So I need help.
I've sent out many query types. This is my latest. I've incorporated an insane number of suggestions, overdosing on books dealing with queries and agent interviews dealing with queries. So I am lost in the maze.
So, if you have suggestions, please mail me at rogergathmann@gmail.com. Or leave me a comment.
Thanks
Dear x,
May 1, 2003 was an auspicious day. President Bush gave a
speech announcing the end of hostilities in Iraq under a banner reading
“Mission Accomplished.” This was the first mistake. The popular conservative
Governor of Texas, Hutch Sterling, went to a victory party that night. There he
was captured on a telephone camera making out with one of the beauty
contestants of the organization that threw the party, the Patriot Foundation.
That was the second mistake. The Governor’s wife, Holly, pulled into the
parking lot of Austin Wines, popped into the store for a bottle, and brought it
back to the car. Later, at around 11:00, her mutilated body was found in the
back seat of her car, which was parked at the side of Lake Austin Boulevard up
where it runs past the golf course. That was the third mistake. The next day,
Joan Malcolm saw it on the news. Malcolm knew Holly, slightly, had interviewed
her. Malcolm was well known writer – most known for her first book, Your
Enemies and Mine: Notes on the Goth Aesthetic, a surprise best-seller in
1984. Malcolm decided right away that she had to do this murder. In fact, as
the months dragged on, Malcolm, it turned out, would have more success than the
police in tracing the line that lead from Holly’s body to Hutch’s seeming
culpability. That was the fourth mistake.
“Auspicious”. Auspicious comes, according to one daring
etymology, from haruga, the entrails of the victim, and aspicere,
look. The Roman aruspice would examine the sacrificed animal’s innards,
and find there signs of the future as legible to his experience as the signs of
the Zodiac in the sky. The case of Holly Sterling did have a victim, one could
even say a sacrifice, but what were the signs signifying? In 2003, they
signified the confluence of many social forces: the growth of cable tv
stations, often reflecting some billionaire’s predilections, where the content
was 24/7; the growth of internet media of all type, where content was 24/7; the
global war on terrorism complex, taking over a spot that was once filled by the
Cold War complex; an economy that was in recovery from the tech crash by means
of a mortgage bubble that was growing and growing, debt creating affluence
rather than affluence creating debt. Joan Malcolm, who’d made her bones on
finding enemies and attacking them, found this new world as full of enemies as
the eighties or the nineties, but somehow they had sunk below the old levels. Even
the Iraq war, that spectacular fraud, was not up to her level. But the murder
of Holly seemed to be something symbolically more, some final revelation of the
era’s infâme, and she threw herself into it with a sort of relief. The
story traces both the many paths that led all the characters to their moment, on
May 1, 2003, and the paths that led some of them out of it.
My novel, Made a Few Mistakes (208,000 words) is a
variation on the usual crime novel (for instance, it never comes to the firm
conclusion about who done it and why that anchors most crime novels). It is, as
well as a crime novel, also a political novel, a state of the nation novel,
like Joan Didion’s The Last Thing He Wanted or Susan Choi’s American
Woman. It has an admittedly large
word count, but one that encompasses a multitude of Shandian turns, giving a
sense of the zigzag that pulls the reader – Joan herself, going over her notes,
for instance – further and further in.
I am looking for an agent with highbrow tastes in literature
and lowbrow tastes in American marginalia.
I would
like for you to represent my novel. [Put in here some relevant info on why]
I’ve published a non-fiction book (Everyman’s Marx, Mark
Blatty, 2012), and a translations from German (The Basho of Economics: An
Intercultural Analysis of the Process of Economics, Ontos, 2007), as
well as numerous reviews and essays for a number of magazines (American
Scholar, Poets and Writers, Salon, Feed, etc.) and newspapers. I was the
academic book reviewer for the Austin Statesman from 2008-2011.
I am sending the first chapter with this letter.
Yours sincerely,
Roger Gathmann
Made
a Few Mistakes
By
Roger Gathmann
Chapter 1
Order out of disorder – A shocking crime– Some bit players –
Consciousness and creepiness.
