On a quiet, palm-lined street off the main drag in Venice, Calif., PW rattles the locked gate of Richard Rayner's classic Los Angeles bungalow. The yard is littered with toys and bicycles, but there are no children in sight, and no adults either. There's a smell of ocean in the air, and the funk with which Venice is usually associated—Muscle Beach and all that—seems very far away. Then, two small boys appear, staring quizzically. Right behind them come the grownups of the house: first, the English-born Rayner, wearing black jeans and an untucked, oversized white shirt; then his petite, dark-haired Finnish wife, Paivi. Rayner fiddles with the lock, confirming that it's there so the couple's children—Harry, 5, and Charlie, 4—can roam free. Then he leads the way up the path to the house, where we walk through a succession of light-filled rooms, through a small backyard and into the close confines of his dark, book-lined study. Rayner's shirt billows like a spinnaker as he walks. "It's an obsession," he says—unnecessarily—as his visitor stands at the study's threshold, taking in the miles of books that line the walls.
They're everywhere—on shelves, on the desk and on the floor—and they're an interesting mix, from Nabokov first editions to works on modern architecture and the Bolshevik revolution. These latter categories have guided Rayner through the creation of his massive new novel, The Cloud Sketcher (Forecasts, Dec. 4), published in February by HarperCollins, which bought world rights to the book for $125,000.
HarperCollins's enthusiasm for the novel dovetails with Hollywood's recent embrace of Rayner's work. Los Angeles Without a Map was made into a 1999 movie starring Johnny Depp and Julie Delpy, and Rayner's 1997 novel, Murder Book, bought by actor John Malkovich to direct himself, is now in development. Film rights to The Cloud Sketcher were sold for $600,000 to the English director Alan Parker, who is also writing its screenplay. The latter deal was brokered by Rayner's film agent, Matthew Snyder (son of Golden's Dick Snyder). "Matthew said, 'If you'd pitched this book to me, I would have said, 'Richard, don't waste your time,'" Rayner recalls with a laugh. " 'A novel about a Finnish architect, and the first 200 pages are set in Finland?' But when he read it, he said, 'Richard, I think we can do something with this.'"
Pulling up a chair, the very intense Rayner begins to talk, sometimes curling his legs beneath him as he does. He has dark hair and dark eyes, wears tortoiseshell glasses and tends to gesture as he talks. Every now and then he'll jump up to make a point, riffling through a reference book to show a particular photo or illustration. The Cloud Sketcher begins in Finland, where protagonist Esko Vaananen, an 11-year-old boy with a scarred face and a tragic family background (dead mother, alcoholic father) falls in love with a beautiful young Russian, Katerina Malysheva. He's enamored, too, of new technology and is particularly taken by a newspaper account of the first elevator. The novel takes us from Finland's notoriously bloody civil war in 1918 to New York in the 1920s, where Vaananen, now an architect who yearns to build skyscrapers, discovers that he loves Katerina still. Along the way, he encounters an extraordinary range of characters, from Prohibition-era gangsters to the riveters who put their lives on the line so that this country's skyscrapers—or "cloud sketchers," as they're known in Finnish—could be built.
The Cloud Sketcher was partly inspired by works of architecture, from New York's early skyscrapers to the Art Nouveau—style train station in Helsinki by Eliel Saarinen. "I'd always been struck by that building," Rayner says. He was also impressed by the Finnish architect himself, who, already world famous and in his 50s, headed off to the United States to start a new life. Rayner's book owes another debt to two favorite novels: Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead —"An amazing novel, it's like a machine"—and Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, a book he loves for its "gorgeous romanticism." But most of all, he says, he owes Cloud Sketcher to his wife, Paivi, whom he met in the summer of 1990 when he was researching an article in her native land. ("This woman came across the room and I thought, 'That's the girl for me.'") "In some ways Cloud Sketcher is explaining to me why I have Finland in my life."
He's surprised by the excitement The Cloud Sketcher has generated so far. "People loved it" at HarperCollins, he recalls, so much so that they gave it two full pages in their catalogue. "Suddenly a book that would have been a midlist book became an A-list book." Foreign rights have been sold in 10 countries so far. In Germany, "what started out as quite a nice offer in the $10,000 range suddenly became this bidding war," a war that was won by Hoffman & Kampe (which paid DM300,000 for the book, about $135,000).
Rayner was born near Bradford in the north of England in December 1955. "The story of my childhood is very much the story in his 1995 memoir The Blue Suit, " he says. As described in that book, his car salesman father really did sell £100,000 worth of cars, then absconded with the money rather than reimbursing the manufacturer. Rayner's father faked his death, vanishing abroad for a decade, only to reappear when the author was an undergraduate. "Obviously he was a mythic figure for me," he says of his father, who died—for real this time—in 1991.
Rayner studied philosophy and law at Cambridge, where he also dabbled in the theater. His thespian ambitions were put to rest—permanently—after an intimidatingly gifted young actress named Emma Thompson turned up on campus: "She was so much more talented than I would ever be." Friends from Cambridge have helped at critical moments in his working life. One is Bill Buford, the American founder of Granta, the English literary review, who's currently fiction editor at the New Yorker. Through Buford, Rayner was led to his agent, Jeff Posternak of the Wylie Agency, which has represented him since 1986. Rayner refers to Posternak and Buford as "the constants in my career."
