Tom Scott, an editorial cartoonist and a screenwriter, was struck by Mallory’s self-assurance, which reminded him of Sam Shepard’s representation of Chuck Yeager, the test pilot, in the film “The Right Stuff.” “He came in wearing the same kind of bomber jacket,” Scott said recently, in a fondly teasing tone. One evening in September, in Christchurch, New Zealand, Mallory sat down in the bar of the hotel where he and other guests of a literary festival were staying. When he made an unscheduled appearance at a gathering of bloggers in São Paulo, he was greeted with pop-star screams. He repeated entertaining, upbeat remarks about his love of Alfred Hitchcock and French bulldogs. He spent much of the past year travelling-Spain, Bulgaria, Estonia-for interviews and panel discussions. Now thirty-nine, Mallory lives in New York, in Chelsea. Craig Raine, the British poet and academic, told me that Mallory had been a “charming and talented” graduate student at Oxford there, Mallory had focussed his studies on Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley novels, which are about a charming, brilliant impostor. Jonathan Karp, the publisher of Simon & Schuster, recently recalled that Mallory, as a junior colleague in the New York book world, had been “charming, brilliant,” and a “terrific writer of e-mail.” Tess Gerritsen, the crime writer, met Mallory more than a decade ago, when he was an editorial assistant she remembers him as “a charming young man” who wrote deft jacket copy. Translation rights have been acquired in more than forty foreign markets. Mallory has said that his second novel is likely to appear in early 2020-coinciding, he hopes, with the Oscar ceremony at which the film of “The Woman in the Window” will be honored. A film adaptation, starring Amy Adams and Gary Oldman, was shot in New York last year. 1-the first time in twelve years that a début novel had done so. A Washington Post critic contended that Mallory’s prose “caresses us.” The novel entered the Times best-seller list at No. He dedicated it to a man he has described as an ex-boyfriend, and secured a blurb from Stephen King: “One of those rare books that really is unputdownable.” Mallory was profiled in the Times, and the novel was reviewed in this magazine. Mallory sold the novel in a two-book, two-million-dollar deal. Like “ Gone Girl,” by Gillian Flynn (2012), and “ The Girl on the Train,” by Paula Hawkins (2015), each of which has sold millions of copies, Mallory’s novel, published in January, 2018, features an unreliable first-person female narrator, an apparent murder, and a possible psychopath. Finn, was the hit psychological thriller of the past year. His novel, “ The Woman in the Window,” which was published under a lightly worn pseudonym, A. J. Dan Mallory, a book editor turned novelist, is tall, good-looking, and clever.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |