[align=right]Yola Monakhov for The New York Times[/align]
Chick-Lit King Imagines His Way Into Women's Heads

By FELICIA R. LEE

class=footerPublished: July 29, 2004



e was reading the part where Driver, the ex-convict built like John Henry, meets Lisa, who is rich and beautiful (of course) and kind of married.

"I'd seen her kicking it outside, dressed in a black business suit, leaning against a black town car, umbrella in hand, talking to two members from Los Angeles's most notorious gang, the L.A.P.D. . . . I saw her five-carat issue sparkling on her left hand. She leaned away, kept her body language professional, but the way she gazed at her ring, then looked at me, told me that her and hubby got along like Shaq and Kobe."

Laughter poured from the crowd at the recent standing-room book signing and reading at the Barnes & Noble bookstore on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Some of the hilarity was probably due to the wink-wink delivery of the writer, Eric Jerome Dickey (he has done stand-up comedy), some to basketball references or shared feelings about the Los Angeles police.

Whatever the reason, with his 10th novel, "Drive Me Crazy," making its debut next Sunday on the New York Times best-seller list, Mr. Dickey has established himself as one of the few kings of popular African-American fiction for women.

The genre was staked out by Terry McMillan in 1992 with the unexpected success of "Waiting to Exhale," which gave the world glamour-puss black ladies with sob stories. Mostly women have followed in Ms. McMillan's fluffy but gigantic footsteps — from Kimberla Lawson Roby, with her take on real issues like cheating ministers, to Erica Kennedy and Tia Williams, who spike their novels with bling, three-cosmo lunches and rap artists.

Mr. Dickey, a 42-year-old Memphis native, began his career in 1996 with "Sister, Sister," a novel about women and men negotiating versions of relationship hell. "Drive Me Crazy," which came out last week, is his seventh novel to become a Times best seller. The first was "Cheaters," in 1999, with a title that tells it all. He sells more than 500,000 books a year, according to his publisher, Dutton.

Even among the tiny fraternity of men who have successfully invaded the black female reading groups, Mr. Dickey has a place of his own.

E. Lynn Harris, another best-selling black novelist, took the standard buppie urban romance and threw into that mix bisexuals and men on the down-low. Omar Tyree started out writing urban romance but now sometimes takes the pen name Urban Griot to reach a male readership with more violent novels (his latest was "Cold Blooded: A Hardcore Novel," published by Simon & Schuster). Colin Channer and Michael Baisden, two other testosterone-influenced practioners of black chick-lit, haven't been around long enough or sold enough books to rival Mr. Dickey.

"He is singular in the way he is tapping into the African-American female psyche," said Patrik Henry Bass, the books editor at Essence, the leading magazine for black women. He described Mr. Dickey's readers as less interested in bling and buzz than they are in relationships.

On a recent sultry Thursday evening in Manhattan, when the summer weekend had already started sucking out the city's energy, Mr. Dickey drew a mostly female crowd at Barnes & Noble that included mothers with babies, older couples and Bergdorf blondes.

After the reading he answered the usual questions: Does he write only from experience? (No, boring.) How does he speak with a woman's voice? (Imagination.) Which writers have influenced him? (He likes Walter Mosley and Bebe Moore Campbell.)

"It's a great life," Mr. Dickey told his audience. "No one has to tell me to come to work."

A long line of people waited for his autograph, some with "Driving Me Crazy" in hand, others with careworn paperbacks.

"I've read three of his books," said Bernadette Houser, 36, a clerical worker from the East Bronx. "Once you pick them up, you can't put them down. This is the first time I've come to a reading, but I just had to come because he makes his women characters so real. `The Other Woman' had me shaking."

Calvin Reid, an editor at Publishers Weekly, the trade magazine, said: "He captures black language and black middle-class characters with more depth than you often see in commercial fiction."

Certainly Mr. Dickey, a genial man with long dreadlocks and a Southern accent that seems to deepen at will, is not so unlike some of his readers. In an interview he talked about growing up in Memphis with a godmother who worked as a housekeeper and a godfather who worked in the Sealy Posturepedic factory. His parents had died.

It was the kind of neighborhood, he said, where people went into the Army to escape. So while he did some writing for his high school newspaper, he thought in terms of getting a real job. "Books," he said, "were from this far away place."

Mr. Dickey majored in computer technology at the University of Memphis (formerly Memphis State) and moved to Los Angeles after graduation to work as a software developer in the aerospace industry. There his world widened to include people who made a living by making music, doing comedy, writing screenplays. He tried his hand at comedy, but after a friend dragged him to a creative writing class, he was hooked.

Being laid off from his aerospace job, he said, gave him a chance to see if he could write. He took some writing classes and for three years sent out query letters about his short stories until he found an agent. "Sister, Sister," he said, started out as short story, but he became obsessed with developing the characters.

"At first I was trying to write like other writers, like Hemingway," Mr. Dickey recalled. "Then it was me just letting go, using the language that I know."

What he doesn't know he learns, he said. For "Milk in My Coffee" (1998), an interracial romance set in New York, he rode around in the back of New York taxis. Sometimes he takes a notebook to the beach and jots down overheard dialogue. It is no harder to imagine a female character, he said, than to imagine an ex-convict like Driver, the protagonist of "Driving Me Crazy," a film-noir-influenced novel that features grifters and Lisa's appeal to Driver to kill her husband.

"I've actually had book clubs tell me that we don't do male writers, you should consider yourself lucky," said Mr. Dickey, who is single and lives in Los Angeles, around the corner from his 5-year-old daughter and her mother. "A lot of brothers don't come to the book signings, but a lot of women don't want men in the book clubs."

And while men may not be his primary buyers, Mr. Dickey said he suspected that they were reading his books. "I get so many e-mails now from cats in the war," he said. "A lot of it is `Thank you for getting me through this situation.' "

Mr. Dickey said his mission was not to lure any particular audience but to tell stories well. His novel "Friends and Lovers" (1997) is scheduled for a stage adaptation that will begin touring in September. Drawing on what he learned as a substitute middle-school teacher, Mr. Dickey said, he imagines himself eventually writing a novel full of under-21 characters. His hobby is collecting comic books, he said, but disappearing into the heads of his characters is so much fun it's almost like a hobby for which he gets paid.

"I would love to just continue what I'm doing," said Mr. Dickey, who said he often wrote on a laptop while sitting on a bar stool in his kitchen. "To have this type of fan base 10 years from now would be wonderful."

Yeah he's good, Imust admit I thought he wrote for women from the look of his books and where they were placed in the shop but after being pressured into reading Cheaters I enjoyed his work. Thieves paradise stands out as a real good one. Fiction aint really my thing but Ill try to catch up with the next one, he has good form.

Yep, this man is good. I've read Cheaters and Liar's Game, haven't come across any other books yet. I've read a few of Walter Mosley's books as well: Black Betty, Walkin The Dog, the majority I have read from the Easy Rawlins selection. These two along with Patrick Augustus are my favourite authors