Around age three, Meg Gardiner had no clue what the alphabet was but that never stopped her from using crayons to scrawl the funny looking figures on a piece of paper. Well, no wonder, her dad was an English professor. But it was her persistence with letters and later words that has never let up since she was a toddler.
“It was always something that pulled me in. The idea that I could create worlds out of my own imagination just seemed magical to me,” she says.
Meg may have started her writing career early, but success didn’t come until much later and it took a circuitous route through England, a Stephen King book launch, and finally a family vacation to Colorado before her career exploded. Like so many famous authors, her early career was a series of fits and starts, but the ingredients for her eventual success were kneaded with raw talent (raw being the watchword), seasoned with a large type font, and topped with a sprinkling of happenstance.
She was a precocious child penning two novels, a three-time “Jeopardy!” game show winner, and an attorney––all before she decided what she really wanted was to settle down and write crime fiction.
Let’s start with Conquistador, the Mexican Stallion, a seventeen-page novel both penned and illustrated by Meg at age seven. It starred a red horse. She thinks her mother still has it buried in a drawer and Meg pledges it will never see the light of day.
At age sixteen she wrote a romance novel (no illustrations this time). Since Meg loves sports and describes herself as a tomboy growing up, she set her story at the Indianapolis 500. Her heroine is a young woman who falls in love with an Indy racecar driver, who crashes into a protective wall and dies. The young heroine soon falls in love with another Indy car driver. He too crashes into a wall and dies.
“I thought this was the ultimate,” she says. “I made myself cry. I think by page 60, I killed all the men in the book.” Hmm. And this is a cry for…what exactly?
She titled her novel My Once and Future Love. “Don’t ask me what the heck it was supposed to mean––the story wasn’t sci-fi or paranormal, no time travel or reincarnation, just fast cars and flaming wrecks.” Ahh, the tonnage of a teenage psyche.
In her senior year of college, she had room on her class schedule for electives and signed up for a creative writing class taught by then-teaching assistant Ron Hansen. His first literary western, Desperados, which reimagines the Dalton gang, had just been published. She had written a comic short story, “Boomer Sooner,” and he encouraged her to find a publisher. “That was the most validating thing anybody had told me about my writing.”
It was later published in the campus literary magazine, Spectrum, at the University of California Santa Barbara.
“When I was senior in college talking about what was going to happen next, I mentioned to my dad I loved writing, and it was something I always wanted to do. He kinda nodded sagely, ‘That’s wonderful,’ he said, ‘but how are you going to put food on the table?’” This, remember, is coming from a father deeply embedded in the writing profession. He suggested maybe a law degree, instead?
“I realized you could do writing when you come home from your second shift at Denny’s or you could do writing when you come home from the office,” Meg says. “I come from a family of lawyers, so I know how to take a hint.”
She got her law degree at Stanford and practiced for two years, which was enough. “I was not going to thrive arguing for a living.”
“I worked at a small firm and most of our cases involved smaller businesses, so we knew every case was going to make a big difference to them…It was stressful, so I decided to move to the less stressful arena of publishing––I had no clue.” But she soon would.
For a short time, she taught legal writing and research at the University of California Santa Barbara. Because of her teaching, she says, “Probably half the class decided not to go to law school.” To this day, she has no clue what a favor she did for them.
By now she had a husband, Paul Shreve, and three small children. Her husband worked in computer technology and landed a job with Cisco Systems in London. “Our friends thought we were crazy, but we leaped at it. We thought we’d never get another opportunity like this in our lifetime.”
But before she actually agreed to move, she wanted to check out London. They arrived in early July, it was 72 degrees, and the evening sun didn’t go down until ten-thirty.
“We actually moved in November. The kids were barfing on the plane having flown through turbulence. It was sleeting when we arrived, and the sun came up at eight in the morning and went down at three-forty-five in the afternoon.” And yet, she says, “It was the best decision we ever made.”
She thought they would stay for eighteen months and ended up staying for nineteen years. Her husband had the new job, and she was what’s called in ex-pat circles, “the trailing spouse,” the one who came over without employment. All three kids were now in school, and she thought about how she had always wanted to write a novel. She thought she may never get another chance.
Meg came up with a character “who is not me,” she is quick to say. Her protagonist, Evan Delaney, is a young woman from Santa Barbara, with a legal background, who snatches a Sidewinder missile. For some reason, everything but that last bit sounds familiar.
The story, she says, was about a sting operation, with a bit of “The Rockford Files,” crazy twists, and great banter (pages of it). Meg loves banter. She called it a murder mystery, but no one actually died. So, she rewrote it, nixing much of the witty dialogue, and had a few people knocked off. After a tenth draft, she was done.
“I toned her down, but people still say, ‘she’s you.’ I never stole a Sidewinder missile. I’ve never chased someone down wearing a tight, sparkly Diana Ross dress.”
Shortly after the family moved to Weybridge, Surrey, southwest of London, they joined a church and noticed a bright redhead in the choir swaying and gyrating with the music unlike the stiff, upper-lipped singers surrounding her. Meg eventually met Sharon Kendrick, and months later learned she was a romance writer (who years later would sell tens of millions of novels).
“I gave her a couple of chapters of my first novel. Sharon said, ‘there’s something here. I have a friend in London.’” That friend was literary agent, Giles Gordon. A week later, he called Meg wanting to represent her.
She titled her book Against The Tide. “Gordon told me it was the most boring title he’d ever heard.” But he studiously sent the manuscript out into the publishing world. The aftermath was ruthless. The only good thing you could say about her experience is she didn’t receive a single rejection form letter. Instead, there was a scathing single-spaced screed suggesting her manuscript be burned, buried, and recommending she start all over again.
