Hiding Out
Tommy Martini, the hero of Bloody Martini, has found the perfect hideout – a monastery in Mexico where he can hide from his enemies. Like Tommy, I’ve always loved hideouts. It began in childhood when I dug a hole in our backyard deep enough to sit in and look at a candle. My mother would come to investigate, look down at the boards with which I’d covered it and ask, “Are you coming up for lunch?” This somewhat spoiled the whole idea.
When I went off to Penn State I found a more sophisticated hideout. It was a basement apartment without windows. It was situated between a bar and a bowling alley, so that at most times I was shielded from the outside by recorded music and the sound of bowling balls crashing into ten pins just beyond my bedroom wall. At that time, female students were forbidden to enter the apartment of a male student. One day, while I was entertaining a female student, the phone rang. The voice on the other end said she was a friend of my guest. I handed the phone to my guest and the voice she heard was that of the dreaded House Mother. My guest had been betrayed, and once again my hideout had been penetrated.
For this infraction of campus rules, I was kicked out of Penn State and moved to New York City. I found another hideout – a basement apartment without windows, cheap enough for an unpublished writer. My only visitors were giant cockroaches and rats. These days an unpublished writer couldn’t possibly live there, as the rent would be $5000 a day.
When I became a published writer, I left New York and searched for another hideout. I found it in the far north woods – a broken down farmhouse in an abandoned settlement. The closest phone was in a booth outside a restaurant fifteen miles away. You can’t beat that for a hideout, especially when the snow is six feet deep.
When several books of mine were optioned for movies and one of them even got made, I left the abandoned settlement. It was still abandoned, but I was looking for a change of scene. I found it on a remote coastline of Maine. There was a forest around me on three sides and the sea was a natural barrier in front of me. One day a tour boat came by and over its loudspeakers I heard the tour guide announcing to anyone within earshot, “And there’s the house where the author of ET lives.” Once again my hideout had been penetrated.
Which has left me with only one option – to create a hideout no one could ever find. It’s between the covers of a book, and Tommy Martini is hiding there right now. Until, of course, a faraway friend is murdered and Tommy has to leave his hideout and find out whodunit and why.