In Rudolf Arnheim’s dense and
fascinating Entropy and Art, the
famous art historian makes an extended attempt to translate the thermodynamic
definitions of order and disorder into the realm of aesthetics. Arnheim was a
crossroads savant, a man who liked the idea of viewing, say, aesthetics through
the prism of physics and physics through the prism of aesthetics. One of those
polymath European refugee types that were knocked around the twentieth century,
ran out of cigarettes in refugee camps in France, died lice-ridden in
concentration camps in Galicia or Siberia, or escaped the various traps and
cattle train cars to spend quality exile time in the US archipelago of colleges
where they were as awed by the raw animal beauty of the students as they were
non-plussed by the astonishing childishness of their references and mores. The sororities. The fraternities.
The football. The chewing gum. In his book, Arnheim introduces his entitling
duality with an illuminating example from one of the great rituals of everyday
life: shuffling cards.
The usual
interpretation of this operation is that by shuffling, say, a deck of cards one
converts an initial order into a reasonably perfect disorder. This, however,
can be maintained only if any particular initial sequence of cards in the deck
is considered an order and if the purpose of the shuffling operation is
ignored. Actually, of course, the deck is shuffled because all players are to
have the chance of receiving a comparable assortment of cards.
Now, to tell the truth, I was so
struck by this passage that I tossed aside Arnheim’s book for the day to absorb
its full implications. Day followed day, semester semester, until the need to
read until the end died one of those deaths well known to ambitious but
promiscuous readers, those who are always seeing in the book they hold an
obstacle to the book they really should be reading. It was years ago, but in
looking through my notes about the Sterling case, Arnheim’s example leaped out
at me from some shadowy corner in the brain. I hope the Master – or his shade,
for consulting the Internet, I find that Arnheim is no longer with us, his
death surprisingly recent – will not mind if an unfaithful reader such as
myself filches it. Shuffling, to be all structuralist about it, contrasts with
another image of order and disorder in our contemporary quotidian – the switch.
The switch and its rituals. We live in a world of switches, and probably use
them dozens of times a day. I counted once myself, one day, in the interests of
precision, and got to fifty-five by cocktail time. They have created an
unconscious but powerful idea among us that disorder and order are mechanical.
They are perfect antitheses. On/off, live current/dead current, the
universe/chaos – such is the model. A chicken, in fact, can be trained to
operate a switch. But shuffling! Ah, shuffling has something pathetically human
about it, something characteristic of our ambiguity-seeking, ambiguity-fearing
species! Order in disorder, disorder out of order. Our public lives we like to
think of in terms of switches, our private life in terms of shuffles. Ha! I
have my doubts.
We all wish that the case of Holly
Sterling conformed to our model of the switch. Guilty/not-guilty,
victim/murderer, good/evil – we would prefer to find these things at the base
of it. The trial, or trials, were constructed, after all, to satisfy this
desire. The system is built on these switches: the system of justice, and of
our sentiments, and of our newspapers, and of our moral impressions. But those
of us who have considered the case as a whole, with its larger ramifications,
keep coming upon a shuffle at the heart of it – in fact, a sort of diabolical
shuffling of motives, facts and factoids, as though the game that was being played
might be crooked, and not at all, finally, a homogeneous order/disorder
satisfactory to each player. Order in disorder, disorder out of order – this is
what we keep coming back to, as we grope in the dark for some master switch.
So do we begin the case of Holly
Sterling in 1991? That was, you could say, her big media debut. Standing on the
Circle City courthouse portico next to her husband, Hutcheson, she was making
the prim smile of the picture perfect political wife as her husband announced
that he was running for the District Attorney post in Williamsberg County.
Because he was a Sterling, there was a bigger than normal crowd for such an
announcement. And because this was his maiden speech, Hutch was nervous.
Becoming more seasoned, he’d use a teleprompter, but on this occasion he made
the rookie mistake of reading from his notes. When he got to the phrase, I will
put the full force of my fortune behind my duty, he said: I will put the full
force of my duty behind my fortune. He paused, knowing he’d bobbled it. Then
Holly did an astonishing thing. Her prim smile became a guffaw. She balled up a
fist and playfully whacked her husband on the shoulder. He looked at her, she
looked at him, and they both laughed. Holly then leaned over and said into the microphone,
ooops! The crowd loved it. They loved all of her at the moment, from her bobbed
blond hair to her black Gucci pumps. Later, the newscast of the event was
broadcast not only in the Austin area, as local news, but on news programs all
over Texas.
