“Let’s see where it goes after this, although you’ve got some stiff competition on the list. Everyone wants their new book out this time of year for holiday sales.” Every big bestselling fiction writer was on it.
She told the nuns when she went home the next day, and word of her book being on the New York Times bestseller list spread through the convent like a tidal wave. Several of them had already read it when she gave them advance copies, and the nuns who liked crime thrillers had loved it. The others just read it because she wrote it, and they were so proud of her and wanted to support her.
The following week when Rose called her at the convent, the book had climbed from number ten to number four on the list. And her final Christmas gift after that was one more notch to number three, where it sat for two weeks, into January. The book had been the surprise hit of the season, despite its gory subject, and the fact that mostly men would read it. She didn’t have a heavy female readership, and no man would buy it for a woman for Christmas, with rare exceptions. They bought it for themselves, or the women in their lives bought it for them.
Bert had called her immediately to congratulate her, and Amanda, her editor at the publisher, had sent her emails every week, announcing her ranking on the list, and telling her how thrilled they were.
“Your publisher is very excited about this, Alex,” Rose told her on the phone. “This is a very important step in your career.” At twenty-one. It was hard to believe, and her publisher had no idea how young she was, since all their dealings with her, even contractually, went through her agent. She was a mystery to them, except for the bio that she and Rose had created for the mythical Alexander Green.
It was difficult for Alex to absorb or even remotely understand what this could mean for her in the future. More money than the last deal probably, hopefully more readers, and the bestseller list again. But she couldn’t see beyond that, and didn’t need to. It meant she could support herself by writing, for now anyway, if people didn’t get tired of her books. She didn’t want to count on this yet, and was afraid the bubble would burst one day, and it might. It took years to develop a John le Carré, Stephen King, Georges Simenon, Frederick Forsyth, or an Agatha Christie. She wasn’t there yet and didn’t expect to be, maybe ever. But it felt fabulous knowing that her book had done so well, and there had been a steady build from the last one. She walked into local bookstores just for the pleasure of seeing her books stacked high on the bestseller table. She grinned from ear to ear each time she saw it, and the nuns took pictures at every bookstore where they went.
Despite the astonishing success of her book, she went back to school after Christmas vacation, for her last semester at Boston College. She had only a few easy classes left to take for graduation. She’d done all the hard ones much earlier and had gotten the required courses out of the way.
She finished her fifth novel during spring break, got Bert’s blessing on it, and sent it to Rose, expecting a warm reception for it. A week later, her agent called her and sounded worried.
“The moment of truth has come, Alex. We want a new contract for your last two books. And we want a much bigger one this time, after the success of Darkness.” She still had another book, her third one, due out in the summer. But they had two more complete now to sell. “They just told me they won’t give you a contract now until they meet you. I’ve been arguing with them about it for three days.”
“Tell them I’m in Europe and I broke both my legs.” She was only half teasing, but Rose wasn’t.
“They say they don’t care how long they have to wait. They want to meet the phenomenon who is creating these books. Maybe they want to be sure it’s just one person, and not a committee of some kind, which is happening more and more these days, where a writer does the outline but has half a dozen minions to write it for him. Whatever the reason, they say no new contract until they meet you. They won’t even let me deliver the last two books to them until they do.”
“That’s ridiculous. After the success of the last one, they should be willing to buy the new ones even if I were a gnome with three heads.”
“That’s beside the point,” Rose insisted. “They want to meet you, and they’re not going to relent until they do. They’re just as stubborn as you are,” she said, sounding tense. Alex’s future was on the line here, even if she didn’t understand that. She could be a willful child at times.
“They could blow everything if they let the cat out of the bag that I’m a woman,” Alex said, genuinely afraid of that. “It could really make people mad now. They might not even believe I wrote them,” more because of her age than her sex.
“We could have some ironclad confidentiality agreement drawn up by an attorney, giving you a huge amount of damages if they talk. That’s not unheard-of. They have to have a stake in it too, and we could put some real teeth in it. But you’re not going to get out of meeting them. You’re a big investment for them now, and in the future.”
Alex worried that Rose may have asked for too much money for them to buy the books and they were angry, but Rose assured her that wasn’t the problem.
“How much did you ask for?” Alex frowned as she asked her.
“I asked for the appropriate amount,” Rose said firmly, “based on sales of the last book, and the first one. This would have happened anyway. They were already antsy the last time. You can’t hide in the shadows forever.”
“I have to. I’m not a man, and they and everyone else think I am,” Alex told her with determination. “And I know you don’t believe me, but a lot of men won’t buy crime thrillers by women. My father said so.” Alex had believed him all her life. And this was no time to test the theory.
Rose didn’t want to risk the publisher’s ire by Alex refusing to meet them. And she and Rose wanted a new contract, which wasn’t going to happen unless they met. There was a real danger that if readers knew the Green books were written by a twenty-one-year-old college girl, and that she’d started writing them at nineteen, readers would feel duped. In a way, she was a genius, but Rose didn’t want to have to explain that to the public, nor to her publisher. “Let me talk to a lawyer and see what kind of agreement we can draw up, where they have real money at stake if they expose you. But they might not be willing to sign it,” Rose warned her.
It took a week for Rose’s attorney to come up with language they both liked. They were asking for a $10 million penalty for losses into the future if the publisher exposed her. Although she could start all over again under another pseudonym, her style was too distinct and recognizable now.