Lightning (56 page)

Seven years. I didn’t understand why seven instead of six or eight—or four hundred. All I knew was that I had worked hard on
Lightning
(not my original and preferred title, but that’s another story) and that even though it was a very different book from those I’d done previously, I believed it would please readers who enjoyed
Watchers.
I insisted that it be published after
Watchers,
and this insistence led to an exhausting and depressing four-month wrangle with the publisher before, at last, my point of view prevailed.

In addition to all the aforementioned aspects of the novel that displeased my publisher and therefore also greatly dismayed my agent, there was one other “flaw” that at times seemed to be the one that most concerned them:
Lightning
did not include a dog as one of the major characters. You, being an innocent reader searching patiently for fresh storytelling with unexpected qualities, will not understand why CPW would insist that without a dog in a lead role a novel must inevitably fail. You might point to
Gone With the Wind
and ask me to remind you which of its colorful cast was a canine, and I could say only that Scarlett O’Hara, while not a dog, was something of a bitch. You might observe that Dostoevsky, Dickens, Hemingway, and Jackie Collins wrote numerous bestselling books without including dogs as major characters, and I could not argue. With some success, my novel
Watchers
included a dog as one of its three lead characters, however, and my publisher felt strongly that I should henceforth incorporate this element in each of my stories. I didn’t write cop novels, doctor novels, or lawyer novels, but I was advised to write dog novels if I were to have any hope of a continuing career as a bestseller.

Lightning
was published without enthusiasm—and at once became my biggest success to date. Frequently during
Lightning’s
run on the bestseller lists, booksellers and wholesalers were out of stock and could not fill reader demand until one reprinting or another dribbled into stores. I followed
Lightning
with
Midnight
(not my original or preferred title, but that is another story), in which a dog played a secondary role. CPW held that this book was too different from
Lightning
to be a success, but it included a dog in a secondary role, which pleased my publisher, and it became my first number-one bestseller in hardcover. In my next book,
The Bad Place
(not my original or preferred title, but that’s another story), I brought a dog into the story again—but on the last page. This little inside joke was noted but not appreciated by my publisher.

Although I greatly enjoy writing about dogs and, in the judgment of some critics, have a knack for it, and though I would have enjoyed including them in certain subsequent books, I featured four-footed furries only in secondary roles and only in two of my next seven novels. When it suits me, I can be as stubborn and as temperamental as anyone, and if you try to make an umbrella stand out of one of my feet, you’re in for one hell of a fight.

To date, the four of my books that generated the most reader mail on publication are also the four that continue to bring the most mail year after year:
Watchers, Fear Nothing
(and its sequel
Seize the Night), From the Corner of His Eye,
and
Lightning.
If I had accepted the common publishing wisdom that readers are sheep who prefer to graze on the same flavor of grass, I would have written far different novels from those I delivered. Had I written those stories instead of what I chose to write, sales of my books might not now be nearly three hundred million copies worldwide—and without a doubt, I would not have been as happy at the keyboard as I have been these many years.

Readers are not sheep. They are wolves, filled with curiosity, adventurous, always hungry for a tasty treat with at least a little substance to it. The readers I know and love, the kind of readers to whom I owe my career, are more likely to say “woof” than “baa,” and not just because I sometimes write stories with dogs in them. Thank God you’re out there. If my writing career had failed, I would have made a lousy plumber; if I’d taken up carpentry, I’d now have six instead of ten fingers, and everyone would call me “Stubs.”