DETECTIVE Ed Conlon has just sold his first novel – a gritty cop thriller set in the northern tip of Manhattan – to the Riverhead imprint of Penguin Inc.
Conlon may have to take the boys out for a few at Stan’s Hall of Fame bar to celebrate.
The advance for the still untitled book is estimated to be $550,000.
Conlon is already a best-selling author of the streetwise non-fiction cop tome “Blue Blood,” an insider’s account of life patrolling housing projects in the South Bronx. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award this year.
When the proposal for that first book hit in November 1999 it ignited a frenzied bidding war that attracted interest from a dozen publishing houses. Conlon walked away with a $950,000 advance.
At the time of the auction, Conlon was on the job but writing under the pen name Marcus Laffey for The New Yorker. He had intended to keep his real identity under wraps for the book that grew out of those pieces.
The Post learned of his identity and broke the news that there was a literary millionaire among the men in blue – but because Conlon was working undercover on buy and bust operations, Media Ink opted not to reveal his true name.
Initially, other media outlets from the Associated Press to NBC followed our lead and wouldn’t divulge the police officer’s name, either.
But five days after the story broke, The New York Times’ Alex Kuczynski “outed” the author and attached his real name to the book for the first time. It triggered a mini-uproar in the publishing world, which honors pen names and pseudonyms.
With the cover blown, Riverhead decided to bring the book out under the author’s real name. When it hit in 2004, it ended up making the bestseller lists as both a hardcover and a paperback.
Conlon, one of only a few cops with a degree from Harvard, has now been on the job 11 years and has every intention of staying. “It can be a miserable schedule – two nights on and two days on, but everything else is pretty good,” he said.
He is rather taciturn about the plot of the new book, but says it revolves around two fictional detectives working in the Inwood section of Manhattan. “I figure I’ll take 18 months to two years to write it,” said Conlon, “after that it is up to them what they do with it.
Julie Grau, Riverhead publisher, said she expects to publish the book in 2008.
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David Pecker, the CEO of American Media, is scrambling to cut costs and buff his image. He’s just hired the public relations firm of Freud Inc., with Lisa Dallos and Matt Hiltzik to handle his public relations. While recent revelations involving the company’s business efforts on behalf of California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger have given American Media a public relations black eye, Pecker may be more focused on the fiscal health of the company with a board meeting with investors looming next week.
Toward that end, he is planning to reduce costs by cutting back the total number of pages in the National Enquirer to 60 pages. It had been running 72 pages since a big redesign and price hike earlier this year.
Paul Field, editor-in-chief of the National Enquirer, broke the news to his staff last week. One source said he read them the riot act and urged them to break more big stories.
Field, however, insisted, “I didn’t need to read them the riot act, but I told them that we made a company decision to change the number of pages from 72 to 60.”
He said that will enable the company to keep a 75 percent editorial to 25 percent advertising mix on the pages.
Sales slumped coming out of the gate in April after the redesign, but then seemed to revive briefly in the summer, even reaching one million for one issue in mid-July. More recently, the single-copy sales have slumped again over the last three issues into the range of 730,000 copies a week, sources said. “We’ve had the last three issues that were very flat, but the whole market seems to have been down the past few weeks,” said Field.
He said he welcomed the cutback in pages. “It will enable us to focus on what is really important – delivering the wow factor on every page.”
Meanwhile, on the company’s newest magazine, Celebrity Living, edited by Kelli Delaney, Pecker said he plans to cut the cover price to a quarter as a circulation building promotion on the Oct. 24 issue.
As reported by Page Six earlier, the magazine axed West Coast Bureau Chief Maryann Norbom last Friday, after an item appeared about the company’s dragging its feet on paying expenses printing her business cards.
But insiders insist the tiff was unrelated to the expense snafu. The company has already hired Lauren Tabach from Teen People as the new West Coast bureau chief of Celebrity Living. “She’ll be responsible for building our connections to Hollywood, especially young Hollywood,” said Delaney.
Elsewhere the search continues for a new editor of Shape and a chief financial officer for the corporation. But the company has at least filled the vacant publisher’s job at Shape, promoting Sabine Feldmann to the job.
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Playwright Gordon Dahlquist has hit the literary jackpot, selling his first novel, “The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters” to Bantam, a unit of Random House Inc.
The book, along with a yet to be written second book, was snapped up in a two-book deal for $2 million.
Agent Dan Baror said he is already selling the overseas rights to the book in Italy, Brazil and Holland for $500,000 and has offers from publishing houses in Britain and Germany that will add another $1 million to the take.
“He started writing the book while he was sitting around on jury duty,” said Baror, ending with a 1,300 page tome.
Baror calls the book “an exuberant return to the classic – and classically lurid – Penny Dreadfuls of the 19th Century.”
He said the book has murders, sex, airships, lords, ladies, secret societies and insidious rituals. The main characters include a young plantation heiress hot on the trail of her fiancé, a mercenary framed for the murder of a man he was supposed to have killed but did not, and a military physician.