Justin Scott’s Fiction Takes Over Part Of His Identity

By Shannon Hicks

Justin Scott has been outed. The Newtown resident and author of the Newtownesque Ben Abbott mysteries was the subject of a feature in The Boston Globe this past summer that announced to the world that our neighbor has been writing under the pseudonym Paul Garrison for quite some time.

Under his own name, Mr Scott is the author of thrillers and mystery novels, beginning with the 1973 release of Many Happy Returns and continuing steadily since then with nearly two dozen titles including The Ship Killer, Rampage, The Nine Dragons, The Auction (published in England), and Treasure Island: A Modern Novel.

He has, since 1993, also been creating titles for his Ben Abbott series — books that follow the detective workings of real estate agent-turned-amateur private investigator Ben Abbott. HardScape, the debut Ben Abbott mystery, was published in 1993. StoneDust followed in 1995 and then FrostLine came in 2003. The latest Ben Abbott mystery, called McMansion, will be out later this month. While Mr Scott was in attendance during last weekend’s Holiday Book Emporium hosted by Friends of Booth Library, his first public event for the new book is scheduled for Thursday, December 14, at the library.

Writing as Paul Garrison, Mr Scott penned Fire And Ice, which was published in 1998. Garrison also released the novels Red Sky at Morning (2000), Buried At Sea (2002), Sea Hunter (2003) and The Ripple Effect (2004). (Mr Scott, it turns out, also wrote and released the books Deal Me Out and Lend Me A Hand nearly three decades ago under the name J.S. Blazer.)

While this is not on the level of the Valerie Plame-CIA outing — Mr Scott’s use of the Garrison pen name has, after all, been something of an open secret for a growing number of people over the years — it is still newsworthy that someone who went to such pains to create and protect a second identity has decided to finally fess up.

“I’ve been writing undercover [as Paul Garrison] for ten years,” Mr Scott said last week. “It was time to come out. To put the two halves together, so to speak.”

So when he heard from a friend a few months ago that a reporter for The Globe was working on a feature about writers coping with the world of publishing and their multiple writing personalities, and that the Boston reporter, David Mehegan, was interested in talking with Mr Scott, he welcomed the opportunity to talk.

When Mr Mehegan first contacted Mr Scott, in fact, the reporter was under the impression that Mr Scott was still trying to safeguard his secret.

“He promised me anonymity, but I told him it was time to talk,” Mr Scott said. “‘Just spell my name right,’ I told him. ‘Both of them.’”

And so on August 16, in a Boston Globe feature called “Author Unknown,” the world learned what so many of Justin Scott’s friends and neighbors have long known: Justin Scott and Paul Garrison are one in the same.

Readers of Paul Garrison have been hooked on suspense novels “about the men and women who roam today’s oceans on sailing boats and hi-tech catamarans, mega-yachts and attack submarines, tugboats and express liners,” according to the website SeaStoriesByPaulGarrison.com.

Paul Garrison was, according to his “biography,” an international businessman based in Hong Kong who was the grandson of a sailor who wandered the South Seas in the last of the square-rigged trading vessels.

Almost everything that was said about Mr Garrison was true, says Mr Scott.

“It was true, except it was my father — not my grandfather — who sailed,” he said. “Otherwise it was all basically true. That biography is notable more for omission than for embellishment.”

Mr Scott has many friends in the publishing world, he said, who write under two and sometimes three different names. Authors are quickly associated with one genre, not a number of them. It is common for one writer to have pseudonyms for their lines of romance and/or western and/or mystery novels; it is almost unheard of to see the same name under different genres.

“By taking a pseudonym, authors are given a fresh start in the computers,” Mr Scott explained. “Books should be ordered and marketed on their singular merit, and nothing else. I wanted to see that first Paul Garrison book do well, and get a great shot, not be based on what my previous novel — as Justin Scott — had done.”

If a novelist has a good book that does great with sales, it is going to be easier to sell a publisher and book stores on publishing and then selling his or her next novel. But when sales of one book slump in this age of keeping everything computerized, it is hard to conceal bad sales. When an established writer submits a manuscript to a publisher and the publisher takes a look at past sales, it is all there on the screen: good or bad, book sales stick with a writer like a fingerprint.

By the late 1990s, Mr Scott had been writing and publishing novels for two decades, so he had seen the best and worst of the publishing industry. After writing a few mysteries and then turning to thrillers, Mr Scott introduced the Ben Abbott character with 1993’s HardScape. When he wrote Fire and Ice (1998) as a follow-up to The Ship Killer (1978), Mr Scott’s agent worried that his readers might not follow the jumping back and forth between thrillers, mysteries, and now sea stories.

That is when Mr Scott and his agent, Henry Morrison, decided to try creating a new author in order to start fresh. Garrison’s books got great reviews, and the books continued to be published.

