THE NIGHT THE HEART OF THE STORIES ALMOST DIED

Copyright 2015 by Don McGregor

I am probably lucky you are reading these words at all.
February 1985.
Mortality had been whispering to me in the winter days of New York City.
A shortness of breath.  Probably sinuses.
A slight pain across the back of the shoulders.
Probably from playing on the monkey bars at Marine Park with my son, Rob Roy. 
One night in the early morn hours, the whisper became a shout, a shout that brought adrenaline rushing with the speed of blood-pulse, obliterated sleep, leaving me wide aware and staring at in the dark up at the ceiling.
I had a heart attack at the age of 40.
Okay, just from personal experience, I will state, I’ve come to the conclusion you shouldn’t diagnose yourself when you’re feeling bad. I’m not stating that I don’t still ignore those words and do it, just that many times you might be better off if you didn’t.
I had a terrific time writing the second Nathaniel Dusk series, APPLE PEDDLERS DIE AT NOON. Everything went right with those four books where things hadn’t during the first Dusk mini-series, LOVERS DIE AT DUSK. When I realized I would be far from the Apple Peddler’s assassination I asked Bruce Bristow if we could have a double-sized first issue. I thought that was a possibility because it had been done with other comic book series, and as long as it has been done before you have a shot in hell of getting “Yes.” But Bruce not only thought that was a good idea but thought the entire mini-series should be double-sized volumes, and thus, I didn’t have to worry about room to fit all the themes and characters I wanted in the story.
DC also let me edit the book. I have no idea why, but that meant while I was spending months researching the series I could voucher the editorial fees and not have to worry about money coming in while I put the entire series together. Everything in those books on the days that are recounted are what the weather was like to what was happening in New York City.
I timed action sequences around storms.
A horse lying dead in the middle of Times Square on a hot day, it really happened right at the time it happens in the book, I just added Dusk chasing murderers right into the chaos, the killer’s getaway car crashing into the fallen steed’s corpse.
I felt compelled to come up with something to put Dusk through.
Some hellish, tortuous suspense sequence.
I’d shot him up with rat poison in “Lovers”, and I knew a lot of the fans would expect some terrible ordeal for Dusk to fight to survive. It should be something memorable. But what? How do you top rat poison injection?
As I stated, I’d had shortness of breath for awhile, which I put down to sinus problems. I was going to a Jewish “Y” in those days, swimming in the pool, and using the steam room to clear my sinuses. The older Jewish men would spit cold water onto the steam room regulator and there was so much steam you couldn’t see anything.
It was one day when the hiss sounded abruptly and the heated mist hit us that I came up with the idea of Dusk locked in the steam room.
Now, it is one thing to come up with a dire situation.  It is another to figure out how to get the hero out of that life or death scenario alive, if you intend to have the series continue.

So, how would one get out?
I would try to record how that scalding heat felt. Good for the sinuses, too, right?
Day after day, I went through the ordeal, tried to get as close to the reality of the heat as possible, drenched in sweat, skin feeling like needle pricks jabbing in every part of your body at the slightest movement.
The hiss from the metal sphere chilled the heat with the idea of death chambers.
Probably not the best place to be day after day when you’re only a short time away from having a heart attack.

