It’s Life in Bus Lane for Published Novelist at Work on Third Book

For first-time author Donald Stanwood, it was the best of times in 1978 when his novel, “The Memory of Eva Ryker,” was published.

Stanwood, then 28, was earning $4.68 an hour behind the camera counter at J.C. Penney Co. in Newport Beach. He lived frugally in a Santa Ana apartment with Susie, his part-Siamese cat, and rode the bus to work.

Then the money started rolling in: a reward for the eight years it took him to write his historical mystery about a fictional survivor of the Titanic.

In all, he earned more than $300,000 in pre-publication hard-cover, paperback, book club, serial and foreign-rights sales. A deal for a TV-movie starring Natalie Wood brought in another $90,000. “There was one year,” he recalled, “when I wrote a check to the IRS for $60,000.”

Flush with success, a smiling Stanwood told The Times in 1978: “The novel bought my freedom.”

That it did.

In January--after nearly eight years of writing--Stanwood’s second novel, “The Seventh Royale,” was published by Antheneum.

The second novel came out none too soon because money from the first novel “is just about gone,” said Stanwood, who had to go back to work.

No, he hasn’t returned to the camera counter at J.C. Penney Co., but close to it: He works six days a week at a Fotomat in Costa Mesa, where he is writing his third novel during the slack time. And he is back to riding the bus.

Not much has really changed in Stanwood’s life style. Now 38, he still lives in the same one-bedroom Santa Ana apartment. Susie, the part-Siamese cat, died in 1982 at the ripe old age of 19 and has been replaced by a black-and-white stray named Minnie.

He still owns a $15,000 Peugeot he bought with his book earnings. But it’s currently out of commission with fuel line problems, hence the reliance on buses.

The car and some traveling were Stanwood’s only extravagances. Mostly, he used his “The Memory of Eva Ryker” windfall to live on while he wrote his second novel.

“It seemed like a lot of money, but spread out over time, it’s not a great deal,” the author said recently. “I never thought of it as some sort of inexhaustible supply,”

Going back to a regular job is perfectly fine with Stanwood.

“I enjoy cashiering, the work part of it--there’s something about ringing up a cash register that is like playing the slots in Las Vegas,” he said. “And when it’s not busy, I’m able to do some work on the book I’m working on now. It provides a steady income--not a great deal of money--but it makes a difference.”

Stanwood may be making ends meet humbly, but he remains highly regarded in Orange County’s literary community.

In April, the soft-spoken author was chosen to be featured on the Orange County Public Library’s second annual author poster publicizing the library. “I was flattered,” admits Stanwood, who posed sitting on the bumper of a Bugatti Royale provided by the Briggs Cunningham Museum in Costa Mesa.

On Sunday, the Friends of the Library Foundation, a nonprofit support organization for all public libraries in Orange County, will honor him at a reception, where he will autograph copies of the poster and his new book.

The plot of the “The Seventh Royale,” a mystery thriller spanning four decades and three continents, centers on the high-stakes world of rare antique cars--in particular the Bugatti Type 41 Royale, the so-called “car of kings.” Only six of the expensive luxury automobiles were built between 1927 and 1929. The book’s title refers to a fictional seventh car, one coveted by a then relatively unknown German “political crank”: Adolph Hitler.

Reviews for “The Seventh Royale” have been mixed: “A marvelous book whose action moves lightning fast from old Europe to Salt Lake City to California and back,” enthused one reviewer. “A certain oppressive tedium,” complained another.

“I don’t get deeply upset over reviews--I went through the same thing with ‘Eva Ryker,’ ” said the author, whose prematurely gray hair and round silver-rimmed glasses give him a bookish air despite his casual attire: blue jeans and a Hawaiian aloha shirt.

Stirring a cup of instant coffee in his kitchen on a recent morning, Stanwood observed that when the money for his first novel started coming in, a lot of people suggested that he should buy a condominium. But he comes from a long line of apartment dwellers and is not interested in owning a home. Besides, he said, “I hate yardwork.”

Stanwood’s apartment is a typical writer’s lair, with the living room stuffed with books, photographs of old friends and assorted memorabilia. On a picnic table next to the kitchen rests a portable typewriter. (His personal computer is out of order).

Nowhere to be seen, however, is his Orange County Public Library poster. Instead, an autographed copy of last year’s poster featuring his good friend T. Jefferson Parker, author of the best-selling mystery novel “Laguna Heat,” is taped to the refrigerator door.

