The early 20th-Century, English critic and editor Cyril Connolly once said, "Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self." Novelist Michael Gruber is intimately familiar with both sides of this equation. As the ghostwriter for a series of bestselling legal thrillers, Gruber found happiness in writing but frustration in keeping his identity secret. It's taken years for him to achieve what Connolly implied was impossible—writing for himself, about subjects he cares deeply about, while also writing for an eager, devoted public that knows him by name.
With the 2003 publication of his first novel under his own name, Tropic of Night, Gruber realized what he'd dreamed of: critical acclaim, commercial success and—perhaps most importantly—the opportunity to talk about his work in a public forum and interact with readers. According to Gruber's publisher, William Morrow, Tropic of Night now has more than 300,000 copies in print (in hardcover and mass market paperback). Gruber's second novel, Valley of Bones, which Morrow will release on January 1, will have a 100,000-copy first printing. And Gruber's young adult novel, The Witch's Boy, will be published in April by Harper Tempest. Not bad for a man who spent the first 20-odd years of his adult life alternately chasing octopuses around the Caribbean and writing speeches for policy wonks in Washington, and then went on to create a thriller series that PW called, in its heyday, "hugely popular"—but accomplishing this last feat in a completely clandestine manner. Jane Friedman, CEO of HarperCollins, views Gruber's wide-ranging abilities this way: "When you have an author who's as creative as Michael Gruber, who can transcend both the adult and the children's, well, that's heaven."
The Wheels Begin to Turn
PW meets Gruber at his home in Seattle, in an old fishing bungalow that he and his wife, a painter, moved into about 10 years ago. Green with yellow trim, the house sits on a hill overlooking Lake Washington and Mercer Island, and the day we're there, it's uncommonly sunny. Light filters in through the trees hanging over the house, and the expanse of water below sparkles. It's an idyllic, perfect writing retreat, far from the East Coast hustle and bustle Gruber grew up with. As Gruber speaks it seems the peaceful environment even affects the timbre of his voice: he speaks quietly, thoughtfully. Dressed in black and sporting circular, tortoise-shell—rimmed glasses, he leans back on the modern leather sofa in his sunny living room and tells us about his past.
Gruber was born in New York in 1940 and attended Columbia University, where he studied English. He says he'd "always been a writer," but the school's traditional stance turned him off from literature. In the 1960s, when Gruber was an undergrad, Columbia, he says, was "cynical regarding modern literature. Everything I loved was trash, low class. So I completely changed." A few years after graduation, he "succumbed to a brainstorm." He "shaved the beard off" (though it's back now), ditched his literary ambitions—for the time being—went back to college (the City College of New York), got the equivalent of a B.A. and won a fellowship to the University of Miami to study biology.
Gruber spent about four years lazing about in his bathing suit, observing octopuses in the warm waters of Florida and the Caribbean. Alas, a career in science required a bit more. "I could memorize stuff, and think scientifically," he recalls, "but actually doing science? I'm a writer." Hence, after getting his Ph.D. in marine biology, Gruber did not take the Jacques Cousteau route. Instead, he got a job as a cook in a Miami restaurant, then left to drive around the country in a bus, cooking meals for fans at rock concerts. Once Gruber became a father, he needed a steadier job, which he found in the government.
"It was essentially a writing job," Gruber says of his new gig after moving from Miami to Washington in 1976. "I was a speechwriter." Writing speeches, mostly on the subject of the environment, paid the bills and allowed Gruber to flex his creative muscles, albeit in a rather limited way. That changed, to an extent, one day in 1984, when Gruber's cousin Robert K. Tanenbaum called him from his law offices in Los Angeles.
Gruber and Tanenbaum's mothers are sisters and raised their sons in New York together. Tanenbaum went on to become a successful trial lawyer, and when one of his cases became nationally famous, the publishing house Franklin Watts (now a division of Scholastic) asked him to write a novel about his legal adventures. Knowing his cousin could write, Tanenbaum contacted Gruber. "He called me up," Gruber remembers, "and said, 'I've written a hundred pages. Would you have a look at it?' " Gruber hesitates before explaining his reaction to Tanenbaum's hundred pages. "It was the kind of novel by somebody who doesn't know anything about writing novels," he says diplomatically. "So I called him, and I said, 'This is unsalvageable. It's not a novel, it has no characters, no plot, nothing.' He said, 'What should I do?' I said, 'Look, for half the advance, I'll write your novel.' On the basis of that we got another contract, for a lot more money. And so I went into business."
