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MYSTERY SERIES

By CAROLE GOLDBERG
Special to The Courant
May 10, 2009

As unpublished authors will tell you, it can be tough to get a literary agent to take your call.

So if an agent contacts you, don't put her on hold.

Chris Knopf of Avon wisely heeded a call about a book he had never finished writing, and it propelled him into print, via the boutique Long Island publishing house Permanent Press. Now he has four novels to his credit, featuring the sharp-witted and cynical Sam Acquillo, who uses skills acquired as a boxer and design engineer to fend off bad guys and solve mysteries in the Hamptons.
Knopf's series, beginning with "The Last Refuge" and continuing with "Two Time," "Head Wounds" and "Hard Stop," published this month, garnered enthusiastic reviews from The New York Times, Boston Globe and others.

"The characters are such original oddballs and their conversation so bracing, you want to kick off your shoes and spend some time on the porch with them," said the Times.

His books are also published by Random House Canada, and other foreign editions include Italy, Spain, England, Japan, Turkey and China.

Not bad for a guy who was "personally rejected from graduate school in writing" by none other than novelist John Barth, Knopf, 58, says.

Also not bad for a guy with a rather demanding day job.

That would be chairman and executive creative director at Mintz & Hoke Communications Group, an advertising and public relations firm in Avon.
Knopf grew up in Philadelphia, which he says has "a drive-through inferiority complex like Connecticut but is a tough town." An obsessive reader in a family that valued books, he says, "I read whatever was lying around and wrote from the get-go. I wrote my way out of trouble my whole life. I didn't like to study that much."

He also realized, "You kind of want to make the thing yourself. That's my orientation as a human being."

Knopf followed that impulse in various fields. He played bass guitar in a band when he was at Dickinson College and beyond. He's skilled at carpentry and converted a barn to a customized home.

After being turned down at graduate programs in the United States, he enrolled at one in England sponsored by Antioch College and London University, where he began writing novels.

"My first one is in a box somewhere," he says, quickly adding he has no plans no unearth it.

He returned to the States and worked as a copywriter, doing stints in theHartford area with the Charles Palm agency, among others. He quit for a time to write, but with a son on the way in his first marriage, he went back to work. He eventually settled in at Mintz & Hoke and later bought the agency with his second wife, Mary Farrell. They have two partners.

One of his early efforts, a thriller, attracted the interest of agent Mary Jack Wald.

"I owe her everything in this whole pursuit," Knopf says. Wald counseled him to learn from comments in the rejection letters he received:

"She'd say: 'They're telling you things about this book.' "I'd say: 'I don't believe you.'"

"The Last Refuge," which he began, dropped and later finished at Wald's urging in the late '90s, was published in 2005. Its main character is the aforementioned Sam Acquillo, whom Knopf saw as the kind of tough but appealingly cynical guy Paul Newman might have played.

Sam drops out of corporate life after a fist-fight during a board meeting, endures a nasty divorce and retreats to a bare-bones cottage on Little Peconic Bay in the Hamptons, built years ago by his hard-bitten father. When a neighbor dies, Sam gets involved in disposing of her estate and soon is knee-deep in real estate and corporate malfeasance and murder.

The novel introduced an exasperated cop, Joe, who has Sam's back, and several piquant female characters, including Amanda, a beautiful banker; Rosaline, a sharp psychologist; and Jackie, a lawyer as quirky as she is brilliant. Sam also can't do without the '67 Pontiac Grand Prix inherited from his dad, and Eddie, his inquisitive dog.

They reappear in the subsequent novels. In "Hard Stop," his fans learn more about his acrimonious parting with the conglomerate and how its tentacles still reach into his life. "The arc of the story travels across the series. I want Sam to evolve," he says, acknowledging that it's tricky to keep a character fresh yet familiar to loyal readers. "It gets harder to control your characters, and then there are the editors' expectations. They get proprietary and protective, saying 'Sam would never do that!'

"But they are windows into the readers and absolutely improve the books."

Next January, Jackie will be the heroine of her own mystery series, published by the Thomas Dunne imprint of St. Martin's Press here and Random House in Canada. Knopf says many of Sam's qualities derive from his father and grandfather.

"My grandfather was a boxer, and I use things he taught and told me. My dad was a mechanical engineer, an Ivy League grad, but a tough SOB.

"Sam's a lot of my dad: tough, with cynical humor, quick wit, snappy one-liners and, somewhere, a heart."

He says he shares some avocations with Sam, such as carpentry.

"I'm an omnivorous reader, an information junkie," yet he hates doing research for a book. "I want the fluidity of talking about things I already know, like carpentry."

Eddie is a salute to his own dog, Samuel Beckett, a Wheaten terrier. "He's a goofy dog," Knopf says, and he's given Eddie "the same personality and spirit."

Other characters "are composites of people I know and stuff I just plain make up."

He writes at night or on weekends, many spent at the second home he and Farrell own in Southampton. He doesn't read other fiction while writing "because fiction has voices that get into your head." But he does read nonfiction, "weird, arcane stuff, like Kant and de Tocqueville."

Knopf credits his editors with invaluable assistance

"There's this dumb aphorism that I read in The Courant's funny pages years ago that says: 'A great father is priceless. Nobody needs a bad father.' You could say the same about editors...

"A book is a big thing written over months. It's very easy to lose track of the story and the details. So continuity and consistency is the first big practical advantage they provide. "[Editors] help you keep your prose and character development coherent and true to your intent ... in the mystery realm; they also help you be mindful of things readers look for in a genre book, without compromising what makes you different."

He cautions novice writers that "amateurs, especially your friends and family, and typically writers' groups, aren't objective. They don't want to hurt your feelings, so they'll mislead you with praise. Or, not really knowing what they're doing, will offer up criticism that could really confuse an aspiring writer.

"My strong suggestion is to have your freshly finished manuscript [first draft] read by an intelligent, clear-headed reader who knows nothing about you."

Knopf makes the time to write, despite his Mintz & Hoke responsibilities.

"There's a lot of time, if you don't do other things," he says. "People have the time, but they don't focus. You have to do it every day."

• Carole Goldberg is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.
Copyright © 2009, The Hartford Courant