“I don’t have a place to put the poster yet, and I don’t know if I want to see myself staring back at me on the refrigerator,” said Stanwood, who met Parker in the late ‘70s at a Mexican restaurant in Santa Ana where Parker was waiting on tables.

They both are now members of the Fictionaires, the Orange County writer’s group that meets twice a month to critique members’ works-in-progress. Stanwood said he read “The Seventh Royale” chapter-by-chapter over a five-year period with the Fictionaires.

Although he said he would have liked to have written the novel faster, he makes no excuses for what some might consider his lengthy creative process. “It’s not like cranking a piano roll faster,” he said. “If I did, it would have been a different book.”

Novels, he said, “are a matter of accretion. It’s like little stalactites in a cave: a drop at a time.”

Stanwood acknowledged that the money he made on his first book provided “a great deal of security, a buffer” for him while he wrote his second novel. But, he added, “it created problems of discipline in some ways. I had to overcome an inclination to sloth. I’m great at blowing time. I can design an entire day around having lunch.”

Actually, he said, he wishes he had gone back to work earlier. “It’s good as far as getting my act together and bringing a bit of discipline” to his life.

Having received a $50,000 advance for the second novel before it was written created another obstacle: “The feeling that somehow with signing (the contract), the thing was a property with financial rewards before it actually existed,” he said. “I think it was a psychological barrier, working on something that existed somewhere out in the ether but it didn’t (exist), and I had to pull it out of my brain.”

Another reason it took him so long to write “The Seventh Royale” is that the first draft was 1,200 pages long. Working on his personal computer, he trimmed it to 700 pages in four months.

“I have this theory that the first draft is the hard part, and I can always find ways to improve it,” he said. “People say, ‘You’re such a brilliant editor.’ I say it was just a case of the original author being such a windbag.”

Stanwood got the idea for “The Seventh Royale” in 1979 after a friend, a Bugatti lover, suggested that he do a story about a fictional seventh Bugatti Royale built for Hitler.

“I felt writing about Hitler is a double-edged kind of thing: It’s something people will always be interested in, but on the other hand it’s been done to death,” Stanwood said. “I knew what I didn’t want to do: Nazi plotters, the war, the Gestapo. I wanted a different kind of approach.”

He chose the the years 1926-27, a period in Hitler’s life when he had just gotten out of prison and was primarily dismissed as a nobody, Stanwood said.

While acknowledging that he has not written a “towering psychological portrait of Hitler,” Stanwood said there was a “whole period in Hitler’s life in which he had an incestuous passion for his niece, Geli Raubal, the daughter of his half sister. “She was the great love of his life,” he said. “No one knows for sure whether they consummated the relationship, but I felt the whole background was fresh and hadn’t been done before.”

The fictional premise of the novel involves Hitler wanting the Bugatti Royale for political purposes and to impress Geli. Because the “car of king’s” builder, Ettore Bugatti, would never have sold a Royale to someone like Hitler, Stanwood said, Hitler uses a go-between to buy the car.

Although Stanwood has yet to hear about paperback, foreign and subsidiary rights sales for “The Seventh Royale,” he doesn’t think that it will make him as much money as “The Memory of Eva Ryker.” Stanwood, however, feels “The Seventh Royale” is a better book. “I think ‘Eva Ryker’ has a kind of a comic book, teen-age sensibility to it; I think this (‘The Seventh Royale’) is more mature in tone.”

Stanwood isn’t resting on his current literary laurel, however. He said he has already written about 100 pages of a new novel, the premise of which he would prefer not to discuss. “It’s highly rip-offable: It’d be like Peter Benchley (the author of ‘Jaws’) talking about the shark off the beach,” he said.

He produces about a page a day, writing in longhand in a notebook during lulls on the job at Fotomat. He then goes home to type it, “improving on it as I go along,” he said.

A decade after his first brush with literary fame and fortune, Stanwood appears content--with one exception.

“Well, I’d like a car that was running reliably,” he said with a laugh. “But I’m a lot happier person than I was when I working at Penney’s. And I’m quite confident about this new book I’m working on. I guess I’m kind of philosophical, or stoical, at this point. Virtually all books are ephemeral. You go through this post-book depression. Even with a big hit, it’s no more than a few weeks or months before it’s crowded out on the bookshelves.”