Gore Vidal, P.I.

In the 1950s, Gore Vidal, writing as ‘‘Edgar Box,’’ knocked out a trilogy of pulpy mystery novels, which are being reissued this month by Vintage ($16 each). Now 85, Vidal explains here why he had to secretly slum it in the paperbacks.

You wrote these books very quickly, in weeklong spurts of 10,000 words a day. Why the nom de plume?

After “The City and the Pillar,” which was a cheery tale of two boys who were in love with each other, Orville Prescott of The New York Times, a very distinguished newspaper of yesteryear, said that he would never review a book by me, much less read one. And he said that to Nicholas Wreden, who was the head of E.P. Dutton, who was my publisher. I said, “Can’t we get him up on charges?” And he said, “No, The Times is always like this,” and I said, “Well, the sooner they are out of business the better.” I hope I step on no toes there, but it is a kind of lousy paper and deserves everything that is coming its way.

And that is an opinion that you hold to this day?

I see no reason to change it.

As a result of Prescott, you thought you could no longer write a commercially successful novel because it wouldn’t be reviewed?

Yes. Luckily I had England all those years and they had real critics. So I did very well with the English press and didn’t exist in The New York Times.

Initially, you said you weren’t ‘‘sufficiently stupid’’ to write popular novels. Did writing these books increase your esteem for commercial writers?

I don’t think anything could do that. Don’t ask for the impossible when we have the moon.

“Death in the Fifth Position” is a whodunit, but there’s also a lot of 1950s New York atmosphere: White Russian ballet companies, the reach of McCarthyism, the gay bars in Harlem, late-night bathhouses. Was it drawn from life?

I knew quite a bit about the ballet. I had been a victim of hypothermia in World War II, hit by a wave, it landed on the bow of the FS-35, which was the ship of which I was first mate. The result was, I had a frozen left leg, or knee actually. So, I went back into hospital, I had been in the hospital in Anchorage in Alaska, and I had to go back in again and they were talking about operations and this and that. I said no to everything. … I had seen them botch some operations and I was in Birmingham General Hospital in Van Nuys, California, not far from where I am in my “home,” as they call them out here — that means “house” — and, in due course, I went back to New York from whence I had come before the Army. Then, out of curiosity and partly for health reasons, I spent a winter studying ballet with a guy who was quite a good teacher and I learned quite a few things about my knee and my leg and how the hell to survive it. I was studying in a class with real dancers and they were quite aware that I was not a real dancer — they just thought I was funny.

Did you ever want to take credit for the books when they came out. You never felt a kind of desire to identify with…

No, no, no … you must remember that I’m a comic writer. There was no place for a war writer to be a comic writer.

You mean people expected poignant, serious serious stuff from a veteran?

Well, I don’t know what people expect, that’s their problem. But I expect that I had to do well by the military because I had spent so long in it.

Most of the characters in your early novels had been in the service.

Everybody had been in the service, you know, except the Bush family.

In the Box novels, your hero claims that he doesn’t really care about seeing justice done. He’s finding the killer just to protect his girl, who’s a suspect. Or, in the second book, he’s more interested in selling the story of a senator’s murder to the New York Globe. He only begins to solve the crime when he himself is targeted.

I wrote a book before that called “Williwaw,” which has murder at sea — where the head of the engine room gets murdered. And no one on the ship is interested in solving the murder. It’s considered a classic novel and [Christopher] Isherwood always loved it. He said, “It’s the first time I’ve read a murder story in which no one was interested in solving the murder.” I said, you know, “We must make allowances for originality.”

Agatha Christie is a particularly strong influence in these books.

In everybody’s books. Don’t single me out.

And there’s also one passing reference to Holmes…

I like Christie because I thought she was a great naturalist — those are real villages she writes about — and it’s fascinating. I used to like to read not for the mysteries but I read her for the characters. They are of no use to an American writer, but anyway they are very nice to read.

Edmund Wilson called detective stories a vice that “ranks somewhere between smoking and crossword puzzles.”

I don’t think mystery stories are any lower than stories of how George and Emily failed to get status at the university or to English department politics. That to me is about as tedious as it can get in print.

I’m wondering what happened to the book “Some Desperate Adventure.” Was that going to be an Edgar Box novel?

No, I thought about it, but no, it wasn’t going to be. It was going to be a little shocker, actually. Tennessee [Williams] loved it and was always trying to get me to publish it, but I never did.

Why did you resist? Certainly not because of fear for any kind of reprisals — you had already received those.

Well, one more Orville Prescott and I might have been responsible for murder.

Do you have any expectations for the way these books will be re-received? Do you think they’ve been remembered well by people?

No, I don’t see people coming up to me on subways and asking me about them. You see, I never played at being author, I just happened to be one.

But surely you had an actively literary social life?

Not so much, no. I have never taught. I think I applied for a Guggenheim once. It’s the only time Truman Capote and I were ever on the same side. We both applied one year and neither of us got it.

Do you wish that people paid more attention to your fiction? Not to say that they don’t, of course, but I mean, you are chiefly referred to as an essayist and here’s a very significant example of your successful fiction…

I’m never very self-reflective of these matters. What people think of me is people’s problems, not mine.

Well, Mr. Vidal, it has been a pleasure.

Give my best to Orville Prescott in whatever retirement home you may find him. He caused more damage to American literature, well, than anything else.

Note: Orville Prescott died in 1996 (his obituary).