“The goal with Paul Garrison had been to get that first novel published well,” he continued. “We just wanted to start fresh. We were attempting to fool the computer.”

For nearly a decade the author and his agent were able to do just that. Garrison was never a best-selling author, but he had a steady track record that HarperCollins — his publisher — looked at favorably.

Mr Scott admitted recently that he was happy to not only fess up to his “secret” identity, but also pleased with the timing of the feature story in the Boston newspaper.

“We’ve kind of used this opportunity to combine everything into one website” for Justin Scott and Paul Garrison, he said. “It was fun to find all these connections between the two authors, including many I had forgotten about.”

He was also pleased, he said, that the timing of his unveiling coincided with his new release.

Ben Abbott Is Back

McMansion has an official release date of December 15 (hardcover $24.95, 270 pages; ISBN 1-59058-063-X), but, says Mr Scott, some shops already have their copies ready to sell. Copies will be available for purchase during his program on December 14 at C.H. Booth Library.

The setting for the Ben Abbott mysteries is blatantly Newtown transformed into Newbury, a small Connecticut town where there is a Ram Pasture, a General Store, and a flagpole, and even a weekly newspaper titled The Newbury Clarion published by Scooter McKay. Sound vaguely familiar?

Mr Scott has said that the McMansions he describes overrunning Newbury, like those he observes now filling up farmland and forests around Newtown, did not begin to show up until after the recession of the early 1990s.

After renting in Newtown for a while, he purchased his home tucked back into the woods off Parmalee Hill Road in 1979.

“That was well before Newtown’s big building boom really got underway” he said, adding he fell in love with the town in part because its rural qualities reminded him of where he grew up.

Mr Scott grew up in Bayport, on the south shore of Long Island. His father was A. Leslie Scott, who wrote 250 westerns, under a variety of pen names (ahem…), and poetry; his mother, Lily K. Scott, wrote novels, romances, and short stories. His sister is the novelist Alison Scott Skelton, as was her late husband, C.L. Skelton.

Mr Scott is married to Amber Edwards, an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker who has made PBS documentaries and is senior producer of New Jersey Public Television’s State of the Arts. She is a contributing correspondent to WBGO Public Radio in Newark. In her spare time she performs a musical show with fellow Newtown resident Patrick Brady, who was the music director of Broadway’s The Producers.

Brigette Sorensen will be at the library as well on Thursday evening. The Newtown resident and artist became friends with Mr Scott and Ms Edwards when all residents became involved in the town’s tercentennial events. Ms Edwards was the producer of an October 2005 event, Tableaux Vivants, and Mrs Sorensen was one of the lead scenery painters. Her artistic talents made a deep impression on the Scott-Edwards couple, and they went to Mr Scott’s agent with a suggestion for him when it was time to create the artwork for the new Ben Abbott novel.

McMansion opens with the murder of Billy Tiller, a greedy developer determined to ruin the small town charm of Newbury with a string of tacky starter homes. When he is found dead — run over by a bulldozer, a Caterpillar D-4 to be specific — the police arrest a young environmental activist named Jeff Kimball. The young environmentalist, who was found sitting on the bulldozer when Tiller’s remains were found, also happens to be wearing a backpack filled with cans of spray paint and posters reading “Power to the People, Love Live The Earth Liberation Front.”

Ira Levy, Kimball’s lawyer, asks Abbott to dig around. Abbott does not want to take the case — he despises everything Tiller stood for and worries that his loathing might hamper the investigation — but Levy twists his arm.

Abbott determines pretty speedily that Kimball could not have committed the crime, but figuring out who did is a bit trickier.

There are plenty of locations and residents for Newtown residents — current and former — to watch for, and descriptions of events that have happened here in town show up. The Bee publisher, and his collection of police scanners, makes an appearance. In Chapter Six, a favorite recent news item is recalled with a photo caption that reads, “Railroad crews tested the strength of the damaged bridge by running a locomotive over it.”

You know how people often conclude anecdotes with, “I swear it happened. I couldn’t make this stuff up!”? Justin Scott has once again blended fact and fiction — combining true stories with colorful embellishments of the town he has called home for nearly three decades — and offers readers an entertaining new novel.

In addition to his program at C.H. Booth Library on December 14, Justin Scott will be at The Hickory Stick Bookshop in Washington (telephone 860-868-0525) on Saturday, December 16, at 2 pm.

He will then be the featured author for “Get Lit,” the author series at Chow and co-sponsored by RJ Julia Booksellers. The series is presented at the café, 966 Chapel Street in New Haven; telephone 203-772-3002. The program starts at 7 and $5 not only gets you in the door, it will also be used toward the purchase of the book if you have not already picked up a copy.