Dear Jacques, Midtown Manhattan looks like a painted whore in December, the weather would freeze a polar bear's nuts, and the Rangers just lost their fourth straight. What depresses me more is the thought of you lolling around in the tropical sunshine while I break my ass up here. But I'm doing too well to kill myself. It turns out getting disbarred was the best thing that could have happened, career-wise. I just signed up this big horse for the Bruins, the agency flourishes, and life is fat -- and now suddenly your whining letter lands on my desk. No, Jacques, I do not intend to advance you a "small tiding of faith" until your latest poems get published. Your mooching has inspired me with a more breathtaking idea, which doesn't require you to suffer the mortifying shame of indebtedness to your oldest, dearest friend. When you sent me that last batch of verses, asking me to try to flog them, I started thinking -- why not a literary sideline? So I have decided that instead of you having to grovel, I will personally advance you a couple of grand against royalties for the smash best-seller you are about to write.

I'm not talking poetry, which doesn't sell even if you're Shakespeare and you've been dead for five hundred years. This may hurt, Jacques, but I never thought you were much of a poet anyway. In fact I found the shit you mailed me too depressing to read. Hymns to a Dying Planet? But you can turn out a phrase, and my idea is to have you rip off an old-fashioned thriller that I'll flog to publishers as the work of a triple agent hiding in the tropics. Put the right ingredients in and the big houses will be flocking to the doorstep of the R. B. Rubinstein Agency, waving fistfuls of dead presidents. One of those ingredients is blood.

I want a body count. I want a two-fisted hero, not some whining patsy crippled with sorrow and woe like the schnockered poet who's right now reading this letter. I'm thinking more James Bondish -- maybe he's hiding out in the tropics, only he can foil Dr. Zork's plan to take over the world, and Zork is trying to blip him off. I looked up the rules. You throw in a big red herring near the start. You invent a twist that comes at you like a slapshot. You create a kick-ass hero and a ravishing heroine with whom you ultimately engage in explicit sex.

And you pay me my standard commission, no reduction for failed poets. Are the girls still going topless at the far end of the beach? Someone better put a stop to that, some poor schlemiel could get a heart attack. Give me an outline, a chapter. Rocky.