THE DICE MAN is a novel that in most all possible universes would never have been finished and never published. But Chance, ever busy, created a series of accidents in 1969-70 in Deia, Mallorca, that allowed a 222 page manuscript written over four years by an un-ambitious, unpublished 37-year-old college professor to be discovered and finished.

A young Englishman starting a new publishing house discovered the book in a Deia café and signed me up to publish it. I was thus encouraged to complete the final 500 manuscript pages in less than six months–after averaging only 50 pages a year over the previous four years.

As a result, Deia in that year has always been for me the most special place in the world. Its beauty, ambiance, and gathering of interesting artists and writers made it special in the summer and fall of 1969 even before my barely begun manuscript was unexpectedly discovered.  The events that brought me and my family to Deia and then led to my life being transformed from college professor to novelist are worth describing.

It began when a friend at the college I was teaching at in 1969 decided to create a study abroad program in Deia, He asked me to be his Associate Director (after another friend had decided he couldn’t do it). The Mediterranean Institute enrolled twenty-five students from all over the U.S. to study art and literature. We invited some fine guest writers to stay and  give lectures, including the English novelists Colin Wilson and Anthony Burgess and the American poet Galway Kinnell. And Robert Graves, then still living, was also to grace us with a brief talk.

In the summer of 1969 I and my wife and three sons arrived two months before the Institute was to open. I became friends with Jay Linthicum, a young poet and novelist (then 23) who was fiercely ambitious. He and I soon began collaborating on a potboiler novel about sex and drugs in Deia.  Jay persuaded me to let him read the manuscript pages of THE DICE MAN.  He was the first person to see the novel other than my wife. How Jay felt about the book I no longer recall, but clearly he neither panned it nor raved about it or I would remember.

In any case, in early November 1969, when Jay was sitting in the Sa Fonda Cafe, an Englishman, Mike Franklin, who had just created a publishing company with a rock impresario named Talmy, happened to be passing through the village. Jay and he met at the café and began talking. Jay eagerly mentioned the fact that he had a finished novel and that he and I were collaborating on a potboiler that would make us all a lot of money. As an aside he mentioned that I was also working on a novel. Mike Franklin asked us to give him the manuscripts of all three books.

Weeks later Mike wired us (ah, the quaint old days of Western Union) that he’d like to publish both the potboiler and THE DICE MAN. He suggested modest advances for each of the two books. To our surprise, he offered more for THE DICE MAN, an intellectual book that had no commercial potential (in our eyes) than for our potboiler, which was so au currant we were convinced it would become a bestseller.

So Chance had intervened to get my book first a reader, and then a 
publisher. Next it intervened to give me the time actually to write the book.

In 1969 the hippie revolution was at full tilt. Bob De Maria found that 
smoking pot made him feel he was about to have a heart attack. He much 
preferred alcohol. As Director of the Institute he felt he had to be 
strongly anti-dope. I would sometimes smoke dope with a few of the students. As a result, he asked me to take an early sabbatical—in the spring of 1970 rather than later that fall as I had planned. He would find someone else to teach my courses.  I happily agreed.

So in the winter-spring of 1970 I and my family continued living 
in Deia and I began finishing THE DICE MAN. At the same time I continued work with Jay on the potboiler. Each morning  I would go merrily up to my study in Ses Figueres, (the name of the house in Deia  we were renting), work for three or four hours on THE DICE MAN, take a break, and then work for a couple of hours on my sections of the potboiler. Sometimes I would let the dice decide which book I should work on or which new scene I should write. By late May I had finished THE DICE MAN and my half of the potboiler, and both completed books were sent off to Mike Franklin in London.

To my surprise Mike announced that he found that THE DICE MAN, although needing a bit of work, pretty good. (Later he would refer to it as a “near masterpiece”), but about the potboiler he had some concerns. My style was simple and direct and I took a comic look at everything. Jay’s style was convoluted and poetic and he took a serious look at everything. Our collaboration was probably doomed from the beginning, but we were too inexperienced to know it.

