ABOUT THIS WEBSITE

I had heard of Peter Viertel's roman à clef novel White Hunter, Black Heart for years and finally came across a little paperback copy of it about 1996. After reading it, I wanted to send a letter to Viertel telling him how much I enjoyed the book. Not able to find an address for him, and not sure if his most recent book publisher would forward mail to him or not, I waited several years. Then I came upon what I thought was a clever idea: I would find out where the Deborah Kerr fans were sending their fan letters, figuring that address in Switzerland (which is where I thought he and Kerr were living, down the lane from Greta Garbo) and that it would assuredly be the same address whether the envelope was addressed to Kerr or Viertel.

I then hunted down that Swiss address from among Deborah Kerr fans (who were fairly numerous in 1996) and sent my letter to Viertel. Not too long afterward, he wrote back a very cordial letter (from Spain!) with a few kind remarks.

In those early days of the internet, looking online for most kinds of detailed information was not particularly efficient, and finding very little available online about the book and the author, I hunted around libraries and used book shops and found a few more of his novels. Assuming there were other readers 'out there' going through the same hunt-and-search as I had been doing, I put together a webpage listing all the Viertel titles I knew of from his career.

I then wrote another letter to Mr. Viertel, sending along print-outs of the webpages as I had had no way of knowing if he himself had internet access. I asked him if it was alright for the site to exist, and also told him how many times I had been sent messages from people searching for copies of his first novel The Canyon, and that the copies I knew of were rather expensive.

Instead of a letter, I got a phone call (from Spain!) from Peter Viertel himself. A very friendly and relaxed conversation followed and we talked on his books, and then specifically about The Canyon. He discussed how we could answer requests for copies of the book by placing a number of them into my hands from his own self-published reprint stock, and I could then simply send the funds from the sales back to him. I told him the price that I thought was fair, and that would still be under the prices being listed by booksellers. He then asked: do you think the buyers would prefer to have them signed, or not? I of course said, "signed."

While doing these trans-Atlantic communications and book sales, and because I never asked which address (Switzerland or Spain) was the better address, I sometimes had the peculiar situation of sending duplicate mail to both addresses just to be sure he got the communication. One time Peter contacted me to ask about something I was sending to him which hadn't arrived to him yet: of course I had sent it to one address, confident he was there, but of course now he was at the other one.

I always intended to ask Viertel for a formal interview to put on this web site, but I hadn't quite figured out what I should concentrate on, the novels or Hollywood? The novels were my main interest, but the Hollywood material would certainly be the most desired by the users on the internet. And, ideally, I wanted to go to Spain (or Switzerland) and do the interview in person, which at the time seemed rather intimidating. Thus, this was a project that took much more thought and planning than was really necessary, as Viertel was friendly and open about talking on his career. This interview never came to fruition, though, because Peter Viertel died on November 4, 2007.

Erik Weems