Stuart Woods: Dirt

“Hickock could grow old while that happens,” Stone said.

“Oh, they’ll get around to it.”

“You think you’ll be able to get anything out of the wiseguy I wounded?”

“Who knows? We’ll see what’s on his yellow sheet, see what we have to bargain with. Maybe he’ll hand me somebody.”

“My bet is that a bullet from the nickel-plated twenty-five with the silencer killed Arnie Millman.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised. We’ll see.”

They made ready to leave. “Arrington!” Stone called out.

“Coming,” she called back from the bedroom.

“How’s the new apartment?” Stone asked.

“We’re moving in in a couple of weeks,” Dino replied. “Mary Ann is going nuts, buying stuff. Did you know Ralph Lauren makes wallpaper? I didn’t.”

Arrington appeared with a suitcase, walked over to Stone, set down the case, and leaned against him. “I don’t want to live here anymore,” she said.

“You don’t,” he replied.

They made their way slowly downtown in a taxi.

“Pull over here for a minute, will you, driver?” Stone said. The cab pulled over to the curb. Stone reached into Arrington’s bag, retrieved the two packets, got out of the car, and dropped them into a Federal Express bin.

“What was that?” Arrington asked when he was back in the cab.

“Oh, just jump-starting the wheels of justice,” he replied.

“So it’s over?” Arrington asked.

“It is,” Stone said.

“No loose ends?”

“Well, yes. There’s the murder of Martha McMahon, Amanda’s secretary.”

“ Murder? You think Amanda pushed her?

“That’s my best guess, but nobody will ever be able to prove it. Amanda will get away with it.”

She took her hand in his. “Stone, my darling,” she said, “if I’ve learned anything in my life, it’s that nobody gets away with anything. Ever.”

He turned and kissed her lightly. “I hope you’re right,” he said.

I would like to express my gratitude to every gossip columnist in the business, for giving me such good material.

I am also grateful to my editor, HarperCollins Vice President and Associate Publisher Gladys Justin Carr, and her staff, for all their hard work; and to my literary agent, Morton Janklow, his principal associate, Anne Sibbald, and all the people at Janklow and Nesbit for their careful attention to my career over the years.

Stuart Woods on Stone Barrington

An Interview by Claire E. White

Stuart Woods was born in the small southern town of Manchester, Georgia on January 9, 1938. His mother was a church organist and his father an ex-convict who left when Stuart was two years old, when it was suggested to him that, because of his apparent participation in the burglary of a Royal Crown Cola bottling plant, he might be more comfortable in another state. He chose California, and Stuart only met him twice thereafter before his death in 1959, when Stuart was a senior in college.

After college, Stuart spent a year in Atlanta, two months of which were spent in basic training for what he calls “the draft-dodger program” of the Air National Guard. He worked at a men’s’ clothing store and at Rich’s department store while he got his military obligation out of the way. Then, in the autumn of 1960, he moved to New York in search of a writing job. The magazines and newspapers weren’t hiring, so he got a job in a training program at an advertising agency, earning seventy dollars a week. “It is a measure of my value to the company,” he says, “that my secretary was earning eighty dollars a week.”

At the end of the sixties, after spending several weeks in London, he moved to that city and worked there for three years in various advertising agencies. At the end of that time he decided that the time had come for him to write the novel he had been thinking about since the age of ten. But after getting about a hundred pages into the book, he discovered sailing, and “…everything went to hell. All I did was sail.”

After a couple of years of this his grandfather died, leaving him, “…just enough money to get into debt for a boat,” and he decided to compete in the 1976 Observer Single-handed Transatlantic Race (OSTAR). Since his previous sailing experience consisted of, “…racing a ten-foot plywood dingy on Sunday afternoons against small children, losing regularly,” he spent eighteen months learning more about sailing and, especially, ocean navigation while the boat was built at a yard in Cork.

He moved to a nearby gamekeeper’s cottage on a big estate to be near the building boat. In the summer of 1975 he sailed out to the Azores in a two-handed race, in company with Commander Bill King, a famous World War II submarine commander and yachtsman, who had done a round-the-world, single-handed voyage. Commander King then flew back to Ireland, and Stuart sailed back, single-handed, as his qualifying cruise for the OSTAR the following year.

The next couple of years were spent in Georgia, dividing his time between Manchester and Atlanta, while selling his grandfather’s business, a small-town department store, and writing two non-fiction books. Blue Water, Green Skipper , was an account of his Irish experience and the OSTAR, and A Romantic’s Guide to the Country Inns of Britain and Ireland , “was a travel book, done on a whim.

He also did some more sailing. In August of 1979 he competed in the now notorious Fastnet Race of 1979, which was struck by a huge storm. Fifteen competitors and four observers lost their lives, but Stuart and his host crew finished in good order, with little damage. That October and November, he spent skippering his friend’s yacht back across the Atlantic, calling at the Azores, Madiera and the Canary Islands, finishing at Antigua, in the Caribbean.

In the meantime, the British publisher of Blue Water, Green Skipper had sold the American rights to W.W. Norton, a New York publishing house, and they had also contracted to publish the novel, on the basis of two hundred pages and an outline, for an advance of $7500. “I was out of excuses to not finish it, and I had taken their money, so I finally had to get to work.” He finished the novel and it was published in 1981, eight years after he had begun it. The novel was called Chiefs .

Though only 20,000 copies were printed in hard-back, the book achieved a hefty paperback sale and was made into a six-hour critically acclaimed television drama for CBS-TV, starring Charlton Heston, Danny Glover, John Goodman, Billy D. Williams, and Stephen Collins.

Chiefs also established Stuart as a novelist in the eyes of the New York publishing community and was the beginning of a successful career. He has since written fifteen more novels, the most recent of which are Dead in the Water , which just came out in paperback, and Swimming to Catalina , just out in hardcover from HarperCollins. Both books feature Stone Barrington, the handsome, sophisticated attorney/investigator, and are New York Times bestsellers. Chiefs won the coveted Edgar award from the Mystery Writers of America, and Stuart was nominated again for Palindrome . Recently he has been awarded France ’s Prix de Literature Policière, for Imperfect Strangers .

In 1984 Stuart married for the first time, but the marriage ended in 1990. “I married too young,” he says. “I was only forty-seven.” Then, after fifteen years in Atlanta, he moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. There he spent five years, building a house and meeting his second wife, Chris, who was working in a local bookstore while trying to write her own novel. He now divides his time between Florida and Connecticut and travels widely. At fifty-nine, he has no plans to retire. “I reckon I’m good for another fifteen or twenty novels, maybe more,” he says. “I began to be a lot more careful about my health after I learned that heart disease can be prevented by drinking red wine, so I should be around for a long time.”