FBI agent Candice DeLong has snagged an estimated $400,000 from Hyperion, the consumer book publishing arm of Disney, for a memoir of her career as a crime-busting profiler in the male-dominated bureau.
During DeLong’s varied 20-year career, she’s helped hunt for everyone from the Tylenol Killer to the Unabomber.
“She’s been called a real-life Clarice Starling [Jodie Foster’s character in “Silence of the Lambs”] and a female Donnie Brasco,” said Hyperion’s publisher and Vice President Martha Levin, who beat out three other publishers for “Special Agent: My Life on the Front Lines as a Woman in the FBI.”
Currently, DeLong is based in San Francisco, where she works closely with the Behavioral Science Unit.
Even though DeLong plans to retire in July, she still ran the book proposal by the FBI for approval.
And the FBI says it will get one more look at the finished product to make sure there’s no release of classified information between the covers.
“They have to submit the manuscript when they finish writing it,” said Pama Tompkins, a writer in the research and communications department of FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., where all books by FBI employees must be previewed.
“I think it goes with the territory,” said Hyperion’s Levin. “I don’t think it will inhibit the book. Otherwise I wouldn’t have purchased it.”
Koster said the book will go into detail about being one of the few woman agents, the hazing she faced and her eventual rise through the ranks to become a field profiler working on some of the bureau’s most famous cases.
DeLong, who is a divorced mom of a grown son, will be working closely with ghostwriter Elisa Petrini. DeLong’s path from agent to author was sparked by an unlikely source — bestselling thriller writer Ken Follett. He had consulted with DeLong while writing “Hammer of Eden,” his latest novel, which has a female FBI agent as its heroine.
Follett then tipped off Elaine Koster — a former Penguin Putnam editor turned literary agent — that DeLong was interested in writing her memoir.
Koster took up the proposal and sparked an auction attended by four-publishers.
“Our plan is to publish the book in spring 2001,” said Hyperion’s Levin.