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Stuart Woods
After college, he spent a year in Atlanta and two months in
basic training for what he calls “the draft-dodger
program” of the Air National Guard. Then, in the
autumn of 1960, he moved to New York, in search of a writing
job. The magazines and newspapers weren’t hiring, so
he got a job in a training program at an advertising agency,
earning seventy dollars a week. “It is a measure of my
value to the company,” he says, “that my
secretary was earning eighty dollars a week.” He spent
the whole of the nineteen-sixties in New York, with the
exception of ten months, which he spent in Mannheim,
Germany, at the request of John F. Kennedy. The Soviets had
built the Berlin Wall, and Woods, along with a lot of other
national guardsmen, was sent to Germany, “. . . to do
God knows what,” as he puts it. What he did, he says,
was ” . . . fly a two-and-a-half-ton truck up and down
the autobahn.” He notes that the truck was all he ever
flew in the Air Force.
At the end of the sixties, he moved to London and worked
there for three years in various advertising agencies. In
early 1973, he decided that the time had come for him to
write the novel he had been thinking about since the age of
ten. He moved to Ireland, where some friends found him a
small flat in the stableyard of a castle in south County
Galway, and he supported himself by working two days a week
for a Dublin ad agency, while he worked on the novel. Then,
about a hundred pages into the book, he discovered sailing,
and “. . . everything went to hell. All I did was
sail.”
After a couple of years of this his grandfather died,
leaving him, “. . . just enough money to get into debt
for a boat,” and he decided to compete in the 1976
Observer Singlehanded Transatlantic Race (OSTAR). Since his
previous sailing experience consisted of, “. . .
racing a ten-foot plywood dinghy on Sunday afternoons
against small children, losing regularly,” he spent
eighteen months learning more about sailing and celestial
navigation while his new 30-foot yacht, a Ron Holland design
called Golden Harp, was being built at a yard in
Cork. He moved to a nearby gamekeeper’s cottage on a
big estate, on the Owenboy River, above Cork Harbor, to be
near the boatyard.
The race began at Plymouth England in June of ’76. He
completed his passage to Newport, Rhode Island in forty-five
days, finishing in the middle of the fleet, which was not
bad since his boat was one of the smallest. How did he
manage being entirely alone for six weeks at sea? “The
company was good,” he says.
The next couple of years were spent in Georgia, writing two
non-fiction books: Blue Water, Green Skipper was an
account of his Irish experience and the transatlantic race,
and A Romantic’s Guide to the Country Inns of
Britain and Ireland, which was a travel book, done on a
whim. He also did some more sailing. In August of 1979 he
competed, on a friend’s yacht, in the tragic Fastnet
Race of 1979, which was struck by a huge storm. Fifteen
competitors and four observers lost their lives, but Stuart
and his host crew finished in good order, with little
damage. (The story of the ’79 Fastnet Race was told in
the book, Fastnet Force 10, written by a fellow
crewmember of Stuart, John Rousmaniere.) That October and
November, he spent skippering his friend’s yacht back
across the Atlantic, with a crew of six, calling at the
Azores, Madeira and the Canary Islands and finishing at
Antigua, in the Caribbean.
In the meantime, the British publisher of Blue Water,
Green Skipper, had sold the American rights to W.W.
Norton, a New York publishing house, who also contracted to
publish his novel, on the basis of two hundred pages and an
outline, for an advance of $7500. “I was out of
excuses to not finish it, and I had taken their money, so I
finally had to get to work.” He finished the book and
it was published in March of 1981, eight years after he had
begun it. The novel was called Chiefs.
Though only 20,000 copies were printed in hardback, the book
achieved a large paperback sale and was made into a six-hour
television drama for CBS-TV, starring Charlton Heston, at
the head of an all-star cast that included Danny Glover,
Billy Dee Williams and John Goodman. The 25th anniversary of
Chiefs came in March, 2006, and W.W. Norton
published a special commemorative replica edition of the
hardcover first edition, which can still be ordered from any
bookstore.
Chiefs established Woods as a novelist. The book
won the Edgar Allan Poe prize from the Mystery Writers of
America, and he was later nominated again for
Palindrome. More recently he was awarded
France’s Prix de Literature Policiere, for
Imperfect Strangers. He has since been prolific,
having published forty-three novels. His publishers have
asked him to write three books a year, instead of two. A new
Ed Eagle novel, Santa Fe Edge, will be published on
September 20, 2010. It is his 44th novel. In January, a new
Stone Barrington novel, Strategic Moves, will be
published, followed by another Stone, Bel-Air Dead,
in April, 20011. He has just concluded negotiations for
three more novels to be published in 2011 and 2012.
After publishing fifteen novels before appearing on the
New York Times bestseller list, he has since had
twenty-eight straight bestsellers on the the Times hardcover
list.
He is a licensed, instrument-rated private pilot, with 3,200
hours total time, and until recently flew a Jetprop, which
is a Piper Malibu Mirage a six-passenger, pressurized
single-engine turboprop. He sails on other peoples’
boats, owns a Hinckley T38 power boat and is a partner in a
85-foot 1935 Trumpy motor yacht, Enticer, on the
cover of Loitering With Intent), which has been
recently restored to like-new condition.. He is now flying
his first jet, a Cessna Citation Mustang.
Stuart Woods is once again a born-again bachelor and lives
with a Labrador Retriever named Fred in Key West, Florida,
on Mount Desert Island, in Maine, and in New York City. (Of
a warm nature, he says he’s always looking for 70
degrees Fahrenheit.)
Books:
 D.C. Dead, January 2012
Bel-Air Dead, December 2011
Son of Stone, October 2011
Strategic Moves, September 2011
Grass Roots, August 2011
Under the Lake, May 2011
Bel-Air Dead, May 2011
Santa Fe Edge, April 2011
Strategic Moves, January 2011
Lucid Intervals, December 2010
Kisser, September 2010
Santa Fe Edge, September 2010
Hothouse Orchid, May 2010
Lucid Intervals, April 2010
Kisser, January 2010
Loitering With Intent, December 2009
Hothouse Orchid, October 2009
Mounting Fears, September 2009
Deep Lie, August 2009
Hot Mahogany, May 2009
Loitering with Intent, April 2009
Mounting Fears, January 2009
Santa Fe Dead, December 2008
Iron Orchid, April 2006
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