The rumors spread, and the man got credit for ten times what he ever did, once driving off an entire motorcycle gang armed only with a bullwhip.
After dropping his crabs at the market each morning, the man always drove up to Mile 82 and the Green Turtle Inn. He stuck quarters in the news boxes out front and carried the stack of papers inside.
“Hey, it’s Ralph!” “Hi, Ralph!” “How the crab business treatin’ ya, Ralph?”
It didn’t seem the man’s reputation could get any bigger until one of the breakfast regulars came across an old paperback at the Islamorada Library. “What’s this?”
She thumbed down the row of books. There was another, and another, finally a whole bunch, all with Ralph’s name on the cover.
The next morning at the restaurant, everyone had books, wanting autographs. “Ralph, why didn’t you tell us you were a writer?”
“What’s to tell? That was another lifetime ago.”
They talked about him after he left. “Wow, a tough guy who’s sensitive and writes books.”
“Just like him not to mention it.”
“That’s so cool!”
Ralph Krunkleton had seen life the way other people only dream. He had an uncanny knack for being at the right place at the right moment, an almost perfect sense of literary timing. Almost. He always seemed to be one human skin removed from huge success. The problem: Ralph wrote mysteries, which got no respect.
In 1958, he was twenty-seven years old and fifty pounds lighter. Goatee and turtleneck. It was San Francisco, drinking coffee at the City Lights Bookstore and listening to bad poetry. The beatnik movement was exploding, and he knew them all. Ginsberg, Burroughs, Ferlinghetti. Ralph wrote his first novel, a quixotic tale of wanderlust on America’s highways and living in The Now, a stream-of-conscious bohemian murder mystery called B Is for Bongo. Another book came out that same year, and Jack Kerouac’s career took off.
Ralph was still in San Francisco nine years later when the Summer of Love broke out at the corner of Haight and Ashbury. He began taking notes at the Fillmore, where he hung out with Jefferson Airplane and giant pulsing amoebas. He wrote a zeitgeist tome about hippies traveling the country in a brightly painted school bus, dropping LSD and getting murdered one by one. It was called Bad Trip. Tom Wolfe’s career took off.
New York two years later, Ralph was thrown in the back of a paddy wagon with Norman Mailer during an antiwar demonstration.
“I suppose you’re going to write a murder mystery about this!” said Mailer.
“Maybe I will!” Ralph shot back.
The Naked and the Murdered was published the following year and faded quickly after a single printing. Mailer became an asshole.
Ralph was last represented by the renowned agent Tanner Lebos. Ralph met Tanner in 1969 at a Simon and Garfunkel concert in Central Park. Tanner was wearing a Simon T-shirt; Ralph a Garfunkel. It was meant to be. They started talking. Tanner was struggling to get his literary firm up and running. He took Ralph on, and they were together almost twenty years. By the mid-seventies, however, their careers were on clearly diverging trajectories.
Ralph began spending more and more time in Florida until he was there year-round. He split his days between his homes in the Keys and Sarasota, where he played liar’s poker with John D. MacDonald, McKinley Kantor and the rest of the gang at Florida’s version of the Algonquin Round Table.
“Stick to mysteries, kid,” said MacDonald. “Trust me. You’ll see.”
In the late seventies, Tanner paid Ralph a visit. They did lunch poolside at the Polo Lounge in Palm Beach. Ralph came in a corduroy leisure suit; Tanner wore tangerine sunglasses and an ascot. The conversation didn’t go well.
“One favor,” said Tanner.
“What’s that?”
“One book that’s not a mystery. Just one.”
“I don’t feel it.”
“You louse up more good books by throwing bodies around. Look at Fitzgerald — where would The Great Gatsby be if it was a mystery?”
“Technically, it is a mystery.”
Tanner began to simmer. “Let’s enjoy our food.”
While Ralph stayed down in the bargain bins, Tanner went on to become one of the hottest literary agents in Manhattan, eventually branching into theatrical representation. As they say, he was going places. Ralph was not. It continued another ten years until the big split-up in 1987. There had been a loud argument in the parking lot of a Longboat Key seafood restaurant, complete with police cars and women screaming and Tanner and John MacDonald wrestling at the base of a grinning lobster in a chef’s hat.
The phone was ringing in the stilt house when Ralph got back from morning coffee at the Green Turtle. He picked it up.
“Ralph, it’s me, Tanner. New York.”
Silence.
“Ralph? You there?”
“Tan?”
“Bet you didn’t expect to hear from me.”
“It’s been a while. What? Ten years?”
“Eleven.”
“Good to hear your voice.”
“I love you, too. Listen, you’re not going to believe this, but I just got a call from your publisher. Your book’s taking off. They’re going back to press.”
“Which book?”
“The Stingray Shuffle. But the others are starting to catch the draft, too. It could be big.”
“Is this a joke?”
“They want you back on tour.”
“But that book’s been out for years. You said yourself it was dead.”
“It’s a crazy business.”
“I don’t want to tour. I like it here.”
“Don’t be a shmuck. Why did you write in the first place? So people would read your books. Well, now they’re reading them. And they want to talk to you. You owe it to your fans.”
Ralph was a stand-up guy. When Tanner put it that way, he couldn’t refuse.
“What are they talking about?”
“Twenty cities, plus a few book festivals, a little TV and a celebrity mystery train.”
“Could you repeat that last part?”
“It’s the new thing. Mysteries are big now — who would have thought? They have all these fancy dinners and cruises and train rides where people pay a fortune to act all this shit out. Don’t worry about the details — you’ll be getting faxes.”
“I don’t have a fax machine.”
“Doesn’t matter. I have one of the new faxless fax machines. And you’ll need some clothes.”
“When is this supposed to start?”
“They were planning next Thursday. But that was before Publishers Weekly hit the stands. Have you seen it?”
“I’m in the Keys.”
“There’s an article on you, page sixty-seven. They’ve made you out like some kind of tropical Salinger. Nobody can get in touch with you. They can’t find anyone who’s seen you in years or even has a recent photo. There’s talk you’re keeping some dark secret, but they’re not even sure you’re still alive.”
“That’s crazy. I’m in town all the time. Have coffee at the same place every day. There are no secrets—”
“I’ve told the publisher I want to push back the tour a month so we can grow the ambient buzz about your bizarre need for privacy and seclusion, and when the public appetite is too much to stand, then we put you on the road.”
“The publisher isn’t going to go along with this foolishness.”
“They already have a team working on your mystique. They want everyone wondering who or what it is you’re hiding from.”
“I’m not hiding from anything—”
“Start.”
“What?”
“Don’t leave the house, and don’t answer the phone. Unless it’s me.”
“How will I know it’s you?”
“Caller ID.”
“I don’t have caller ID.”