . ." Would I? You bet I would. I didn't think very hard about that "sort of." She liked the writing, she said. She liked Brady. But the story didn't work. No suspense. She knew whodunit from the beginning. She didn't want a few revisions. She wanted me to reinvent my story. I didn't know if I could do it. The story was what it was, so real to me that changing it would be like giving myself different parents, rewriting my own life. But I absolutely knew that if I couldn't do it, I'd never publish a novel. I did it. It was the hardest writing job I've ever tackled. * * * When Betsy called to tell me that they wanted to publish the book I was calling CHARITY'S POINT, I resumed work on that stamp story. And I realized I had other stories to tell, and that Brady could tell them all. Thirteen others have followed, more or less one a year. I've changed publishers several times, experienced first-hand the ups and downs of this bizarre industry. After eight books, I quit my day job and became a WRITER. I wrote for magazines. I wrote non-fiction books. I appeared in bookstores, gave lectures, did interviews on radio and television. I taught writing. I even wrote a book about mystery writing. My first novel, the one I called CHARITY'S POINT, will always be special to me because it was my first. I like to think that each one that followed was better than its predecessor. That is the writer's hubris. I recently read CHARITY for the first time since Scribner's published it in 1984. Hmm. Not bad. Somewhere along the way, Scribner's decided to call it DEATH AT CHARITY'S POINT. Just to make it clear to booksellers and potential readers that it was a mystery, you see. A suggestion from the marketing department. Oh, well. A more cumbersome, unambiguous title I cannot imagine. But they gave it an award and they liked that stamp book I sent them a few months later. I called it THE DUTCH BLUE ERROR, and they did not suggest retitling it THE DUTCH BLUE ERROR MURDERS, for which I was, and still am, grateful. William G.
Tapply
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