Of course, I didn’t know I was heading for a heart attack, and steam rooms probably weren’t the best regimen for that.
*                                  *                                  8
One night, I stepped into the swimming pool at the shallow end and went to take a stroke. It felt as if a muscle would tear apart from my rib cage! Reach too far, too fast, and something would rip loose!
It was a scary sensation speaking of mortality.
I told myself not to push it!
I lowered my arm, puzzled and alarmed.
I carefully, slowly breast-stroked back to the pool’s edge.
I breathed carefully, delicately.
And went to the steam room.
*                               *                                      *
There were problems with the penciled artwork for Peddlers. The art needed to be sprayed with a fixative so that the soft, dark pencils by Gene wouldn’t smudge. Gene lived in an apartment in Manhattan and said he couldn’t do it. The fumes would fill the small rooms.  The chemical smell was a strong assault to the nostrils. 
DC’s production department felt it wasn’t their job to protect the pencils and stated they would not do it.
These are things that as a story-teller, as a writer, you cannot anticipate will affect your book when only the writing is possessive, that consumes you to sit and face the nothingness of a blank sheet of paper or a empty, glaring computer screen.
Nobody is going to give a fuck what happens to your book.  It isn’t their book.  They have other things to do, and it is just a job to them.  If you don’t look after what you have created, you can’t fix it later. 
When I found out that there was a stalemate, and that the art stood unprotected, with nothing being done to fix it, as the deadline neared, I told them to find me a place to do it, show me what to do,  and I’d come in and spray the pages.
I have one bottom line, to get the finished book, the vision I’d had of what the book could be for me and the readers, to make it as close to the reality that would come into the world as I’d had in those very first days of trying to bring it to life.

I did the work after hours by the storage elevators in the back.
Sprayed almost 200 pages.
Thick mist. Sharp in the nostrils and eyes.
Playing Hell with my sinuses.
The fumes were so thick I had to keep running out the space every dozen or so pages.
My shortness of breath was pronounced.
Damn sinuses!
I was gasping for air before I was a quarter of the way through. But it needed to be done
so Gene’s art wouldn’t be ruined.
I would plunge back into the fumes to add more pages to the completed list.
The night I had the heart attack, I was really tired. I was turning over in bed, ready to fall asleep, when the pain hit, and turned me right back onto my back. Adrenalin pumped like wildfire! I was wide, staring-in-the-dark-awake!
The adrenaline pulsed alarm and fear.
Marsha was asleep beside me.
I thought, “What the hell is this? A heart attack?”
My body was soaked in the kind of cold sweat you’re always reading about in hard boiled private eye novels.
A thought managed to get through the pain and panic, something like, “Am I not going to see morning light?”
And absurdly, because I’m a writer, I guess, “Is this the last story I get to write?”
I’d never get to finish “Alexander Risk”? Or do another Detectives Inc..?
I went out to the couch and picked up a copy of Jack Kirby’s Hunger Dogs graphic novel (I think that was the title) and tried to distract myself, looking at comic pages and all the while convincing myself, hey, I’m only 40, this can’t be a heart attack.
By morning, I’d convinced myself, sort of, by dawn light.
At that point in time there was no history of heart disease in my family.
My dad died on a heart condition at age 72.  He was in much better physical condition than me.
His brother died of heart complications.
But that was long afterwards.
In the morning, I told Marsha to make a doctor’s appointment for me. She knows me well enough to know I wouldn’t do that for no reason. But I needed to get into DC and go over APPLE PEDDLERS before it went to press.
  

I was supposed to meet Tom Carlyle, Cubby Broccoli’s press agent, at MGM on some James Bond interviews I’d done for STAR LOG.
I had a mantra: It couldn’t have been a heart attack. Part of me was positive. Another part knew, yeah, it was, but rejected it, wouldn’t accept it, couldn’t
accept it. And if I did end up in the hospital who would make sure Dusk got off, and nobody fucked with it.
This was the day the book went off to become reality, and all it needed was for me to be there to check it out, make sure everything was right, all the corrections done, and watch it make its way out of the offices.
I hope I would be smarter these days. I’m probably lucky to be writing these words today.
I trekked into Manhattan and saw Dusk safely off. But it was as if my feet were encased in cement.
I had to trudge everywhere, with each step I was on my way to meet with Tom Carlyle, who at that time was Cubby Broccoli’s personal overseer on the promotion of the James Bond films.
I had a wonderful dinner with Tom, who told me great stories about working with George Stevens on Shane, and about the early days of the Bond films and trying to sell them in the United States, and about Jane Fonda and Barbarella.
I never saw Tom again. He died of cancer.