Then Chance intervened again. I had decided to invest my lifetime savings 
($11,000) in a sailboat to cruise the Mediterranean. I bought a 30-ft. 
Catalac catamaran lurking in Antibes and I and my family boarded in June to 
begin cruising a bit before sailing onto Mallorca in time to meet Mike 
Franklin in late July to discuss possible revisions of THE DICE MAN. The day before we left to go to the boat Lloyds of London wrote me a note to ask if I wanted to continue the insurance on the boat of the previous owner. Being the author of a new novel that celebrated chance, I felt it was my duty never to insure anything.. At the last second, however, I decided that perhaps just this once, being the first time I would have sailed a boat in the open sea, I would go against all my principles and get a little insurance. So I dashed off a note to Lloyds simply saying “yes.”

We cruised from Antibes along the French Riviera to Genoa and then south 
down to Pisa and then across to Corsica and Sardenia. On the day we were to set sail in clear calm weather for Mallorca, my wife had an overwhelming premonition of disaster. She first tried to see if she and our two youngest boys could get a boat or plane to Mallorca, but when that proved impossible she (who hadn’t been inside a church in several years) went into a little seaside chapel to pray.

Eight hours out from Sardenia, motoring all the time in the dead calm waters, our engine broke down. I couldn’t fix it.

But then the wind arrived! How wonderful! We began sailing. The wind 
became fresh. We sailed faster! The wind became stronger. We reduced sail. The wind became a gale. We lowered all sails. The wind became a huge gale, a mistral blowing down off the Alps in fine sunny weather, waves ten feet high and breaking on top.

The morning after the storm had first hit us we awoke to find one of our two rudders sheered off. Later that second day, we lost our rubber dinghy, our only life raft, which I had rigged as a sea anchor to hold the catamaran’s bow into the wind and seas. We lost our main halyard up to the top of the mast. We were thus without power, without steering ability, without a life raft and no way to raise a sail unless someone climbed to the top of the mast in a gale.

The storm increased. We knew that if our catamaran capsized that we would all die. For three nights I and the boys lay in our bunks and heard the huge rollers hissing towards us and then crashing into the side of the boat, the boat tipping, tipping . . . .  All three nights, although there was nothing she could actually do, my wife stayed on deck, willing the waves not capsize us.

At some point I apologized to her for killing her and the boys, and said I would never make the same mistake again.

On the fourth day, we saw a freighter in the distance and shot off flares to attract its attention. We were rescued. The Scottish freighter had been blown 200 miles off course by the gale and thus appeared to rescue us. We were less than forty miles from a deserted section of the African coast where within ten hours our little boat would have been dashed to pieces on the rocks.

I wanted to stay and try to save the ship, but the Scottish Captain knew a fool when he saw one and pretty much ordered me to stay aboard his freighter while he tried to tow our boat to his next port of call. I asked him where his next port of call was, and he said Hong Kong.

Actually it was O Porto, Portugal. He tried to get a message to Deia to tell people that we were alive and well but no one in Deia ever got the message (primitive times back then, no cell phones, etc.).

Mike Franklin arrived in Deia to meet the author of the novel that he thought was quite promising and found I hadn’t arrived as expected. Nothing but the huge waves crashing all along the coast. My brother and his family arrived to vacation with us and found we were nowhere to be found, only huge waves crashing along the coast. Mike began to wonder if THE DICE MAN would sell better if he could promote the story of the author’s tragic death.

Eventually we arrived back in Deia, our progress slowed by our having lost our money and passports when the catamaran sank within a half hour of being towed by the freighter. Mike had long since gone back to London. And with him any chance of our working together to make the novel better. (I did revise it a tiny bit in August but without much input from the publisher).

With the loss of our catamaran, we were essentially penniless. I checked the piles of mail awaiting us and found nothing from Lloyds. Penniless. The next day I checked the mail again. A letter from Lloyds. They wrote that they would be happy to insure the boat and would I please send the first year’s premium of one hundred and ninety pounds. I sent off a check for one hundred and ninety pounds. Ten days later I wrote them to sadly report that the boat had been lost in the Mediterranean and would they please send me a check for seven thousand pounds.

Within a couple of months Mike sold American rights for a large advance and I was able to retire from teaching, and, after a year back in the States, Mike sold film rights to Paramount, who had signed up Academy Award winning director John Schlesinger to direct. (Forty years later and a dozen screenplays later, still no film). In any case, such temporary wealth let us return to Deia in 1972-1973.

