At the age of fourteen…

This inspired me to write some crime stories… “’Here’s to crime!’ he shouted and raised a glass of champagne, but he crumpled like a pricked balloon as the heavy hand of Detective Sergeant Murphy fell on his shoulder.” …”Joe Maguire regarded the flushed face of the dealer with disfavor. ‘A coke bird’, he decided. ’Better cut him off the payroll; get coked up and shoot a good client.’"

I did a short story too, with a trick ending, about this gangster who goes to a fortune-teller… “’ This man is a criminal’, she thought shrewdly, ‘a gangster, perhaps… he must have made enemies’. I see danger’, she said. The man’s face twitched – he needed to know. ‘I see a man approaching… he has a gun… he lifts the gun… he’ – With an inarticulate cry the man leapt to his feet and whipped out an automatic, spitting dead to the fortune teller… blood on the crystal ball, and on the table, a severed human hand."

I wrote a series about murderers who all died of brain fever in a screaming delirium of remorse, and one character in the desert who murdered all his companions – sitting there looking at the dead bodies and wondering why he did it. When the vultures came and ate them he got so much relief he called them “The Vultures of Gold” and that was the title of my story, which closed this rather nauseous period. (Este parágrafo é para o Interzone…).


At fifteen I was sent to the Los Alamos Ranch School for my health, were they later made the first atom bomb.

I was forced to become a boy scout, eat everything on my plate, exercise before breakfast, sleep on a porch in zero weather, stay outside all afternoon, ride a sullen, spiteful, recalcitrant horse twice a week and all day on Saturday. We had to stay outdoors no matter what, all afternoon – they even timed you in the john. I was always cold, and hated my horse, a sulky strawberry roan. There were crew leaders many of them drunk with power – who made life hell to the crew.

What I liked to do was get in my room against the radiator and play records and read the Little Blue Books put out by Haldeman-Julius, free spirit and benevolent agnostic… Remy de Gourmont… Baudelaire… Guy de Maupassant… Anatole France… and I started writing allegories put in a vaguely Oriental setting, with dapper jewel thieves over the wine, engaged in philosophical discussions I prefer not to remember.

I had a bad rep with the other boys… “Burns incense in his room… reading French books…”

Then I had an English period, gentlemen adventures and all that…

And then I read Oscar Wilde. Dorian Gray and Lord Henry gave birth to Lord Cheshire, one of the most unsavoury characters in fiction.

And I wrote a story for True Confessions, about a decent young man who gets on the dope. He was grieving the loss of a favorite dog, sitting on a park bench looking at the lake, smell of burning leaves…

“’ Hello kid, mind if I sit down?’ The man was thin and grey with pinpoint eyes, the prison shadow in them like something dead. ‘If you don’t mind my saying so, you look down in the dumps about something’.

In a burst of confidence the young man told him about the dog “… he went inside the burning house. You see, he thought I was in there.”

“Kid, I got a pinch of something here make you forget about that old dead dog…”

That’s how it started. Then he fell into the hands of a sinister hypnotist who plied him with injections of marijuana.

“Kill, kill, kill”. The words turned relentlessly in his brain, and he walked up to a young cop and said “If you don’t lock me up I shall kill you”. The cop sapped him without a word. But a wise old detective in the precinct takes a like to the boy, sets him straight and gets him off the snow. It was a hard fight but he made it. “And if any kind stranger ever offers me some pills that will drive all my blues away, I will simply call a policemen.” (sim, sim).

A story about four jolly murderers was conceived in the Hotel La Fonda in a rare trip to Santa Fe when I was feeling guilty about masturbating twice in one day.