Detective Fiction Gets a New Eye

Gar Haywood’s Aunt Hazel was right.

When Haywood was 9 years old, his aunt was the one adult who defended what the boy knew in his childish imagination to be true: He was destined to be published.

And just as he says Aunt Hazel always suspected, Haywood was recently proclaimed a “born writer” by St. Martin’s Press executive editor Thomas Dunne. In a phone interview, Dunne said that Haywood’s “Fear of the Dark” is, “a great first novel.”

The book, about a black private eye who hunts down the killer in a racially motivated murder, was recently named winner of the Best First Private Eye Novel contest sponsored by St. Martin’s Press, the Private Eye Writers of America and Macmillan Ltd. Along with the award goes $10,000 and publication of Haywood’s novel.

“Until someone comes along and says, ‘We’re going to publish this,’ you could be kidding yourself,” said Haywood, downtown recently on his other job as a Control Data Corp. roving computer repairman. “Winning the contest has taken a huge weight off.”

Although his novel was termed “gritty and streetwise” by St. Martin’s publicity department, Haywood, 33, said that when it comes to firsthand experience, “I know absolutely nothing about the streets and that’s the way I like it. What I do know about the streets I get from the Metro section of the L.A. Times.”

Haywood grew up in Baldwin Hills under the literary influence of his father, architect Jack W. Haywood, who was included in last month’s City Hall exhibit, Black Architects.

Haywood’s love of genre fiction and his admitted indifference to the classics date back to the days when he borrowed reading matter off his father’s night stand. The books he found there were usually science fiction.

From the age of 9, Haywood said, “I had a tendency to read a book I admired, and then write one exactly like it.”

The youth began collecting rejection slips for his derivative science-fiction stories, shooting back hostile letters to editors when their opinion of his work didn’t tally with that of his Aunt Hazel.

“I wasn’t capable of handling rejection in a professional manner at the time, whereas now it only brings tears to my eyes,” Haywood deadpanned.

By his late teens, Haywood had stopped mimicking the work of others, and he was growing impatient with science fiction because of its increasing technical complexity. He started reading and writing detective fiction.

Grades Slipped

Although he realizes the genre is scorned by some, “There’s no shame in being a detective writer,” Haywood said. “The human experience is filled with a lot of things, and murder and mayhem happen to be two real things, unfortunately.”

As a young man determined to write as much as he could, Haywood worried about making a living. He had never been big on school, he said, and had let his grades slip after his parents divorced when he was 13 and his father moved out of the house.

It was while pursuing one of his many schemes to make money that Haywood met his wife-to-be, at a broadcasting workshop. Today Lynnette and Gar Haywood live in Sherman Oaks with their two daughters, Courtney, 4, and Erin, 2.

When Haywood read about the Best First Private Eye Novel contest (last year’s winner, Les Roberts, was also from the Los Angeles area), the notion of a deadline inspired him to get to work on an idea he’d been incubating. (“I work better when I’m staring some terrible fate in the face.”)

“As much as I was reading detective fiction, I wasn’t seeing any black characters out there,” Haywood said. “I couldn’t understand that, so I decided to try my hand at it.”

Haywood would come home after fixing errant printers and disk drives all day, greet the kids, eat a quick dinner, and seclude himself in one bedroom of the family’s two-bedroom apartment. He and Lynnette moved their bed into the living room so that the bedroom could serve as his study, he said.

Since Lynnette had encouraged him to pursue his writing, he said, “she must have felt like she’d created a monster,” when he began working until 2 or 3 a.m. on weeknights and all day on weekends.

Missed Laker Games

‘What I had to sacrifice the most to finish the book--and I do mean sacrifice--is my sports mania,” Haywood said. “I missed a lot of Lakers games.”

He added: “My wife’s going to laugh at this. She’s going to say, ‘The heck you did.’ ”

Haywood mailed off the completed novel in mid-August after allowing only one person--his wife--to preview it.

It is set in a fictional time of racial unrest in the United States, but the locale--South-Central Los Angeles--is real. St. Martin’s editor Dunne said the author’s ability to evoke Los Angeles neighborhoods and characters brought to mind Charles Dickens’ descriptions of London.

Describing what he called the book’s simple plot, Haywood said someone shoots and kills a patron of the Acey Deuce bar. The slain bar-goer also happens to be an up-and-coming black militant.

Enter Aaron Gunner, a failed-private-eye-turned-electrician who is hired by the murder victim’s sister to track down the killer.

On Sept. 5, Haywood came home from work and rewound the messages on his answering machine as he was loosening his tie. The second voice on the tape was that of Thomas Dunne at St. Martin’s. “He left a very succinct message saying I’d won the contest,” Haywood said.

No one else was home at the time, so Haywood played back the recording six or seven times, privately celebrating the moment he’d been expecting since he was 9.

Haywood has an Aaron Gunner sequel in the works and says he feels “validated” as a writer. However, that success hasn’t diminished his imagination, which is just as headstrong as it was when he was a mediocre student picturing himself a famous child author.

Only today in Gar Haywood’s daydreams, he’s wearing a Laker uniform.