“I didn’t realize how high the bar was,” Meg says. “I wasn’t writing a comic novel, and I never intended to all along. What works in a social situation with friends isn’t what a book needs.”
“If I wanted to write suspense, I needed a stronger story.” She came up with a different plot with the same protagonist. She wrote China Lake, named after the Naval Air Weapons Station in California, where her husband grew up. This time Evan Delaney had to protect her nephew from a cult.
“I read authors to examine what they were doing. What level are they that I’m missing? How do I train myself in this craft so I can grip readers the way their books did?”
She was even more relentless than before in her rewrites and editing. This time when China Lake was ready to send to publishers, Gordon decided to pull Against The Tide from the market so Meg would be identified with her second manuscript. She had an offer from Sue Fletcher at Hodder & Stoughton within seventy-two hours while other publishers stood in line.
“To begin, I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a cleaner manuscript,” Gordon told her. Meg’s incessant editing paid off. China Lake sold well throughout Europe, but it was no bestseller. And no matter how hard Gordon tried, he couldn’t interest an American publisher in her work.
Meanwhile, she persevered in promoting her novel, trying to build readership. At a book signing in the village of Cobham, not far from her home, a woman picked up her novel, read the back cover, and declared, “I’m never going to Wyoming, and I don’t read travel books.”
Huh?
Another middled aged patron snubbed her saying, “This is a beautiful cover, but I can’t read fiction.”
“I said, ‘That’s a tragedy for you. Isn’t there something the doctors can do?’” Not all of Meg’s banter had disappeared.
“Someone asked if I knew Starsky and Hutch,” from the television show. Another wanted to know if she had a dune buggy like the ones on the television show “Baywatch” and if she wore a red bathing suit like the female stars on the show.
“When they learned I had lived in Southern California, all they saw were the stereotype excesses.”
A year after publication, her publisher offered her a two-book deal. In the next four years, she wrote four more novels in the series. Days before the launch of her fifth Evan Delaney novel, mega-selling author Stephen King was going through his shelves at home looking for a book to read on a flight to London where one of his European book launches was about to take place.
His British publisher was also Hodder & Stoughton and had been flooding him with free copies of many of their authors’ books in hopes King would review them. King would shelve what he considered the promising ones, keeping them in his “Someday Books” collection––books he might read someday. He chose China Lake and read it on his seven-hour flight to London.
Why hers?
“He thought the type was nice and easy on the eyes,” Meg says. “He thought he would not get eyestrain on the red eye to London.”
“That was the true deciding factor,” King wrote in an Entertainment Weekly column three months later.
After he landed, “My first question to the nice publishing people who met me at the airport was why an American woman writing thrillers set in California was living and working in England?” King wrote in his column. “They didn’t seem to know. I next asked how many of the four Evan Delaney books…had been best-sellers in England. The answer was none. This staggered me. Then I asked who publishes her in the U.S., and the answer was no one. That floored me.”
“At that point he wanted the rest of my novels,” Meg says, “and my publisher invited me to King’s book launch at Middle Temple Hall,” where Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” was first performed in 1602. A thousand people attended King’s launch. “It freaked me out and was quite a shindig. When I arrived, my editor grabbed me to meet Stephen.”
She trembled as she approached and first noticed how tall he is, well over six feet. “He’s got this devilish grin on his face and said, ‘I’m your biggest fan.’ Then he started laughing.”
Soon he wrote a blog about her novel, but it got no traction with American publishers. Three months later however, on her way to a Colorado family vacation, Meg had a layover at Dulles International Airport outside of Washington D.C. Her editor called and told her King had just published a column about her book in Entertainment Weekly. She raced around the airport buying every copy she could at newsstands before jumping on her flight.
Once on board she began reading. King urged Americans to go on Amazon and buy China Lake from her British publisher. At first, she was ecstatic. “Then I realized he was writing this because no one in America was interested in my book…The rest of the flight I think my husband was ready to jump out of the plane because I was so antsy…By the end of flight, I just figured keep one foot in front of the other.”
Well, she sure read that wrong.
She awoke in her Colorado hotel room the next morning and checked her email. Her account had exploded. Fourteen American publishers suddenly wanted the book they didn’t want yesterday or for the past four years. She signed with Penguin, which bought American rights to her entire backlist.
“I’m eternally grateful to Stephen King,” Meg says.
Since that day in Colorado, China Lake has won the prestigious Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. It became a Publisher’s Weekly and Barnes & Noble bestseller. And how did it do with American readers? Penguin sold hundreds of thousands of copies of a novel nobody wanted. Go figure. She has since become a New York Times bestselling author.
“…she can be fall-on-your-fanny hilarious,” wrote King. “Ms. Gardiner’s narrator heroine pointing out that the road to hell is paved with disco balls, for instance. I kind of knew that but had never been able to express it.”
She had expressed in a larger font what even Stephen King couldn’t. How impressive is that? And no crayons were involved.
“I’m the luckiest person in the world,” she says.
From her base in literary England, Meg Gardiner had finally discovered America––or to put it more accurately, America had finally discovered Meg Gardiner.
___________________________________
China Lake
___________________________________
China Lake
Start to Finish: 2 years
I want to be a writer: 7 years old
Experience: One short story, taught college class is legal writing, two years legal experience
Agents Contacted: Queried one, stumbled upon her agent through friendship with Sharon Kendrick
Agent Responses: Two
Time to Sell Novel: 72 hours
First Novel Agent: Giles Gordon
First Novel Editor: Sue Fletcher
First Novel Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Inspiration: Walter Farley, Ray Bradberry, Sue Grafton, Carl Hiaasen
Advice to Writers: Just do it. Write where your passion takes you. Finish.
Website: MegGardiner.com
