I saw Stephen Cannell at a book-signing at a San Diego
bookstore yesterday. I had no idea he was going to be there.
I had read his KING CON and thought it was pretty good so I
hung around to hear what he had to say.
He's tall and tan and fashionably thin. He says he's got
severe dyslexia and failed the first grade and then the
fourth and then the tenth. He said an advantage was that he
was incredibly popular with the other six-graders when he got
his driver's license. He said his first published work was a
poem about Martin Luther King. He got a B- on it, but his
sister later turned it in as her own and got an A on it and
got it published in a school publication. His parents pulled
strings and got him into college and a teacher recognized his
talent and told him to write constantly.
His dad was a successful businessman and had several
furniture stores in the area and Cannell married his high
school sweetheart and went to work for his dad. He came home
every evening and wrote for five hours. He wrote half the day
on Saturdays and Sundays. His uncle was playing golf with a
guy named Eisenback who evidently was a big literary agent
and Cannell talked his uncle into giving him a script. After
several calls to the agent about the script, Eisenback called
Cannell in and talked to him about how good a golfer his
uncle was. Cannell got impatient and asked if the dickweed
had read his script and the guy said no and that he wasn't
going to and that scriptwriters were a dime a dozen and that
Cannell was wasting his time thinking he could make a living
scriptwriting. Cannell gathered up his stuff and left.
Shortly after that he wrote a script for 1 Adam 12 and the
following week became the main writer and went on to write a
buttload of stuff, including The Rockford Files. He opened
his own production company but some law that got passed in
1995 made it difficult to be an independent so he sold it and
started writing novels.
He's four or five into a series now. The latest, the one he
was signing, is VERTICAL COFFIN. Anybody want to guess what
that is an allusion to? I'll bet Jim Doherty knows. I think
Cannell said it was police slang.
It was the first book-signing that I've ever attended.
miker
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