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Especially with the economy the way it is now.”
    29
    Trelaine’s next book had Darrow going after a ring of rapists who made movies of what they did, previewed them over YouTube, then sold them through a “back channel” over the Internet. It was his biggest seller ever.
    A few weeks later, Trelaine’s body was discovered in the front seat of his Mercedes. The back of his head was nothing but pulp.
    The papers went insane with speculation. What had made him a target for assassination? Was it his courtroom fighting for justice? Or was it his novels, the ones that had carried his crusade even farther?
    Trelaine’s entire backlist was reissued, with new thematic jacketing of the paperbacks. On the back of every one was a collage of newspaper headlines about his murder.
    They flew off the shelves.
    30
    I let six months pass. Then I called the editor, and told him I had something he
had
to see. I could hear the boredom in his voice until I said, “And I can’t tell you about it on the phone.”
    Inside his office, I told him I had another three Darrow novels on my hard drive. All completed.
    He wasn’t bored anymore.
    31
    The head of the publishing house called a press conference to announce that Trelaine couldn’t be silenced. “Whoever had him killed thought they could stop him from writing the truth, but they didn’t know who they were dealing with,” he told a rapt audience. “There are at least two more
completed
manuscripts already in our hands. That’s all I have to say at this time.”
    The press corps had heard a version of that story before. Stieg Larsson died before
any
of his books had been published, and now he’s the bestselling writer in the world. They did everything but shout “Amen!”
    CNN ran the story every hour for a whole day and night.
    The bloggers kept it alive for weeks more.
    Preorders came in so quickly they almost crashed the company’s server. It was probably even worse at Amazon.
    32
    On a special crossover episode between
Law & Order
and
CSI
, a crusading novelist was found dead in the front seat of his car.
    At first, his wife was the prime suspect. Especially when they found she’d been having an affair, and that there was a big life insurance policy, too. But the murder turned out to be the work of a professional. The truth came out when they matched the assassin’s “signature” to other crimes in the FBI database.
    In exchange for the DA’s office “taking the needle off the table,” the assassin gave up the people who hired him—a cartel of kiddie-porn producers.
    33
    When the next Darrow finally came out, they couldn’t print them fast enough.
    HBO bought the series.
Variety
quoted a studio bigwig as saying “Darrow is too big for any one movie.”
    34
    Trelaine’s editor is my editor now.
    My own novel was released, under my own name. The housepaid a respectable advance, and made a commitment to major promotion: full-page ad in the
Times
, thirty-city tour, a launch party at the publisher’s mansion. Plus the stuff the public doesn’t know about: window displays, end-caps, front-of-the-store dumps … you have to
pay
for all that. Throw in the top-tier Amazon “package,” a ton of favor-trade blurbs, and you can bet the farm on the outcome. It’s simple math:
payoff
equals
payout
.
    I’m a lock for The List.
    I wonder if Julia will see me on TV.
    for David Hechler

SURE THING
    When I got down to my last sixty-one bucks, I knew it was time to go.
    My room rent was paid for that night, and they wouldn’t lock me out until ten the next morning.
    I couldn’t die with money in my pocket.
    So I put fifty on the nose of a trotting mare I always liked. Fancy Candy was a gross longshot, even against the pack of non-winners they had her in with at Yonkers.
    That left enough for a better supper than I’ve had in … ah, who remembers? I blew the change on a tip for the waitress. For luck.
    I never buy the newspapers—they tell you who’s running, but not