Afterword to “Some Like it Cold” (1995)
Another thing that Gerald of “The Pure Product” gave me was a first person voice. In the first twenty years of my writing career, I was not comfortable writing first person. Somehow, adopting the voice of this edgy, immoral character liberated me.
After the publication of Good News From Outer Space, an apocalyptic, rather grim vision of the near future, I wanted to do something different for my next novel. I began writing a screwball time travel comedy that later became Corrupting Dr. Nice. But sixty pages into the book I got stuck (this seems to be a habit with me), and began to doubt whether the time travel concept I had worked out was viable. I decide to try a short story set against the same background, and that led me to the character of my time traveling “talent scout” Detlev Gruber. Once I decided what he did, I needed to find a figure from the past that he might attempt to recruit. I considered several possibilities before I settled on Marilyn Monroe. I read a number of biographies, concentrating on the circumstances of her death, and discovered the hordes of theories—conspiracy and others—surrounding that sad event. In this situation, with competing claims offered, I picked what seemed to me a probable sequence of events given what I'd been able to find out. But naturally I had to make some things up, and select others with a view to the story I was telling.
Once I got started the story came very rapidly and I was quite pleased with the result. But unlike Corrupting Dr. Nice, the Gruber stories, though they may be enlivened by Detlev’s cynical wit, are not comedies.
One of my little jokes here is that, unlike Detlev, with a little work I could pass for Abraham Lincoln, but for me, Einstein is out of the question.
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