Charles Salzberg, author of Swann Dives In Guestpost!

Charles Salzberg Guest Post

I can’t remember the first time I actually wrote anything that wasn't an assignment for school, but I can remember what inspired me to be a writer..
I learned how to read relatively early and soon read any book I could lay my hands on.  It was rather odd, looking back, because it wasn't as if I had an important role model. I never saw my father read anything other than the daily newspaper, and although my mother read an occasional book, I was more likely to see her thumbing through a popular magazine.  My brother, who suffered from dyslexia, read only on pain of death—and to this day I don’t think he’s ever read a book, not even one of mine.
But my maternal grandmother, well, that was another story.  I doubt she finished more than a year or so of high school, if that—she went to work at the age of 14 and didn't stop until she retired at the age of 65, she was married at 15, and gave birth to my mother just three months short of her sixteenth birthday.  But she was a voracious reader.  Books, magazines, and newspapers.  She was also an avid moviegoer and I can remember sitting in the backseat of our car, on our way to Brooklyn, perhaps to visit relatives, as she would relate the plot of the most recent movie she’d seen. Every detail.  Every important scene. Every line of important dialogue. I was transfixed.  How amazing to be able to tell a story so well, so vividly that it became much better than actually seeing the movie myself!
In addition to that, reading was vitally important to my eventually becoming a writer.  I was a shy, introverted child and I was most comfortable inside a book.  At first, it was the typical kids’ fare: Hardy Boy Mysteries, the Random House Landmark series of historical books, like the story of Sam Houston and Marie Curie; and sports novels, like my favorite, The Winning Forward Pass (someone actually found this book at a used bookshop and purchased it for me.)
On the first floor of the apartment building where I grew up, there was a Rexall drugstore.  Besides a soda fountain and rows of pharmaceutical products, there was an aisle with racks of paperback books.  Almost every day after school or in the early evening, I would stroll through the racks of books, mesmerized by the alluring covers and fascinating titles.  I would spend any money I had on books, many of them well beyond what someone my age might comprehend: Seize the Day, by Saul Bellow, The Victim, also by Bellow; Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger; The Moviegoer by Walker Percy; The Natural, by Bernard Malamud; The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer.  These were the books I bought and hungrily devoured.
I attempted my first novel when I was about 12.  It was a roman a clef about the sleep-away summer came I attended, with the sexy owner’s wife, the raunchy counselors.  I think I typed out 8 or 8 pages before I gave up (incidentally, the most useful class I ever took was typing, in junior high school, a class I was forced to take if I wanted to skip a grade, which I did.) I kinda wish I had a copy of that now, but alas, it’s lost to history, probably tossed out with my comic books and baseball card collection.
As for inspiration, I’m most inspired by other writers and what they accomplish.  In terms of writing itself, I don’t need to be inspired.  It’s a job, a craft, one that I enjoy and probably the only thing I can do relatively well—like most writers, I’m never really satisfied with what I write, I always think it should be better.  Frankly, I’m a “lazy” writer in that I’ll do anything I can to avoid writing.  But when I actually do sit down at the computer to write, it just seems to come out, like magic.  And sometimes I even surprise myself by what I write.
If that’s not reason enough to keep writing, I don’t know what is.

About Charles Salzberg
Charles Salzberg is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Esquire, GQ, New York magazine and the New York Times Book Review.  He has written, co-authored or ghostwritten over 20 non-fiction books, and his novel, Swann’s Last Song, was nominated for a Shamus Award for Best First PI Novel. His latest novel, Devil in the Hole, was published in July, 2013. He has been a Visiting Professor of Magazine at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, and he teaches writing at the Writer’s Voice and the New York Writers Workshop, where he is a Founding Member.

About Swann Dives In
A millionaire, a missing heiress, evasive college professors, rare book dealers, and ten thousand dollars a week draw a retired Henry Swann back into the detective game in Charles Salzberg’s new novel, SWANN DIVES IN. When last seen in Salzberg’s Shamus Award-nominated mystery debut, Swann’s Last Song, Swann was wiped out and done with skip tracing—finding missing deadbeats and losers for a few bucks. Working as a cable service guy was a bit on the dull side, but for Swann not risking life and limb was a welcome relief. Swann finds having an excellent reputation for finding people is a blessing and a curse as his services are sought out once again and the money and the case are just too intriguing to turn down. 

Millionaire lawyer Carlton Phillips has lost track of his daughter Marcy. Her last known whereabouts were at her school, Syracuse University. While trying to track down Marcy and/or her geeky boyfriend Sean Loomis on a quick trip upstate, Swann follows the clues to a sorority house, a pizza joint, and the office of a literature professor who is clearly hiding something. 

Armed with more questions than leads Swann flies up to Boston where he narrowly avoids the arms of a seductive and secretive librarian. Finally back in New York City, Swann tries to sort out the details of the case. Is Marcy Phillips a victim? What is the nature of her relationship to the sexy and cagey Elizabeth Lawson? Is Carlton Phillips somehow involved in this story? How are all of these people connected to the rare book world, and who is really trying to get away with something?


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