The next day Doctor Adesman told me, “Don, you no longer have a virgin heart.” His exact wording. I don’t have to look up no stinking diaries for that.
I lived to be able to see the reviews for Dusk.  The first one I was told about as I was forced to stay lying on a couch, uable to do anything except go to the doctor for EKGs and medication and examinations was that I’d had a review from Evan Hunter.
Evan Hunter aka Ed McBain, creator of the 87th Precinct novels, is one of my heroes.
Many of my heroes have been writers.
Before the heart attack I managed to contact many mystery writers and have sample copies of the first issue sent to them for review.  I didn’t court the comics industry.  The people who were involved in the medium, the people who loved it, would probably be aware Nathan existed.
I wanted to capture the mystery genre lovers who would never believe there might be a comic that made a serious attempt at creator a character and a series that they might like.
I tried to get DC to take it to Warner’s Mystery novel section.
They oddly did not communicate with other sections within the corporate structure.
I tried to get DC to buy Ellery Queen Mystery Magazines subscription list, which catered to readers of mysteries and private eyes.  I could not convince them.  The publicity people had an approach to advertising.  No one was going out of their comfort zone.
I lived to read the back cover reviews:

Marsha thinks Sabre was to blame, because I’d said at one point, “This book is breaking my heart.”
Sabre was being held for ransom in Spain. Why? 
The short answer is Ragamuffins.
For those of you who know my work, I’m sure you’re wondering how the hell that could be.
It’s a tangled trail.  Another story, too long to go into here.
I’ve written a piece about Tangled Trails between projects, the books themselves and what is happening behind the scenes.  If I ever write a book on comics, I’ll go into further detail.  
I’ll go excavating through all the notebooks, all the scripts, all the diaries, all the notes in calendars, including the Marvel one in 1978 where I hand-wrote the threat that someone was going to make Sabre white!
Get me a deal, and the book is underway.
And now, some folks, if they read this, could wish it would never happen.
Let the sonofabitch drop dead before he reveals where the skeletons are buried.
But here’s a little background on working with Gene Colan on Nathaniel Dusk.
There had not been a comic book published with color and comics in the early 1980s. I dearly wanted to print Gene’s pencils from Ragamuffins. I have no capacity for knowing how to do it; I could just earnestly tell Dean Mullaney, the publisher, that that’s how I wanted to do it. Dean figured out how it could be done, and Steve Oliff and Sam Parsons did a coloring job that captured the approach I wanted, subtle and diffused, golden with memory in the flashbacks, harsher colors in the Flash Forwards.
For the first time, in Ragamuffins, Gene Colan’s pencils were published in comics!
Dean Mullaney has often said it is his favorite book of everything he published at Eclipse, and the cover for the color issue is the only piece of art he has from those days, and it hangs over his bed, where he can see it.
When we did Nathaniel Dusk at DC, I wanted to print Gene’s pencils again. I told DCs editorial that Dean would tell them how we had done Ragamuffins.
When the first issue of Nathaniel Dusk came out, Gene called me, his voice frantic. “They ruined it, Don! The ruined the art!”
I had no idea what he was talking about.
“Nathaniel Dusk! All the line-work is dropping out!”
I went into DC, saw the book, and Gene was right. When I asked what happened, I was told that a “big company like DC can’t call a little company like Eclipse for information.” This is the kind of thing that gets me crazy!
“So, you’re telling me, because you can’t make one phone call, you print a book wrong and you would ruin Gene Colan’s art?”
Which is exactly what they had done.
People seldom write about Gene’s elfish sense of humor. He was quick and witty, and he loved to tell you some far-fetched thing and see how far he could get you to go along with it.
In the second series of Nathaniel Dusk, Apple Peddlers Die At Noon, I had a character named “Lice” Williams, and I had described him as a hulking guy, who looked as if he had been in the electric chair and all it had done was spiked his dark hair, and leeched to color out of his flesh so it looked corpse- like.
Gene calls me around 11 o’clock at night and tells me, No, he’s not going to draw “Lice” that way. It’s too cartoony. He then goes on to elaborately describe how he will draw the character, and I’m saying, over the phone, okay, Gene, but I really think that will work, but Gene is adamant, No, it won’t. I’m going to make “Lice” look like Stan Lauren, but you’ll see, it will work out.
I can’t imagine it, but if Gene insists, okay.

