The Abracadabra Kid: A Writer’s Life by Sid Fleischman

I recently chanced upon a copy of a book called Mr. Mysterious & Company by an author I had loved as a child, Sid Fleischman. When I read the book as a kid, around 1972, a teacher told me that the author lived in my town, Santa Monica, and she suggested I write to him, which I did. To my pride and amazement he wrote back and offered to visit my school, so I got to meet him and show him off to my friends. It was a special day, and a special memory, so when I saw the book in the “collectibles” section at a bookstore in Cedar City, Utah where Jim and I were visiting a few weeks ago for the Shakespeare Festival I had to buy it.

My curiosity was also aroused to find out more about Sid Fleischman. I discovered he wrote an autobiography, this book, in 1996, and the library had a copy. So, after reading Mr. Mysterious & Company again and enjoying it again, I read this.

It turns out that Mr. Mysterious & Company was the first children’s novel that Mr. Fleischman wrote. He was forty-two. He’d already been a published author of short stories, written nine mystery and thriller novels for adults and a half dozen books on magic. One of his thrillers, Blood Alley, had been made into a movie with John Wayne. Fleischman wrote the screenplay. Mr. Mysterious & Company was kind of a lark. He included his actual three children: Jane, Paul, and Anne, as the three children in the novel and dedicated it to them. He set the novel in the old west, he says, because his latest novel called Yellowleg had been a western so he already had a lot of appropriate research available. Yellowleg was also made into a movie, by the way, Sam Peckinpah’s first feature.

His first children’s novel was a hit, so he kept writing them, and found his calling. Mr. Mysterious & Company was written in 1962, the year I was born. I read it sometime around 1972. By then, Fleischman had written ten more children’s novels. I recognized having read all of those titles as well, borrowed from the library. Particularly memorable were a series of books about a farmer named McBroom with a magical farm. I stopped reading children’s novels about then but Fleischman kept writing them, thirty-two by 1996, when he wrote this autobiography (there’s a list of his publications at the back). Eventually he wrote forty of them. His children’s novel The Whipping Boy, from 1986, won the Newberry award.

Sid Fleischman was born in Brooklyn, in 1920, to immigrants from Eastern Europe, but his father brought the family to San Diego when Sid, called Sonny Boy, was two years old. His father was trained as a tailor. His shop catered to the clothing required by the sailors in the town, so the family survived the depression relatively well.

Fleischman’s first love was magic. Because he couldn’t afford props, he learned sleight-of-hand. As a teenager he joined a magician’s club. Through the club he met another teenage magician and the two performed together. When the friend, named Buddy Ryan, went to Berkeley for college, Sid and Buddy took a summer traveling around northern California in a broken down car putting on shows, along with Buddy’s older sister Mary who they used as a magician’s assistant.

For a couple of years, Sid performed professionally as a magician. He lived with an uncle and aunt in Alhambra and did shows at the vaudeville theaters in Los Angeles. I liked the coincidence that his first theater gig was at the Hippodrome in downtown LA on Third and Main across the street and up one block from where Jim and I had an apartment until a year ago. Then he got a steady gig doing a floor show at a restaurant at Fourth and Hill, a couple of blocks from us the other direction. Neither the theater nor the restaurant are still there, though. Sid also toured the western states with a “spook show” meaning a magic and illusion show that played in movie theaters after the evening’s last show of horror films to keep the scares going for the audience.

But by the end of the 1930s, vaudeville was over and the war was beginning. He went to university (San Diego State) and started getting interested in writing. He took a trip to Mexico City and explored the Aztec pyramids then came back home and met a girl at school who had also been in Mexico City visiting the pyramids but they hadn’t met. They started dating. When Sid was drafted, they quickly married before he shipped out. He served in the Navy on a Destroyer Escort first on the east coast and then repositioned into the south Pacific.

Back in the states, filled with story ideas from his travels, he started writing pulp fiction novels, and started a family with his wife, Betty. Looking for a place to live they settled first in Monterey, then when the movies got interested in his writing he moved the family to Santa Monica where he lived the rest of his life.

My family moved to Santa Monica in 1967, when I was five years old. Fleischman says that his house was blocks from the ocean and there’s a picture of it in the book. He doesn’t give the address but I’m guessing that it must have been in the ocean park neighborhood which meant they lived about a mile from my family. (Farther north in Santa Monica anything “blocks from the ocean” would have been apartments or large homes too expensive for a writer with a wife and three kids to afford). The Fleischman kids probably went to my junior high school and certainly attended my Santa Monica high school, but ten years before me.

Once planted in Santa Monica, Fleischman quickly turned from adult novels and screenplays to children’s novels. He says that he loved the response that he got from kids. I was one of those kids. Here’s what he write about us:

“I was astonished. When I wrote for adults, I was lucky to receive one letter a year, and that was generally from some snorting reader who wanted to know why I had used a semicolon instead of a colon on page 147. And no one ever writes to a screenwriter. But these kids were writing to tell me they’d had fun reading the novel. I was like a comedian who for the first time hears laughter from across the footlights. I was thrilled. If a child asked me three questions, I’d type out a three-page reply. Today the volume of mail is so heavy that I can manage only a couple of sentences.

