Fifteen Minutes to Live

Phoef Sutton Fifteen Minutes to LiveYou don’t get many do-overs in life, but my good friend Phoef Sutton, the insanely talented, Emmy-award winning writer, got the chance with his new novel Fifteen Minutes to Live. And it’s fitting, since the book is also about revisiting the past. But I don’t want to spoil the story, so I’ll let Phoef tell it…

I started writing as teen-ager.  Short stories.  I still have hundreds of rejection slips from PLAYBOY and ALFRED HITCHCOCK’S MYSTERY MAGAZINE and ELLERY QUEEN.   I took each one as a badge of honor.  I knew that one day I’d get accepted…

Well, that day never came.  I started writing plays in college because I knew I could put them on – they’d have that much life anyway.  This proved an invaluable experience for what came to be my chosen profession.  Writing stuff that makes people laugh.

I loved TV as a kid.  Who doesn’t?  I can still recite episodes of the DICK VAN DYKE SHOW and GET SMART by heart.  But I never thought my career would go in that direction.  I always wanted to write horror stories and thrillers.  Richard Matheson was my idol.  And Cornell Woolrich and Robert Bloch.  I knew who Carl Reiner and Jim Brooks and David Lloyd were, of course.  But I never saw myself following in their footsteps.

But fate had plans for me.  I ended up writing for CHEERS, sitting next to David Lloyd and learning from the masters.  I guess writing for what TV Guide just named one of the best written shows in TV history is something to be proud of.  But I still had that nagging desire to see my name in print.

When I read Oliver Sacks’ THE MAN WHO MISTOOK HIS WIFE FOR A HAT and started putting myself in the place of its oddly brain damaged heroes I knew I had a way in to that novel I always wanted it write.  It just flowed out of me, unbidden, like a dream.

Writing in complete sentences after a career of writing stage directions was not so easy.  But the joy of being able to get inside characters’ heads and tell what they’re thinking and feeling was heaven.

So I wrote FIFTEEN MINUTES TO LIVE, then called ALWAYS SIX O’CLOCK.  Imagined that, in the book world, the writer was king and what he says is Gospel.  I didn’t know about editors and notes.  I made the mistake of selling it to a publisher who wanted to turn it from a noir-ish, Cornell Woolrich-style nightmare into a straight romance.  And I agreed.  The end result pleased nobody and sank without a trace. Always Six O'Clock

With the advent of electronic publishing, I now have the chance to present the book as I originally intended.  People seem to be responding to it the way I hoped they would years ago.  It’s very gratifying.   Almost like getting one of my stories accepted by ELLERY QUEEN would have been to my high-school self!