Jumping in here late on SPADE & ARCHER and Joe Gores.
I know he worked on the book for three, maybe four years--including all his research. He didn't share any information about the advance, but he told me that Knopf printed 50K copies, which he said was more than the first run of any other book of his.
Joe did go to Notre Dame undergrad, but followed it up with a Masters in English from Stanford.
He originally applied for a MFA in Creative Writing there, but after Stanford reviewed the short stories he submitted as part of his application he was told that "they read as if they were meant to be sold" and had to settle for the non-creative writing program.
He was further frustrated when he submitted "Hammett, Chandler and MacDonald" as his thesis topic and it was rejected because those gentlemen "did not write literature."
All this was during the time that Wallace Stegner ran the creative writing department, btw.
Still, Joe's having the last laugh because he's being profiled in an article for the alumni magazine.
--MC
--- THE BIG WAKE-UP: coming in November, 2009 http://www.markcoggins.com/book/wakeup.html
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