AN UNLIKELY DETECTIVE

Mike Lubow has just published The Idea People, a madcap whodunnit about an ad man turned amateur detective.

BY MITCH HURST THE NORTH SHORE WEEKEND

What do Don DeLillo, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Heller, Dorothy Sayers, and Elmore Leonard have in common? They are all novelists who honed their craft in the advertising industry. You can add Riverwoods resident Mike Lubow to that list.

Lubow recently published his first novel, The Idea People, and the plot draws on his considerable experience working in advertising as a copywriter and creative director for firms both in New York and Chicago and also for his own creative agency. While professionally successful—he worked on campaigns for Chrysler and a public service campaign alongside Dick Van Dyke—Lubow couldn’t resist the urge to have his byline on the cover of a book.

“I always was interested in the literary life. I wrote magazine articles and short stories that got published,” he says. “I really wanted to be a novelist. The advertising career was a little more practical for a family man at that time. But I sent short stories, fiction, to magazines and luckily, I got published pretty widely.”

While not fully retired, Lubow says he’s slowed his work down to where he has time on his hands to pursue other projects. He says writing the novel and putting it together was a lot of fun.

“I still have some ad copy writing but the business changed a lot, from writing, words on paper and printed words to tweets and social media and things that a guy like me didn't grow up with,” he says. “I'm very comfortable with a keyboard under my fingers and cranking out the words. That's what I like to do.”

The Idea People is set in the 1980s, a decade that’s getting a lot of attention these days, especially on television (think Stranger Things).

“It starts out in a big city in a high rise building in a fancy conference room with a table that's as long as a bowling alley and a lot of big shots and suits. I lived in that world for a bit,” Lubow says. “I was always a little neurotic and nervous about making presentations.”

The primary character, Ben Franklin Green, leaves the big city after a disastrous pitch and winds up going to the natural world of the Wild West, specifically the Rocky Mountains. But things take a turn when his mentor’s daughter disappears and Green finds himself in Laurel Canyon, of all places, self-deputized as a detective and determined to solve the mystery.

“He's an ad guy who drops out of the ad business and he has a friend in L.A. who he goes to visit. The friend has a very outdoorsy, adventuresome young daughter who's 21 years old, and she goes missing in the mountains,” Lubow says. “The friend says, ‘Maybe you could help the detective agency think differently, think outside the box, and come up with some ways to bring my daughter back’.”

In the novel, Lubow teases the creative correlation between ad man and detective.

“The beauty of the story, the theme of the book, is things are not as they appear. And that's what our hero feels about advertising because advertising always portrays products as more beautiful and glamorous than they really are,” he says. “There is a scene in the beginning of the book where he's been sitting in a McDonald's-type hamburger joint. He's looking at the hamburger in his hand and he's also looking at a poster on the wall of the hamburger and he thinks, ‘You know, the hamburger on the poster is never the hamburger in your hand’."

Lubow says he tried to combine elements of suspense and mystery, but also to keep the novel light and humorous. The approach was something straight of his advertising background. He also drew on themes from his childhood.

“I've always liked cowboy stories a lot. I still like cowboy stories. I've also traveled to Colorado, and I've hiked through the Rocky Mountains, and I've been in the areas where the book takes place,” Lubow says. ”The idea if I could say it is an advertising guy goes west and becomes a cowboy. That's kind of a fantasy of a grown man.”

At one point in the book, Ben Franklin Greene, who's a little bit of a neurotic, finds himself wearing a cowboy hat out of necessity and having a gun belt strapped around his waist with a heavy revolver on it and he's on a galloping horse. Lubow says it all makes sense the way the pieces fit together, even if things really aren’t as they seem.

“I'll tell you a little secret. The bad guys are not necessarily the kidnappers,” he says.

The Idea People is available in paperback and as an e-book on Amazon.com.