Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

The sultan of plot

It all started when he stumbled across a newspaper brief about Babe Ruth. Now the college professor is taking a swing at fame with his first published book.

By COLETTE BANCROFT
Published January 21, 2005

[Times photo: James Borchuck]

Eckerd College professor Lee Irby used Huggins-Stengel field, where Babe Ruth practiced, as a setting for his novel.

ST. PETERSBURG - When Lee Irby shows up for lunch on a downtown St. Petersburg patio, he looks every inch the laid-back Florida college professor. But the guy's got the jitters.

He arrives on a scuffed green bicycle. His hair curls over the collar of his dark-blue cotton shirt, short sleeves on a balmy January day. He stretches long legs under a table and picks at a salad.

He has been a nervous wreck for months, he says. "I liked myself better as an aspiring writer. But I like the bank balance now."

It's the publication day of Irby's first novel, 7,000 Clams. Well, not technically his first novel. He has been writing them for years; "three or four" never saw print.

But a few years ago, he saw an old newspaper story from 1925 about Babe Ruth being sued for a gambling debt, and 7,000 Clams was born.

The novel is published by Doubleday, a major house, and Irby has a contract to write a second book. He still can't believe it, he says.

Ever since he sold 7,000 Clams in 2003, "I've been afraid they would change their minds. They can cancel a contract, you know. I was afraid they'd look at it again and say, "What were we thinking?' "

But the book is real, complete with a jazzy pulp fiction jacket and big-name blurbs and a spot on that week's "Required Reading" list in the New York Post.

"It's not the New York Times, but. . . . Today is the publication date; you can go out and buy it. So I guess I can stop worrying about that."

Irby, 41, is a history professor at Eckerd College. He earned his master's degree from the University of South Florida in St. Petersburg. One day while he was in graduate school, he was trolling through old records for material for an academic paper.

"There it was," he says, a brief item in a copy of the St. Petersburg Times from March 1925 about New York Yankees slugger Ruth, who was in town for spring training.

"It just said that he had been sued for $7,000 for a gambling debt.

"So I looked in all the biographies, and it's not in there. But it turns out he was getting divorced at the same time."

It was the kind of juxtaposition of facts that would interest a historian, especially a baseball fan who was into Florida's past.

But Irby saw something else. "I started thinking, how out of control was he in 1925, all the drinking and gambling and women? How do you tell a story about this?"

Although it grew from that newspaper squib and weaves in a short course on the history of St. Petersburg during its first real estate and tourism boom, 7,000 Clams is fiction. Hard-boiled fiction, in fact, the kind of two-fisted, wisecracking tale that makes you think of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall trading double-entendres through wisps of smoke.

The novel's main character is Frank Hearn, a rough and ready bootlegger who has a way with the dames, although his big plans sometimes go off the rails.

Irby has some experience in that. Raised in Richmond, Va., the son of a judge and a businessman, he studied English and history at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, graduating in 1986.

"After college," he says, "I worked for the Virgin Islands Daily News. I was the only sportswriter on the island, so I settled all the bets in bars."

But he was restless. He bummed around Europe, ending up so broke at one point in Florence, Italy, that he borrowed money from a priest.

He came back across the Atlantic and wandered around Mexico and the United States. "I went to Chicago and lived on a sofa for a while," he says, and later worked as a paralegal for his mother. Eventually, he wound up back in his old stomping grounds in Charlottesville.

There he met his wife, Beth Forys, "a very together, very accomplished woman," Irby says. They started dating in 1989. "I didn't think she would be interested in me. But I guess she needed entertainment."

While Forys worked on her doctorate in environmental science at the University of Florida, they lived alternately in Gainesville and Key West, where she was doing research. Irby tended bar and wrote.

Growing up in Virginia, he says, "I always had this Edgar Allan Poe fixation. I always wanted to write. I've known it since I was 14. I was a lifer. Besides, I was never good at any other job."

Forys was always supportive of his writing, he says, although she didn't always like his books. "My previous books were very male, very harsh.

"There was some pretty serious interest in them, so I never had the feeling I was completely deluded about being a writer." But none of them quite got him a publisher's contract.