“My writer’s lifestyle was changing. Suddenly I was being asked to fly around the country to speak at schools and libraries and conferences and to sign copies of the novel. Many years later I won the Newberry award, and in my acceptance speech I recalled a sunny moment when I was signing slips of paper for kids in a Santa Monica library. ‘I looked up, and there in line stood my younger daughter, Anne, age seven, with a slip of paper in her hand. She wanted my autograph, too. I knew I had arrived.'” (pp. 153-154).

Because I had borrowed his books from the library I didn’t have a book for him to sign when he came to my school and I never got his autograph.

Now that I’m embarking on a writing career of my own, I especially enjoyed some advice to writers that Fleischman includes toward the end of the book. He talks about his writing schedule and his method for keeping notes, and he says that he writes without an outline and without knowing where the story is going in advance. That’s all personal stuff and his model won’t work for me. But this I like: (pp. 177-179)

1. It’s the job of the hero or heroine to solve the story problem; don’t leave it to a second-banana character like Uncle Harry. You’d know something was wrong if Watson solved the crime instead of Sherlock Holmes. This clunky plotting sank many of my stories when I started out.
2. The main character should be changed by the events of the story. Remember your fairy tales? Change is built into the refrain at the end: “And they lived happily ever after.”
3. If there’s a hole in your story, point it out and the hole will disappear. For example, in McBroom’s Zoo I wanted to use the Hidebehind, a fabled frontier creature. No one knows what the Hidebehind looks like because eery time you look, the animal hides behind you. I saw the hole at once. All McBroom needed to do was hold up a mirror and he’d see the Hidebehind’s mug. I plugged the hole by pointing to it. Works like magic. “I even tried walking around with a hand mirror,” Mc Broom declares, “but the Hidebehind was too eternal clever for tricks like that.”
4. Dramatize important scenes; narrate the trivialities. I have seen a lot of this the other way around.
5. Give weather reports. It helps the reality of a scene if foghorns are blowing or kites are in the sky on a windy afternoon or the day’s so hot wallpaper is peeling off the walls.
6. The stronger the villain–or opposing force–the stronger the hero or heroine. A wimpy problem delivers a wimpy story.
7. When possible, give important characters an “entrance.” That’s why grand staircases were invented.
8. Write in scenes. It’s generally hard to find any pulse in straight narration. Color it gray. Show; don’t tell. Color it splashy.
9. Imagery is powerful shorthand. It says in four or five words what might otherwise take you sentences to describe–and not as vividly. It takes time to think out fresh similes and metaphors, and they must be apt and exact. Practice helps. After a while you develop a knack for it. Clumsy imagery must be ripped up instantly.
10. If you’re stuck on the plot, look around for the second stick. [Earlier in the book he points out that you can’t do anything with a single stick but with two sticks you can start a fire.] When I discovered a tricksy Teutonic wood spirit who turned hay into horses, I couldn’t figure out what to do with it. Then I came across a Yiddish saying: “It’s easier to guard a sack of fleas than a young girl in love.” After I burst out laughing, the image of guarding a sack of fleas caught my fancy. The spirit could turn a guarded sack of gold pieces into a guarded sack of fleas. The Hey Hey Man followed, with the elfin pixie making a return appearance in The Midnight Horse.
11. Don’t make a mossy rock or a frying pan the hero or heroine. Stores are tough enough to write without adding to the difficulties with an inanimate object in the lead. This sort of thing is best left to the professionals, who rarely touch it.
12. Tease out important information to dramatize important scenes. Here are two versions of a phone call.
    “Aunt Amanda! You just won the lottery!”
    Here’s the same scene, teased out. “Aunt Amanda! There’s big news! I’ve been trying to reach you for an hour! Don’t you ever answer your phone?”
    “I thought it must be Gertrude calling.”
    “Gertrude’s been dead for ten years.”
    “What?”
    “Turn up your hearing aid.”
    “Why are you yelling?”
    “There’s wonderful news!”
    “You’re going to get married?”
    “I am married, Aunt Amanda. You remember that lottery ticket you bought? I hope you didn’t misplace. it.”
    “Of course I didn’t misplace it. I threw it away. I never win.”
    “Go through your trash, Aunt Amanda! You won! You won the lottery!”

Fleischman wrote this autobiography in 1996. He was 76. His children are grown. He’s proud of them. His son Paul also became a children’s books author and a Newberry winner. He reports on the whereabouts of many of the folks from earlier in his life. His wife has died, of cancer in 1993. After this autobiography he wrote several more children’s novels as well as biographies of Harry Houdini, Mark Twain, and Charlie Chaplin.

He died on March 17, 2010, one day after his 90th birthday.

I write a diary entry like this after every book I read, mostly novels, mostly the best of nineteenth and twentieth century literature.  To see what else is on my reading list click here.