Evan Marshall

Evan Marshall edited at Houghton Mifflin, New American Library and Dodd, Mead before opening the Evan Marshall Agency, which represents fiction writers. The Marshall Plan for Novel Writing, issued by Writer's Digest Books in 1998 and revised for a fourth edition twenty years later, breaks a draft into sixteen numbered tasks, from finding a hook and fixing the central conflict to building the lead character and pacing what comes after. A companion volume on placing the finished manuscript followed in 2003, and the method was later sold as software, managed by his wife, the editor and agent Martha Jewett. He writes the fiction he gives advice about, too. Missing Marlene, out in 1999, began a Kensington series about Jane Stuart, a widowed literary agent in a New Jersey town, and her cat Winky. Four later mysteries for Severn House, starting with Death Is Disposable, follow Anna Winthrop, a supervisor in the sanitation department of New York.