Chuck Verrill, Editor and Agent, RIP

Went to a memorial today for Chuck Verrill, longtime editor at Viking Press, and later agent for many great books. Held at the Center for Fiction in Brooklyn, the brief speeches by friends and colleagues were full of sweet memories and humorous stories. Speakers included Stephen King; Scribner’s Nan Graham; Verrill’s fellow agent Liz Darhansoff, who made Chuck her agency partner in 1991; Abigail Thomas, a longtime Viking editor, and memoirist; and a number of family members. Verrill worked with King on his books for more than forty years, first as his editor and then as his agent.

I didn’t know Verrill well, but we did have lunch a couple times over the years, and I remember he enjoyed hearing about how in 1979 King was on tour for his early novel The Dead Zone and he visited Undercover Books, my family’s bookstore in Cleveland. King was escorted by a Viking sale rep named Dennis Ciccone, and the subject came up of other Viking novelists being published by the Press at that time. I mentioned that I had enjoyed Ernest Hebert’s The Dogs of March, set in New Hampshire, and Howard Frank Mosher’s Disappearances, set in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. King, a Maine native, beamed hearing me extol his fellow New England writers, and agreed that both of those novels were exceptional.

At the memorial on Saturday, I learned that Chuck Verrill had for a time been an editorial assistant to the estimable Viking editor Alan Williams, who was himself editor for work by Mosher. #publishing #friendship