Irby didn't want to study creative writing in a university setting. "As soon as you take yourself seriously like that, you're dead."

But five years spent largely in Key West might not have been the best incubator for a writer either. "I was in Key West for so long that I thought I was the smartest person in the world. Of course, everybody I talked to was drunk, stoned or both."

In 1996, Forys was hired to teach at Eckerd College. Irby says they knew nothing about the area, so they decided to look for a house on the beach, expecting something like Key West. "So we drove over there and looked around, and Beth started crying."

They happened into the office of a woman who had worked in real estate in Pinellas County for decades. "She took one look at us and said, "You have to live in the Old Northeast.' And we got in the car and she drove us over there and we bought a house that day. You could buy a house there back then."

Irby says, "I figured it would be great. I could walk downtown and get drunk, walk back home, just like Key West.

"But I kept falling in love with the city."

That love of St. Petersburg helped carry him to grad school, where he found an attitude adjustment even before he found Ruth's gambling debt. "Graduate school helped. I was in class with people like Pam Iorio. I learned there were a lot of other smart people around. Humility goes a long way."

He also found mentors such as USF professors Gary Mormino and Ray Arsenault, whose work in Florida history, Irby writes in the acknowledgements for 7,000 Clams, he "plundered with gusto."

The last novel he had written before he started grad school, Irby says, was "very black. My wife couldn't get through it.

"So I told her, "I'm actually going to write you a book.' I wanted to write something she would enjoy."

Writing 7,000 Clams took four years and seven drafts, Irby says. "I changed. I became obsessive about the book, the way I didn't with any other book. It's like I really was living in the book."

Finding the right tone was difficult, Irby says. "How could I get rid of the last vestige of that black, cynical, frat boy humor?"

The historical setting helped him find the right distance from his material. "As soon as I could take myself out of it and just function as a narrator, it worked."

Though 7,000 Clams is a hard-boiled thriller full of gangsters, gambling and gunshots, Irby says, "I wrote my wife a love story. But not a sappy one."

Hearn, the main character, spends much of the book sorting out his romantic entanglements with two women, mysterious nightclub singer Ginger DeMore and headstrong rich girl Irene Howard. "Once you figure out a good love triangle, you've got it," Irby says.

Not only did his wife like the novel, but so did Nat Sobel, a New York City literary agent whose other clients include James Ellroy and Richard Russo. Sobel and Irby spent about four months reworking the manuscript. "I trusted his suggestions."

Three weeks later, the book was sold.

Irby says he doesn't plan to write full time. "I love teaching college. I'm never going to quit." He likes the flexibility of a professor's schedule, which leaves him and Forys plenty of time with their kids, Iris, 4, and Jay, 1.

But he's already working on the story for his second novel about Hearn, set in Miami during the down portion of the Florida real estate cycle in the '20s. "I've done the boom; now I'll do the bust."

He says he isn't sure what he'll write after that, although he doesn't want to get into writing a one-book-a-year series. "That's just brutal."

But then he starts talking about a third Hearn book, wrapped around a couple of real-life characters. A Miami police chief was indicted for murder in 1928, Irby says. "They were taking people out of the jail and killing them. So he gets indicted, then he gets re-elected and keeps the job for decades.

"The beautiful thing about Florida history is it's just ripe for the plucking."

And the whole thing could circle back to where it started. "If I ever did a fourth book, I'd have Frank as an old man in St. Pete with Jack Kerouac. "Let me tell you about St. Pete in the boom, kid. . . .' "

Colette Bancroft can be reached at 727 893-8435 or bancroft@sptimes.com

Lee Irby will read from and sign 7,000 Clams at 2 p.m. Saturday at Waldenbooks, Countryside Mall, Clearwater. He will also be reading and signing at 6 p.m. Feb. 4 at Bayboro Books on the USF St. Petersburg campus; at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 10 at Barnes and Noble, 11802 N Dale Mabry Highway, Tampa; and at 7 p.m. Feb. 26 at Borders, Tyrone Square Mall, St. Petersburg.

[Last modified January 20, 2005, 08:57:05]