I shall start bravely, with a cliche: You can’t judge a book by its cover.
But maybe you can judge it by its title. At least that's kind of what happens as a writer.
Previously, I’ve started novels with a title, which provided a sort of guiding principle. But this latest novel began as a short story, which was itself based on an experience I had when I’d first arrived in L.A..
Bear with me as I digress: The year was 1981, and Anwar Sadat had recently been assassinated. Shortly after his death, the CIA—which hadn’t seen the assassination coming (what’s new?) took out full-page ads in major magazines—remember magazines?—seeking recruits to help fill what they had determined was an enormous intelligence gap.
I was in L.A., hanging out at The Improv, writing spec sitcom scripts, hoping to break into the industry, and getting nowhere. But I was also very interested in foreign affairs. I saw one of the CIA ads and thought, “You know, I might be a pretty good spy.” I’d been a reporter before the TV-writing bug bit me, and figured that a spy was really just a reporter who didn’t reveal that he was reporting. You had to be able to listen, which I’d always been told I was good at. You had to be able to write, which I could do well also. Besides, I liked to travel, and the job sounded exciting.
I wrote a letter to the CIA in which I spelled out my qualifications—not mentioning my forays into sitcom writing--and noted my alarm over the state of world affairs. It must have been a good letter because a few days later I received in the mail a letter from the CIA, inviting me in for an interview. If memory serves, the letter arrived in an unmarked envelope, but my imagination may be embellishing this particular detail.
I went for the interview, which was an utter failure. (Or was it? I could be lying. I may actually be a spy, you know…)
Anyway, I didn’t write this story for thirty years, but when I finally did write it I thought that it had the seeds of a longer tale, with this premise: “What if a struggling sitcom writer got a job at the CIA?”
The concept went through many iterations before crystallizing as this: What if a struggling sitcom writer gets a job for the CIA, but doesn’t even know he’s working for the CIA? I knew I had something interesting there, but it seemed a little far-fetched. How could you work for the CIA and not know it? A passing remark by my brother, Bruce, answered the question. Bruce had a friend who was in the CIA and wanted to join the civilian workforce. Unfortunately, his entire career had been basically classified, so he had no resume.
I thought, what if my character worked for a CIA cover company that was created to give legitimacy to CIA agents who are leaving the agency? This dovetailed with another experience of mine, which was writing for the employee magazines of a big insurance company. The CIA cover company, I decided, would be an insurance company. Retired and compromised CIA agents worked there, built up their resume, and then had the credentials to join the working world. My character would write for the company’s employee magazine, yet have no idea that his real employer was the CIA.
I really love this idea, and I won’t spoil the story any more other than to say that it turned out to be something more of a subplot than the actual plot of the book. But that is neither here nor there.
Remember, the previous several paragraphs were a digression. I started out talking about titles, so let me get back to that. As I wrote the book, which spooled out in many funny and unexpected ways, my working title, Secret Spy, became less and less accurate. My character, Tom Huttle (who is the central character in two other novels, Echo Valley and Huttle the Hero, both set many years later) was not a spy at all, secret or otherwise. He wasn’t the main character, either, much to my surprise.
Ultimately, the story does have a lot to do with spies, however. It’s just that Tom isn’t one of them. I needed a title that reflected what the story is really about. So, here is the description of the book: “Hollywood, 1982. For FBI Special Agent Terrence Tillberry, being in love with Petra Tarasova is wonderful, except for two things: First, she’s in the KGB. Second, she can’t stand him. It’s not like Terrence is much of a prize, either. He’s barely holding onto his job, and since his divorce, he’s ballooned in weight, thanks to a diet of Hostess fruit pies and Twinkies. And the financial strain of caring for his increasingly demented mother hasn’t helped him feel any less desperate. Luck seems to turn Terrence’s way when he discovers a secret list of CIA operatives. Treason might just be the way to win Petra’s heart, and maybe solve the rest of his problems, too.
But when the bodies start piling up, Terrence realizes that his problems are only just beginning.”
See what I mean about the Tom Huttle story being a subplot? He doesn’t even bear a mention in this description. Poor Tom. Not to worry, though. He has plenty to do. In any event, it was clear that Secret Spy would simply be an inappropriate title for this story. Trying to come up with a better title, I brainstormed, I asked my writing group, and generally worked myself into a later. In darker moments I thought, “What if I never come up with a title? What if I’ve written an entire book and it will languish forever because I can’t figure out what to call it?”
The thing is, titles have an enormous amount of work to do. They have to convey the tone of the story: in this case, funny. They have to give an idea of the central conflict. I dabbled with Spies in Love, but that’s the actual title of a recent nonfiction book about terrorists. Not funny. Ideally, the title also provides a sense of the setting, too. (Flashback: I wrote my first screenplay in 1981. It was a drama about a girl molested by her father, which at the time was a very taboo subject. I titled it—pretentiousness alert—A Bird and a Memory. How embarrassing. Needless to say, it went nowhere.)
I shared my perplexity with my pal, J.B. White, and told him the central conflicts of the story. “How about The Spy Who Loathed Me?”
That was it! The story is essentially about Terrence Tillberry’s increasingly desperate and self-destructive efforts to gain the affection of KGB agent Petra Tarasova. She doesn’t like him. Plus, being a play on the James Bond title “The Spy Who Loved me,” the title had a nice retro-homage feel to it.
Then came the cover. I wanted to use a Hostess fruit pie with a bite out of it, against the Soviet hammer and sickle. But my friend Barbara Morgenroth felt that, given the constraints of ebook thumbnails, such an image would be too busy. She made the a great cover using a battered hammer and sickle against a red background. The title, in an homage to the Saul Bass movie posters for the Hitchcock and Bond pictures of the 60s and 70s, is a nice retro typeface, which stands out against the red background.
You can see it at the left. Yes, it’s only a couple of square inches, which is no reflection on the acres of work and thought that went into it.
