Publishers in a Frenzy Over Boston Deaths

Charles Stuart’s body had not even been fished out of the Boston harbor on Thursday when Colleen Mohyde received her first call about a book on the murder-suicide case that has gripped this city and much of the country.

“I had hardly had time to get my coffee,” the assistant editor at Little, Brown Co. said.

Since then, Mohyde said, at least eight more literary agents and writers have contacted her about possible books on the stunning story of a pregnant woman shot and killed in inner-city Boston last October while driving home to the suburbs after a birthing class.

Her husband, Charles Stuart, who was seriously wounded in the incident as well, at first told police that he and his wife had been shot by a black man who leaped into their car at an intersection and demanded their money and jewelry. But last Wednesday evening, Stuart’s youngest brother Matthew came forth with information implicating Charles Stuart as his wife’s murderer. Early the next day, before the morning rush-hour traffic had begun, Charles Stuart apparently parked his car on the Tobin Bridge and jumped to his death.

Since then, with bizarre details continuing to tumble out, the city has talked of little other than the strange tale of the victim-turned-villain.

“We’ve been living and breathing this case here,” said Mohyde. She added that several editors at the New York office of her publishing house had received proposals for books on the Stuart case as well.

“You know, it’s a wonderful story, just a wonderful story,” Jane Dystel, a literary agent in New York, said. “There are so many different elements to it.”

Dystel was so convinced of the marketability of the Stuart case that she pulled one of her client-writers, Joseph Sharkey, off another true-crime project and ordered him to take the first shuttle to Boston. Sharkey arrived here within three hours of Stuart’s suicide.

“I’m not sure where the body was,” Dystel said when asked if Sharkey had arrived in town before the body was pulled from the harbor. “But we were there.”

In New York, Henry Dunow, a literary agent with Curtis Brown Associates, said that when he first read of the case in the Friday morning newspaper, he saw quick parallels to such true-crime bestsellers as Joe McGinniss’ “Fatal Vision,” and “Small Sacrifices,” by Ann Rule. Dunow immediately picked up the phone and called Constance L. Hays, a reporter in the New York Times’ Boston bureau.

Dunow said he recognized the complex story instantly as “obviously, a very fertile subject for a book.” There was racism, violence, a personality who would apparently “walk out of a birthing class and shoot his wife” as well as the fact that so many people so willingly swallowed the story of Stuart, who first telegraphed the tale when he called state police for help on his car telephone, Dunow said.

His call to Hays came, by her recollection, before coroners had completed the autopsy on Stuart. Hays, covering the story for her daily newspaper beat, told Dunow she was too busy to think about his proposal or any of the other seven inquiries she received from agents and publishers within days of Stuart’s suicide.

“But my husband, ever practical, said I should find out how much the advance should be,” Hays said.

At the city’s two daily newspapers, the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald, reporters on the Stuart case said that they, too, had been besieged by calls from publishers and agents seeking to interest them in Stuart book projects. On Tuesday, one Globe writer was said to be in New York, negotiating a contract for a book on the story.

But while “it’s tempting, very tempting, to think that in three months you could make a lot of money slapping something out very quickly on a story that already has a lot of information out about it,” Globe reporter Matthew Brelis said he had heard colleagues echo his own view that for journalists, there is sometimes a fine line between exploiting a story and covering it. Brelis said that at least 10 Globe reporters, as well as several columnists, had been assigned to the Stuart story.

Brelis said he got a call from Dell about doing a book. But like Hays of the New York Times, “I said, look, I’m just too busy to think about it,” Brelis said.

Even in publishing--a field quick to recognize a commercial topic--the flurry of interest in this case of true crime and a seemingly happy, upwardly mobile suburban young couple appeared to set new records, James Frost, the editor in chief at Warner Books in New York, said.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Frost said.

“We saw a lot (of interest) for the Lisa Steinberg case,” involving child abuse in New York City, Frost said. “And if the Green River suspect”--referring to a string of murders near Seattle--”had actually been the man who had committed the murders, you would have seen a similar response. A good mass murderer with the psychological underpinnings is always a good subject.”

Frost said the number of inquiries he had received suggested that “every major agent in town has someone wanting to write this book.”

Frost said he expected that “publishers will probably shy away from” the racial angles of this story. Instead, “we see it as personality-driven. Everyone wants to know what makes Charles Stuart tick.”

While conceding that the field was something of a derby at the moment, Frost predicted that the market could sustain “two, maybe three books, tops” on the case. However, said Frost, “I don’t think you’re going to see that few.”

John Sterling, editor in chief of the adult trade division at Houghton Mifflin, a publishing house based jointly in Boston and New York, said he had several Stuart proposals on his desk, and that he had spoken to at least half a dozen agents about Stuart book projects. He said he knew of “seven or eight” other proposals circulating within his publishing house.

“But I am not terribly interested, I confess, in the numbers,” Sterling said. “What is clear is that people are going crazy on this.”

Part of the explanation for the feeding frenzy, Sterling said, was “a very quiet fall (autumn) on the acquisition front.

“Frenzies tend to happen when people get hungry,” he explained.

But to Sterling, what makes the story so fascinating is the surprise element of Stuart’s apparent involvement in his pregnant wife’s death.

“Who could imagine?” Sterling asked. “Who could imagine that this man would shoot his pregnant wife?” That kind of “whiplash” effect, he continued, “is like suddenly feeling the ground beneath you shift.

“Suddenly,” Sterling said, “you have this amazing lightning rod.”

At Little, Brown, Colleen Mohyde took much the same position.

“It’s a question of trust, the public trust,” she said. “You don’t want to be cynical. You want to believe that victims really are victims. We all sort of become victims otherwise.”

Some publishers predicted that big advances might be forthcoming as a result of competition over Stuart books. But as James Frost at Warner Books noted, “the big unknown is that we haven’t heard from the heavyweights yet”--writers, said Frost, such as Joe McGinniss, Ann Rule and Norman Mailer. “They’re still out there,” he said.

Still, interest continues at a feverish pitch. Mohyde, for one, said she had heard the Stuart tale likened to “a nonfiction ‘Bonfire of the Vanities,’ ” or to “An American Tragedy,” by Theodore Dreiser.

“There’s definitely a book there,” she said.

And apparently a movie as well. Ron Howard, the Hollywood producer, was reported to have made extensive inquiries about securing rights to the story. And Hays, at the New York Times, said she had been unsure what to respond when a producer called demanding to know who owned the rights to the Stuart case.