THE QUIET KILLER : After 21 Highly Regarded Novels, Malibu's Ross Thomas Is Poised to Become the Next King of Crime

By JOSEPH DALTON

Nov. 8, 1987 12 AM PT

<i> Joseph Dalton is a New York writer. </i>

“I can’t believe this,” Georgia Blue said.... “Do-gooders don’t steal five million dollars. Thieves do. Grifters like us, Otherguy. If those two want romance, fine. I’ll take cash.”

“What’s so wrong with doing a little good while we’re at it?” Overby asked.

Georgia Blue sighed. “Because there’s never any money in it.” --”Out on the Rim,” by Ross Thomas

In Malibu, Ross Thomas smiles--which he does infrequently but well, an even white smile that makes you want to smile back and put your hand on your wallet, if not in that particular order. He takes another quick slash of Perrier water and returns to a subject he’s studied carefully, which is chicanery in high places. “Oliver North was the patsy--no, that’s not the right word: the mark . Now here comes Gen. Secord and Albert Hakim, and the mark is saying, ‘You handle the money.’ Now when the mark is telling you to handle the money, you’ve found the mother lode, the Seven Cities of Cibola.

“When I was with the union, well, any time you have a membership of say, a million, you’ll find guys flying in to sell you something that you just desperately need--the guys that fly in with the deal.” Another hesitant smile to puncture the moment, and Thomas says, with Oz-like serenity, “Those guys are known as . . . dealmakers. That’s the only way it makes sense--Ollie North had always had his ideology, and he was the mark. He’s the prime current example of American naivete.”

A final sad smile, full of sorrow for the thievery but bemused at how slick it went, and the thought occurs that Thomas might have made a good con man. Instead, he went into politics--speechwriting and organizing, the nuts and bolts of getting elected--and was at least fair at it. Now he writes novel about the deals that go down at the fringes of power, and he’s very, very good at that. “In the new book, what I was writing about was greed,” he says, shaking his head and smiling his smile, with wonder in his voice. “And how it affects everyone-- everyone .”

The new book is “Out on the Rim”--the Pacific Rim, of course, and it’s about the Philippines in the days after Cory Aquino took over. But really it’s about the Ross Thomas territory, out there on the frayed edges of American power, where greed and soft money intersect, and one man’s patriot is another man’s Ollie. An extensively plotted novel, it follows five characters on their way to deliver $5 million to a New People’s Army commander in the jungle. Since $5 million divides nicely by five, there are a few neat twists along the way. But over 21 years, and 22 books, Thomas has always had his admirers. The difference is that now a few have become believers.

“Look at this,” says Otto Penzler in his New York office. Penzler runs the Mysterious Press, Thomas’ new publisher, and the office could have come out of one of the lesser London clubs at the turn of the century--two comfortable chairs, a nice sofa, 12-foot bookcases lining the walls. He’s waving a copy of “Out on the Rim”: “That’s foil on the cover--see how it jumps out at you? Know what that costs? Seventeen thousand dollars--that’s somebody’s salary for a year. We’re doing this right--Ross deserves it.”

The early rumor in New York publishing circles was that Thomas had left Simon & Schuster, for a $750,000, two-book deal with the Mysterious Press. Thomas won’t talk money, and Penzler says only that it was a three-book deal, for more. But he is spending $100,000 on the publicity campaign, and the Mysterious Press is hoping to sell about 80,000 books, which would move “Out on the Rim” nicely about halfway up the bestseller lists. The New York word for this is breakout , as in this is Ross Thomas’ breakout book.

So the early word, in addition to breakout, is good. The Book-of-the-Month Club made “Out on the Rim” a featured alternate for November, and that’s not to be underestimated. For one thing, the Book-of-the-Month Club prints pictures of your book in its ads and people see it there long after they’ve forgotten reviews and the initial advertising and say, well, it must be good. For another, the Book-of-the-Month Club has about 1.6 million members, and a fair number of them will buy the book, somewhere between 15,000 and 60,000 for a featured alternate. That’s a lot of books, and Thomas has his fans there, too.

“It’s a fantastic book,” says Al Silverman, the club’s chairman and CEO. “How many has he written, 16 or 17? Twenty-two? I’m surprised he’s not better known. We don’t do this very often, but we have done it, and I suppose the best recent example is Elmore Leonard.”

