Tangled up in Publishing Synchros

The publishing industry is an incestuous business. Editors, agents and writers move around, disappear, and pop up over and over. There’s a saying, ‘Never knock down your bridges, because you may have to cross back over to the other side.’ It fits perfectly with publishing.

Now with the expansion into e-books, we are encountering the same sort of connections and re-connections as we found in traditional publishing. Recently, our new e-book publisher, David Wilson of Crossroad Press, wrote a post on Facebook that caught my attention. He said he was trying to find movie producer Anthony Yerkovich, who was the original producer of Miami Vice, and later of a little known TV series called Private Eye. David said he was hoping to re-publish a novel based on Private Eye, written by a deceased author, Dave Pedneau.

That puzzled me because I wrote the Private Eye novels for Yerkovitch  under the pseudonym, T.N. Robb, after Trish and I wrote The Making of Miami Vice. I put up a comment on David’s post telling him as much. He was confused, because he had the book in front of him and the author was Dave Elliot, a pseudonym Dave Pedneau used. Yes, complicated and confusing.

I found the copies of the T.N. Robb novels and was about to photograph the cover and send to Dave when I solved the mystery. It turns out I wrote Private Eye #1 and #3. Dave wrote Private Eye #2. I probably knew that long ago, but had forgotten.

It turns out that another author Kathy Ptacek had recommended Dave Pedneau’s books for re-publication in Crossroad Press. When she found out Dave was dead, she managed to track down his daughter. The daughter and Dave’s former wife said it was a miracle that she’d contacted them because they were looking for some way to get Dave’s books published again. Another synchro.

Meanwhile, to show the incestuous nature of publishing, I surprised David Wilson when I told him I had written Dave Pedneau’s last novel after he died. Dave and I (and Trish) had the same agent and editor, and the latter had asked me to take Dave’s outline and three or four chapters and write the novel. It’s called N.F.D (No Fair Deal) – though in police jargon Fair is actually another four-letter word that couldn’t be put on the cover of a book.