Swimming to Catalina

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 ofBlue 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 calledChiefs .
    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.
    Chiefsalso 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 areDead in the Water , which just came out in paperback, andSwimming 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 forPalindrome . Recently he has been awarded France’s Prix de Literature Policière, forImperfect 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 time.”
     
    CEW: When did you first know you wanted to be a novelist?

    SW: My mother taught me to read a year before I went to school, and I became a voracious reader. I first tried to write a novel when I was nine, but I gave up when I found out how hard it was.
    CEW: Did you take any formal writing classes or seminars?
    SW: The only writing class I ever took was a correspondence course at the University of Georgia, because I needed an additional five credits to graduate. Any teaching I learned from came from my early bosses in the advertising business, who were sticklers for persuasive prose. I learned a lot there.
    CEW: I’d like to talk about the latest two novels which feature the popular character, Stone Barrington:Dead in the WaterandSwimming to Catalina . What was your inspiration for the storylines?
    SW: The inspiration forDead in the Water came from an article I read in a yachting magazine about an incident where a woman’s husband died in the middle of the Atlantic and she managed to sail herself the rest of the way across. I wrote a short story about it for anothersailing magazine, and later, it occurred to me that it might make a basis for a novel. Still later, it occurred to me that it might make a Stone Barrington novel. Near the end of the book, when Arrington marries her movie star, I thought that might make a good beginning for the next book, which is howSwimming to Catalina came along.
    CEW: InSwimming to Catalina , Stone Barrington returns and Hollywood and its pretensions are skewered—hilariously. Did you spend a lot of time in Hollywood to research the story or did it grow out of your experience in havingChiefs turned into a TV mini-series?
    SW: My experience of Hollywood comes from being in Los Angeles on book tour every year or two and having some friends in the movie business.Chiefs was filmed in Chester, South Carolina, and that never took me to California. I didn’t do any specific research for the