D. Keith Mano
Personal aside first. Brought out my most recent novel in 1982. Well taken critically, but I couldn’t have rented a mantra on the sales. It was, I realize, rather too exacting and long for my readership, which sank. So, listen, I’m not proud, I’ll write the froth-blower’s anthem next, you name it. To that end a friend felt my publisher out: Like, uh, what should Keith write now? And the publisher, quite sincerely, said, “To be commercial Keith should write under a pseudonym now.” Eighteen years of fiction and my best bet in 1984 is nonpersonhood. I reference this because the very same prejudice will hold when you travel upwind. A best-selling writer, George V. Higgins for one, can get bottled in bond by his own success. Publishing people would rather drain fluid from their optic-nerve canal than tinker with salable formulae. P. G. Wodehouse is never anyone but P. G. Wodehouse. Yet, since 1974 or so, Higgins has pulled off a remarkable transition: from distinctive realist crime writer to serious, long-reach novelist, still distinctive. And done it the one way it can be done—by gradual increments, deepening and expanding, without any obvious change in style or reader expectation. Or name. It’d be easier to market infant dental floss.
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