For their breadth and depth, his books are called “literary crime fiction.” This suggests a disdain for the genre that Price never expresses. In fact, in its original conception, The Whites was straightforward genre fiction. Under a pen name, Harry Brandt — a nod to his first agent, Carl Brandt, who died two years ago — Price had planned on writing a series of more conventional thrillers.1 This was, he readily admits, largely a financially motivated decision: He was trying to get the prime placement on your preferred airport bookstore’s paperback spin rack.The first pen name book had been planned for the fall of 2011; it was supposed to be delivered quick, nice, and easy. But his process took over. “You care about the mystery, but there’s so much more going on that’s peripheral to the mystery,” he says. “It just became … sprawling.”
Price’s regular contract is with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, but he’d signed the pen name deal with Henry Holt. So as silly as it is, and as much as he’d rather not, he’s obligated to publish The Whites under a pen name. “A thousand times, I’m gonna be asked, ‘Why the pen name?’” he says. “And a thousand times, I’m gonna say, ‘I don’t fucking know. It seemed like a good idea at the time.’
― Number None, Tuesday, 17 February 2015 16:30 (nine years ago) link