A week later, the pages come in, and when I see them, there is “Lice” Williams exactly as I’d written him. I called Gene and asked, “Uhhh…Gene, didn’t we have a half hour phone call last week, and you went on at length on how you were going to draw him gangly and looking like Stan Laurel.”
Gene laughed. He had a great laugh. “I just wanted to see if you’d fall for it, Don.”
And we both laughed.
The book looked terrific. You cannot imagine how lovely those pencils looked. And this time they were printed basically right.
You learn how different artists work, and everyone is different.
Some artists like to see the whole script, others like Gene only knew the page he was drawing, and often if I sequence really turned him on visually, he would extend it. But by this time, I knew that, and I had enough pages within each individual issue, that I could write in the script at a half-way point or 2/3rds through that if he was behind me, now was the time to catch up, because we had a big climax coming.
You can see where he caught up, and, for instance, you can see him capturing Coney Island in the 1930s in such detail, taking the photos I had gathered while researching the series and transforming them into backgrounds for the action.
You won’t see many scenes like that in your average comic book.
The first public appearance Doctor Adesman do was for DC in Chicago to promote Nathaniel Dusk.
When I do a comic convention, I try to give all the fans that come up everything I have at that moment.  I hope that I can give them the same energy, the same courtesy, the same conviction I had for them and the book at four in the afternoon as I did at 10 in the morning.  I hope I give them something they will remember fondly.
I was at the DC table, and DC had invited many comics folks to a boat tour somewhere around Chicago.  I manned the table for hours.  I was going to take a break to get something to eat, a thing I can forget to do when caught up in the whirly-ghirly atmosphere of a con.
I told Pat Batienne I was going to get something to eat.
The staff always wants you to stay.
Pat told me there was going to be food on the boat, just eat there.
The bus taking us to the ship broke down.  I was sitting with my buddy Dean Mullaney.
By the time we made it to the boat, the food was mostly gone.  There was wine left.
In the parking lot, waiting for a bus to take us home, standing in the dark, talking with Dean, I suddenly felt as if a fist closed about my heart.
Not painfully.
Just squeezed.
And took all the energy out of me.
I slumped over the back trunk.
Dean noticed something was wrong, and bent over me.
“Don’t be a tough guy, Don.  You okay?
“I have no idea, Dean.  There’s no pain.  It’s not like…the night it happened.”
I did not realize until recently  that in that parking lot, it was the first time I met Bob Schreck.
Dean had me stay in his hotel room, to make sure I was all right, since DC had me in another hotel.  We went and ate at the hotel dining room first. 
Dean and I have been best buddies for nearly 4 decades.  And this in a business which can tear people apart as if callously torn used Kleenex.
  
I didn’t figure on Marsha calling me at the hotel, not getting ahold of me, and worried that something had happened.
She was afraid I’d done to much.  Of course, she was right.

My dad is gone.
Gene is gone.
But I had times with both of them.
I love this photo of Gene and I below.

And one more picture, in his home, in winter-time, near where we both lived.

So here is the last thing to write on this piece, something I’ve ended pieces with over the years:
Be kind to each other.
Be kind to yourselves.
And hang in there!


COPYRIGHT 2015 by Don McGregor
You can find copies of the IDW hardcover DETECTIVES INC right here:  http://www.amazon.com/Detectives-Inc-Don-McGregor/dp/1600104940/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1425521468&sr=1-1&keywords=don+mcgregor+Detectives+Inc
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