An update from James Preston Girard

Earlier this year I wrote about how much I loved James Preston Girard’s work, especially THE LATE MAN, which I consider to be one of the best crime novels I have ever read. And while I’d hoped that the piece would lead to the revelation of his recent whereabouts (as he hasn’t been heard of, publication-wise, since 2002’s SOME SURVIVE) I was nonetheless surprised to find a note from the author in my inbox the other day.

He’s kindly allowed me to post his update, which reveals what he’s been up to the last few years and debunks what may be the most common misconception about him: that he based his work around the crimes of BTK:

I’ve gotten somewhat disconnected from the world of publishing in recent years, and it’s always pleasant to discover that I (or at least the books) have not entirely vanished, after all.

I actually wrote a novel in between those two — a 600-page mystery (not suspense) novel that every editor in New York claimed to love, although they all rejected it because it was so different from TLM. SOME SURVIVE began as an expansion of one of the subplots in that book (which was entitled THE NATURAL FATHER), and evolved into a completely different novel, more in the vein of TLM. But editors were convinced that it was no more than a revision of the book they’d already rejected, so most of them didn’t read it. I think the editor who purchased it only did so because he wanted to market it as "by the author of THE LATE MAN." Once he read it (after buying it, I think) he asked for some revisions that he thought would make it more "cinematic." By the time those were done, he’d left editing to write his own book, and SOME SURVIVE was inherited by an editor who didn’t like it much (I think it offended her), and wound up being put out as a paperback, which meant it didn’t get reviewed.

Compared to publishing a hard-cover novel that is well-reviewed, publishing a paperback original is like dropping a pebble in the ocean. You don’t have the slightest idea what’s going on with it, whether people like it or not, whether anyone is even reading it. For that reason, just learning that someone has actually read SOME SURVIVE tends to please me more than praise of THE LATE MAN.

It seems to take me about four years to write a book. I had hoped that wouldn’t be true with a nonfiction book, but apparently it is. It’s just that the first couple of years are taken up by research instead of writing early drafts. I’m now actually writing the book (entitled ADAMS ROAD), and I’m hoping to be done with it soon because there’s a novel in my head that I want to get to. ADAMS ROAD, incidentally, is not going to be the usual sort of true-crime book. It’s more about the investigation and prosecution than the murder itself (which, in my opinion, remains something of a mystery.)

The notion that I was somehow involved in coverage of the BTK murders, and that they have some connection to THE LATE MAN, appears also to have a life of its own. I’ve been denying it ever since TLM was published, but even my friend Robert Beattie has repeated it, in his own recent book on BTK, NIGHTMARE IN WICHITA. The truth is that I was living in Lawrence, working as an academic editor and teaching freshman composition, during most of the time when the BTK murders were occurring.

I joined the Wichita Eagle as a copy editor (not a reporter) in early 1998, around the time the final murder occurred. The newspaper in TLM is not modeled on the Eagle but on the Topeka Daily Capital, where I’d worked for several years as a reporter in the late 60s. Even friends of mine on the Eagle, however, persist in trying to figure out which real people there were the models for characters in the novel. (The answer is none.)

If the murders in the book were based on anything real, it was on a series of murders in Michigan, back in the early 60s, which I had happened to read about. I did come to know some of the people who were involved in the BTK thing — reporters who covered it for the Eagle, obviously, but also Det. Ken Landwehr, who was in charge of the lengthy investigation. A lot of people in Wichita believe he was the model for L.J. Loomis, but I actually interviewed him after TLM was published, to find out what I had gotten wrong about actual police investigations.