Elmore Leonard. There’s a name to conjure with, as in “Ross Thomas is the next Elmore Leonard,” which is what got New York anxious. But we’re talking the deal now, and apart from both having two first names, they’re really not very similar. Leonard is a fine writer, with an acute ear for the American vernacular, but his characters are usually blue-collar thieves-- or people who’ve gotten mixed up with them, somehow--and there’s not a lot of world view there, except that somehow right will prevail.

Thomas’ characters are a little more complex. The protagonists of his books are, he says, “Thirty-nine, with a past.” They are fellows who once did something well, now retired from the game. Something gets them back into it--an old friend’s request, or death, or the promise of enough money to enjoy retirement. They wear J. Press suits and shirts with that Washington affectation, the button-down collar, which shows that maybe they don’t think they’re quite 39 yet. But at the same time, the old-gunfighter-on-the-porch refrain is playing: Can I still do this? The view from 39 is slightly cynical, but not cynical enough to take advantage of the eccentrics and grotesques Thomas’ characters meet along the way. Like Velveeta Keats, to take one from a novel set in California, “Missionary Stew,” of 1983. Ms. Keat’s family used to be very big in the drug trade, but she thinks they’re in T-bills now, and she asks, “You ever notice how fast things move nowadays? The Keatses went from dirt-poor to hog-rich to banker stuffy in one generation. But when I was born back in ’52 they named me Velveeta because they thought it sounded pretty and tasted good.”

The protagonist asks if they still like Velveeta, and after wondering if he means the name or the cheese, she answers sadly, “They don’t like either one anymore. Mama calls me Vee now and they switched to Brie. Mama puts it on crackers with slivered almonds and sticks it in the microwave for a few seconds. If you’re wondering what I’m doing out here, I’m a remittance woman.”

As that brief passage shows, Thomas understands the value of compression: You’re not going to be too surprised by Velveeta Keats after meeting her like that. And it probably comes from Thomas’ unfashionably liberal politics, but the cynicism is smoothed by the strong belief that if only a fool thinks every dog has its day, only a bigger fool believes that most dogs don’t deserve a chance.

You see, Ross Thomas doesn’t write your standard genre thriller--what he writes are novels about politics viewed as white-collar crime. Or, to stretch the claim a little further, novels about politics that are really novels of manners and style. Very few have even tried that--”Democracy,” by Henry Adams. “The Gay Place,” by William Brammer, Lyndon Johnson’s press secretary. “All the King’s Men,” by Robert Penn Warren, and a few of George V. Higgins’ lesser efforts. The list is thin.

In a time with lots of style, but very little in the way of manners, the writing has won Thomas a number of admirers. The books sell best, Penzler says, on the L-95 strip from Boston to Washington, and then in Los Angeles because Thomas lives here. But possibly because his characters are so close to the people they spend the day with anyway, Thomas’ biggest fans are careful, serious observers of American politics. It’s always nice to meet a fan:

“I love Ross Thomas--I’ve been trying to get the paper to let me do a piece on him for a long time,” says E. J. Dionne, who is covering presidential politics in 1988 for the New York Times. “He’s like a Southern California Graham Greene--the people are aware they’re not good, but they’re saved by their awareness.

“I think I like ‘The Seersucker Whipsaw’ the best, because it’s about Africa and I covered foreign politics. But I like ‘Chinaman’s Chance’ a great deal also. I just really admire the balance he’s struck between cynicism and belief. You know the old line--liberalism has been in trouble since Humphrey Bogart died. And when Humphrey Bogart was replaced by Woody Allen, liberalism really got into trouble. Ross Thomas is a Humphrey Bogart liberal.”

“ ‘Missionary Stew,’ ” says John Ellis, a producer of the NBC News Election Unit. His official title is producer, but Ellis covers politics, and there are a lot of people who say he’s the best in the country. Others would say only that he’s the best informed political reporter, because he’s only got the NBC nightly new’s 24 minutes to get what he knows out. Ellis helped run New Jersey gubernatorial candidate Peter Shapiro’s first campaign as a Yale undergraduate (undergrad in ‘75), then Ed Sadlowski’s campaign for president of the United Steelworkers when he got out. Since George Bush is his uncle, he also knows his way around Republicans.

