I wanted to know how authors come across their agents, so I asked a few writers I know. Chicago author of the acclaimed book Cast of Shadows shared his story with me.

I was extremely lucky.

Late in 2001 I was talking with Pete Fornatale, an editor with Three Rivers Press who worked with John Warner and me on "My First Presidentiary." Pete asked me what I was working on next. I told him it was a novel about a doctor who clones his daughter's unknown assailant so one day he can see what the killer looks like. He said when I was done I should send it to Simon Lipskar, because that sounded like the kind of book Simon would dig.

I think sometime the next year, with Cast of Shadows perhaps a third done, I got impatient and sent Simon a note introducing myself and telling him what I was working on, which was a total dork move. Don't do that. Simon wrote back and politely told me there wasn't anything he could do until the book was finished. And that's true. Worry about finishing your book, and then worry about getting an agent.

Anyway, I finished in the summer of 2003 and I sent another query to Simon. "Remember me?" etc. etc. Simon didn't reply, possibly because my email got lost or possibly because he remembered me as the idiot who queried him with 30% of a novel. I wrote him again and said that if he wasn't interested, that was fine but please let me know so I could approach other agents. Simon responded right away and asked for the manuscript. I sent it to him early in September of 2003.

Simon emailed about three weeks later and said only that he was halfway through and that we needed to talk when he was done. The next day he tracked me down at a recording studio in Chicago where I was editing a radio commercial and he said he wanted to represent me.

Cast of Shadows sold to Knopf about five weeks later.

Kevin's original letter to Simon after the jump.

Dear Simon,

I contacted you almost two years ago about a novel I was writing called "In Medias Res" (you had been recommended to me by Pete Fornatale, who had been my editor on a humor book at Three Rivers Press). That novel is now called "The Wicker Man" and, after twenty months of nights and weekends, I have finally finished it. I know it's been a long time, but I was writing to see if you'd still be interested in reading it.

Briefly, the story is as follows: Police in a Chicago suburb are
baffled when Anna Kat Moore, the teenage daughter of a local physician, is found raped and murdered at the clothing store where she works. They have no leads and the case goes cold. As the months pass, her father, Dr. Davis Moore, finds his grief compounded by anger and confusion and by the incompetence of local law enforcement. The prospect of never facing Anna Kat's murderer makes the remaining years of his own life seem unbearable. His practice at a fertility clinic is suffering; his marriage of 20 years is crumbling.

In time, the detectives return his daughter's personal effects and,
among them, he discovers a sample of the killer's DNA. Despairing that Anna Kat's attacker will ever be identified, Dr. Moore secretly clones the killer, and places the child with a local couple who had sought his help conceiving. Then he waits for the boy to grow up.

The story takes several turns over the course of 20 years as Dr. Moore secretly uses the child to pursue the killer. At the heart of the suspense, however, is the cloned boy, Justin Finn. As a young teen obsessed with serial killers, Justin discovers he has been created by Moore for a solitary purpose--to catch a real-life murderer--and becomes obsessed with that end through any means.

Originally, I think I described it to you as an "Ira Levin thriller
with some of the philosophical foundation in Walker Percy's work."
That's still true, although it's more the former than the latter, I
think. The philosophical aspects are a jumping off point for the story. If there is still such a genre as "psychological thriller" this, I suppose, might be a "philosophical thriller."

If you still have any interest in seeing more, I can send you the plot synopsis and as much or as little of the manuscript as you'd like.

I hope you are well.

Best,

Kevin Guilfoile
http://www.guilfoile.net