There is one footnote to this long story. What happened to the pot boiler? When THE DICE MAN turned out to make me some money and Mike Franklyn said he really didn’t want to publish the potboiler, I decided to share some of my success with the man who Chance had used to get me to finish the book. I bought all of Jay’s rights to the potboiler so I could make a novel of my own out of it.

Once in the seventies and once in the eighties I took it up and tried to create a coherent and amusing story out of the disparate stuff Jay and I had wrought, eventually throwing out ninety-nine per cent of what Jay had written, not because it was bad but because his sensibility was so different from mine. However, I was still not creating a novel I was happy with. Then in 2004 my wife urged me to try again: the book contained so many delightful comic scenes written literally at the same time as and in the same manner as scenes in THE DICE MAN. So I revised it yet again and this time was pleased with the result: NAKED BEFORE THE WORLD: A LOVELY PORNOGRAPHIC LOVE STORY.

And that comic novel, set entirely on Mallorca and mostly Deia, about an Institute and its students and professors and hippies, is now being made into a film, based on my screenplay. So we hope again, within the next six months, to return for the filming to our lovely Deia.

But as the novelist Thomas Wolfe so famously said: “You can’t go home again.” Deia will never again be what it was for me in that one year of 1969-70: the place where a writer, thanks to many accidents, was born.

I understand that an introduction to a novel, especially one written for a first edition printing by a relatively unknown author, may seem egotistical; this of course presumes a reaction to this book passionate enough to warrant such a pre-defense. I am willing to gamble my humility on this presumption. Stranger Will is a book that will polarize readers, and I believe setting proper context for this novel is important.

Stranger Will started with a newspaper article about dead bodies. I was in college, and for the first time in my life, open to outside influence. Sudden self-sufficiency coupled with my first completed year of university study forced me to open up to new ideas. Despite my historical defiance of the status-quo (or what I thought at the time was defiance), the university liberal arts program did its job and liberated me from my somewhat-rigid thought structure. Where before I would have read the dead body article and walked away simply satisfied with its morbid imagery, I instead walked away with a sense of possibility. The article had potential, though I wasn’t yet sure how to leverage it. That would come months later.

My first years in college correlated with the most heated years of twenty-aughts Middle East conflict, specifically the invasion of Iraq. American’s were just beginning to feel the wear after having been misled into combat. Protests didn’t work for Vietnam. Protests didn’t work for Serbia and Kosovo. And protests weren’t working for the 2003-(insert final date here) Middle East situation. More than any other point of my life, I realized that the world was much greater than me. A line from Octavio Paz’s “The Blue Bouquet” (which I altered slightly and used in Stranger Will), comforted me immensely:

“I thought that the universe was a vast system of signs, a conversation between giant beings. My actions, the cricket’s saw, the star’s blink, were nothing but pauses and syllables, scattered phrases from that dialogue.”

Despite the negative context of the story, I felt this non-control to be an optimistic and consoling outlook. Paz’s line would become my mantra for dealing with a world that I truly could neither control nor understand. Apathy, for all its faults, at least relieves stress.

As a result of this realization, I decided to write what I eventually came to understand as a self-help novel for the war-torn. In Stranger Will the main character slowly learns that in order to be mentally and emotionally free he must accept being controlled. I am sure this sentiment would please ruling powers, from the upper manager to the throned king. However, my intention is not to feed those powers, but instead to warm the subverted.

That dead body article ultimately became the basis for my protagonist’s job. William Lowson cleans crime scenes. Such a macabre position forces William to come to terms with control the way I’d had to during the Middle East situation. Fellow writers may already sense the inherent difficultly with promoting Apathism. How can one express passion around a topic that is passionless by definition?

I met this challenge on two fronts: genre and sentence style. Noir literature was born and popularized of the years preceding and during the great depression. Not surprisingly, noir literature deals with emotionally- and physically-damaged morally-ambiguous protagonists made so by a physically-damaged and morally-ambiguous environment. People were living bleak in the 1930s, so they wrote and read bleak. Pairing noir conventions with Stranger Will‘s oft-subdued and minimalistic language came naturally, yet nonetheless uncomfortably.

Perhaps my own personal interest in the behind-the-scenes miscellanea of a writer, even an obscure one, does enough to justify this defense. It is my name on the cover, after all. But I hope the need goes further than my own interests. Even if that need stays confined to my family. My kid may read this one day. I plan to be senile by that time, so justifying this book won’t be possible. So, for you Jameson, know that I love you (I finished the book before you were born. At the time of publication you will be just over two years old).

How did this story come about?

Influences. The writers you love, and the writers you hate[1]. The thing about influences is that writing or talking about them can easily turn into a list. And a pretentious list, at that. But there is a list of people who made work that mattered, and still matters, to me: Francois Camoin, Raymond Carver, Amy Hemple, Darrell Spencer, John Steppling and Chuck Jones. Then, there’s a the list of work that appeared at the perfect time in a person’s life…the most common would probably be, for the young male, “Catcher in the Rye” or “On the Road”…for me it was James Baldwin and Richard Yates. I haven’t read either of them for a while, but they were essential to me for many years. Hemingway. And, later, Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby is still the longest 169 page novel ever written…not a wasted phrase in there).

In some ways, the writer is the last person you should listen to about their work. The reason is that, whether right or wrong, the writer can never see the work the way the audience can. I look at any piece of mine, and I see the hinges, the fractured and sanded bits that I monkey-assed into something resembling form and shape.

Recently, I installed a Swamp Cooler in the desert. We bought it at this colossal garbage shop. You may have seen places like it: A warehouse filled with objects that once were bright and new, brimming with American Dream promise from the shelves of a Woolworth’s or Sears. But now, years later, these were dusty appliances, big and small, weird contraptions of the Ronco-inside-the-egg-egg-beater style. Something called the “Denterion,” a chrome and drill-laden monstrosity made for dentists of the 50’s. I wanted it, of course, but smarter heads (i.e., my wife Gayle) prevailed.

So, we bought an old swamp cooler there, brought it home and found it didn’t have its face plate. I didn’t even know they had face plates. Jim, the guy installing it laughed when I said I didn’t know they had face plates. We were stuck. So, I built a vent system for it with an old heater return and some aluminum tape and sheet metal screws. While I was building this vent, the cooler was on, blowing blissfully cool air at my face (it was 110 degrees outside). Blowing cool air until a black puff of smoke coughed and gagged at me and the smell of a burnt out motor invaded the house.

“Damn that Ray White,” Jim said.

Ray White owned the big crap store. And, I later found out, he owned half of that town, and half again of all the surrounding towns. He didn’t look like the richest man in a town—he was fat and dressed in high-waisted 70’s pants and spent all of his day on a crummy couch in front of the shop. He dabbed at his sweaty brow with a handkerchief and looked like a Tennessee Williams villain thrown into a Rockford Files episode.

Jim went on to tell me that Ray White sold crap, absolute garbage, and that I should have let him (Jim) see the swamp cooler before I bought it (fair enough, since he knew all the parts it was supposed to come with). He then went on to tell me about Ray Whites riches, the fact that his bloated wife drove around town in a Cadillac with an out-of-date license and no registration and that the local cops were powerless to do anything to her.

He also told me this: Ray White had been robbed by masked bandits, kidnapped and taken out into the high desert and left in his trunk. The police happened upon the car…approached, walked around cautiously. Heard a voice from the trunk. Found out it was Ray White. They asked him for the trunk combination (it was a high end Cadillac with combination locks all around), punched it in, and popped the truck. Ray White got out of the trunk and drove home.

The kicker? This happened twice. Exactly the same way. “I figure it’s the same guys,” Jim said. Which made sense.

The point to this story? None-except that I’ll use it someday. Which is the only point a writer ever needs, I’d argue. To use it or not use it—the art of selection. Of finding what you’re obsessed with, and then enacting those obsessions on the page. Me? I’m obsessed with the weird things that happen to weird people. And the weird things that happen to so-called normal people (of which there are none, ultimately, in my book…you think someone’s normal, it just means you haven’t really gotten to know them).

