Dead in the Water

my value to the company,” he says, “that my secretary was earning eighty dollars a week.”
    At the end of the sixties, after spending several weeks in London, he moved to that city and worked there for three years in various advertising agencies. At the end of that time he decided that the time had come for him to write the novel he had been thinking about since the age of ten. But after getting about a hundred pages into the book, he discovered sailing, and “…everything went to hell. All I did was sail.”
    After a couple of years of this his grandfather died, leaving him, “…just enough money to get into debt for a boat,” and he decided to compete in the 1976 Observer Single-handed Transatlantic Race (OSTAR). Since his previous sailing experience consisted of, “…racing a ten-foot plywood dingy on Sunday afternoons against small children, losing regularly,” he spent eighteen months learning more about sailing and,especially, ocean navigation while the boat was built at a yard in Cork.
    He moved to a nearby gamekeeper’s cottage on a big estate to be near the building boat. In the summer of 1975 he sailed out to the Azores in a two-handed race, in company with Commander Bill King, a famous World War II submarine commander and yachtsman, who had done a round-the-world, single-handed voyage. Commander King then flew back to Ireland, and Stuart sailed back, single-handed, as his qualifying cruise for the OSTAR the following year.
    The next couple of years were spent in Georgia, dividing his time between Manchester and Atlanta, while selling his grandfather’s business, a small-town department store, and writing two non-fiction books. Blue Water, Green Skipper , was an account of his Irish experience and the OSTAR, and A Romantic’s Guide to the Country Inns of Britain and Ireland , “was a travel book, done on a whim.
    He also did some more sailing. In August of 1979 he competed in the now notorious Fastnet Race of 1979, which was struck by a huge storm. Fifteen competitors and four observers lost their lives, but Stuart and his host crew finished in good order, with little damage. That October and November, he spent skipperinghis friend’s yacht back across the Atlantic, calling at the Azores, Madiera and the Canary Islands, finishing at Antigua, in the Caribbean.
    In the meantime, the British publisher of Blue Water, Green Skipper had sold the American rights to W.W. Norton, a New York publishing house, and they had also contracted to publish the novel, on the basis of two hundred pages and an outline, for an advance of $7500. “I was out of excuses to not finish it, and I had taken their money, so I finally had to get to work.” He finished the novel and it was published in 1981, eight years after he had begun it. The novel was called Chiefs .
    Though only 20,000 copies were printed in hard-back, the book achieved a hefty paperback sale and was made into a six-hour critically acclaimed television drama for CBS-TV, starring Charlton Heston, Danny Glover, John Goodman, Billy D. Williams, and Stephen Collins.
    Chiefs also established Stuart as a novelist in the eyes of the New York publishing community and was the beginning of a successful career. He has since written fifteen more novels, the most recent of which are Dead in the Water , which just came out in paperback, and Swimming to Catalina , just out in hardcover from HarperCollins. Both books feature Stone Barrington,the handsome, sophisticated attorney/investigator, and are New York Times bestsellers. Chiefs won the coveted Edgar award from the Mystery Writers of America, and Stuart was nominated again for Palindrome . Recently he has been awarded France’s Prix de Literature Policière, for Imperfect Strangers .
    In 1984 Stuart married for the first time, but the marriage ended in 1990. “I married too young,” he says. “I was only forty-seven.” Then, after fifteen years in Atlanta, he moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. There he spent five years, building a house and meeting his second wife, Chris, who was working in a local bookstore while trying to write her own novel. He now divides his time between Florida and Connecticut and travels widely. At fifty-nine, he has no plans to retire. “I reckon I’m good for another fifteen or twenty novels, maybe more,” he says. “I began to be a lot more careful about my health after I learned that heart disease can be prevented by drinking red wine, so I should be around for a long