By Susan Shinn Salisbury Post CHAPEL HILL -- Sean Rowe knows the exact moment the freight train plowed into him: Midnight, Jan. 15, 1999. He was showing friends the old trick of placing a coin on the rails so a passing train would flatten it. He put a nickel on the tracks, quite pleased with himself, and turned around. He never saw the second train coming from the opposite direction. "The midnight freight goes through Fort Lauderdale every night," he says. "It stopped that night." Rowe stopped it. It threw him across six lanes of traffic and put him in the hospital for six weeks with a fractured skull, broken ribs, a collapsed lung and dislocated shoulder. Out of that brush with death came the birth of a novelist -- and a man who's haunted by the onrushing passage of time. Rowe's been trying to beat the train ever since. * The call was a writer's dream come true. One June afternoon in 2004, Rowe was writing copy at his desk at Adam & amp; Eve in Hillsborough, the nation's largest marketer of adult products. The phone rang. It was Sarah Burnes, a literary agent whom Rowe had met through a friend. It was a magic moment, Rowe says. "How fast can you get to New York?" she asked him. "I've got seven publishers who want to meet you." "Nine days if I walk fast," was his snappy reply. "Get on a plane," she suggested. Enough time had passed -- 10 months -- that Rowe had nearly forgotten he'd even sent her the manuscript. Rowe spent three days in New York, riding taxicabs, being wined and dined. "My head was swimming," he says. "Sarah was literally holding my hand through this." Rowe's first novel, "Fever" was published last month by Little, Brown and Co., part of a two-book contract. Rowe was lucky to be working with Burnes. She had been a book editor for 10 years before becoming an agent. "She's a great editor," he says. "She has that rare talent where she can put her finger on needed changes." One of his meetings was with Sonny Mehta, a well-known editor at Knopf. He was the only person in the 70-story building allowed to smoke in his office. It was, Rowe remembers, much like meeting the Wizard of Oz. Rowe lit up, too. "So we're smoking cigarettes and talking about 'Fever,' " Rowe says. The two spent an hour together, with Mehta leaving the room several times to take calls from some guy named Bill. Rowe finally figured out that Mehta was in the final stages of editing "My Life," President Clinton's book. "We had a very nice talk," Rowe says. In the end, Little, Brown won the bidding. * Although people who know Rowe may see more than a little bit of him in his protagonist, Matthew "Loose Cannon" Shannon, Rowe insists that his writing has very little in it that's autobiographical. "I didn't consciously say, OK, I'm modeling this protagonist on myself," he admits. "But at its core, 'Fever' is a story about a man who has lost his way in life, and manages to rediscover himself in the nick of time." Like Rowe. A native of Douglas, Ga., Rowe was a Morehead Scholar at UNC. In Miami, he worked for the Herald, then the New Times. After 10 years of daily and weekly journalism, he was burned out. "I realized if I didn't make the next step, it wasn't going to happen," he says. The night of his going-away party, he met the train. Before that, Rowe had been in touch with Tom Jackson and his wife, Jan Mann, about coming and staying with them at their farm near Fayettevile to finish up his novel. Jackson had been a student of Rowe's father at East Carolina University. H.D. Rowe was a professor of linguistics and literature who taught his son to read and write very early in life. Rowe's father died just before he entered Carolina at age 19. "I want to get to know you," Jackson told the young man. The two have been friends for more than 20 years. He arrived at the farm -- beat up, bankrupt. "He was sick, hurt, weak, befuddled," Jackson says, "but determined to work on a novel. He was writing within a day of when he got here." Rowe stayed until he took the job in Hillsborough, writing and healing and working in fresh air and sunshine. "I bottomed out," he says of the accident. "I'm trying to lead a calmer life now." * Rowe met the mid-October deadline for his second book, "I-95." Set in Fayetteville, it's the story of a soldier returning from Iraq. He likes the local connection. He still hopes "Magic City" will be published someday. Rowe had sent that 700-page manuscript -- a mystery thriller -- along with "Fever" to Burnes. "Fever" was thrown in as an afterthought, but Burnes saw something in it that worked. The 272-page thriller moves along at a fast clip. Rowe would like to think his contract with Little, Brown will be extended. "I'm already working on a third thriller," he says. It's tentatively called "Banks of the Ohio" although Rowe suspects the title may be eventually shortened to "Pretty Polly." Both titles, Rowe explains, are the name of an old mountain folk songs -- "murder ballads" popular in the Appalachians with his father's people. The book is