He’s Caught Up in the Raptor of His Work

You could call it “The Case of Desperate . . .” well . . . “Near Desperate Measures,” figures writer Eric Garcia. Like so many ex-English majors, he found himself out of college, fancy USC degree under his belt, with nothing but the usual ambiguous prospects--to teach or not to teach?

But staring into the future, Garcia had a scheme that his down-on-his-luck, ever-adaptive private eye, Vincent Rubio, would hazard without a moment’s hesitation.

Gathering dust was this manuscript, rather a monster in a box, that leaped off with a beguiling premise: That dinosaurs didn’t really die out. Rather, they now pass their days conveniently, although uncomfortably, outfitted in human “skin.” (“Anonymous Rex,” Villard, 1999.)

“I’m usually pretty gung-ho about things,” Garcia said, “but for some reason it sat around for a year and a half. A friend of ours and my wife, Sabrina, convinced me I would have to do something.”

And that “something,” acknowledged Garcia, “some would call sneaky. But if it’s sneaky, it’s sneaky!”

Rifling through his “basic early modern Ikea” bookcase, he plucked out some titles. “Ones that I most dug off of,” he recalled. “A lot of Vonnegut and a book called ‘Vurt’ and one called ‘Permanent Midnight,’ Jerry Stahl’s memoir. And I went through them, found the publisher and then pretended that I was a producer in L.A. looking for the spoken-word rights. I feel a little bad about it--I don’t like being deceptive, but I had to!”

Once he got the names, he slipped queries in the mail to three agents, but to a fourth, whose name came up several times, he decided to also send a first chapter.

That little piece of detective work not only led him to an agent, Barbara Zitwer Alicea, and the publication of his book, but spun him off to a multi-title book deal and, of course, talk of movie tie-ins.

“Before it came out, I thought I could be a novelist and just write. But in the last month since the book’s been out, I’m finding, now I’m a talk show guest, an interviewee, trying to be a marketer. Before I sold the book, I thought, ‘OK, now you can sit back and just write the books.’ Maybe if you’re J.D. Salinger . . . but for the most part, there is so much more to it than the writing.”

“Anonymous” will not be the last we will see of Vincent Rubio. The next in the mystery-speculative fiction series, “Casual Rex”--actually a prequel--will be followed by “Opposite Rex,” “Hot and Sweaty Rex,” “Premarital Rex,” “Rex and Violence.”

“I don’t think in my career I’ve come across such an original concept, with such humor and storytelling brio,” said Jonathan Karp, senior editor at Random House. “For a guy in his 20s, he’s prodigious.

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“It’s quite possible that he’s prehistoric,” continued Karp with a sly lilt, like a wink, in his voice. “I’m not quite convinced he isn’t a raptor himself.”

It all leaves the 27-year-old Miami native feeling a bit wide-eyed. He’s a burst of energy, shaping anecdotes with his hands, setting up scenes like a Letterman monologue.

Commencing with the big “What if?” . . . or “Guess what?” depending on what side of speculation you’re standing on, “Anonymous Rex” is the first-person musings of L.A. detective Vincent Rubio--a dinosaur (a velociraptor, to be exact) under his latex human exterior. Persistently chased by creditors, trying to quit a mean basil and oregano habit (recreational drugs of choice in the dinosaur world) and nearly on the skids, Rubio is thrown a bone by the largest dino private-investigation company, TruTel. He is to look into what appears--on the surface--to be a routine Valley arson case but eventually clarifies the murky details behind the recent mysterious death of his partner, Erine.

Where did the premise came from?

“I honestly have no idea,” said Garcia, covering his cherubic face with both hands, as if to hide a fast flush. “I mean, I had no obsession with dinosaurs as a kid. I mean, I dig dinosaurs--and it sounds good to say that I did--but I wasn’t a dino-nerd.”

For Garcia, it’s just been a chance to act out a lifetime of influences and inclinations--from sci-fi and Monty Python to sketch comedy and improvisation.

“I’d written short stories a good amount when I was a kid,” said Garcia, who kept his nose in the books of a wide range of writers, including J.R.R. Tolkien, Madeline L’Engle, Stephen King. “I would just sit in the back of the car during family vacations--in Europe, Asia--devouring certain authors.”

But there was a bit of the extrovert too. The little routines that his parents pressed him to perform for their friends grew into an improv group in junior and senior high. And by the time he enrolled at Cornell University, he was ready for main stage--and a series of improv and comedy ensembles from the Whistling Shrimps to the Skits-o-phrenics.

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But it became clear to Garcia early on that he and Cornell weren’t meant for one another. After an aborted attempt at a spot in USC’s cinema school’s writing program, Garcia transferred back to English--and by happenstance into novelist T. Coraghessen Boyle’s creative writing course. “When I found out that he was there, I took every course I could from him . . . And I think there I found it’s the babbler in me who likes to write books better.”

“Eric has always seemed tremendously self-confident,” Boyle said. “He writes very beautiful, fluid prose. He’s a young guy, but always seemed ahead of his years. He always had a sense of where he wanted to go. I wish I had had that; instead, at his age, I was mired in confusion and misery.”

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As fun and broad as the tale of P.I. Rubio is, Garcia has infused some hidden meaning, some pathos. Inside all of the fun--like his favorites, Kurt Vonnegut and Tom Robbins--after the wild ride is over, there is a nugget to ponder that lasts and lasts: the surprise inside the sucker.

“Some people are kind of picking up on it, “ Garcia said. “I think maybe it sinks in slowly because your brain is trying to deal with the strangeness of the book in general. But it’s really about what it’s like to have to adapt” or, in other words, how to work around the confines that the world has handed you.

“Eric always had his own special edge and surreal twist,” Boyle said. “He was writing literary fiction but always bending the boundaries, blending two types of fiction. What makes it work is his fluid writing and his sense of humor. That [mystery] territory has been beaten to death, so I think that freshness is why people are responding.”

Perhaps that’s because Garcia sees life in panorama. So much of his life has been about taking a bit of this and that and adapting it: “After I sold the book, I found out it’s really hard to sell merged genres,” he said. “I thought, ‘Oooh! Dodged a bullet there!’ I think it’s too bad that there is such an emphasis on genre in the marketplace. It’s the Blockbuster-ization of literature. Now ‘Anonymous Rex’ has become a mystery book. But it’s a lot more. . . . There are a lot more people in me.”

Lynell George can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].