I enjoyed these professional gossips with Horace so much that I began to feel beholden to him; after all, I was more or less trapped in my workshop, too. At last I submitted perhaps a dozen ideas for his judgment. Horace discussed them all, very sensibly and realistically, and at last suggested combining two different ideas into what ultimately became The Demolished Man. I remember one of the ideas only vaguely; it had something to do with extrasensory perception, but I've forgotten the gimmick. The other I remember quite well. I wanted to write a mystery about a future in which the police are armed with time machines so that if a crime is committed
They could trace it back to its origin. This would make crime impossible. How then, in an open story, could a clever criminal outwit the police?
I'd better explain "open story." The classic mystery is the closed story, or whodunit. It's a puzzle in which everything is concealed except the clues carefully scattered through the story. It's up to the audience to piece them together and solve the puzzle. I had become quite expert at that. However, I was carrying too many mystery shows and often fell behind in my deadlines, a heinous crime, so occasionally I would commit the lesser crime of stealing one of my scripts from Show A and adapting it for Show B.
I was reading a three-year-old Show A script for possible theft when it dawned on me that I had written all the wrong scenes. It was a solid story, but in the attempt to keep it a closed puzzle, I had been forced to omit the real drama in order to present the perplexing results of the behind-the-scenes action. So I developed for myself a style of action mystery writing in which everything is open and known to the audience, every move and countermove, with only the final resolution coming as a surprise. This is an extremely difficult form of writing; it requires you to make your antagonists outwit each other continually with ingenuity and resourcefulness. It was a novel style back then.
Horace suggested that instead of using time machines as the obstacle for the criminal, I use ESP. Time travel, he said, was a pretty worn-out theme, and I had to agree. ESP, Horace said, would be an even tougher obstacle to cope with, and I had to agree.
"But I don't like the idea of a mind-reading detective," I said. "It makes him too special."
"No, no," Horace said. "You've got to create an entire ESP society."
And so the creation began. We discussed it on the phone almost daily, each making suggestions, dismissing suggestions, adapting and revising suggestions. Horace was, at least for me, the ideal editor, always helpful, always encouraging, never losing his enthusiasm. He was opinionated, God, knows, but so was I, perhaps even more than he. What saved the relationship was the fact that we both knew we respected each other; that, and our professional concentration on the job. For professionals the job is the boss.
The writing began in New York. When my show went off for the summer, I took the ms. out to our summer cottage on Fire Island and continued there. I remember a few amusing incidents. For a while I typed on the front porch. Wolcott Gibbs, the New Yorker drama critic, lived up the street and every time he passed our cottage and saw me working he would denounce me. Wolcott had promised to write a biography of Harold Ross that summer and hadn't done a lick of work yet. L F. (Izzy) Stone dropped in once and found himself in the midst of an animated discussion of political thought as reflected by science fiction. Izzy became so fascinated that he asked us to take five while he ran home to put a fresh battery in his hearing aid.
I used to go surf-fishing every dawn and dusk. One evening I was minding my own business, busy casting and thinking of nothing in particular when the idea of using typeface symbols in names dropped into my mind. I reeled in so quickly that I fouled my line, rushed to the cottage and experimented on the typewriter. Then I went back through the ms. and changed all the names. I remember quitting work one morning to watch an eclipse and it turned cloudy. Obviously somebody up there didn't approve of eclipse-breaks. And so, by the end of the summer, the novel was finished. My working title had been Demolition. Horace changed it to The Demolished Man. Much better, I think.
The book was received with considerable enthusiasm by the Galaxy readers, which was gratifying but surprising. I hadn't had any conscious intention of breaking new trails; I was just trying to do a craftsmanlike job. Some of the fans' remarks bemused me. "Oh, Mr. Bester! How well you understand women." I never thought I understood women. "Who were the models for your characters?" They're surprised when I tell them that the model for one of the protagonists was a bronze statue of a Roman emperor in the Metropolitan Museum. It's haunted me ever since I was a child. I read the emperor's character into the face and when it came time to write this particular fictional character, I used my emperor for the mold.
The reclame of the novel turned me into a science fiction somebody, and people were curious about me. I was invited to gatherings of the science fiction Hydra Club where I met the people I was curious about: Ted Sturgeon, Jim Blish, Tony Boucher, Ike Asimov, Avram Davidson, then a professional Jew wearing a yarmulka, and many others. They were all lunatic (So am I. It takes one to spot one.) and convinced me again that most science fiction authors have marbles missing. I can remember listening to an argument about the correct design for a robot, which became so heated that for a moment I thought Judy Merrill was going to punch Lester del Rey in the nose. Or maybe it was vice versa.
I was particularly attracted to Blish and Sturgeon. Both were soft-spoken and charming conversationalists. Jim and I would take walks in Central Park during his lunch hour (he was then working as a public relations officer for a pharmaceutical house) and we would talk shop. Although I was an admirer of his work, I felt that it lacked the hard drive to which I'd been trained, and I constantly urged him to attack his stories with more vigor. He never seemed to resent it, or at least was too courteous to show it. His basic problem was how to hold down a PR writing job and yet do creative writing on the side. I had no advice for that. It's a problem which very few people have solved.
Sturgeon and I used to meet occasionally in bars for drinks and talk. Ted's writing exactly suited my taste, which is why I thought he was the finest of us all. But he had a quality which amused and exasperated me. Like Mort Sahl and a few other celebrities I've interviewed---Tony Quinn is another Ted lived on crisis, and if he wasn't in a crisis, he'd create one for himself. His life was completely disorganized, so it was impossible for him to do his best work consistently. What a waste!
In all fairness I should do a description of myself. I will, but I'm going to save it for the end.
I'd written a contemporary novel based on my TV experiences and it had a fairly decent reprint sale and at last sold to the movies. My wife and I decided to blow the loot on a few years abroad. We put everything into storage, contracted for a little English car, stripped our luggage down to the bare minimum and took off. The only writing materials I brought with me were a portable, my Commonplace Book, a thesaurus, and an idea for another science fiction novel.
For some time I'd been toying with the notion of using the Count of Monte Cristo pattern for a story. The reason is simple; I'd always preferred the antihero, and I'd always found high drama in compulsive types. It remained a notion until we bought our cottage on Fire Island and I found a pile of old National Geographies. Naturally I read them and came across a most interesting piece on the survival of torpedoed sailors at sea. The record was held by a Philippine cook's helper who lasted for something like four months on an open raft. Then came the detail that racked me up. He'd been sighted several times by passing ships which refused to change course to rescue him because it was a Nazi submarine trick to put out decoys like this. The magpie mind darted down, picked it up, and the notion was transformed into a developing story with a strong attack.