The Most Famous American Writer You Never Heard Of

By Donald Morrison

Since its publication in France in May, Douglas Kennedy's The Woman in the Fifth has sold more than 200,000 copies and dominated best-seller lists. It will enjoy similar success when it appears in a dozen other countries over the next few months. That's an easy prediction to make because a) like the American author's six previous novels, this one is brisk and brainy and b) each of those has sold at least half a million copies.

Just don't look for The Woman in the Fifth here in the U.S.: it does not have a publisher. Kennedy, 52, is an international literary franchise, but he can't get shelf space in the land of his birth. He may be the most successful American novelist America doesn't know.

Not that he minds. "Everyone should have my problems," says Kennedy, in the elegant 19th century London house he shares with his wife and their two children. They have other homes in Paris and Berlin and on the Maltese island of Gozo. "I'm published in every English-speaking country in the world except the U.S. I'm translated into 18 languages, including Romanian and Lithuanian. They love me in Vilnius."

As they once did in New York City. He grew up there, attending expensive U.S. schools and working off-Broadway. He went to Dublin at 21 to start a theater group and ended up running the respected Abbey Theatre's second stage. In 1988, Kennedy and his wife moved to London, where he cranked out four travel books and a novel, The Dead Heart.

Then, says Kennedy, came "my 15 minutes of fame." He got successive $1 million advances for his next two books and was heralded as the next John Grisham. But they weren't big hits. "I was 41," he says. "I decided I was going off to write what I wanted." That was The Pursuit of Happiness, a sweeping love story set in postwar New York City. No U.S. publisher would touch it, but it thrived overseas, selling 350,000 copies in the U.K. alone. Kennedy has the gift--or perhaps curse--of transcending genres. His thrillers are romantic, his romances thrilling, and all of them bristle with literary references and big questions about love and life. Consider The Woman in the Fifth. Harry Ricks, an American academic, loses his job and his marriage over a disastrous fling with a student. He flees to Paris and ends up living and working illegally in a squalid corner of the immigrant-filled 10th arrondissement. He meets a beautiful woman, but she will see him only a few hours a week at her apartment in the tidier fifth arrondissement. Then people who have wronged him start having "accidents," and he begins to suspect that the woman he loves is not what she seems.

The setting is no coincidence. Kennedy's Paris flat is not far from the fifth, he is fluent in French, and last year he was made a chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His novel tries "to look at Paris in a different way," he says, "through the eyes of immigrants who live there but seldom come in contact with white French natives."

Kennedy's next novel returns him to the U.S., to Boston. He's going home only in his imagination, but hey, it's a start.