After graduating in 1977, Rayner worked briefly for a law firm, then at Time Out magazine—"a sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll kind of place," he says—where he eventually became an editor. "One was able to invent spurious reasons to do a story," he recalls. "I kept finding reasons to come to L.A." He eventually wrote about that city in his 1988 novel, Los Angeles Without a Map, which documents a steamy affair Rayner had with a Playboy Bunny, while exploring other aspects of Southern California's sometimes phantasmagoric terrain.
The book was accepted by Britain's Secker & Warburg, but just as it was about to go to print, Rayner balked. "Buford said, 'Come be an assistant editor at Granta, and I'll edit the book for you,' at a point when the original editor was happy with the book and I wasn't. I put it through the typewriter one more time, which I happen to know is the reason it did as well as it did." (The book was published in the U.S. by Grove Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 1988, and later in paperback by Plume and Mariner Books.) Rayner moved to Los Angeles for good in 1991, where he worked as a freelance writer, contributing to the New Yorker and other magazines. "I had sort of torched a relationship in London. I was feeling kind of pissed off with England and ready for a change."
For all their European roots, he and Paivi seem, in some ways, to be typical Angelenos. She has worked in development, searching out stories to be made into films, for Robert Redford's Wildwood, among other production companies. For his part, Rayner knows Los Angeles as few Americans do, having written extensively about its once-notorious police force. Rayner's second novel, which was published just after he arrived in this country, was The Elephant (Turtle Bay, 1992), a work he describes as plagued by first-novel mistakes: "It was autobiographical and kind of undisciplined.
"I'm much more disciplined as a writer now," Rayner continues with a laugh. "When I'm going over the top, I know I'm over the top." By contrast, his next book, The Blue Suit (Houghton Mifflin)—which he describes as "a very tight, well-wrought little thing"—was disciplined with a vengeance. A memoir, it recounts how Rayner, back in his undergraduate days, drifted into a life of crime, stealing first editions by beloved authors, then forging checks and, eventually, even burgling houses. He wrote the book after his father's death, and it's tempting to speculate on how the older man's criminal history might have influenced his son. Rayner considers himself lucky—and he was—for having avoided jail; he was caught only once, for shoplifting a book.
Ironically, he owes at least part of his reputation to his reporting on law enforcement. The LAPD became his beat for a time after he reported on the 1992 Los Angeles riots for Granta, then, four years later, wrote a cover story on the force for the New York Times Magazine. "I was riding around in the back of cop cars for months," he recalls. In 1997, he translated some of these experiences into Murder Book (Houghton Mifflin), a crime novel featuring a protagonist named Billy McGrath, an LAPD homicide detective with a philosophical bent.
As for his latest book, Dan Conaway, Rayner's editor at HarperCollins, was "sufficiently encouraged by how Murder Book had done to then pony up for The Cloud Sketcher on the basis of 400 pages, only 200 of which he was happy with," he says. The two worked closely together on the manuscript. Rayner had first been moved to aim for a blockbuster—to write bigger—after hearing Paivi talk about The Horse Whisperer. "She came back one night and said, 'there's 200 pages of this novel and they're going to pay $1 million for it.'" Rayner threw himself into researching The Cloud Sketcher, reading any number of books, touring famous skyscrapers, poring over other material. If The Cloud Sketcher is dense with historical detail, it's no accident; Rayner worked hard to re-create the "specific textural detail" of its era, from the music that was popular to the clothes people wore. He insists that "You have to know what movie was showing that particular week."
Asked about his work schedule, he says, "I just write all the time." But now he does so with a difference. "Up until Murder Book, all I was trying to do was write an entertaining page and then write an entertaining page after that." Since then, he's realized "that these things work better if you have a plan," and he now plots his books more carefully. "I'm a book person," he adds, gesturing toward the books on the wall. "You can get a sense of that, I'm sure. I've had to learn how to be a narrative writer, and that's kind of come later on." Some of the writers he admires, and has learned from, he says, are Graham Greene, John Updike and William Boyd. Movies themselves are another important influence: "My work has certainly been colored by the fact that I've watched thousands of films in my life."
Behind Rayner's desk, there's a shelf dedicated to research books for the project of the moment. Slowly, the volumes it once contained, on Finland, architecture and 1920s America, are being replaced by books on the McCarthy era and jazz. His new novel, tentatively entitled The Devil's Wind, is "another historical sort of thing," he says. "It's about the 1950s, HUAC and be-bop and European émigrés in California." Astonishingly, he's simultaneously working on a second book, one that also involves a daunting amount of research. He calls Drake's Fortune, to be published by Doubleday next year, "a historical nonfiction book about a con man in the 1920s," and notes that the New Yorker has bought an excerpt. He professes to delight in switching off between projects, even dense historical ones such as these. "I enjoy getting out and doing stuff."
As for the future, he says: "I want to write the kind of things I like to read, whether it's Dickens or John Irving or Lorrie Moore, that make you want to turn the page. Something that will have literary credentials but be very compelling—you know, a story." He laughs as he adds, "As John Cleese says in a Monty Python sketch, it's not just getting the right number of words, it's getting them in the right order."
