Unfortunately, no one in American book publishing agreed.

Thirteen years of late-night typing in my unfinished garage earned me enough rejection slips to paper a hedge fund honcho’s Xanadu. Finally, I got good enough to publish my first novel, When the Bough Breaks. But even that was no quickie; I wrote the book in 1981; it was accepted in 1983 but held until 1985 because the editor who bought the book left and the corporate drones at my publisher couldn’t figure out what to do with a story featuring a psychologist, a gay cop, and a story line that ventured into the then-uncharted territory of child sexual abuse.

My advance was six grand, which amounted to about three bucks an hour, meaning Bough was bought as what’s charitably termed a “small book” in the publishing biz.

This means it was predestined to disappear and that would be the end of my literary career.

Being totally naive about the business of publishing, I had no idea that I was being set up to fail, and was, in fact, as happy as a pig in swill. Because I’d been vindicated: no longer was I a pathetic, self-deluded mope with a good day job.

I was a novelist!

To my publisher’s amazement, Bough earned a hefty (by 1985 standards) paperback sale and garnered rave reviews, including a gracious showcase by the eminent British-born critic John Gross (whose departure from the New York Times has rendered that tedious periodical sorely lacking in sparkling critical talent).

Mr. Gross featured my book in a Times daily review along with write-ups of new novels by Dick Francis and John D. MacDonald. Which is kind of like opening for the Beatles.

Dick and John and I all got good reviews, and people went out looking for When the Bough Breaks. Some people even managed to find it. Reorders poured in. The book became a word-of-mouth bestseller.

The rest, as they say, is history. But by no means linear history. It took two more bestsellers, including one that stayed on the New York Times list for three months, and switching to a new publisher to get me working with people who understood what I was about.

None of this is intended as a gripe-fest. I didn’t deserve to get published one second sooner than I did, because until then I simply wasn’t good enough. And one vital component of getting good enough was embracing an old saw: Write what you know.

Yeah, in retrospect that’s a great big duh. But prior to 1981, I simply wasn’t ready for self-revelation-for what sportscaster Red Smith described as “sitting down every morning at your typewriter and opening a vein.” (I paraphrase, but you get the gist.) Nor had I experienced quite enough of life’s dark side to have something important to say.

In 1981, my thick skull finally cracked open just wide enough to absorb the obvious epiphany: It was time to create a protagonist who shared my background as a child clinical psychologist.

Like me, Alex Delaware earned a PhD in psychology at age twenty-four.

Like me, he’d worked in a pediatric hospital, including long hours on the cancer ward, and had burned out.

Like me, he’d treated kids who’d experienced severe trauma, including as crime victims. Like me, he’d learned more than he believed possible about the darkest side of life.

Like me, he had dark hair and blue eyes, though his locks were curly and mine are wavy.

He’s right-handed; I’m a southpaw. He’s Midwestern to the core (more on that later), and I was born in New York City and raised in LA.

He sees twenty-twenty; I’m myopic.

He’s taller and thinner than I am. And, of course, he’s younger, because one of the nicest things about writing fiction is playing God, and the benevolent deity that I pretend to be has chosen not to age his characters in real time.

Overall, I think of Alex as a down-to-earth yet dashing fellow. Energetic, confidently masculine, analytical, insightful, hopelessly compassionate, and, most important, addicted to the truth. In a perfect world, these are all virtues I’d choose for myself.

Right from the beginning, I set out to create a true hero, not an antihero, because in 1981, the antihero was the default cliché.

Unlike me, Alex lives in an idiosyncratic house up in the hills of Bel Air and is single. That last detail is most important, because a married guy with kids wouldn’t-shouldn’t-get into the kind of fixes Alex finds himself in. I, on the other hand, have been married since the age of twenty-two, and I am the father of four and, to date, the grandfather of one.

Truth be told, I am a thoroughly domestic guy who has suppressed a natural tendency toward recklessness and risk taking in order to let my loved ones maintain a sense of security. Exceptions do arise: a few years ago I was zipping around the Laguna Seca racetrack at 130 mph in a Formula 1 car. I’ve owned an Alfa Romeo, an Aston Martin, and a supercharged Porsche, so you can see where my heart lies, automotively. And sure, there have been dark moments. Years ago, I was nearly stabbed to death in San Francisco. I’ve played guitar for a room full of homicidal maniacs at a state hospital for the criminally insane. Have been the only Jew on a bus full of Arabs during a jaunt to the West Bank town of Hebron. Walked the old city of Jerusalem at three a.m. Survived cancer. But no more motorcycles, no flying lessons, no bungee jumping, no carving tools or power saws because, enough scars.

The most dangerous tool I wield nowadays is a ’65 Fender Stratocaster.

Delaware, on the other hand, throws caution to the Santa Anas. Therefore, he will forever remain single and just a bit alienated from the loyalties and routines of domestic life.

For some reason, there is a cadre of readers that really want him to get hitched. Sometimes they write me requesting nuptials in an upcoming book. I appreciate their loyalty, but my response is consistent: when wedding bells chime for Alex, you can be sure the series is over. Unlike a police officer, whose involvement in crime is part of his routine, Dr. D’s entrée to murder necessitates a deft suspension of caution. He simply must be maritally untrammeled in order to take the kinds of risks that contribute to a gripping story.

When, after thirteen years of failure, I began writing When the Bough Breaks, I believed the process to be my final attempt at breaking in as a novelist. Maybe it would’ve been. Who knows? Thank God that hypothesis was never put to the test. The point is, because I saw the book as my final audition, I obsessed about coming up with something fresh and different. If I wasn’t able to come up with something new, I didn’t deserve to break in. As part of that scheme, I set out consciously to sidestep as many of the conventions of the hard-boiled-detective novel as I could while preserving the guts and soul of the genre.

Write what you know meant there was no other kind of book I could’ve written.

My day job as a psychologist was nothing but sleuthing-hour by hour (forty-five-minute segment by forty-five-minute segment) I conducted investigations that traversed the back alleys of the unconscious. Every time a new patient arrived in my office, the process unfolded: solving a psychosocial whodunit in order to ameliorate suffering. A lot of nasty stuff got unearthed along the way.

What I was attempting to achieve as a psychologist were daily triumphs of psychic archaeology: digging up long-buried shards of experience in an attempt to build a coherent picture of a troubled human being, in order to help that human being. If that’s not detective work, I don’t know what is. I’m anything but a Freudian, but I do believe that we ignore the past at our peril. That belief has informed every novel I’ve written.