“I guess he must have been out of it by Humphrey, by 1968, because there’s no television in the books,” Ellis says, “and television has just changed the way politics gets reported in his country. But the rest of it is perfect.”

“Nobody writes as well about politics--power is really fascinating, but the people who write about it always make it much duller than it really is,” says Mandy Grunwald of the Sawyer-Miller Group, perhaps the Democratic Party’s top young media consultant. She and James Carville plotted the strategy and made the spots that got Wallace Wilkinson the 1987 Democratic nomination for governor in Kentucky after he’d been running last right up to the day of the election.

“He writes really well about the eccentrics in the business of politics,” says Grunwald. “But most of all, he understands the love of the game. Like Carville always says: I’m a game player, not a rule maker. And that’s what his characters are, too. They’re junkies, and he understands the drug. There’s a thing in ‘The Cold War Swap’ where somebody says that public relations is the art of controlled revelation.” She laughs. “I say, yeah-- I want to be in the controlled revelation business.”

Ross Thomas is pleased, both with his fans and the attention his new book is getting. With the front page review in the Washington Post Book Review. When the eminent Clifton Fadiman writes in the Book-of-the-Month Club News that “what is finally delivered is action-jammed and suspense-packed entertainment with hardly an ounce of fat. It just happens that its author seems to be not only an adroit carpenter of thrills but also a very smart man.” On the other hand, he’s been at it more than 20 years, and he has always agreed with Clifton Fadiman. There’s a certain reserve here; mostly it’s quiet pride. But it’s also a mannered resolve that he did good work in the past without the fuss, and nothing has changed. Except that it’s nice.

The Book-of-the-Month Club throws a monthly luncheon for its more eminent authors--John Updike, people like that. They threw one for Thomas, even though “Out on the Rim” was only a featured selection--after all, they’d thrown one for Elmore Leonard. They wanted to meet Ross Thomas. So he went to his catered luncheon in the club offices on Lexington Avenue, and everyone thought he was a fine fellow. Awfully quiet though--seemed to be awfully shy. They hoped it wasn’t the fish.

“I always wanted to be thought of as shy,” says Ross Thomas, laughing. But he is an oddly formal man; sometimes with his courtly manners, his punctuality and his careful speech he almost seems to have come from an earlier time. Thomas nods. His father was 42 when he was born in Oklahoma City, and his mother was 42, he says. Maybe that has something to do with it.

His parents were from Alabama, his father a contractor, though they didn’t build much in Oklahoma City between 1930 and 1945. His father wasn’t too involved with politics, but his mother was a precinct worker. “They both were yellow-dog Democrats,” he says. “I loved politics, always.” His parents would take him to Memorial Park down the street for rallies in summer, and he remembers Sen. Thomas (Blind Tom) Gore on the Fourth of July. “I have a vision in my mind the boy that led him onstage was his grandson, Gore Vidal,” he says. “It probably wasn’t, but I don’t want to know different.”

Thomas grew up, spent a year at Oklahoma University, then went to work on the Daily Oklahoman as a cub sports writer. Then he got drafted and sent to the Philippines, where he saw action in an intelligence and reconaissance patrol before the invasion, experiences drawn on in “Out on the Rim.” Discharged after coming down with hepatitis, he finished school on the GI bill.

He drifted down to Lafayette, Louisiana, as a general assignment reporter--”finishing school” Thomas remembers fondly. “Louisiana used to have the best, hardest, most vicious state politics around. I think it’s Texas now. But if you were interested in politics, it was the place to be then.”

He went back to Oklahoma City as the Oklahoma Farmers Union’s public relations director--the first step into a world he wouldn’t leave for 15 years. In 1952, he moved to Denver for a job with the National Farmers’ Union.

But he was always itchy, and in 1956 set up a PR firm with two colleagues in Denver to run a Colorado governor’s race, and when the National Farmers Union executive director got into the Senate campaign, they handled that one too. They lost the senate seat but won the governor’s race, and Thomas was hooked: “It was great, all seat-of-the-pants stuff--no polling or television and lots of dirty deals. It’s an addiction--like coffee, or cigarettes. If they’d had campaign consultants like they have now I’d still be doing it today.”