Or should we begin two years later,
on February 10, 1993, two weeks after the burial of Holly and Hutch’s only
child, when the couple stood, again holding hands but this time a little more
desperately, clutching hands is more like it, as they gave their lives “back”
to Jesus, a transaction presided over by the telegenically beatific gaze of the
“Wagon Master” of the Frontier Fellowship, the rangy, ‘g’ droppin’ Jebulon
McCord?
Or do we push the case back further
into their youth, contrasting Hutch’s Houston opulent youth, full of those
intimations of future greatness that were a prominent part of his campaign
literature, and Holly’s rags to riches story, in which the omens were more
ironic and the smoothing hand of the publicist more challenged?
Well, as far as the public was
concerned, the Holly Sterling case proper begins with a conversation between an
ACP cycle cop and a police dispatcher. Maury Lockwood, the man with the police
scanner who caught this transmission for the world at large, was eventually hauled
into court to defend himself re the doubtful legality of the tape, and fined at
the end of his trial, but nominally, his lawyer having made several pertinent
points about freedom of information and the evident disparity between the law’s
prosecution of Lockwood and the blind eye it turned to the media; and what with
the sale of the thing to KXOX, Maury about broke even. KXOX did better, selling
it at a considerable markup to their national network. From there it was picked
up by all of the others. By May 02, 2003, the nation, if it wanted to, had
heard it ten times on the regular channels, and some exponentially greater
amount on the news cable stations. As a result, this is a very well-preserved
tape, and it is now archived by many an amateur on YouTube, where you can find
it if you need to refresh your memory. Expert listeners have been here, as well
as cranks, whose comments are also available on YouTube and a number of
conspiracy web sites that I will leave it to the reader to find on his own. Cleaners
of data, clearers of interference, scraping down to the vocal thrust through
the matter, the levels of noise, the friction of magnetic flicker rubbing
magnetic flicker. The tape is all neatly transcribed, except for one
controversial burst of static that gave rise to the well-known rumor… Well,
about poor Holly’s head, which has joined Marie Antoinette’s and Jayne
Mansfield’s in a very special pantheon -- although Holly’s does not belong
there, according to the official version.
And
if we can’t trust the official version? But really, isn’t this what the whole
Sterling case was, on one level, about?
The female voice in the dispatch
office of the APD is anonymous, and some would say Southern, although the brisk
pace, the verbal speed, indicating that she had been trained, at least, in
getting straight to the point in the least amount of transmission time
possible; on the other hand, the Southern slant of the ACP cycle cop’s voice
belongs, as we know from TV interviews since, to Paul Strange. Perhaps it is
appropriate – or at least more fun, and what is a media circus without fun? –
to enter this case via the small fry, the essential bit player. Paul Strange
fits the type. Oh, does he fit the type! Poor Paul. When he was picked up on
that transmission, Paul was a twenty-three-year-old who’d moved to Austin
(“back to Austin”, he insisted) in 2000, a good year for inflow to the booming
Central Texas metropolis. He was short for a cop, in fact that was one of the
problems he had to deal with when applying to the Accelerated Cop Program, but
at some point, his height gained an inch in the official dossier, and he was
in. He was baby faced, with droopy eyelids, sleepy, shadowed eyes. Loose about
the mouth, and distinctly lacking in the facial hair department – Paul took out
his Bic razor only once a week, and then the lather floating about in the
pooled water in the sink disclosed a discouragingly thin scum of dark shavings
that would cling for days in a ring around the sink until his girlfriend would
tell him it was disgusting and she wasn’t going to clean it up again. He’d been
educating himself at the Community College in all the arts necessary for the
career he’d dreamt of: criminology, psychology, English 101, and management
science, which he imbibed sitting, as he invariably sat, in the back row,
staring under those somewhat bluish lids at his instructor with no light of
intelligence in his eyes, apparently waiting in vain for the strings of
sentences and bullet points to cohere into a possible exam answer. The bullet
