Michael Malone's Worst Book Tour

This great contribution from best-selling author, Michael Malone:


"On a snowy, slushy, sleeting New York winter night, I made my way to a Barnes and Noble bookstore on the upper West Side, where I was to give a reading from First Lady, the third in my trilogy of "Hillston" novels. A clerk thoughtfully waited at the doors, studying a flyer with my picture on it. I gave her my name.
As I did so, a fierce overweight man near us, bundled in a blue parka with a ratty fake-fur hood, shoved a wet Shop Rite bag at me. "Sign these!" he ordered. "I collect you. I drove in from Newark."

Despite the sleet, I started to reach for the bag, right there on the sidewalk, but the young clerk-- flushed with what? enthusiasm for my fiction?--pulled me away and whisked me inside and onto the escalator.

She smiled uneasily. "There's a, unfortunately, a problem."

It was only then that I looked over to the signing area. Around the otherwise depressingly empty cluster of chairs, facing a podium where a small banner looked to read "Michael alone," there stood milling about at least half-a-dozen men with NYPD on their enormous yellow slickers.

Despite her relatively petite size, the young clerk had so a firm grip on my elbow that I wondered if she was charged with turning me over to an IRS agent at the top of the stairs, someone who'd come to arrest me for some inadvertent claim I'd made about having an office in the home.

But then I noticed twisting yellow police tape snaking around the room and out the doors. Behind it, paramedics were lifting onto a gurney the corpse of a very elderly woman whose feet, encased in pink sneakers, stuck up stiff with rigor mortis.

At the landing, the clerk turned me over with relief to a harried bookstore manager. He and I watched the crowd below as they stepped back solemnly to make room for the medics. They bounced their gurney along with a cheerful nonchalance.

The manager apologized. "We had to cancel your reading. Someone died, waiting in a back row where no one noticed her."

"Waiting for me? I wasn't even late."

"No. Not for you."

This was oddly a disappointment. Not even the dead woman had come to hear me read.
He explained, "It's old homeless people. They sit in our signing areas to get out of the cold. They fall asleep. We try not to bothe r them."

He waved his arm at the nooks and crannies of bookshelves below. "Especially in the snow."

"It's kind of you," I agreed.

"I don't think we'll do it anymore probably. This is a total downer."

I tried to cheer him up. "She looked like she could have been in her nineties."

"I guess"

"At least she died surrounded by books."

"Ha." I wasn't sure what he meant by his sharp laugh.

He took me back down to the entrance and said goodbye. In front of the store, cops blocked off sightseers while the medics hoisted the woman into the back of the city ambulance.

"Just sign these books!" shouted the man in the parka, still out there, now skirting around the barricade. "I drove all the way from Newark!"

He hurled his soaked shopping bag onto the hood of the ambulance; it burst open and my first three novels slid into the slush of the gutter.

Suddenly the ambulance lurched forward with a shriek of its siren, astonishingly loud; louder than the man from New Jersey, who endeared himself to me forever by his wail of grief. His still unsigned books had been run over by huge ice-crusted tires, both front and back.

I signed them, wet as they were, against the bookstore window, on which the young clerk was posting a sign. 'MICHAEL MALONE READING CANCELED.'"


Michael Malone is the author of ten internationally acclaimed novels, including the classic "Handling Sin" "Uncivil Seasons," "The Last Noel," and the NYT bestseller "The Killing Club." His newest novel "The Four Corners of the Sky" appears on May 1. Currently at work on a sequel to his "Hillston" series of novels, he has also written plays, television programs, a collection of short stories and two books of non-fiction, one on film, as well as innumerable essays for such magazines and journals as Harper's, the New York Times, Playboy, Partisan Review and the Wilson Quarterly. Among his prizes are the O Henry, the Edgar, the Writers Guild Award and an Emmy as head writer of ABC's "One Life to Live." He has taught at Yale, the University of Pennsylvania and Swarthmore and is now a professor in the Theater Studies Department at Duke University.