Over the years, Tanenbaum's novels have been published by New American Library, Dutton, HarperCollins, Atria and Simon & Schuster, and they feature two of the thriller genre's most popular characters: the husband and wife team of Manhattan chief ADA Butch Karp and PI Marlene Ciampi. The books—No Lesser Plea, Immoral Certainty, Material Witness, Corruption of Blood and others—have generally received raves from critics and readers. In the books' acknowledgments, Tanenbaum graciously thanks Gruber. Call it "collaborating," call it "ghostwriting"—Gruber says he created the characters and the novels based on stories Tanenbaum told him or transcripts of cases Tanenbaum had worked on. Simon Lipskar of Writer's House, who is now Gruber's agent, tells PW, "They [the Tanenbaum books] read like a book Michael Gruber had something to do with." He laughs, "I'll put it that way."
This arrangement—Gruber ghostwriting, the two of them splitting the advances and royalties, and Tanenbaum's name being the only one on the book jackets—continued for 14 books. The cousins became "somewhat estranged" when Gruber said he wanted to have a relationship with Tanenbaum's publisher (previously, Gruber didn't interact at all with any editor or publisher). This didn't go over well with Tanenbaum, and when, thanks to Gruber's pressuring, Tanenbaum revised his contract so that it would have Gruber's name in it, Gruber had to agree that he wouldn't make any claim for copyright, and tensions increased.
"It's very sad," Gruber laments. "You can imagine, being a writer, you write all these books, but you never experience the life of a writer." He lays out one scenario: "You're at a party, and you say, 'I'm a writer.' Someone says, 'Oh, have you been published?' 'Yeah, I have seven million books in print.' 'Really? What's your name?' 'Oh, I don't publish under my own name.' " Throughout Gruber's business relationship with Tanenbaum, Gruber found solace in an online writing community called the Well. "It's the one thing that kept me sane throughout this," he says. For years, Gruber kept his identity cryptic, but wrote about his experiences online.
Resolved, published in 2003, was the last Tanenbaum book Gruber was involved in (though Tanenbaum continues to publish books, the most recent of which, Hoax, received mostly tepid reviews). Their relationship now? Gruber answers, "Zero." However, when PW asks him if he took anything positive from the experience, Gruber says, "Yes. Would I have done it [become a novelist] without him? We'll never know. It was a cushion, a back door into writing novels. It was a great opportunity, it just went too far."
Once it became clear to Gruber that he'd never get cover credit for his work with Tanenbaum, Gruber started writing The Witch's Boy, "a very personal book about being trapped." He finished it in 1996 and tried to sell it, but the agent he showed it to told him, "It's a great book, but I can't sell it." The novel, with its strong fantasy elements and unique twists on familiar fairy tales, may have been ahead of its time. So Gruber started writing what would become Tropic of Night, which eventually became his way out of anonymity.
Reaching His Stride
Tropic of Night is an intricate thriller that moves between Miami, Long Island and West Africa. Although the book has murder, mystery and thrills, the PW review said, "How readers categorize this book will depend on their acceptance or rejection of Gruber's underlying thesis: 'The point is, there's no supernatural. It's all part of the universe, although the universe is queerer than we suppose.' " Heavy stuff for a thriller, but that's Gruber's point.
"I am really interested in pushing the genre," he tells us. Whether Gruber's novels fall into the thriller or the "literary thriller" category, it's certain readers will probably pick up his books based on their cover art (Tropic of Night's jacket, in hardcover, is quite scary: a crude knife) and the electrifying tale the flap copy promises is inside. Yet once they get inside the book, they'll find a rather complex, nuanced story. Gruber says his model when writing Tropic of Night was Smilla's Sense of Snow by Peter Høeg, one of the most popular literary thrillers in recent memory.
In Tropic of Night, Gruber tells the story of a series of ritualistic murders that sweep Miami, and the two very different people—a former anthropologist and shamanism expert, and a Cuban-American police detective—who are pulled in to uncover the truth. To this tale Gruber adds underlying currents that get to the heart of issues like race and the way in which people construct reality based on what their culture teaches them. In addition, Gruber brings a supreme storytelling ability to the work. For example, Tropic of Night opens with the following: "Looking at the sleeping child, I watch myself looking at the sleeping child, placing the dyad in a cultural context, classifying the feelings I am feeling even as I feel them. This is partly the result of my training as an anthropologist and ethnographer and partly a product of wonder that I can still experience feelings other than terror." This goes on, until Gruber packs the whammy punch: "It is not all that interesting to watch a child sleep, although people do it all the time. Parents do.... I am not, however, this child's mother. I am this child's mother's murderess."