points were new, but the stare, the scribbled scramble of his essay answers,
the pity C, were old news, known (and now forgotten) to Old Mr. Maier
(geometry), Mrs. Snail (geography) and Miss Annie Mackeral (reading) in,
respectively, high, middle and elementary school. These schools were located in
Duluth, Georgia, and so at that time was Paul, much to his chagrin. At the age
of two, he’d been stored next to his sister, Amee Lea, and a box bearing the
title, “Misc”, in the back seat of the Malibu, and hauled to Duluth, with his
mother, Bonnie, controlling sibling rivalries
from the front seat as she nervously navigated the speed on the highways
going from Austin to Atlanta, treating herself during the one night stopover at
the hotel in Natchez to approximately four martinis (which, she estimated, were
the equivalent of the usual one valium) to relax the knot she felt in her
chest, the stifled fright accumulated from estimating crash opportunities as
they opened up constantly on either side of her. Bob and the furniture were
already waiting for her in Duluth. Paul blinked at all this, sucked his thumb,
cried when Amee Lea poked him (out of boredom more than meanness – Amee Lea was
mostly protective of her Boo) but didn’t think much of it until later. Later
began when he was six, which is when he was thrust from the warm blanket and
snack of kindergarten into the harsh glare and hard seats of elementary school
and began his quest to find an edge. Miss Mackeral, using the most up to date
theories in psychology (she’d aced her course at Georgia State) wrote a note to
Bonnie describing Paul as “lacking in self-esteem.” By sixteen, the lack had
been filled somewhat: by smoking pot, by a fanatical devotion to certain cop
shows and to the Stone Temple Pilots, and by weaving around himself a story of
being really from Texas. In the crowd of freaks he hung around, he gradually
acquired the name Tex. He loved that.
What really closed the self-esteem
gap, however, was his discovery, as the end of high school came into view, that
a certain kind of girl was just wild about heavy lidded, baby faced boys. This
type of girl, he was happy to find, was often “kranked” to “do it like they do
it on Discovery channel.” Doing it made him simply happy. Paul was very good at
the lineaments of satisfied desire, which set him apart from many of his
friends, male and female, although he didn’t know it.
Here is an excerpt from the KXOX
broadcast, May 2, 2003:
PS: DHQ, I’m ACP Paul
Strange here. I have a bit of a what you call a tricky, uh, situation here …
There’s a car here, silver, 02 Lexus, let’s see ... and I’m knocking at the
windows. Over.
DHQ: I’m reading you, PC 40,
coordinates please, over ...
PS: And you know I have been told
that if I run into….
DHQ: Where are you, PC40, over
PS:
Easing the car door open. Its unlocked…
DHQ: That’s a negative, PC40. Coordinates. Coordinates
officer!
[Various background noises: something metallic, a muffled what the… Jesus (expletive) … oh, god damn, a whooshing sound, expletive
shit, a rushed sound of bootfalls on pebble]
DHQ: Did you open the door? Tell me you did not open the
door.
PS: Door is open. And this woman, this woman, I think I have
a part of her on my
[Background sound of croaking and
spilling]
DHQ: Are you all right? Officer…
PS: Paul. My name is
Paul Strange. I’m ACP. Get somebody the (expletive) here... Somebody, some
sick, oh man, her (static) head.
DHQ: I’m getting a lock on you. A cruiser is coming. Back
away from the car.
PS: My dinner come up.
This transmission gives us these for-murder-fans
essential anchoring points: a car, a place, a body. Paul Strange had found the
night a little too hot, and at a certain point had taken off his gloves, which
is why his prints were on the window, the door, the seat, Holly Sterling’s
boot. And Paul’s digestive fluids mixed with food were in the foot area of the
back seat. This was unfortunate from the point of view of the clean crime
scene, as was made evident at various trials. It was not an encouraging start
for a candidate officer, either. And when the Austin Chronicle picked up on the fact that Paul Strange was out
there that night with a minimum of training, due to a program that had been run
on the quiet for two years to increase the police department’s manpower at a
low cost, the ACP program was quietly folded. As for our bit player, Strange,
he got into a fight in a bar three months later, and was suspended from the
program. However, being interviewed three times on television and at the trial
gave him the idea of starting his own private security company, which he did.
He went bankrupt in 2006.
