Ashford's Multimillion Pound Book Factory

There can't be very many best-selling authors who spend much of their creative life crawling around a study floor on their hands and knees. But here's Max Morgan-Witts doubled up on the carpet in the home of his co-author, Gordon Thomas, in Ashford, County Wicklow. In front of him is a massive manilla folder chock-a-block with notes, pamphlets, and photostat cuttings from the New York Times of 1929. All around, piled high against the wails, stacked on top of what is arguably the longest private desk in Europe (21 feet), jammed into almost wall-wall shelves, are similar folders, some of them nearly a foot thick.

Thomas, ushering a visitor into this newly-built sumpptuous workplace (how many writers wrestle with the muse in a "study" that has two stories, self-contained kitchen and bathroom and a view over a heated swimming-pool?) sees no need to apologise for his colleague's unusual working position. That's the way they've done it in nearly 14 years together. Indeed, Thomas sometimes jokes that they will fit knee-pads, a la gridiron.

From time to time Witts rises, sits at his allotted section of the desk and writes in a precise hand all over pages produced from Thomas' ebullient prose by a typist beavering away downstairs. Witts' crawling is made necesssary by the drudgery of checkking, double-checking and triple-checking. Somewhere in the 14 million-plus words of raw material around them is the corroboration they need.

It is their seventh book, and probably their biggest assignment so far. The subject: the Great Crash of '29, the Wall Street stock market shimp that triggered a deepression, prompted once highhflying financiers to leap out of skyscraper windows, closed down banks, and generally shook the world's faith in the great American dream. If occasionally the authors seem edgy, it's understandable.

They face a race against I time .. The giant US publishers, Doubleday, want the manuuscript before Christmas so they can meet production' schedules of the hardback edition before October 29, the fiftieth anniversary of the Crash. NBC television will make a four to six hour 2 million dollar series from the book. And Twentieth Century Fox plans a feature film, with, the co-authors as associate producers.

The Hollywood interest is nothing new to Witts and Thomas, since four of their books have been or are being made into movies, but it's the first time the pressures have synchronised. Add to all that a bitter legal battle with their discarded American publisher, which the authors finally won in September, and you have an idea of what life is like at the top of the best-selling tree.

The authors have been rapidly scaling that tree almost since they first combined their disparate but matching talents in the sixties. Their first book, The Day the World Ended is a riveting account of the vollcanic eruption on the island of Martinique in 1902. Like subsequent books, its interest in calamity is not ghoulish or gloating. Rather, it's a human dissection of people's reeactions when confronted with imminent disaster.

With almost metronomic regularity came other books:

Strange Story of the Morro Castle (a mystery of the sea), Voyage of the Damned, Guernica ( an account of that dreadful blitzkrieg), and Ruin From the Air (dropping of the atomic bomb on Hirooshima). Sales steadily built up. Now they stand at around 26 million copies.

Since they first met at the BBC where Witts was an exxecutive producer, the writers have established an almost brotherly relationship. A Canadian who lives in London, Witts flies across to Ashford for the roughly two-yearly ritual of writing. (It's in Ashford that all the docuuments, garnered by a worlddwide network of researchers as well as by the writers, are stored.) Every now and again Thomas lets him go home to his family - "half-term", he jokes.

The chapters are written according to a precise schedule which ends on December 21 with the final one, and disspatched to Doubleday ten at a time via Aer Lingus, (Shortly before Magill went to press, they were ahead of the timeetable.)

The basis of the Witts! Thomas formula is a good working relationship. "We don't come to blows", says Witts but concedes that there is oeasionally "electricity in the air". There also appears to be an attraction of oppoosites (they have been termed the "Laurel and Hardy" of disaster). Witts, for instance, is impeccably dressed in tweed jacket, polished shoes, rollltop pullover and creased slacks. Even crawling around on the floor, he manages to convey an impression of correctness. (He's also death on bad grarnmar.)

Thomas by contrast is portly, often rumpled in dress and loquacious. thomas is also the salesman, a key inngredient in the promotion circus, especially in America. So meticulous is Thomas about publicity that he mainntains a cross-index file of reeporters around the world who have at one time or another interviewed them. And he keeps in touch with many of them.

With stoic cheerfulness, they submit to slightly insane publicity jamborees which may involve in a three-week spin as many as a 100 teleevision interviews, and even more radio and newspaper interviews. Why? "It sells books", says Thomas. Indeed, the selling is as important as the writing. To promote the present book they will probbably, for the first time, have to split up. Usually, they are interviewed together, employying a much-refined technique which includes putting questions at each other, antiicipating every possible angle, before going live.

But perhaps the basis of the authors' long-lasting succcess, in a profession with a very high failure rate, is disscipline. The research finished, they got down to writing in August. Since then they have been toiling away mostly seven daysaweek, according to an inexorable schedule starting precisely at 8.45am.

Lunch isbetween 1-1.45pm, followed by the day's only scheduled entertainment, 15 minutes of table-tennis. After the dinner break at 6.30pm, they return to work until around 9pm. "Sometimes we're dying to get back" says Witts who has, Thomas con-. fides, a "mania for work". During the writing there is little' social life for either; they take only urgent phone calls, most of which come from New York publishers, producers and their minions. "They all Want," says Thomas, "delivery like yesterday".

Don't they ever take a holiday? (In January they both fly to New York for work on the film and television series.) Witts looks almost shocked. "Yes, but you never need a break for long: There's no need to sit in the sun for six months. Two days is a break."

"I don't think we're workkaholics", says Thomas unncertainly.

Both writers are ex-reporters with a highly refined foottin-the-door technique. Hardly anybody refuses their requests for interviews, a fact they attribute to their age (Witts is 47,Thomas 45). Says Witts: 'We don't look like bright young 23-year-olds, nor do we look too decrepit". They also work hard at getting their subject's confidence by being well prepared, using a tapeerecorder and checking back on quotes afterwards. A trannscript with an important source may run to 150 annootated, indexed pages.

Occasionally they. run into opposition which, apparently, dissolves eventually. 'We'1l get the story", Thomas said earlier this year about one such difficulty in America. "We allways do." Having got 'it, they check it. Witts, a painstaking researcher, says: "We've never been faulted on any important factual error".

As the visitor left, Witts had got back on the floor to check the name of a shoe-shine boy who used to clean the big bankers' shoes in WaU Street. He was mortified to discover that in the rough draft they had got it wrong.

Financial footnote:

It's a heady thought for aspiring writers, expecially unpublished ones, that Thomas and Witts were signed up for their three-cornered deal (book, film, television) before they had researched or written one single word of The wsn Street Crash. Such is the value of a hot track record or, in Hollywood parlance, being "bankable". The terms of the deal were generous by any standards. Between them the writers split a 500,000 dollar advance from Doubleeday, accepted an offer of world wide research assistance from their long term associiates, Readers Digest. That aid is worth roughly 300,000 dollars. They also share 5 per  cent of the film's gross. Fox/NBC pay 100,000 dollars for the book for the television series. And the authors still haven't collected any harddback royalties on which they share 1.90 dollars a copy (compared with 19 cents soft back), let alone the soft back rights and royalties. But to earn that kind of money you have to be good, tough and punctual.