PRO-File: Jeremiah Healy

Tell us about your current novel?--TURNABOUT (Leisure Books mass-market pb reprint, March, 2005) is under my own name (Jeremiah Healy) and deals with a former FBI agent who installed a security system in a mansion on the North Shore of Massachusetts. Problem: The rich, older client calls him, claiming his grandson has been kidnapped from the place, and the client wants the security man to figure out how the system failed and to find his grandson.
>
> Can you give us a sense of what you're working on now?--A stand-alone thriller involving the stalking and implosion of a major Boston law firm. I'm also collaborating with a couple of executive producers in Hollywood on a potential police-procedural series based on, believe it or not, an aspect of investigation NOT yet tapped by the current franchise programs.
>
> What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?--The short-term freedom to be the captain of how you spend each day.
>
> The greatest DIS-pleasure?--The long-term insecurity of not knowing when the next paycheck will arrive.
>
> If you have one piece of advice for the publishing world, what is it?--For writers, don't think of your profession as a "career." Rather, think of it as a series of projects, some of which will fly higher than others, and some of which will never get off the ground. And also write next the next book you really WANT to write.
>
> Are there two or three forgotten mystery writers you'd like to see in
> print again?--Donald Westlake's pseudonymous "Tucker Coe" novels, Benjamin M. Schutz's "Leo Haggerty" novels, and Dennis Lynds' pseudonymous "Michael Collins" novels, all three series private-eye and superbly written.
>
> Tell us about selling your first novel. Most writers never forget that
> moment.--I'd sent the manuscript of BLUNT DARTS to 28 publishers before the 29 accepted it (back in 1982, when I started submitting, the author could still snail-mail a full manuscript directly to an editor with no literary agent in-between). Later, that 29th editor (the great Ruth Cavin, literary and literal godmother to many of us) was vindicated in her opinion by the book being nominated for a Shamus Award, a paperback auction for the mass-market reprint rights, and the New York Times putting it on its holiday list as one of the seven best mysteries of 1984. Seventeen more novels, and three collections of short stories later, I'm still truckin'. www.jeremiahhealy.com