How long does it take to write a novel?
That’s the first question most of us writers get when we’re out doing a book program.
The answer is . . . it depends.
For Joe Konrath, it’s 28 days—the month of February. He’s writing full time.
But for someone holding down a day job, like David Heinzmann with the Chicago Tribune, it can be five years. Yes, it took that long for David to write first crime novel. It came out two months ago from Five Star.
Chicago Tribune investigative reporter breaks with his thriller
David Heinzmann brought the cover of his new—and first—book to a meeting of fellow crime writers back in October. He was to do a show-and-tell with Mike Black and me at a bookstore in Oconomowoc. We all had books we were promoting, and the three of us share the same publisher—Five Star.
A cold cover that book cover was. Ice on Lake Michigan with the skyline of Chicago at twilight in the background. Overprinted in red on the ice, the title: A Word to the Wise.
You knew immediately this was a Chicago story and it takes place in winter. How right for a book that was to be released in December and promoted to the max at a launch party in January.
The reviews are mixed, but Chicagoans love Chicago books, so A Word to the Wise will do well, particularly since Sara Paretsky and Rick Kogan have endorsed the book—Paretsky, the creator of the V.I. Warshawski detective series, 13 books out, and Rick Kogan, a Tribune feature writer and host of WGN Radio’s Sunday Papers program. Kogan, too, is a writer of books, several of them true crime.
It was one of Heinzmann’s profs back in college—Bob Walker, professor of American studies at George Washington University—who put Heinzmann on to detective fiction.
“He made a strong case for detective fiction being one of the better forms for reflecting what’s going on sociologically in a society,” Heinzmann says.
That stirred his thoughts about what he might write. So, in preparation, he read the novels of three masters of American detective fiction—Raymond Chandler, John MacDonald, and Dashiell Hammett.
One has to pay the bills, so Heinzmann took a job with Chicago’s Daily Southtown. He covered the crime beat and found there’s possible material here. That was 15 years ago.
From the Southtown, he moved to the Tribune. And continued on the crime beat.
Now Heinzmann was ready to write his detective novel.
“I wrote a manuscript based on my experiences at the Southtown. A working-class south suburbs, public-corruption murder mystery with a reporter as the protagonist,” he says.
No publisher would buy it, so that manuscript went in the drawer.
“I had a couple of agents who worked with that manuscript. They said not this one, but show me the next one.”
That’s an invitation that will send any writer back to the keyboard.
Heinzmann’s next manuscript was A Word to the Wise.
An agent ran with it and eventually placed it with Five Star.
While that was going on, Heinzmann did what every good writer does. He wrote a sequel that he’s now revising.
A Word to the Wise didn’t grow out of any one event that Heinzmann observed on his beat.
“Yes, I covered the Chicago Police Department for five years at the Tribune before I moved onto investigative projects that got me off the daily cop beat. But this is not a Chicago cop book. The lead character is a former FBI agent. And there’s a casino scandal in the story.”
Casino scandal?
Remember Rosemont?
A couple years back, there was a big public uproar over building a casino in that Chicago suburb. Mob links surfaced. Got lots of attention. And the deal collapsed.
Heinzmann was writing his A Word to the Wise book at the time. His main character, Augustine Flood, was involved in a story line that just wasn’t working, so Heinzmann junked it.
“Suddenly, I was writing about this—Rosemont—and the rest of the manuscript grew from there,” he says.
To find out more about Heinzmann and A Word to the Wise, go to his website. Heinzmann also is a blogger. You can read his posts here.
© Jerry Peterson.
