In the time it takes you to read this sentence, W.E.B. Griffin will have written another novel.
Preposterous, you say? Perhaps. But only because of the physical limitations of typing.
You would be foolhardy, indeed, to underestimate the prodigious productivity of Griffin, a human-story factory, a deforester of the first order.
The mind-bogglingly prolific author has written, cowritten, or ghost-written more than 200 books. A precise total is difficult to ascertain because the man has had more noms de plume than Keebler has cookies.
For years, he churned out paperbacks under names such as Webb Beech, Eden Hughes, and Edmund O. Scholefield. That's in addition to more than 60 books written under his given name, William E. Butterworth.
He used so many assumed names because he worried that libraries and bookstores would be disinclined to acquire four books in a year from the same author.
Says his 49-year-old son and now-collaborator, William E. Butterworth IV: "The one thing I knew innately from age 10 or 11 was that he was the hardest-working person I knew. He always had three or four books under way in various stages."
It wasn't until 1983's The Colonels, the fourth entry in his military series, Brotherhood of War, that he achieved major notoriety as W.E.B. Griffin.
"That was my first hardcover book and my first best-seller," he says on the phone from Argentina. He splits his time between that South American country (Pilar, his wife of 20 years, is Argentine) and Alabama.
Since that breakthrough, he has juggled six popular series with more than 50 million copies of those 42 (and counting) books printed in more than 10 languages.
According to the author, his astounding output results from a particular kind of compulsion.
"I like to say it's nose-to-the-grindstone," he states. "The truth of the matter - and this is a common trait of all kinds of writers - is that we're unhappy away from the typewriter for more than two hours."
His latest book, The Traffickers, is the ninth volume in his Badge of Honor series, revolving around Philadelphia cops. (For the first Badge book, Men in Blue, Griffin used the pen name of John Kevin Dugan.)
The Traffickers begins with, in short order, a meth lab explosion in Northeast Philadelphia, a shooting that leads to a stampede at the Reading Terminal Market, and a decapitated body dumped in the Schuylkill. Investigating these crimes is Homicide Sgt. Matthew Payne, "the Wyatt Earp of the Main Line."
The local flavor isn't manufactured. Griffin, 79, has deep roots in this region.
"My father's side of the family has lived in Wallingford for years and years. They've been in Pennsylvania since before the Revolutionary War," he says. "My mother is Pennsylvania Dutch, born in Tatamy, near Easton. She lived most of her life in Bucks County."
Griffin grew up in Philadelphia and New York, bouncing among relatives after his parents divorced.
"I enlisted in the Army in a recruiting office above a drugstore on Market Street," he says. "I had been kicked out of school and didn't have a home, so I joined the Army. It wasn't the first time I was kicked out of school."
The year was 1946. After serving as a counterintelligence specialist in Germany and then being reconscripted for the Korean War, Griffin returned to Philadelphia.
"That was tough, looking for a job," he says. "I first worked for J.L.N. Smythe, a wholesale paper company. I loved that. I'd still be doing it, but I didn't make enough money.
"So I went to work as a salesman of Karo syrup and Mazola oil. I visited every grocery store in Philadelphia. I hated selling Karo."
To support his family, he became a civilian technical writer for the Army Aviation division at Camp Rucker in Alabama, determined to write fiction in his off-hours.
Decades later, when that ambition had finally begun to pay big dividends, Griffin got a letter from a Philadelphia cop named Zebulon Casey, who had noticed all the references to the City of Brotherly Love in the author's work. Casey wondered if Griffin would be interested in building some of his novels around the city's Police Department.
Initially reluctant, Griffin was won over by the generous assistance he got from Casey and his fellow officers in providing plot material and procedural background.
Daniel Judge, a retired lieutenant on the force and a friend of the now-deceased Casey, recalls how those informational sessions went: "When Bill came to town, we would set up meetings with detectives and supervisors and kick around stories.
"One time, we were talking about the Chestnut Hill Rapist," Judge continues. "One of the rapes took place on Forbidden Drive in Fairmount Park. Bill said, 'Forbidden Drive? I have to go see it.' So we took him up there. He said, 'This place has the perfect name for a nefarious crime to happen.' "
"You have to do research," says Griffin. "People would laugh at you if you didn't get everything right. But I've done this all my life, and you acquire all these minute details. And if I don't know something, Google is God's gift to writers."
Given the pervasively macho setting of his work, it's not surprising that Griffin's readership is predominantly male.
"By and large, women don't like me - personally or as a writer," he says, laughing. "Most of my fans are men with some military or police connection."
As he hit his 70s, Griffin's pace had dwindled to a leisurely single book a year. So he recruited his son as a collaborator in 2006, doubling his quota. (Friends refer to them as Bill III and Bill IV.)
"I started out editing the galleys," says the junior partner. "Then, he started feeding me chapter by chapter, and I would give him feedback, 80 per cent of which he ignored. Back then I was contributing 10 to 15 percent of each book. When I became the coauthor, [that ratio] flipped around."
Griffin may be slowing down enough to smell the gunpowder, but he remains engaged and enthusiastic about his work.
Asked to name the favorite of all his myriad books, he cites The Honor of Spies, which will be published in January. It's the fifth book in his Honor Bound series about OSS operations in Argentina during WWII.
"It's the best thing I've ever written," he says emphatically. "Of course, I'll feel the same way about the one that comes out next June."