It's a lazy summer afternoon.
Perhaps it's the heat. Perhaps it's the way the mid-afternoon light seems to permeate even the deepest of shadows. Regardless, this weather encourages the kind of quiet introspection that is the writer's bread and butter.
Sitting on his back porch in west Magnolia, Larry Karp shifts in his plastic deck chair to adjust the cushion against his back. From inside the house come the sounds of his wife, Myra, finishing up with a group on a tour of their personally restored collection of antique music boxes.
The former director of Obstetrics and Perinatal Medicine at Swedish Hospital, Karp retired in 1995 from a 25-year career in medicine to pursue his childhood dream of writing novels.
His first mystery, "The Music Box Murders," was published by Worldwide Library in 2000. He released two more novels in the series, "Scamming the Birdman" and "Midnight Special," before his publisher folded.
Now, at 66, with a new publisher and a standalone mystery, "First, Do No Harm," Karp has found peace with the discipline, frustration and momentary elation that come with being a successful novelist.
All in a day's work
For Karp, novel writing is equal parts job and intellectual practice.
"Even when the writing's going badly, as it does quite often, you don't quit," Karp says, the quiet, even tones of his voice barely competing with the growl of a lawnmower being fired up in the adjacent yard.
"You have to look at it as any other kind of job," he adds. "When I was at the hospital, if I was having a bad day I didn't walk out of the office and go home. I had to hang in for the day, grit my teeth and take care of the patients."
Karp says he's come to understand that, even when the writing is going badly, "things are always happening." Some days he may write 3,000 words, and other days the count may amount to "minus 30." Either way, Karp explains, he's achieved something - even if it's only working his way through a tough passage.
"I think a lot of what's called writer's block is failure to realize that writing is a very uneven process," he says. "It takes patience."
Dreams and reality
Karp grew up in the 1950s in Paterson, N.J. True to the postwar American attitude, he says he dismissed his desire to write fiction as impractical, instead pursuing a career in medicine.
"I always wanted to be a writer," he says, "but in the 1950s, most kids in New Jersey didn't tell their parents they wanted to be novelists. You got a real job. You went straight through high school and college. You didn't take a year or two off to find yourself. If you changed your major in college in those days, they'd send you off to a psychiatrist because you were an unstable teenager."
Karp's career in obstetrics didn't keep him away from the world of letters entirely. In 1976, he published "Genetic Engineering: Threat or Promise," a biology text explaining in lay terms the new scientific field of genetic manipulation. He also released "The View from the Vue" in 1977, a memoir of his residency at Bellevue Hospital in New York City.
When he was finally able to make the switch to fiction, however, Karp quickly learned that the process was entirely different from the writing he'd done previously.
"With nonfiction," he says, "you just outline what you want to say, all the different topics and subtopics, and then you write them. That's fine, but novels for me don't work that way. They're not straightforward."
"First, Do No Harm," Karp's fourth novel, is set both in the present day and, through flashback, in a small town in New Jersey in 1943. The story revolves around the ethical differences (and disturbing similarities) of three generations of men from the Firestone family - a doctor, an artist and an aspiring med student, respectively.
The writing of this book, Karp says, took him back to his roots as both a physician and a writer.
"When I finally got around to writing fiction," he says, "I set out to write a literary novel and then wrote three murder mysteries. This one is billed as a murder mystery or a murder thriller, but it's really a literary novel with murders in it."
Tale of the Junkman
When Karp was a boy he became enraged by the fact that a neighbor in his middle-class community, a junkman during the Second World War, was able to fund the building of a huge house using a fortune amassed from selling black-market scrap.
"Us kids had given up our metal toys and were out scrounging aluminum foil for the scrap drives, so the wealthy junkman really bothered me."
In his younger years, Karp tried to write a novel called "The Junkman," fully intending to "sock it to" his childhood nemesis. Unfortunately, he says, the book "just wasn't any good." He did salvage one element from the failed experiment, the character of Murray Fleishman, the junkman. "I just couldn't figure out what I should do with him."
Then, a few years ago while visiting a friend in Denver, Karp read a newspaper article about a doctor in a little town in Arkansas around the turn of the century who had a house where a he kept young, unmarried, pregnant society girls. After the girls gave birth, the doctor would sell the babies off to wealthy bidders. This story stood in stark contrast with memories of his childhood doctor in Paterson, who never missed a diagnosis and never lost a patient.
"I think it was largely because of this doctor that I went to med school," Karp says. "The guy seemed like a sorcerer. When he walked into the room, you knew you were going to get better, even if you were dying. It was like he had magical powers over life, death and illness."
The two doctors came together in Karp's head to form another character, Samuel Firestone, a well-respected physician with a glaring character defect.
And the story that began to emerge gave Karp a chance to revisit the junkman.
"Right then I knew I had the way to tell the story that I'd wanted to tell for a long time," Karp says. "Finally, when I could play someone off Murray the junkman, I didn't have to concentrate on socking it to him."
Karp says that by the end of the book he actually came to like Murray. "He was really just a good-natured slob who saw an opportunity and grabbed it," he says.
Smiling fate
Like the circuitous practice of writing itself, Karp embraces the serendipitous set of circumstances that eventually led him down the road to "First, Do No Harm."
"My first reaction when my publisher went out of business was loss," he says. "Now I look back and I feel bad for my publisher, but if they hadn't gone out of business I would've kept writing the Music Box series. If I'd still been writing the series, I probably never would've noticed that article in the Denver newspaper that led me toward "First, Do No Harm," which is by far the best thing I've ever written."
Karp pauses. The lawnmower next door lets out one last angry snarl before it's shut off for the evening. A warm breeze ruffles his gray hair as the shadows cast by the trees in the yard slowly begin to lengthen.
"It's happened often in my life. Things that look like disasters have turned out to be real opportunities."
Sean Molnar is a freelance writer and deejay living in Seattle.
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