But they didn’t, and Thomas’ first marriage was breaking up. He went off to Bonn, West Germany, a haphazard foreign correspondent for radio networks, doing some work on the side for the Social Democrats. It was all getting boring when he answered a blind ad in the International Herald Tribune for experienced political operatives. Thomas found himself working for Patrick Dolan Associates, running Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s campaign in the first elections after Nigerian independence. Dolan was a former Foote Cone and Belding hotshot who had been an OSS hotshot in World War II; despite wondering how much he was going to be running it for Awolowo and how much for the CIA, Thomas took the job. He’d never been to Nigeria, but Dolan told him to go interject some American razzmatazz into a Nigerian election and he figured he could do that. Mos of what he tried is detailed in “The Seersucker Whipsaw”--skywriting that Awolowo’s opponents called poisonous and so on. Thomas spent a good year and headed back to Washington. Awolowo lost and got thrown into prison by the victors.

In Washington, Thomas looked into government jobs, and then landed something more suited to his skills: Arnold Zander had founded the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees AFL-CIO, had to run for re-election every two years and figured--correctly--he was just too nice a guy to pull it off. Zander was right, of course, and he had union official Jerry Wurf after his job. Thomas actually grins. “Crazy Jerry,” he says. “I was the hatchet man.”

His official title was director of public relations and publications, but the job was to get Zander through those conventions every two years. It was a good place to study chicanery, since public employees always knew what was being stolen and where. They won in 1962 in Minneapolis and then lost the 1964 convention in Denver by 21 votes; Wurf flew to AFSCME headquarters in Washington at midnight and changed the locks. Thomas hooked up in a similar situation with the United Steelworkers, working for the incumbent president, David McDonald.He wasn’t too surprised with the membership dumped McDonald around a year later.

By now he had a little money, and he had a little time, so he sat down and wrote a novel. “That’s all most people need anyway,” says Thomas.

He called up a friend from his foreign correspondent days, Baltimore Sun editorial writer Bynum Shaw, who was the only person he knew who had published a novel. He told him he’d written this masterpiece, and what did he do next?

“You get some brown paper,” Shaw told him. Right. Brown paper.

“Then you get some string,” Shaw went on. String. OK.

“Then you mail it off to a publisher,” Shaw said, and gave him the address of his editor at Morrow. The book was “The Cold War Swap” and it won the Edgar for the best first novel of 1966. Thomas was off. He’d written his first novel in seven weeks, and in the next 10 years, he’d write 15 more.

“I always got bored with jobs after two or three years,” says Thomas. “I wanted to be a writer since I was 17, because writers didn’t go to work. I said, that sounds good.”

The first novels are sort of your detective story, political and procedural, including six under the name Oliver Bleeck, which made Morrow worry that he was competing with himself. They’re all nicely written, but slightly formulaic. Then “The Seersucker Whipsaw” is one step forward. And the big step is “The Fools in Town Are on Our Side” (a great title from Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn”: “Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain’t that a big enough majority in any town?”), the first book where he gets the cynicism and hope in balance. After that, it’s a ride--”The Porkchoppers,” about the Steelworkers, “Yellow-Dog Contract,” about AFSCME; “If You Can’t Be Good,” about some work he was doing with Jack Anderson.

Thomas has no nightmare stories to tell about starting out, partly because he was 39 when he started and partly because he had a trade. He was a Great Society poverty warrior at VISTA along with his friend Arch Parsons (now in the Washington bureau of the Baltimore Sun, putting together what Parsons describes as the 12-minute speech--Thomas wrote half in six minutes.

But that well-documented love of the game had begun to fade. At a certain point you can no longer put in the hours needed; at a certain point you really have heard it all before. It’s a young person’s game--Hamilton Jordan was White House Chief of Staff at 34 and 39 is the upper edge of the lining. Thomas had married again, his novel writing was going well, but he needed to make a change. He moved to Malibu.

“I like oceans,” Ross Thomas says simply, as only someone raised in Oklahoma can. I like to look at them.” When he was 12, his father took him to Chicago; Lake Michigan was the first body of water he had ever encountered he encountered he couldn’t see across. “That was something to me,” he says. Now he can look at it all the time.

