When the reviews of the book came out, I was pleasantly surprised. They were almost all favorable, and the topper was the New York Times review. The reviewer said, “The Naked Face is clearly the best first mystery of the year.” And to top it all off, at the end of the year I received an Edgar Allan Poe Award nomination.
When I returned to Hollywood, I was still working on Nancy, but I could not stop thinking about writing another novel. The Naked Face had not been financially successful. In fact, I had spent more on publicity than the book had made. But there was a more important element involved in writing the novel. I had experienced a sense of creative freedom that I had never known before.
When one writes a screenplay or television show or a play for the theater, it is always a collaborative effort. Even if you write alone, you are working with a cast, a director, a producer, and musicians.
The novelist is free to create whatever he or she wants. There is no one to say:
“Let’s change the scene to the mountains instead of the valley . . .”
“There are too many sets . . .”
“Let’s cut out the words here and create the mood with music . . .”
The novelist is the cast, the producer, and the director. The novelist is free to create whole worlds, to go back in time or forward in time, to give his characters armies, servants, villas. There is no limit except the imagination.
I decided that I was going to write another novel, even though I had no expectations that it would be any more successful financially than The Naked Face. I needed an exciting idea, and I remembered a story of mine that Dore Schary had refused to buy at RKO, Orchids for Virginia. I decided that that was the story I wanted to tell. I turned the screenplay into an elaborately textured novel, and changed the title to The Other Side of Midnight.
The book was published a year later and it changed my life. It stayed on the New York Times best-seller listfor fifty-two weeks. The Other Side of Midnight became a phenomenon, an international runaway best-seller.
Bea Factor’s prediction that I would become world-famous had finally come true.
Afterword
Of all the varied writing I have done over the years—motion pictures, theater, television, novels—I prefer writing novels. Novels are a different world, a world of the mind and the heart. In a novel, one can create characters and bring them to life. The transition from playwright and screenwriter to novelist was easier than I had expected. And the advantages!
A novelist travels all over the world doing research, meeting interesting people, and going to interesting places. If people are affected by something you wrote, they let you know. I sometimes get mail that is very emotional.
I received a letter from a woman who had had a massive heart attack and was in the hospital, and would not let her parents or her boyfriend come in to see her. She wrote me that she just wanted to die. She was twenty-one years old. Someone left a copy of The Other Side of Midnight on her bedside. She started to skim through it. Intrigued, she went back to the beginning and read the book. When she was through, she had been so caught up in the characters and their problems that she forgot about her own, and was ready to face life again.
Another woman wrote to tell me that her dying daughter’s last request had been that all my books be spread around her hospital bed, and she had died happy.
In Rage of Angels, I let a little boy die and I began to receive hate mail. One woman wrote to me from the east, gave me her phone number, and said, “Call me. I can’t sleep. Why did you let him die?”
I got so many similar letters that when I did the miniseries, I let him live.
Women have told me that they had become lawyers because of Jennifer Parker, the heroine of Rage of Angels.
My novels are sold in one hundred eight countries and have been translated into fifty-one languages. In 1997, the Guinness Book of World Records listed me as the Most Translated Author in the World. I have sold over three hundred million books. If there is one reason for the success of my books, I believe it’s because my characters are very real to me and, therefore, real to my readers. Foreign readers identify with my books because love and hate and jealousy are universal emotions that everyone understands.
When I became a novelist, one of the things that struck me was how much more respect a novelist gets than a screenwriter working in Hollywood. Jack Warner said, “What are writers but schmucks with typewriters?” A sentiment shared by most studio heads.
One day when I was writing Easter Parade, I was in Arthur Freed’s office when his insurance agent came in. We were talking when the secretary announced that the dailies were ready to be seen. Freed turned to his insurance agent and said, “Let’s go look at the dailies.”
The two men got up and walked out of the room, leaving me sitting there, alone, while they went to watch a picture I had written.
Not much respect.
I enjoy traveling around the world doing research for my novels and I have fun doing it. In Athens, I was researching The Other Side of Midnight. Jorja was with me. We passed a police station and I said, “Let’s go in.”
We went inside. There was a policeman behind the desk. He said, “Can I help you?”
“Yes,” I said. “Can someone here tell me how to blow up a car?”
Thirty seconds later we were locked in a room. Jorja was panicky. “Tell them who you are,” she said.
“Don’t worry. There’s plenty of time.”
The door opened and four policemen with guns came in. “You want to blow up a car? Why?”
“I’m Sidney Sheldon and I’m doing research.”