Writers Read: David Handler

Wednesday, March 15, 2023

David Handler

David Handler is the Edgar Award-winning, critically acclaimed author of several bestselling mystery series.

In 1988 he published The Man Who Died Laughing, the first of his long-running series of mysteries starring ghostwriter Stuart Hoag and his faithful basset hound Lulu. The newest entry in the series is The Girl Who Took What She Wanted.

Recently I asked Handler about what he was reading. The author's reply:

Whenever I’m working on a new Stewart Hoag mystery, which I’m currently doing, I rarely read crime fiction by anyone else because I don’t want my writing style to be influenced by another writer’s voice or plot structure. But I’m a devoted bookworm, as are most writers, so I absolutely must seek out something else to read.

Right now, I’m curled up with one of the most cherished volumes in my home library, Essays of E.B. White, a treasure chest by the man who I and millions of other devotees consider to be mid-twentieth century America’s finest writer of prose. I am forever in awe of the crisp, clean, clarity of his voice, his dry wit, keen insights and remarkable ability to make you feel as if he’s sitting right there in the room simply talking to you. His writing style is so brilliant that he makes it looks easy.

It’s no accident that he’s the White of Strunk and White’s indispensable The Elements of Style.

The collection of essays I’m reading spans many of the different facets of White’s fascinating life. There’s a section on his fabled farm in coastal Maine. “Death of a Pig” never fails to bring a tear to my eye. There’s “The Years of Wonder,” a frequently hilarious reminiscence if his youthful shipboard misadventures in Alaska. And, best of all, there’s “Here is New York,” his 1948 valentine to New York City that I swear I’ve read twenty times. The last line of its first paragraph creeps into my mind incredibly often: “No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.”

“Here is New York” is a much beloved essay. In fact, it’s so beloved that it was published as a slim volume all by itself in 1949. And it’s still in print. The latest edition has a forward by his stepson, Roger Angell, the long-time fiction editor of The New Yorker who was a brilliant essayist himself on the subject of baseball. Angell just passed away in 2022 at the age of 102, still writing away. If you’ve never read E.B. White and you’re a devotee of good writing I strongly encourage you to dive headfirst into his essays. But I’m betting that you actually have read E.B. White and just don’t remember it.

You see, he also wrote Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little.