The goal of my writing

Hat tip to Rand, who inspired me to do something similar, no comparison of stature implied. I began reading her works in the early 1970s, kept at it until I found every syllable. I was luckier than most, because the University of Wisconsin and city libraries had collected quite a lot. In Philadelphia, I found LP recordings of her speeches and videos of her TV interviews. I was obliquely involved in multiple attempts to bring Atlas to the big screen during her lifetime, so I was privy to considerable gossip. Publication of her Journals and web chatter completed my appraisal of who she was. Others had personal encounters. I did not. Nor did I have any interest in or respect for The Collective, the Brandens, Peikoff, the Society, TOC, Sciabarra, or anyone else, however intelligent and industrious they were. I studied her fiction and drama. It seemed particularly contemptible that others made a career of restating her ethical ideas, which I deemed the least important aspect of her legacy. Not asking you to agree, speaking only for myself as an individual, a former filmmaker, screenwriter, legal theorist, and author of several novels and a pile of nonfiction books and essays.

I was ill-prepared to write anything, sketchily self-educated with little formal schooling. All schools infuriated me, especially higher ed. So, I read authors I liked -- RLS, Balzac, Fitzgerald, Gene Rhodes, Ray Chandler, and Dashiell Hammett, with as much depth and passion that I devoted to Ayn Rand. It was a little tedious to study Grotius and Aquinas, but it paid off, gave me a good grounding in classical logic. I became aware in great detail that legal philosophy was beset with tiny errors that grew to fallacies writ large in constitutional law. Few men saw the genius of Paine's mature thought or the obvious truths argued by Otis and Lincoln.

Please forgive the digression. It was never my goal to be a legal scholar. I got pushed into it. One wonders -- however briefly -- why law students are exempted from studying Madison's Debates In The Federal Convention and Henry Steele Commager's Documents of American History. Our forefathers faced fundamental questions and flunked the test. It fell to me, an idiot in many ways, to repair the damage by writing a new constitution, another task that I got pushed into. One cannot build a free nation, unless it is secured by due process of law and an independent apolitical judiciary. Laissez Faire City died for want of common law courts. My work is often shunned without debate, because it asks men to think. LFC liked my soap opera serial The Good Walk Alone and published several of my essays on government, but drew the line at taking practical steps to transition from arbitrary dictatorship to civilian due process.

Dictators and their henchmen were durable antagonists in my fiction, beginning with a first novel set in the distant future on Mars. It's an enormous challenge to write a first novel, and it required several revisions over the years to straighten out and simplify the story of a brave man and a brave woman who changed the course of plausible fictional history. That's typical Wolf DeVoon, boy meets girl and they fall in love, defend each other and defy the threat of lethal force wielded by loveless hardened autocrats. It might be the whole of human history, a never ending passion of private action in defense of liberty and justice.

It's not my purpose to plug my work. I'm not difficult to find, if you care to read something I wrote. Recent work found an appreciative core of friendly reviewers. I'll speak about my last novel because it's the last one I will write. I'm old and sickly, and I don't want to repeat the death bed karma of RLS, proudly telling his wife that Katriona, sequel to Kidnapped, was the best story he had ever written. It wasn't. It's important to sense when it's time to quit, while the quitting is good. The very last story I attempted, a novellete, offended and disgusted an old friend. I tore it up. It's time to quit. Scott Fitzgerald died with unfinished work ("The Last Tycoon"). Chandler died with unfinished work ("Poodle Springs"). I shouldn't compare myself with Fitzgerald or Chandler, far better authors than I was. However, I'll say a few words about "Partners," a much admired swan song that was completed while I had the vision and power and momentum to conceive and execute a thrilling full-length novel.

I think it's fairly clear that most novelists are best if they write about themselves. Melville's seafaring tales, for instance. Hemingway's adventures in Spain and Cuba. Vonnegut's war experience. "Partners" is set in 1975 in Milwaukee, the locality and era of my hard youth. I remember it in sharp focus, and the main character is a slightly taller, better me. I knew the love interest, slightly brighter and braver than the girl who loved me. It's a story of triangles. There is a glamorous ex, maddeningly stupid. There is a professional killer who the main character is drawn to partner and understudy, pulling him away from the love interest who holds the key to his happiness. The background is another personal flashback, Cosa Nostra, hippies, and corrupt police. Drugs were cheap. Sometimes, life was cheap.

If someone had told me 20 years ago that all my ignorance, aspirations, global adventures, and years of experimentation as a novelist would result in the bittersweet tale of love and loss in "Partners," I would not have believed it. It was not on my radar. I poured everything I had into a four-part series, The Case Files of Cable & Blount, loved every word of it, adored Chris and Peachy, two years of writing full time, 10 hours a day, 7 days a week. The final volume of that series is a marvelous adventure in stereo, separated and searching for each other. But when it was finished, it had to be finished. I didn't want to repeat the mistake that Forester made, taking Hornblower into elderly decline. I had to leave Chris and Peachy in their active maturity, early 60s. I had no plan to write anything else. Suddenly, clear as a bell, the city I grew up in. A guy age 31, sitting at a cheap lunch counter, reading classified ads to find a job that he didn't want to do, because all jobs were the same. Not enough money, not enough challenge, every day exactly the same as every other. Fifty bucks in his pocket with rent due on an empty single apartment in a crummy neighborhood. A gust of fate taps his shoulder and sweeps away his long hair and mustache, puts a chrome .357 on his hip in icy winter.

The goal of my writing was unexpectedly fulfilled in a masterwork. Nice, but it's extremely odd that I quit writing, incapable of starting another novel, unable to conceive or execute a good short story. A switch has been turned off by illness and infirmity.

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