It was that passage that hooked Lipskar—his eyes light up and his eyebrows raise as he tells us about it—and prompted him to call Dan Conaway, Morrow executive editor, who counts among his authors Phillip Margolin and Bernard Cornwell. On reading the Tropic of Night manuscript, Conaway "was just floored. It's both a true thriller and completely unlike any thriller I've ever seen. Michael manages to meld this really sophisticated world view into a form that is accessible to the masses." Yet Conaway, speaking to us in his office at HarperCollins's midtown Manhattan building—a large but very filled space (among all the books are a lava lamp and a replica of the knife pictured on Tropic of Night's cover)—says his only worry was "Was this just too far out there?" Tropic of Night certainly isn't comparable to thrillers by the likes of David Baldacci or James Patterson. "It was hard for me, in the moment, to pinpoint my recognizable model," says Conaway. The book's mix of thriller and literary fiction elements did present a quandary: how to package this work?
For Conaway, publishing Tropic of Night "was the chance to publish a very serious writer talking about things much more than 'whodunit' in a way that could find a pretty big market." So it fell on Morrow president and group publisher Michael Morrison and Morrow's director of marketing, Lisa Gallagher, to position the book in a way that it would find that market. They succeeded, by publishing a hardcover that, admittedly, spoke to a more male audience, but following up with a softer mass market cover, which widened Gruber's base.
Then there was the decision not to refer to Gruber's relationship with Tanenbaum on any of the publicity material. For Morrison, it was simple: "I just didn't see any advantage to tying the two together. I thought Michael had written a real masterpiece with Tropic of Night, and we decided to send it out in the world on its own merit." Gallagher explains further: "We did not want to distract people by this kind of chatter about 'Well, he used to write Tanenbaum's books.' It seemed irrelevant to us because we had a very, very fine debut from a writer we believe will go on to be a big, big name for us."
At the Tipping Point
Now that Gruber has cemented his place in the world of books, he's eager to earn more readers, which he'll do in 2005 with the publication of his second novel, Valley of Bones, and the long-awaited publication of The Witch's Boy.
Like Tropic of Night, Valley of Bones falls under the thriller rubric in that it delivers riveting entertainment, but, says Conaway, it is "indisputably something much, much more than that genre designation implies." While Tropic of Night examined our perceptions of race, Valley of Bones explores the nature of faith. The book received a starred PW review and, with its less gory and more "upscale" cover (it pictures a sunset over a graveyard, seen through a dashboard window, with rosary beads hanging from the car's rearview mirror), is poised to appeal to an even broader audience than Tropic of Night did.
While HC hopes adult readers will be flocking to Valley of Bones, the house also has high aspirations for The Witch's Boy. Elise Howard, publishing director of HC's children's division, leaped at the chance to publish the book, which Lipskar says is "the child of [Gruber's] heart." The Witch's Boy is a story of being tangled in an unfamiliar world—a boy is raised by a magical witch, which clearly has its perks, but also its pitfalls—with elements of fantasy and fairy tale lore. Says Howard, "Ten years ago, hardcover fiction for this audience—for an audience from eight to 18, let's say—was still largely an institutional proposition. Now the landscape has changed... largely a result of what's happened with Harry Potter. There is a place for hardcover fiction that has commercial potential in bookstores."
Friedman is optimistic about Gruber's future. "He's an author who's at that tipping point," she tells us, "and that, I think, is fabulous." Harper will heavily push its AuthorTracker program—which allows readers to sign up for updates about their favorite authors' books and events—in ads for Valley of Bones and The Witch's Boy and in the back pages of forthcoming mass market editions of Tropic of Night. "We're trying to reach the consumer and to know who the consumer is, and to reach them with the kind of books that they want," says Friedman. Gruber's books, she says, give the company an "opportunity of finding out more about the consumer."
Full Circle
Toward the end of our interview with Gruber, he shows us his office, a cozy, bookshelf-lined space with a few religious objects displayed between the books, and windows looking out onto a woody yard. He has us sit at his desk, where manuscript pages lie—pages for his third novel, Jaguar, which features the same Cuban-American cop featured in Tropic of Night and Valley of Bones. Jaguar is, Gruber tells us, a novel about the environment. In his first three works, Gruber spins thrilling tales, interweaving them with messages about race, faith and the environment—issues that are clearly important to the author.
He is happy to be finally writing for himself, which Cyril Connolly considered of utmost importance to a writer, but he has also finally gained a public who recognizes him and has received him with open arms.
