Chapter 34 #2
Months later I was called back for a second interview at the Miami Herald and offered a feature-writing position at their Broward County bureau.
I was faced with one of the most difficult decisions of my life.
Maybe I should take the job while I had the chance, and Miami might be a good place for me to live.
Jim and his wife, Mary, were starting a family there. I was close to them, rarely seeing my brother John, a high-ranking officer in the Air Force, never living in the same place very long. Mom had moved from Montreat to Hendersonville near Asheville, and we weren’t getting along.
I told myself there was little possibility Postmortem or anything else I wrote would amount to a big deal.
Better to be a journalist in Miami than a computer analyst in a morgue.
But by now, I was already well along with my next Scarpetta novel.
I’d started it while waiting to hear about Postmortem.
As usual, I had to write. I couldn’t help myself.
The dreadful working title was Posthumous.
Later I would change it to Body of Evidence.
I decided to give myself a chance at making it as an author.
I knew that if I went to work for the Miami Herald, I’d be drained creatively by the end of every day just as I’d been while working for The Charlotte Observer.
I worried it was foolish to leave the environment that had facilitated my creation of Scarpetta, and I told the Herald no.
I continued to work on Body of Evidence while waiting for Postmortem to come out.
When it did in January 1990, the first book review was vicious.
It seemed like a replay of what happened with the Ruth Graham biography.
Robert Merritt of the Richmond Times-Dispatch referred to Scarpetta as a whiner.
She complained about male chauvinists obstructing her way to the top of her profession.
He had nothing good to say, his criticism and the tone of his review striking me as personal.
It seemed what he really took exception to was me.
I suppose if Mr. Owl had weighed in, he would have reminded me of the green-eyed monster.
Postmortem had no marketing or publicity budget, and I was on my own to promote it.
The only appearance I made was at Cokesbury, a religious bookstore in downtown Richmond, and I walked there during my OCME lunch break.
Copies of Postmortem filled the front window because that was the deal.
I’d told the store manager I’d give him my free case of books if he’d display them.
I sat for an hour, not a single copy sold.
I got excited when a browsing customer approached, until she asked where the cookbooks were.
Nobody showed up except a man in a suit and tie.
I sensed his hostile energy as he picked up a copy from the stack in front of my table.
Without so much as a glance at me, he rudely tossed Postmortem back on top of the stack, stalking out of the store.
Remarkably, he looked a lot like Robert Merritt.
Or Robert De-Merritt, as I began to call him.
Soon after his nasty review, I got a call from Charles Wilson, the owner of Volume I, an independent bookstore known for anti-censorship.
I remembered seeing the front window filled with copies of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses when it was published.
Volume I was the last store where I expected the reaction I was about to get.
I was sitting at my desk at the OCME when Charles Wilson told me he was “banning” Postmortem.
He criticized its graphic violence and similarity to the Southside Strangler cases.
It would seem he told the media about banning my book and the story went out over the wire.
A few women’s clubs that had scheduled me to speak saw the news and canceled their invitations.
I knew what it felt like to be canceled.
How could things get any worse? Many years later I was told that the banning of my book was a publicity stunt on the part of Volume I.
Without intending to, Charles Wilson did me a favor, but it didn’t feel like it at the time.
It seemed that once again I’d failed. Worse, I was accused of causing harm by writing a story inspired by real murders.
If I told the truth about violence from Scarpetta’s point of view, it seemed to upset people and offend literary sensibilities.
A reviewer in the U.K. was so angry after reading Postmortem, he hurled the book across the room.
His reason? The killer was a stranger, as violent psychopaths usually are.
Rarely do they know their victims. After all I’d seen, I was incapable of writing a traditional whodunit.
I couldn’t if I tried. Brutalized bodies on autopsy tables weren’t mysteries or puzzles, and murder wasn’t a parlor game.
I was certain my career as a novelist had ended before it began. I should have taken the job at the Miami Herald. But everything was about to change.