As soon as the murder squad came on
the scene of Strange, the cruiser, and the Lexus, the license plate became an issue. Detective Chuck Reilly left his partner to
debrief Strange again and personally made the drive back to HQ, calling Ludlum
at home on his cell. ‘See me at the office,” Reilly testified later, “something
like that. That’s what I told him.”
When Bennett Ludlum got to the scene at 11:30,
he’d had his talk with Reilly.
“I just told him that it was the
Governor’s car. No sir, I didn’t tell him we got a bomb on our hands. No, I
never used the words bomb, explosion, any of that, to my recollection. No, I
don’t know why they printed that, sir. I figure they got the wrong end of the
stick.”
Everybody at the scene by 11:30 p.m.
was aware that this was on a Need to Know basis.
Everybody at the scene did not
include Strange, who was getting tired of going through the same story over and
over down at HQ.
Not that the body was identifiable
with 100% certainty. For instance, there was no purse or wallet in the car. The
contents of the glove compartment had been cleaned out. As for the monuments of
our mortal decay – for instance, the smell in the car, which had been modified
when Strange opened the door but still preserved the overheated smell of blood,
Chanel No. 5, urine and feces – these are general enough to form no reliable
standard of identification. The woman, on the back seat, was face up. In a
manner of speaking. However, a certain circumstance altered the immediate
recognition this face would provoke in the observer – if the observer was
minimally interested in state public affairs, or fashion, or the society pages
of several Texas newspapers. Just that year the cover story in the Texas Monthly. Three cover stories in
the last four years. As a matter of fact, Ludlum had known her, in life, in a
manner of speaking, enough that she remembered him the last time he’d been up
at the Capital[MOU1] and she’d spotted him. Her memory for names and faces was definitely an
asset, they said so in the Monthly article.
By 12:00 a.m the car had been hauled
down to the APD-HQ. The Austin Police Department had located its headquarters
on the shadow line between East Austin, where the shadows were poorer and
darker, and Sixth street, which was a contact zone for the collegiate and the
vagrant, lined with buildings that, under the raw Austin midday sun, looked
dirty and in need of repair, but were lit up at night with neon lights that
gave them collectively a shadowy allure, to which was added the amplified music
broadcast into the street from every other door, making the entire arrangement
seem momentarily legendary if you were in the 18 to 22 demographic. The ten
story, rambling building, built between two one-way streets and always seeming
to be blocked by construction work on one of the streets, barely accommodated
the needs of a force perpetually losing its race with the growth of the city it
served, as the loser in the last mayoral race – who used the lack of a police
force to tout his “concealed weapons for all” theme – liked to point out.
Ludlum had been with the force long enough to remember the old HQ, which was
made of brick – rather than the fake slate cladding wrapped around the new HQ –
and was now inhabited by the Association of Retired State Employees. He’d liked
his old office, which looked out on a block of those central city houses that
had been converted into lawyer’s offices or get out of jail bail shops. His office on the third floor of the new
building didn’t have an exterior window. The Lexus was docked in a pen in the
back of the building, preparatory to a thorough going over. Ludlum had
supervised the transfer of the corpse to a stretcher, and watched three men
roll it through the metal doors (with the cringeworthy bang, as if the sad dead
meat of the corpse could still feel the indignity of this treatment) which
would lead to an elevator, a long underground corridor, and the “toyshop”, the
domain ruled by Travis county coroner Dr. Bill Herndon.
Then Ludlum turned to the business of
getting in touch with Sterling. That Ludlum did not as of yet have the first
clue proves that Ludlum was not a big fan of local tv news.
The pertinent agencies were alerted:
the Austin branch of the Texas Rangers, the Protective Detail attached to the
Governor’s office, the Austin D.A.’s office, and as was disclosed in
Contrarian.com four months later, King and Crockett, a limited liability
corporation with an image management mission in politics, and a long and
complex – or in the words of Frank Crockett, a “mutually fruitful” – relationship
with the Sterling administration. The quote is from an article in
Contrarian.com. One of several. Joan Malcolm’s articles. The one that topped
Contrarian’s “most emailed articles” list for 2003.
James Loveless was at the center of
this one. James Loveless was the man Ludlum approached in the hall that night.
