Eight of Swords Makes a 'Notable' Debut

In David Skibbins' debut mystery novel, Eight of Swords (St. Martin's Minotaur), dramatic events occur with startling synchronicity in the life of its protagonist, a part-time professional tarot-card reader.

The book's author experienced a similar, if happier, extreme convergence a year ago, when, after six months of having his manuscript rejected, he had just about reached the end of his rope as a would-be novelist.

"I can remember this really well," said the 57-year-old Skibbins recently, from his home in northern California. "On a Monday, I said, 'You know what? This isn't working. I don't think I'm going to make it as a writer. I don't think I can handle another rejection notice. I'm going to give this one more week, and then I'm going to put the manuscript under my bed.'

"That was on a Monday. And on Tuesday, St. Martin's called and said, 'Congratulations! You just won the Malice Domestic Contest [for Best First Traditional Mystery]. We're publishing your book next year.'

"Over the space of a five-minute phone call, I went from being a nobody that no one's very much interested in and nobody wants to represent, to all of a sudden being a St. Martin's writer. That's a gigantic leap, in five minutes. It took me months to get over the fact that, 'Oh my God -- now I'm in the game!'"

It was a turn of fate that Skibbins' hero Warren Ritter might well delight in. "He's a guy who believes in miracles," Skibbins said. "He definitely doesn't think that there's an established way to get from Point A to Point B."

In most other ways, though, Skibbins said, he's far removed in attitude and experience from the over-50, amateur sleuth he invented for his late-in-life attempt at writing a mystery.

"When I was studying the genre," recalled Skibbins, who is a Ph.D. with 20 years' experience as a psychotherapist, "I started reading a lot of mysteries. And I can remember, I put one down and said, 'If I have to read another book about a recovering-alcoholic private investigator who is an ex-cop who's burnt-out on life, I'm going to kill myself!' I wanted to write about something radically different than that. So I came up with a tarot-card reader on Berkeley's Telegraph Avenue, who was an ex-Weatherman who's still hiding underground -- and who's manic-depressive!"

Skibbins himself sounded not the least bit depressive, as he recounted the far-from-orthodox route he had taken from his personal Point A (birth in Helena, Montana) to his current Point B (published first-novelist, with a second novel written and contracted for, and a third already well underway).

"My idea of a good time [during adolescence]," said Skibbins, "was to find my favorite little nook in the library of my high school and just read through shelves and shelves and shelves of books. I mean, that's what I did as a kid, was read. And it was a good thing, too, because I read everything Agatha Christie wrote, and Dorothy Sayers, and Georgette Heyer -- all those early grandes dames! And every Sherlock Holmes book that ever was."

Although he always longed to write, Skibbins recalled, "Something in me said, 'No, you can't really have your dream. You've got to make a living.' So I went into psychology, became a psychotherapist for 20 years.... And then I was in a life-coaching workshop, and somebody said, 'Okay, so forget all that. What do you really want to do with your life?' And I went, 'I want to be a writer.' And it's the first time I'd said it out loud -- even though I'd been working on books forever and had all kinds of half-finished projects. But by saying that out loud, it was like: 'I'm going to do this. I'm not going to live forever, and there's nothing more important to me in my professional life than becoming a writer.'"

So he did: first producing and selling a nonfiction book -- Working Clean and Sober (Hazelton, 2000) -- and then a "Great American Novel" that no one wanted to publish.

"And then I went, 'Okay, so what's going to sell? I don't want to just be a writer; I actually want to be a writer who gets published.' I looked at all the genres, and mystery is the most consistent seller of any. 'Okay, I've got to learn how to write a mystery. I've read enough of them, God knows.'"

The apprentice mystery writer spent two years mastering the form's fundamentals, during which time the most useful instruction he encountered was a book on plot by Orson Scott Card. "It had a section on point-of-view that was the best thing I ever read about the subject," Skibbins said. "He really helped me see that the writer is a camera, and I get to choose how close in and how far out I want to be -- but then I have to be consistent around that. I really am grateful for his writing that, because The Eight of Swords is done in first-person; you're really inside Warren's head."

Thus prepared, in a mere 30 days, Skibbins wrote his book -- an exciting tale of a reluctant tarot-card reader caught in a homicidal plot he must decode and thwart. He entered it in the St. Martin's/Malice Domestic contest -- then endured six months during which the same mystery-manuscript was declined by some 49 agents.

And then came that marvelous Tuesday -- and all the wonderful things that have happened since: new friendships with fellow mystery writers; the selling of his second Warren Ritter book to St. Martin's; the selection of Eight of Swords as an April Book Sense Notable; and an imminent tour of mystery bookstores in northern and southern California and points east.

Skibbins sounded a bit giddy still, as he recounted all the ways his life has changed for the better since that epochal five-minute telephone call. It's enough to validate his character Warren Ritter's still-abiding faith in the 1960s: "A time," quotes Skibbins, "when love was free, when youth felt like they could change the world -- and when they did!" --Tom Nolan