The Dark Half

Unless you were an earl tattling on royalty or a movie star tattling on other movie stars, when you wrote for People your byline came at the end of the piece. Thad had to leaf through four pages (two of them full-page ads) to find the name. Mike Donaldson. He and Mike had sat up late, just shooting the shit, and when Thad had asked the man if anyone would really care that he had written a few books under another name, Donaldson had said something which made Thad laugh hard. 'Surveys show that most People readers have extremely narrow noses. That makes them hard to pick, so they pick as many other people's as they can. They'll want to know all about your friend George.'

  'He's no friend of mine,' Thad had responded, still laughing.

  Now he asked Liz, who had gone to the stove, 'You got it together, babe? You need some help?'

  'I'm fine,' she said. 'Just cooking up some goo for the kiddos. You haven't got enough of yourself yet?'

  'Not yet,' Thad said shamelessly, and went back to the article.

'The hardest part was actually coming up with the name,' Beaumont continues,

nipping lightly at the pencil. 'But it was important. I knew it could work. I knew it

could break the writer's block I was struggling with . . . if I had an identity. The

right identity, one that was separate from mine.

How did he choose George Stark?

'Well, there's a crime writer named Donald E. Westlake,' Beaumont explains.

'And under his real name, Westlake uses the crime novel to write these very funny

social comedies about American life and American mores.

'But from the early sixties until the mid-seventies or so, he wrote a series of novels

under the name of Richard Stark, and those books are very different. They're about

a man named Parker who is a professional thief. He has no past, no future, and in

the best books, no interests other than robbery.

'Anyway, for reasons you'd have to ask Westlake about, he eventually stopped

writing novels about Parker, but I never forgot something Westlake said after the

pen name was blown. He said he wrote books on sunny days and Stark took over on

the rainy ones. I liked that, because those were rainy days for me, between 1973 and

early 1975.

'In the best of those books, Parker is really more Re a killer robot than a man.

The robber robbed is a pretty consistent theme in them. And Parker goes through

the bad guys — the other bad guys, I mean — exactly like a robot that's been

programmed with one single goal. 'I want my money,' he says, and that's just about

all he says. 'I want my money, I want my money.' Does that remind you of anyone?'

The interviewer nods. Beaumont is describing Alexis Machine, the main character

of the first and last George Stark novels.

'If Machine's Way had finished up the way it started out, I would have shoved it in

a drawer forever,' Beaumont says. 'Publishing it would have been plagiarism. But

about a quarter of the way through, it found its own rhythm, and everything just

clicked into place.'

The interviewer asks if Beaumont is saying that, after he had spent awhile

working on the book, George Stark woke up and started to talk.

'Yes,' Beaumont says. 'That's close enough.'

  Thad looked up, almost laughing again in spite of himself. The twins saw him smiling and grinned back around the pureed peas Liz was feeding them. What he had actually said, as he remembered, was: 'Christ, that's melodramatic! You make it sound like the part of Frankenstein where the lightning finally strikes the rod on the highest castle battlement and juices up the monster!'

    'I'm not going to be able to finish feeding them if you don't stop that,' Liz remarked. She had a very small dot of pureed peas on the tip of her nose, and Thad felt an absurd urge to kiss it off.

  'Stop what?'

  'You grin, they grin. You can't feed a grinning baby, Thad.'

    'Sorry,' he said humbly, and winked at the twins. Their identical green—rimined smiles widened for a moment.

Then he lowered his eyes and went on reading.

'I started Machine's Way on the night in 1975 I thought up the name, but there

was one other thing. I rolled a sheet of paper into my typewriter when I got ready to

start . . . and then I rolled it right back out again. I've typed all my books, but

George Stark apparently didn't hold with typewriters.'

The grin flashes out briefly again.