Remembering Ruth Cavin

by Julia Spencer -Fleming

She was called “The Legendary Ruth Cavin” so consistently, you would be forgiven for thinking her parents, in a fit of enthusiasm and foresight, had given her the name, the way a pop star might christen his offspring “Prince Michael.” I first encountered her in a message left on my answering machine in April, 2001.

“Hello, this is Ruth Cavin of St. Martin's Press. I'm looking for Julia Spencer-Fleming. I guess I'll just send an email.”

Six months before, I sent a manuscript to the St. Martin's Press/Malice Domestic Best First Traditional Mystery contest, Ruth's baby. And her email (riddled with typos because she had so much correspondence to get through) changed my life.

She congratulated me on winning the 2001 contest and said St. Martin's/Thomas Dunne Books would like to publish In the Bleak Midwinter.

Ruth once told me over drinks that making offers to first-time authors was her favorite part of the job.

“They're so excited and happy,” she said. “At least for that moment, they think you're the best, the smartest editor in the whole world.”

She was full of quips like that, of piercing observations and hysterically funny stories that would have been right at home at the Algonquin Hotel's Round Table.

She did not, however, dress the part. I don't think I ever saw her in anything other than a long, comfortable dirndl skirt, with a shirt in the winter and a T in the summer. At writing conferences, she would hike the halls with an enormous messenger bag hanging crossed over her chest, smiling non-stop, her white hair whisping around her head like a dandelion gone to seed.

When I first met her, she was already bent over from the scoliosis that would be such a trial to her last years, but her frail appearance was deceiving.

“Walking from my subway stop to the office used to be a problem,” she confided.

“I have to stop to catch my breath, and people kept coming up to me and asking if I needed help," she said.

"But then I figured out all I have to do is hold my cell phone up to my ear until I'm ready to go on again. No one bugs you if they think you're making a call.”

When she turned 87, she finally gave in to Tom Dunne and agreed to let the company have a car pick her up at the train station and deposit her at the Flatiron Building, much to the relief of everyone who knew her.

She was a joy to work with.

Not that it was joyful to hear that this and that and especially that other bit would have to go. But she had such a keen eye and perfectly-shaped sense of story you always knew after you finished the hard work of rewriting to her specifications, the book would be better and stronger than it ever could have been without her.

I became utterly blocked while writing my fourth novel, To Darkness and To Death. In order to make sense of its complicated structure, I had outlined the book—42 pages of outline, in fact. The story was to take place over 24 hours, I was four months past my deadline and stuck at 7pm—and I already had 140,000 words (for those of you not intimately acquainted with word counts, that means a published book of over 400 pages.) The characters had turned to cardboard and I had no idea how to get the thing moving again.

I dumped my problem in Ruth's lap on Friday afternoon. Monday morning I had a three-paragraph email telling me to cut one of the major viewpoint characters, consolidate two story lines, and throw away the outline—it wasn't working for me. I tossed a quarter of the pages I had already written along with that damn outline—and the rest of the story poured out to its conclusion.

That is the power of a good editor. That was the power Ruth Cavin wielded for the benefit of all her authors. The world of letters is smaller and sadder today—and so is everyone who knew Ruth.