Loveless was connected to the APD as a consultant in, of all things,
hypnotherapy. Ludlum had conflicted feelings about hypnosis. It was an issue he
thought about a lot in high school, when he’d reached a plateau playing
baseball, and began to explore around, reading Zen and the Art of Archery, experimenting in self-hypnotic
suggestion, applying certain suggestions about forgetting the monkey mind and
being in the ball as it left the pitcher’s hand, and this had paid off in
elevating his batting average by one hundred points and making him a quicker,
more responsive third baseman, not just simply catching the ball but understanding it as he flipped it
from glove to hand to throw to out. This had landed him on the bench at U.T.,
where he was just below the grade that was good enough to start, and where the
whole baseball thing had petered out in pinch hitting and pity substitutions at
the bottom of the ninth, when it didn’t matter. But at the same time he’d
developed other collegiate interests: namely, popular science books and girls
from the art department. Going out with the latter, he learned about Mayan
prophecy, Neuro-linguistic programing, tarot and lithium. Reading the former,
he gained a surface knowledge of quantum fluctuations, the selfish gene, Schrödinger’s
cat, the n+ dimension of strings, and the fact that the human retina receives
ten billion bits of information per second, but by the time this information is
processed by the brain, we operate on one hundred bits. I am, therefore I edit.
Of these two world views, Ludlum put hypnosis in the arty girlfriend category.
And yet, he’d worked on cases where hypnosis worked, where witnesses – like
Lana, the seventeen year old girlfriend of the killer in the South Congress
MacDonald shooting – would, unconsciously, reveal information that they had
supposedly forgotten – edited out with the 9 billion 999 million some bits
they’d trash at every glance.
There was that. And there was that
hypnosis had a very creepy aura.
He also didn’t like the idea of
letting the unconscious contaminate a nicely constructed case connecting one
material evidence to another, which was the most righteous way to go to court.
So these conflicts came up and
expressed themselves in this instinctive shrinking back whenever Ludlum came
into contact with the tall, cadaverous Loveless, with his parchment white skin,
that white hair, that skull like face, sporting those bespoke linen suits,
bending his way through the halls of APD HQ, confabbing with the D.A. And this, too, put Ludlum off, because he
never knew (”it really pisses me off that I don’t know!” he told Maureen, his
girlfriend) who Loveless was working for. The man worked for several masters –
the D.A., the new Texas Department of Homeland Security, and of course King and
Crockett. When Ludlum joined the APD in
1993, there was an obvious distinction between the state and business. In those
days, while the politicians were forever praising “private enterprise”, there
was no notion that business could or should take over the functions of the
state: taxing, imprisoning people, teaching, fighting wars. This was, of
course, no longer the case in 2003, either at home or abroad. The definitions
of graft, insider dealing, of equality before the law, of transparency, had
been put on the back burner. Now Ludlum was always bumping into some private
consultant, some contractor, demanding information they had no right to or
providing ‘advice’ and ‘resources’ that you, a) weren’t going to follow because
it was bullshit and more paperwork, and b) that you had to be nice about so the
guys at the top saw that you were ‘on board.’
Tonight, however, Ludlum was not so
irritated by the thought of dealing with the draculine Loveless for the simple
reason that he needed to find someone to entrust with the delicate task of
telling Governor Sterling that his wife had been murdered and her eyes… well,
he needed to be told, and then later they could fill him in on the details.
Loveless, Ludlum knew, was connected to Sterling. Somehow. How was unclear, but
everything having to do with Crockett and King was unclear. Everything having
to do with the new homeland security mandate was unclear, too, but Loveless was
connected to that. Thus, when Loveless’s long, slightly clammy fingers clutched
Ludlum’s wrist – the man was a wristclutcher rather than a handshaker, which
Ludlum imagined he must have gotten from hypnotherapy – Ludlum did not shake
him off, but told him that he needed to see him, that they had a problem.
“I’m glad we are finally interfacing
Ben,” Loveless said.
Down in the toy shop Herndon was
saying, “bet you it was an ice pick. She should thank God, I guess, that he
didn’t pull out the knife for these (and he pointed) until she was probably
beyond mortal consciousness.”
No comments:
Post a Comment