There is an additional autobiographical paragraph, which I have omitted here, and I usually add one sentence referencing something specific about the agent I am querying. I don't think excessive flattery would improve my odds, but some personal acknowledgement lets the agent know I have at least done cursory research, and am not mass mailing identical letters to everyone in the back of Writer's Digest.
This is the pitch:
Ninety year-old Baruch “Buck” Schatz remembers a time when the only “portable handheld device” anybody needed was a .357, “Google” was the sound a guy made when you punched him in the throat, and “social networking functionality” came out of a bottle.
These days, though, this retired detective is extremely frail and frequently confused. But when he learns the SS officer who tortured him in a POW camp may have escaped Germany with a fortune in stolen gold, Buck decides to hunt down the fugitive and claim the loot. He’s got nothing better to do, and keeping his mind occupied is supposed to ward off dementia.
Assisted by his grandson, a law student who knows how to find information using a computer and is allowed to drive at night, Buck finds a lead down the Nazi’s long-cold trail. But lots of people want a piece of that treasure, and Buck’s investigation quickly attracts unfriendly attention from a Mississippi loan shark, a seven-foot tall Hasidic Jew, a preacher on the take, a cop with a grudge and a bloodthirsty maniac hell-bent on rubbing out everybody who knows anything about Nazi gold.
“Don’t Ever Get Old” is a 76,000 word commercial thriller about a hard-boiled man in a world gone soft, confronting the existential reality of his inevitable decline and death while trying to get rich quick.
Holy cow. This is an awesome query, sir.
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