THE AUTHOR'S KILLER INSTINCTS - The Washington Post

August 15, 2024

With his silver hair, sad eyes, grenadier mustache and fondness for turtlenecks and tweeds, Lawrence Sanders looked more like somebody's dapper grandfather than the rapid-fire craftsman of often disturbingly kinky crime novels.

But by the time he died Saturday at age 78 at his home in Pompano Beach, Fla., he had written 38 books in 27 years that sold some 57 million copies. His publishers used to beg him to slow down.

"They ask me why I have to write so many," he said one day over lunch in his beloved Manhattan. "I point out that I didn't publish a thing till I was 50. I've got a lot to say."

He certainly did. Though he was best known in recent years for his chatty society mysteries like "McNally's Gambit," set in Palm Beach, his heart remained in a far darker vein of books set primarily in New York and occasionally rooted, in curious ways, in Washington.

One of the more provocative, "The Tomorrow File," was inspired by the oblique language of the Nixon White House. It is narrated in an Orwellian newspeak -- money is known as "love"; sexual partners are known not as "lovers" but "users." It opened with a naked female member of a future president's Cabinet galloping bareback down a beach in the moonlight, her nipples painted green.

"Even some of my friends were put off by that one," he said. "They liked it but couldn't figure out what the hell I thought I was doing."

What he was doing, he said, was exploring the writer's craft in every way he could, not in search of immortality but of amusement. "I was a copy editor for 20 years," for magazines like Popular Science, he said. "I still feel like I've just been let out of the cage."

He claimed to have a trunk of rejection slips from early fiction efforts, but when he finally landed a publisher in 1970 he hit the jackpot. The book was "The Anderson Tapes," the story of an ad hoc gang of robbers ripping off an entire Manhattan apartment building. It is told entirely in the form of transcripts of surveillance tapes.

"I had . . . a pretty fair acquaintance with how sophisticated surveillance technology had become," he said. "I knew the FBI and other governmental agencies were using it and I thought it would make a good marketing effort for the book."

But what his gimmick highlighted instead was the curiously sympathetic humanity of his characters. He could put you inside the criminal mind and make you almost relish being there.

He did that so well in his second book, "The First Deadly Sin," that he said he would never write that truly again. It is the dark, bizarre and absolutely riveting tale of a serial killer who does his work with an ice ax -- a fellow so disturbing he makes Hannibal the Cannibal in "The Silence of the Lambs" seem almost normal.

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The narrator's perspective alternates between that of the killer and that of his pursuer, a gruff aging detective named Edward X. Delaney, who considers himself the agent of a wrathful God.

"I was flattered when that one became a major bestseller," Sanders said. "But then we started having people knocked off with ice axes in real life. There were really several copycat murders in various states that police determined were inspired by that book. Jesus, that terrified me. How are you supposed to deal with that responsibility?"

How did he come up with such a killer?

"I dug down in the deepest, darkest, creepiest corners of my psyche," he said calmly, sipping his drink, "and what I found there, I enlarged."

He claimed he was afraid ever to dig that deep again for his villains. But he resurrected Delaney (who'd made a brief appearance in "The Anderson Tapes") in several other books because "readers, particularly women, seemed to like him. I'm not sure why. I don't think I do. He's kind of a plodding slob. And nobody seems to realize that The First Deadly Sin' in the title was his sin, not the killer's."

Sanders said his favorite books were off-the-wall efforts that never sold as well as the others.

He wrote "The Tangent Objective" and "The Tangent Factor" and several others set in Africa. It was a place he'd never been but you could almost smell the jungle in the pages. The books explored the idea of a Napoleon-minded African military officer, financed by American oil companies, setting out to unite west Africa by conquest.

His all-time favorite book was one called "The Pleasures of Helen," which "nobody in hell ever bought. I think it sold about five copies." But he liked it, he said, because it described the thoughts and actions of a woman in New York who stays home from work and spends an entire day by herself. "I had to put myself inside her and become a woman for a day . . . imagining her most private thoughts. I thought I did it pretty well. But I'm not sure what a shrink would say about me wanting to."

Sanders moved to Florida during the 1980s and though he never slowed down either his production or his sales, most critics thought he lost something of his writing edge when he left New York. He was born there and raised in the Midwest, and served three years in the Marines "as a very young man" during World War II.

He politely turned aside inquiries about his private life, but pictured himself as a quietly married beachcomber in his later years, just another snowbird among the retirees. But in the late hours of the night when he did most of his writing, demons drove him, right to the end, even among the palm trees.

His 38th novel, "Guilty Pleasures," is scheduled for publication by Putnam on Feb. 23. CAPTION: Author Lawrence Sanders, seen here in 1985, published his first novel at age 50 and then produced 37 others.

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