It’s been almost three years since the death of renowned author Cormac McCarthy, best known for his seminal works The Border Trilogy and The Road. While some writers’ lives are, pardon the phrase, open books, McCarthy was far more private. In the wake of his death, certain things about his personal life are finally coming to light, including the fact that he was quite the car collector.
One of the standouts from his collection, a 1995 Lotus Esprit S4, is currently up for auction online through Hagerty Marketplace. As of this writing, bidding is currently up to more than $25,000 — not bad for a car that is currently not in running condition and will, per the listing, “require mechanical recommissioning prior to use.”
This Lotus is not the first McCarthy-owned vehicle to go on the market since the author’s death. His brother Dennis McCarthy has taken on the task of selling Cormac’s car collection, and as he tells InsideHook, there were a number of gems to be found there, including multiple models by Allard, Ferrari and Buick, as well as a Porsche 928.
“He liked cars that go fast,” Dennis said.
Dennis recalled a moment when a friend living in Austin, Texas invited Cormac to a concert taking place that night. “I’ve forgotten what car he got into, but he drove from El Paso to Austin,” he said. “As I remember, he averaged over 100 miles an hour on the trip to get there that night.”
That wasn’t the only time that Cormac McCarthy’s penchant for fast cars made a lasting impression. Dennis recounted a story of his brother driving across Texas with a friend in a large Oldsmobile.
“They were, for the most part, going over 100 miles an hour. They pulled into a gas station at four o’clock in the morning and there was a woman there,” Dennis recalled. “She walked around in front of the car and she shrieked. Cormac thought, what have we done to this poor woman? And he walked in front and there were 15 jackrabbits in the grille with all kinds of expressions of horror on their faces.”
Cormac would later use that image in his novel Cities of the Plain. As Dennis pointed out, his brother did not always factor his appreciation of cars into his fiction, with some exceptions — including The Passenger, in which a Maserati plays a significant role. (McCarthy also wrote the screenplay for the 2013 film The Counselor, in which a character played by Cameron Diaz has an erotic encounter with a Ferrari.)
Cormac McCarthy’s Death Is the End of an Era. Maybe Several.
The author has died at the age of 89In talking with Dennis, eventually one subject came up: What exactly did Cormac McCarthy have planned for this ’90s Lotus, given that the listing specifies that it was never registered or titled. As he explained, this was something his brother did with several cars in his collection.
“He had a Cadillac. It was an Eldorado, about a ‘93 or so. He liked buying things cheap with low miles; he bought this Eldorado for pennies. It was a beautiful car, but he never drove it,” Dennis said. “He had another Cadillac that he drove, so of course he got that registered, but if he wasn’t driving it or had no immediate plans to drive it, he would not register it.”
Apparently this connected to another passion for McCarthy: getting hands-on with his car collection. “There were some cars that he took apart, like the Porsche 928 and one of the Ferraris. He liked to modify them to his own specs,” Dennis explained. “Like in the Ferrari, he was putting different controls in the panel. He liked to replace the screws with stainless steel, if you can believe that. So a bunch of his cars that I sold were in a locker in El Paso in pieces.”
It isn’t often that one can own a piece of both automotive and literary history. If you’re interested in bidding on Cormac McCarthy’s 1995 Lotus Esprit S4, the auction runs through Monday, April 27 at 1:05 p.m. CDT.
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