David R. Horwitz

Murder Bay, He Wrote. Love Got It Published

The day after her birthday, Deirdre hiked in the woods behind the home that she had shared with her late husband, David. It was mid-April and most of the snow had melted in southeastern Minnesota, but at a clearing there was an unmistakable outline of a heart.

“I was in awe,” she smiled. “Hemingway said, ‘The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.’”

After David’s memorial service Deirdre discovered she had emailed his obituary to a literary agent, Jeff Kleinman, in Washington, D.C. It was a pivotal moment for Deirdre. “Being a published writer was what David had wanted to accomplish. Don’t writers live in the work they leave behind?” she said. About a week later, on the day that would have been David’s 40th birthday, she mailed a query letter to Jeff:

“You may recognize my name or that of my husband, David Horwitz. Or you may not. I emailed everyone in his online address book that he passed on. It turns out you were in his address book, and at the time I did not know you. Now I found you online, and that has led me to write. I don’t know if David contacted you, but for years he had you in mind as the agent he wanted for his manuscripts. He left your Web page in his bookmark favorites and printouts in his desk drawer.”

Her letter got Jeff’s attention. With his referral, Deirdre took the manuscript to freelance editors Jennifer Barrell and Alex Lubertozzi in Oak Park, Illinois. Seeing great potential in what David had written, they agreed to polish Murder Bay.

“David’s prose sparkled,” said Jennifer. “The two storylines—Mordechai Finkel and Louisa in the 1860s and Ben Carey in the 1950s—are very compelling.”

David, a Rockville, Maryland, native and supervisory computer analyst programmer at the State Department in Arlington, Virginia, began writing soon after a visit to a Wheaton, Maryland bookstore. He was a voracious reader of military history—especially anything on the Civil War or the latest work by Stephen Ambrose. But on that visit he bought Madeline’s Ghost, a novel by then first-time Washington, D.C. author, Robert Girardi.

Mesmerized by Robert’s writing, David decided he wanted to be an author too. David picked up Margaret Leech’s Reveille in Washington 1860-1865, Richard Lee’s Mr. Lincoln’s City, John Alexander’s Ghosts: Washington’s Most Famous Ghost Stories, and the Pictorial History of the Korean War, 1950-1953 and started writing. He happened upon a neighborhood called “Murder Bay,” a notorious area in nineteenth-century Washington, D.C., near the White House, known for its brawlers and brothels. David had found his first title.

To add fuel to his literary fire, he and Deirdre watched ghost films, including Stir of Echoes, The Sixth Sense, and The Blair Witch Project. For storylines they visited the Walter Reed National Museum of Health and Medicine in Silver Spring, Maryland. And they went to see Patrick Hemingway at the National Press Club talk, who gave a talk about True at First Light, a book he edited from the manuscripts of his famous father, Ernest Hemingway.

“One of Patrick’s challenges was to edit more than 800 pages down to about 75,000 words,” she recalls. “Now David knew the length of his first book.”

After the talk, David found the agent, Jeff Kleinman, online. He meticulously researched, rationalized, and rewrote his work the same way he wrote his computer programs. “He wanted his fiction to weave history, stories about his father’s experiences as a D.C. police officer, and a few ghosts together to declare some great truths,” said Deirdre.

Murder Bay: A Ben Carey Mystery is set in postwar 1950s where a young police sergeant with the Metropolitan Police Department is commander of a unit working out of a converted Victorian house three blocks from the U.S. Capitol. The decaying old home appears to be haunted by a Civil War soldier who may have been murdered nearly 100 years earlier.

After David and Deirdre moved from Kensington to rural southeastern Minnesota, they started to drive to work together. “We would discuss the characters and plot lines, and dream that people would find the Ben Carey mysteries so interesting that they would want to make films out of his books,” she mused. “David thought that a film of Murder Bay could combine the best from Cold Mountain and Saving Private Ryan.”

After Alex and Jennifer finished editing the manuscript, Jeff read David’s work. “He told me he ‘gulped’ the entire thing, that it was surprisingly well-done, and that if he were David Horwitz, he’d be very pleased,” Deirdre said.

But for Jeff, the prospect of trying to sell publishers on a first-time author who had passed on posed a seemingly insurmountable challenge. Alex and Jennifer unsuccessfully shopped the manuscript around to other agents. Eventually, they realized they had in Murder Bay a suspenseful, engaging supernatural mystery that deserved to find an audience—but which faced tough obstacles in the publishing world. So they found a distributor and proposed that Murder Bay become the debut for their new publishing venture, Top Five Books.

Fact checking Murder Bay proved challenging. For example, just before going to press, Deirdre needed to verify the nearest police station for Ben Carey’s foot beat in Georgetown. Her request eventually reached Second District Commander Andrew Solberg, who, along with Metropolitan Police Department historian Sergeant Nicholas Breul, confirmed that there was no station at Calvert Street as David had originally written.

“Any officer would have been working our station at 3218 Volta Place, unless it was a major case, in which case a detective would have been assigned to Headquarters at 300 Indiana Avenue,” Sergeant Bruel replied. “From Foxhall and MacArthur, he would have walked him to the call box.”

They made the change. “It’s like Tom Clancy says, ‘The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense,’” she added.

Top Five Books launched their line of trade paperback mysteries with Murder Bay. Even with excellent reviews in Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, ForeWord, and the Baltimore Sun, the book was a tough sell without an author to promote it. The book did sell well enough to libraries to nearly sell out the initial 1,500-copy print run. Murder Bay found a new and bigger audience thanks to ebooks, with more than 50,000 downloads.

“I’m so grateful to Alex and Jen that Murder Bay continues to find new readers,” Deirdre said. “In my eyes we already have a bestseller and a movie. On our last Valentine’s Day together, David and I went to see the film Girl With a Pearl Earring. David thought Scarlett Johansson would be perfect to play Louisa. The role is still hers.”

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