On 9-11, forensic dentist, Dr. Stanley Woods-Frankel got a call from the police to help identify the mutilated and burned bodies at Ground Zero. Brutal nightmares forced him to leave the morgue, reluctantly, after two days. Surrendering does not come easy for him.
Before and since those all too real days, Woods-Frankel, has been writing mystery fiction and at last, in his early 70’s was published. We are all the writers of our own interesting, or perhaps, ordinary lives. Most of us let the story tell itself, like an object thrown into the sky, its trajectory predicable with a peak and inevitable descent towards the ground till we are, in fact, in the ground. Woods-Frankel, now 79, is not most of us.
A West Village resident and Brooklyn native, he is tall and lean with silver hair long enough to be swept-back and tucked behind his ears. With a killer whale’s tooth around his neck, he looks the part of a man with a story to tell. What you might not expect is that the tooth represents both his “ordinary” life as a dentist as well as his other life as an adventure seeking, later-in-life author.
When we met in the garden of the publisher of this paper, he was wearing, in addition to the killer whale necklace, a denim jacket with an American passport patch on the front and patches of cities from all over the globe on the back: London, Paris, Istanbul, Athens, and Rome. “I’ve been to them all,” says Woods-Frankel, who has also written nine novels, two of which are published.
“Perseverance,” is the word Woods-Frankel uses to demystify the process of becoming a published author. He used this word many times during our chat, suggesting that humility is equally important. Talent, which he doesn’t mention, can’t hurt.
Woods-Frankel’s first critically acclaimed novel, False Impressions, introduces readers to forensic dentist, Steve Landau, as he assists the NYPD in tracking down a serial killer threatening NYC. His second novel, Resurrection of Evil, is another Steve Landau Mystery. In this one, Landau is called upon to indentify the remains of Adolf Hitler, which leads to a series of discoveries including the revelation that Hitler did not kill himself after the war, but was instead captured and held by Stalin in the Soviet Union. The book is an exhilarating ride, full of mystery, history, sex and humor. The characters are authentic as well as captivating. The plots twists are astonishing but within the world and context he creates, absolutely believable. With ease you move through time and behind the heavy curtain of secret places: post-war Soviet Union, Stalin’s private moments with loved ones, KGB, CIA, arms smugglers in Greece.
Hero, Steve, and author, Stanley, share quite a few characteristics. Most glaringly, they are both dentists. However, Woods-Frankel practiced general dentistry until his mid-forties when a continuing education course on forensic dentistry caught his eye. It was around this same time that he started writing. After the course, he began doing forensic work. “Many of the cases that appear in the series are slight variations of some of the cases I actually worked on during my involvement with the NYPD,” says Woods-Frankel. Steve is sharp, quick witted and intense about his work. He seeks adventure and world travel. His creator shares these attributes with one variation. Woods-Frankel is intense about his work but that work is writing.
“I had to express myself. I wanted to be known as a writer rather than a dentist.” He rewrote his first book ten times. Then, he applied and was accepted to the MFA program at NYU.
“I had nine people in my class who were all excellent writers and they really helped me. I had a way of making characters and setting and a way of making them mysterious but I didn’t have the mechanics of writing down yet.” The group called themselves “Martha’s Boys,” after a favorite professor and continued to meet after graduation every two weeks to discuss their writing projects. He says, “They were a great help to me and I to them because when it came to plot, nobody beat me.”
In the meantime, he began sending out query letters to agents. Rejection letters started to mount. He persisted. Altogether, he suspects he sent and received hundreds of query and rejection letters over a ten-year period.
Finally, when he did get an agent, she was unable to deliver. Then he got another agent. Same story. It wasn’t until he started querying publishers directly that he found success.
The story of what Fitzgerald calls the “2nd act,” is becoming an increasingly cliché tale. To be old means to be less productive, less enthusiastic, less forward thinking, but more and more often, retirement just denotes the end of the 1st act. I remember when there were old people. They had blue hair. Their greatest ambition was to eat dinner by 4pm and be left alone. Old people, it seems, are a dying breed.
At 79, Woods-Frankel is young. He is just getting started. “I’m in good health. I expect to be around for a long time,” he says with a smile. “My mother-in-law just celebrated her 105th birthday and I think I’m going to make it too.”
