The Flap Copy Flap

Brad Meltzer is a nice guy, so nice that when I showed up to interview him for this site a couple years ago with dead batteries in the tape recorder and absolutely no cash handy, he bought new batteries himself so we could tape the chat. For that, he's always going to stay on my good side.

But the anonymous copywriter at Warner Books who wrote the flap copy for Meltzer's latest thriller, The Zero Game, now, that person's in a heap of trouble. If you want to come to the story fresh, you might want to just move on to the next blog entry...but not until you've bookmarked this "deleted chapter" which can only be found on the author's website. (You can even vote on whether he should have kept it in the final draft or not. Personally, I'm with him...it may add character depth, but it drags the story to a halt, and in this kind of story, you can't slow down for a second.)

OK, now on to my problem.

The flap copy starts out by introducing Matthew and Harris, two congressional staff members taking part in a byzantine dead pool-like game based on vote tallies, phrases in speeches from the floor, quirky stuff like that.

But as Matthew and Harris quickly discover, the Zero Game is hiding a secret so explosive that it will shake Washington to its core. And when someone close to them winds up dead, Harris and Matthew realize this game is far more sinister than they ever imagined. As the bull's-eye (sic) turns their way, it's clear they're about to become the game's next victims.

"Someone close to them" doesn't wind up dead, though; Matthew is killed at the end of the sixth chapter. Never mind for now that this raises a whole set of issues involving killing off your first-person narrator sixty pages into the story, then switching to another first-person narrator for the remainder--apart from the occasional cutaways, which again are a separate structural issue we could talk about some other time. For now, I'm talking about the basic wrongness of setting up reader anticipations with a blatant falsehood in one of the first descriptions of the book they'll read. It's one thing to misdirect readers with the equivalent of a handwave, quite another to state outright that a character is "about to become the game's next victim" after the first death when in fact he dies that death.

As I said at the beginning, Meltzer's a nice guy, and though I wouldn't claim to know him that well, from both that limited meeting and the general commitment to surface verisimilitude with which he constructs his thrillers, I can't imagine he'd deliberately try to con the reader this way. There's only two things I can think of to explain this.

(1) Matthew didn't buy the farm in the first draft Meltzer turns in, which would explain why the flat copy goes on to describe how he and Harris team up with the young Senate page who becomes Harris' sidekick. The copywriter whips something up based on this draft, then Meltzer and his editor realize the stakes need to be higher, and decide to quickly rewrite the story with Matthew dead, except nobody remembers to check the flap copy before it goes to the printer.

But I'm not convinced by that, for the simple reason that by the time Meltzer shows a completed manuscript to his editor, it's got to be pretty much done. Oh, sure, a few tweaks here and there, but to substantially rewrite four-fifths of the novel on the kind of tight deadlines a thriller writer like him has? I'm not seeing it. I'm not saying it's impossible, just highly unlikely.

Which leaves me with (2) the copywriter flipped through the manuscript, somehow didn't notice Matthew's disappearance from the narrative, and assumed he was still alive because, after all, he does narrate the first fifth of the book, generally a sign of a character's enduring significance.

Still, somebody should have caught this, and I can only hope the folks prepping the paperback don't make the same mistake.