Dear Richard,
Thanks for the kind
words. I guess a great many readers never knew it was the
same person writing under my various pen-names, which I
expect might explain why I'm not better known. I've published
53 crime novels and few people really know that. Sigh.
I think my biggest
mistake was not writing the Dan Fortune books as Dennis
Lynds. Point Blank is going to try to correct this by
publishing all pen-names as by Dennis Lynds. Of course the
problem with my books is that most of them, especially the
Sadler, Crowe, and Arden novels, were written on a typewriter
and have to be scanned into a computer and then carefully
checked against the actual book which is terribly time
comsuming.
The Santa Barbara Writers Lunch---actually
brought from Sarasota, Florida, by Willard Temple, a slick
magazine writer, in the Fifties---was totally unstructured.
Held every other Wednesday in the same place---Josie's El
Cielito restaurant---you came, you sat in any open chair, and
you drank, talked, and eventually had lunch in the midst of
the talking. No one introduced you, you just took a seat and
got to know those around you. Sometimes it took weeks to meet
everybody, but what usually happened is people left as they
pleased and the remaining writers sort of collapsed inward
and as the group became smaller you met other people. By the
time I arrived---1964, directly from the upper westside of
Manhattan---it was a large group at one point reaching 60
writers.
They came in all shapes
and sizes: poets, essayists, mainstream novelists, humorists,
genre novelists, and some journalists from the SB News-Press.
Usually someone brought you, but not always. The average
Wednesday would be about 30-35 guys. And I do mean GUYS.
Women were not allowed. (This was largely Ken Millar's (Ross
Macdonald) doing, but there were many others who felt the
same in those days. There were many excuses, largely that men
tended to showoff in front of women, or that it held down the
drinking and cramped the free-wheeling bawdy style).
Every other Monday or Tuesday, Ken would call
everyone to remind them of the lunch (This was the only
structure, and in actuality it was something Ken had taken on
himself. If he hadn't, I doubt anyone else would have. He was
sort of the mother hen.) This could be grueling for a working
writer in that Ken was terribly slow-spoken, and seemed to
have no desire to hang up.
I refer often to drinking, and I mean drinking.
Most of the guys drank hard liquor in those days, and they
drank plenty. Others, such as me, drank beer. There were no
wine drinkers then.
We had one waiter, so service was relatively
slow, but few people came to eat. It was a day off for
professional writers most of whom worked every day and on
deadline. We did NOT talk shop, in the sense of talking about
our own writing, especially what we were working on. The
conversation was
"writerly" not about writing. A lot of politics, publishing,
writers we liked, etc.
I did not go that often
back then because those were the years I was publishing as
many as five, even six, novels a year. In 1973 I had to move
the family back to New York for about two years, and when I
returned to Santa Barbara, I rejoined the lunch and found a
lone woman named Norma had crashed the group all on her own.
After that I brought the first invited woman---Jennifer
Castro, the coowner of a bookstore---and broke the
code.
(The group did eventually split up over that when Josie's
place closed and we had to find a new home. One group of old
misogynists went one place, the majority went to another.
Bill Gault went with the old boys at first, but his heart
wasn't in it, and he soon came back to the main group that
now included women. I had met my future wife Gayle at the SB
Writer's Conference in 1981, and invited her and a friend to
the lunch and she became one of the first women writers to be
a regular.)
After the Eighties the group slowly
disintegrated. It still exists in two forms, but today's
working writers don't seem to need, or want, a twice a month
convivial day off to relax, and while there are as many
writers in SB as ever, they don't congregate. It seems that
today if there isn't something in it to help their personal
careers, they don't want to waste their time. It's a
different world.
By the way, you forgot Davis Dresser(Brett
Halliday who wrote the Michael Shayne novels) who was the one
who actually brought me. Over the years we had the poets Phil
Levine and Henri Coulette, the novelists William Eastlake and
Eudora Welty (brought, oddly, by Ken Millar. That reinforced
the belief of many of us that Ken just didn't want Maggie
(Margaret Millar) to come. They had a strange
marriage.)
Those days are gone, and, as I said, I didn't go
often from 65-73 because I had to write. But most of us
always made the Christmas meeting. As I said, it was a
convivial gang of people with the same general interests, we
were all writers, and that appears to have vanished today.
It's every man
(oops, person) for himself, herself, theirselves,
whatever.
Boy, that's enough.
Oh, one coda, as far as I know, Sue never came to
the lunch even after women joined us. But I have a vague
memory that Sara Paretsky may have come once as she was
passing through.
Best,
Dennis-Michael-Mark-William-John etc.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Richard Moore" <
moorich2@aol.com>
To: <
rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, May 01, 2005 9:37 PM
Subject: RARA-AVIS: Santa Barbara
> Dennis, welcome to the list. I first became a fan of
your's with the
> Slot-Machine Kelly stories in Mike Shayne Mystery
Magazine and look
> forward to the Crippen & Landru collection when
it appears. In due
> time I also loved the Dan Fortune novels although I
didn't know they
> were by the same author as the Kelly
stories.
>
> I know you were a good friend of Bill Gault who I
had the great
> pleasure of knowing as well. He often spoke of the
writer's luncheons
> in Santa Barbara, which I believe you attended as
well. Could you
> describe a typical luncheon? Bill would write about
tidbits from the
> luncheons but I never had a sense of whether there
was a formal agenda
> or if it was a completely informal gathering. With
you, Bill and Ross
> Macdonald attending, it was certainly a group of
heavy hitters. Did
> Sue Grafton join the group as she began her series?
Santa Barbara was
> certainly home to more than its share of great
PI/crime writers.
>
> Richard Moore
>
>
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