about a serial killer who's apparently acting out these songs. "I've been wanting to do this for years," Rowe says. "I grew up with these songs, hearing my father sing them." * Marlena Bittner, his crackerjack New York publicist, schedules readings for him. He's done four so far: Chapel Hill, Delray Beach, Miami Beach, Charlotte. He's appearing at the Miami Book Fair International in November. His travel allowance, he says, is generous. He's never been materialistic. He owns one suit, three pairs of shoes. His two-bedroom apartment in Chapel Hill is the biggest place he's ever lived. It's filled with second-hand furniture, stacks of books, magazines like the New Yorker and Maxim and artwork by friends and his current girlfriend, a 33-year-old artist/bartender. To the right of his computer is a 2x3 poster of the "Fever" cover. His launch party in Chapel Hill on Sept. 25 was great, he says. "You couldn't ask for a better party." About 50 people attended. He sold all 30 copies of "Fever" he'd brought along. He gave a 10-minute speech about the book, which was well received. He'd popped a couple of Percocets beforehand. "I was smooth," he says, that devilish grin creeping onto his face. * The reviews for "Fever" have been excellent. The Washington Post called it a "nifty thriller." Rowe didn't like that word "nifty." "Fever," he says, may be a lot of things. But it is not nifty. "It's more than just a good beach novel, I like to think," he says. "It's got a depth to it you don't always find in those novels." Rowe converted to Catholicism not long ago. "'Fever' has a lot of overt Christian symbols," he says. It even has a crucifixion scene. While writing, Rowe knew he needed a torture scene. "The worst thing I could thing of to do was to nail someone to the cross," he says. "On one level, it was thinking of the meanest think I could think up. On another level, it was a Christian symbol." The first printing was 16,000, large for a first novel. "I have been just overjoyed and surprised at how the book is selling," Rowe says. It is hard-hitting and rough-edged. Think Carl Hiaasen, James Patterson, Elmore Leonard. Patterson, also a writer with Little, Brown, gave a blurb for "Fever's" jacket. "I almost peed in my pants when I found out he read it," Rowe says. Here's what Patterson said: "I read an awful lot of books, hoping for, waiting for, one like 'Fever' to come along. Sean Rowe does just about everything right in this novel." "The trick is to find out how to maintain the narrative drive," the writer says. "That's no easy trick. I try to end a chapter asking questions, to keep the pages turning." * Sean Rowe is 41 now. He doesn't think he'll live to see 50. "I'm really trying to work," he says. "I know I'm in a race with the clock now. And that's all right. I should've been dead six years ago. This is all icing on the cake." He quit drinking a year ago. Drugs and alcohol led to the disintegration of his marriage. He'll try to quit smoking at some point, a habit he picked up more than 20 years ago. "Now is not the time to try to quit," he says, lighting up yet another Marlboro. Although he prefers to write in the mornings, he's been writing a lot at night to try to meet the second deadline. He has another idea for a book, too. This would be a non-fiction memoir, called "Why I Loved You," essays about true friends he's found in life. Somewhere in Hollywood, another agent is shopping "Fever." He doesn't seem to give it much thought. "It's always a long shot," Rowe says. "We've had some interest. That's the real money, but I've not received any phone calls from Brad Pitt." Even if he is a little young to play Matt Shannon. Rowe thinks that Hilary Swank would make a perfect Julia Bonnell, the novel's mysterious heroine. "That's all pie in the sky," he says, grinning. "I don't care about the money. I just wanna keep a roof over my head and keep writing. I've had enough drama for one life." * What he does want more than anything, it seems, is to finish work on a farmhouse he bought in Sampson County for $32,000. Ninety miles south of Chapel Hill, it's near Spivey's Corner, "out in the middle of damn nowhere," Rowe likes to say. "Every little chunk of money I get, I hire some work done on it," he says. "It's nothing fancy. There's a beauty to it, just a stark simplicity to it -- and not a single closet in the place. If the book sells well, I'll be able to finish renovating the farmhouse." He sees it as a place for aspiring writers to go, to finish up that first novel. "I thought that was something nice I could do for other writers," says Rowe, who's a member of the N.C. Writer's Network. He's also a member of The Authors Guild. He proudly whips a white card from his wallet to prove it. Rowe plans to put the farmhouse in a trust. "So it'll be available for North Carolina writers from here on out, when I'm not there to pester them." Contact Susan Shinn at 704-797-4289 or sshinn@salisburypost.com.
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