June 4, 1960

Dear Jim,

I am so glad you detect some good results from the timing. And I was pleased to give Arlene the quote. She is very nice. She sent me a suggested quote, but it sounded like all the others they use on books, and I wanted one not so impersonal.

I seem to keep handing out gratuitous advice, and please let me know when I overdo it to the extent of nausea. But I have a comment on the last of yours I have read. It was several weeks ago, and I am too lazy to go look for it and give you the right title, but it was a shifting point of view book, the guy in the death house waiting for the woman to be killed.

It had a lot of movement and pace and color, but there were two purely structural things about it, which I want to comment on. It began in the gas station. I would have liked to have seen it begin in the death house, with a shrewd cop trying to pry information out of the condemned, and in that scene setting up sympathy for the girl on the run, and a better establishment of the forces at work against her. Then, at the very end, go back to a one page chapter with condemned and the same cop. Secondly, I do think that in many instances you hurry your punch. Once you have worked up to the very edge of violence, give a little more trust to the depth to which you have sunk your hook, and back off a little and draw the suspense out as long as you possibly can. For example: When the sheriff innocently showed up, you shot hell out of him. Why not chose that instant to switch to the girl, stay with her a while to get her established, and then go back to the gas station? Freeze the action and shoot him later.

You are off and running to the extent that you certainly don’t have to believe me or agree with me.

Glad you came up with such an unanswerable way of pressuring Western. But may I raise a slight question? Or maybe just tell you how it works for me. I do like pressure, yes, but I have found out that it bugs me if I contract for the total production I feel capable of doing. I owe Simon & Schuster one book this year, 2 to Fawcett in '61, and 2 in '62. I’ll do more than that, probably. But then it will be gravy, above and beyond commitments. When I was sewed up for the full possible output, I began to write carelessly. Maybe it will not be that way with you. Maybe that 4 a year isn’t a firm agreement. But I should be just a little bit wary of making a firm one on that basis.

I just finished the 2^nd Ladies Home Journal novelette that uses some of the same people as Trap. I pray each night for the continued health of LHJ. Once 3 have been published, I will add one no magazine would take and have a book I hope. At least, if three go, it would be pre-financed.

I am having fun doing the writing book. I have a box on a high shelf. Every few days I write whatever comes into my head about this business and put it in the box. When it is full I should have a book. It may take a couple of years for maybe 200 very short chapters.

Best of luck, and I was really pleased to supply a blurb.

By the way, I have had the most astonishing luck in my reading. Right in a shining row I hit three of the finest novels I have read in at least three years. Each of them makes me sick with envy. I can’t plug them enough. Town Burning by Thomas Williams, The Rack by Ellis, and The Hard Blue Sky by Shirley Ann Grau.

Running into these can restore the faith destroyed by such horrid, turgid, journalistic crap as Hawaii, Advise And Consent, Xodus, From The Terrace and all the rest of those overblown pretensions.

All three are worth buying for keeps.

Best,

John