Steiner book thrills again

SALISBURY — Cartoonist and author Peter Steiner doesn’t think his novels are mysteries or thrillers. But that’s how they’re labeled.

“I fight about it with my publisher. I always lose. I have absolutely no power.”

Steiner, a Sharon resident, spoke at The White Hart on Thursday, May 12, as part of the White Hart Speaker Series, sponsored by Oblong Books and the Scoville Memorial Library.

Steiner is well known as a cartoonist for The New Yorker magazine, but he has also written five novels of international intrigue, centered on Louis Morgon, an American expatriate living in a village in France. The latest, “The Capitalist,” was just published by St. Martin’s Press.

Steiner said the stories have gone from “linear to meandering, less mysterious and less thriller-like.”

In the latest one, Morgon, the ex-State Department/CIA operative, goes after a financier who runs an international Ponzi scheme.

But in his talk at The White Hart, Steiner spent more time describing how he came to cartoons.

By the age of 12, he was a published cartoonist in his high school paper.

“I discovered with cartoons that you can attack people who are more important than you with impunity.”

The cartoon in question concerned a shortage of forks in the school lunchroom. The image was of a boy lying on the floor with a fork stuck in him. The caption, of one onlooker commenting to another, was “Johnny got a fork!”

“The discovery that I had that kind of power was hard to give up.”

Steiner kept it up through college, the Army and graduate school.

Cartooning didn’t pay the bills, however, so he became a university professor, teaching German language and literature.

He finally sold a cartoon to the New Yorker, after two years of trying.

His career as a novelist began, he continued, when his father was dying.

“I began keeping a journal, something I had never done before. 

“It was pretty boring, not helpful or useful. So I decided to populate our conflicts with a fictional father and son. It turned into a novel by itself.”

Encouraged by that experiment, he tried again, writing a novel quickly, in a three-week period.

“I liked that so much I wrote ‘A French Country Murder.’”

Steiner said his training as a teacher and his experience as a cartoonist both help his writing. 

In the former instance, he broke down the 20th-century German novels he taught into their component parts. “I understood what the mechanics of writing were.”

Cartooning, like writing, involves a deadline and a blank page. “I’m never afraid of either.”

And “I usually produce something serviceable.”