Robert Littell interview at January Magazine

January Magazine has a great in-depth interview with Robert Littell, author LEGENDS, which won the LA Times Book Prize last month, and VICIOUS CIRCLE, which will be out in the Fall.
Click here for the full text, but here's a little taste:

How did you first find your way into print as a novelist?

I quit Newsweek in 1970. I had $10,000 dollars in the bank -- my life savings -- plus a wife and two small children. I relocated my family, buying a third of a house [with the other two-thirds being owned by two other couples] in France. My goal was to write Lewinter. I had an agent, who I knew via my [efforts to publish the] Czech Black Book [a revised history of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia], so I sent him the manuscript for Lewinter ... He wrote back and actually fired me.

Then I had a cousin, who is unfortunately dead now; he was the editor at a publishing house and he was very close to me. I sent him the manuscript and said to him that I'm not asking you to publish it, but just let me know if you think it is publishable. He wrote back and said, "I think you should pack your bags and go back to Newsweek!"

Finally, I had a very close friend in the south of France who was a blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter. He was my last resort, as by now my money was almost all gone. So I gave the manuscript to him and asked him to read it, and could he tell me if anyone would publish it. He called me back and he said, "Of course it's publishable, and could I show it to a friend" who was working for a very well known French publisher [Gallimard]. Next thing I know, I get a phone call from Marcel Duhamel [a filmmaker who would go on to run Gallimard's famous Série Noire suspense series], who bought the book for $500. So I sold the book, and I remember walking around with this letter in my hand, completely stunned. Years later, I read that the same thing happened to [F. Scott] Fitzgerald, who when he sold his first book was also walking around, stunned. Then on the basis of the French sale, I got an American agent, who incidentally got turned down by three or four big publishing houses, but finally she got a sale from Houghton Mifflin for $3,000. [Lewinter] was published and got fantastic reviews in The New York Times and other papers, and the book hit the bottom of the bestseller lists for about one hour and a half. [Laughs] ... And I was launched writing books.

--John Mark