The house looks out over the ocean, of course. Thomas takes a phone call, and when Rosalie Thomas bustles into the room he asks for a glass of Perrier water, after introducing her as “the present Mrs. Thomas.”

“My personal politics run to the left end of the Democratic Party,” Thomas says, finishing his phone call. His face tightens. “About as left as you can get.”

The last politicians he evinces admiration for are Morris Udall and Fred Harris, and the last campaign he was invited out on was Fred Harris’ abortive run for president in 1976. He turned it down.”My friends said, ‘Ross, this old boy is the fellow to bring Socialism to these United States,’ ” Thomas says, laughing. “I figured he’d have to do it without me. Probably should have gone, though. Probably could have gotten a book out of it.”

Thomas smiles. “I’m too busy setting up chairs. I don’t think I’ve done that enough in my life.” The present Mrs. Thomas is past president and present recording secretary of the Malibu Democratic Club. They’ve been married for 13 years.

“I’m the Dennis Thatcher of Malibu,” Thomas says. At 61, he is a handsome man--one of those fellows that ran on scotch and cigarettes, that nervous energy kept thin. But the drink is Perrier now, and he pops piece after piece of nicotine chewing gum into his mouth, and the effect is a slight thickening , which is fine. That slightly pop-eyed look and the sad smile in a thinner face, and you’d never have put your hand on your wallet, and maybe asked if he needed a watch.

The nervous energy is still there, but it goes into writing now, every day from nine to two. Presently it’s a book described only as a book about a small California town. Friends say the move to California and the present Mrs. Thomas have both settled him down to work. He’s had numerous nibbles from Hollywood, “the smallest town I’ve ever been in, except for Washington. Everybody knows everybody else.” Perhaps his best previous novel, “Chinaman’s Chant,” which “Out on the Rim” is a sequel to, has been optioned several times since 1978. He ended up with screen credit on Wim Wender’s “Hammet.”

But if anything, he’s become a better writer--the books after the move to Malibu are all better written, with sharper characters, and he was no slouch before. And unlike most writers on the left, the gap between the way things are and the way they ought to be hasn’t become a chasm, insurmountable and hopeless.

But think about Ross Thomas’ college class. Oklahoma University ‘49--poor kids who came back from the war and went to college on the GI Bill and became doctors, and lawyers and petroleum geologists, and voted a straight Republican, by God. In “The Mordida Man,” the Thomas novel about the kidnapping of the president’s brother, there’s a section where one of the terrorist kidnappers is explaining how he became a terrorist--a Japanese American locked into an internment camp as a child, a scholarship student at Stanford in the 1960s who his classmates call “Tojo” and how it burned in him:

“Bingo McKay nodded thoughtfully. “Yeah, I think I know what you mean. If something like that happened to me back in ’46 right after the war . . . I went back to school--to OU. And hell, I was poor. I was living on the GI Bill and wearing suntans to class and eating quarter hamburgers and then one day, sitting there in a Government 101 class, it just came to me. So I got up in the middle of that class and walked out and never went back. Like you said, I just all of a sudden knew.

“ ‘Knew what?’

McKay grinned. ‘That I was gonna be rich.”’

So why didn’t you do that Ross, go out and get rich? Why fool around? Why didn’t you go out and become somebody’s Mike Deaver?

“That’s a good question,” Rosalie Thomas says, leaning forward to hear the answer.

Thomas takes his time. Finally, he smiles that sad smile one last time, and says, “I don’t know.”

“I think Ross felt he could have more fun,” says Arch Parsons, laughing. “And I think he probably has. “ ‘The Fools in Town Are on Our Side’ is a great title--but all Ross’ books are about the fools.”

One final sad smile. “People are always saying, Things can’t be as bad as you make them in your books,” Thomas says. “And then I have the two--month satisfaction of hearings like we’ve just had, and I can say, No, they’re worse.”

“The books are fiction,” he continues. “But when I was a kid, the scariest thought I could have was that I’d be at the telephone company finishing up after 40 years, and they’d be handing me a watch. That scared me. Maybe it’s why I moved on so much. But I’ve written fiction for 21 years, which shows a certain inertia, I suppose. Or discipline. And I think I do it better now than I did it then.”

Yes. Out over the ocean Ross Thomas sits, in chinos and loafers and polo shirt, too formal for Malibu, but very good indeed.