So, I will use this Ray White story. Whether it’s in a story or a play or a novel, I’ll have the richest man in some rat-ass town being kidnapped and taken out to the desert. I’m not sure how I’ll use it, but I’m sure I will. The image of the richest man in town in a truck in the high desert praying that someone will come by, well, that’s too good to pass up for me.

I’ll use that someday.

Which is how I felt when I met a friend of mine’s old friend at a place called the “Zoo Bar” in Lincoln, Nebraska. I didn’t meet him, actually. He walked by our table. Half his face looked kicked in, deflated and grotesque. John, my friend, explained that he tried to kill himself, used too powerful a gun, and blew out half his head, lobotomized himself and now walked around town in a flat daze.

It struck me how horrific it would be…to want to die that badly and not do it. And to be left, an obligation or an afterthought, to everyone else, depending on their relation to you. It reminded me that even the most definitive, absolute desire (to die, in this case) could and will go wrong. That nothing resolves neatly, and that there’s always a mess to clean up—those who don’t think so are just not cleaning up at that particular time.

I figured I’d use that someday. It reminded me of something else. A friend of mine, who’d served in Viet Nam was once asked what he learned there. He said:

1) The human body and mind could survive almost anything. And,

2) Living through certain things was worse than dying.

Some of that sentiment is in “Working Backwards from the Worst Moment of My Life”, probably.

Then, there was another friend whose dad printed Bibles. I think I made up the Koran bit, and the Holiday Inn thing, but I can’t be sure.

Another lesson: Write fiction, and life and invention tend to blur.

Also, I’m obsessed with and by jobs, especially crappy jobs, of which I’ve had a bunch. So, whenever I see some trinket or piece of crap, such as the plastic Jesus do-hickies in the story, I think, some poor bastard makes these.

The character of Pops? No idea, though my guess is that he comes from a background in athletics. My friend Jeff and I sat one night in a Los Angeles bar a while back laughing each other silly with stories about sadistic, mean-spirited coaches we’d had rule our lives and bodies at various times. And maybe that’s where Pops comes from—from some of those hideous, all-powerful men who could make me run until I collapsed or puked for, it seemed at the time, the sheer joy of watching me suffer.

Throughout my stories and novels there are mean, slippery, ugly old men who rule the lives of younger, nicer men and women. They are usually funny. They are usually rich. Where does this come from? I don’t really know. My dad’s not rich, and he’s not a jerk. I’ve had good bosses and bad bosses…once I had a painting boss drop the entire crews’ pay on the Kentucky Derby. But none of these bosses really adds up to a guy like Pops. I don’t know where he comes from, but some version of Pops bubbles to the surface of most everything I write. Maybe I’ll understand why someday, but possibly not. As long as the stories keep coming, I don’t care so much where they come from.

The structural influence on this story was one purely of craft and theft. I’d always liked the noir structure of opening on the near-ending. Think of the opening of DOA, where the man walks in and says he’d like to report a murder. “Who’s been murdered,” they ask. And he says “me” and the narrative then cycles back to the start of this hideous beginning/near ending. Also, The Big Clock (the novel and the movie). And Sunset Boulevard.

I wanted to open “Working Backwards…” near the ending, and then bring it from the start up to and beyond the moment of the opening.

Also, I stole the math part from a Darrell Spencer story. Where his narrative ruminates on jumping in a falling elevator to avoid being crushed, mine thinks about those insanely difficult math problems we had in school.

The hermaphrodite thing in the story? That came from a friend named Jill Colley who used to ask people this question at parties: If you had a child who had both male and female genitalia, but with neither being dominant, what would you do? Jill said that it happened thousands of times a year—and people, in general, went with the doctor’s decision, and made the child one sex or the other. It stuck with me that a wrong choice could have been made. And then what?

And that… “And then what?” is probably the most important question for the writer. Why write? Because I love stories…being an audience to them, as well as a writer of them. As I look at all the stories that went into this story, I’m struck by the amount of distilling that goes on. The way it takes a thousand trees to make one novel, a gaggle of dead dinosaurs to make enough fuel for a chainsaw to carve away for 10 minutes…it takes a lot of lives and a lot of living and a lot of listening to make a single story. And then, there’s the work involved in the actual putting together of the narrative. And then, even then, you may or may not have produced anything worthwhile. But that, like so many other things, is somebody else’s business.