Faye’s unintentional mentoring has extended to another area: Anyone who knows my wife knows she is All Girl. Despite that, she displays an almost freakishly masterful ability to write from a male perspective. (Many writers have commented on her brilliance in that regard. The Edgar^®-winning author Brian Garfield has opined that no one does it better than Faye.) Faye’s exceptional gift made me wonder if I could pull off a female chief protagonist. The result was Petra Connor, hero of Billy Straight and Twisted and an all-around great gal who surfaces as a collaborator in the Delaware novels when her talents are needed by Alex and Milo.

Milo, Milo, Milo.

He, as opposed to Alex, is described in great physical detail in every single Delaware novel, because we view him, as we view the world, through Alex’s eyes. Despite that, I have received several inquiries from readers wanting to know if he’s white or black. At first, I was puzzled by the puzzlement of those loyal fans, since allusions to Milo’s pallid complexion, straight black hair, and bright green eyes seemed to preclude anything but Caucasian. Then I realized that I’d described him several times as “Black Irish,” a tag that refers to a subset of Emerald Isle Celts with dark hair-probably the result of long-ago genetic contribution from Roman invaders. A common term during my youth but one that has, apparently, lost currency. I may need to be less subtle.

I have also fielded countless questions about Alex’s ethnicity, including one rather rambunctious reader who insisted that, let’s face it, Alex is Jewish.

Let’s face it; he’s not.

I am Jewish; Alex is a self-described “mutt,” and that was a deliberate choice. One of the many things that working as a psychologist taught me was that once we get over what I call the hurdle of ethnicity, we’re all pretty darned similar, intra-psychically. For that reason, and because I see myself as an inclusive man, I yearned to create a universal character-to write universally appealing books that avoided the ethnic tunnel vision that would be distracting and detract from meta-themes.

There may be some Semitic protein floating around in Dr. Delaware ’s ribonucleic acid. I couldn’t tell you, as I’ve never seen the results of any lab test. There’s probably American Indian, German, English, French, and Lord knows what else in there too. But Alex is nothing if not ethnically ambiguous-a distinctly American persona cobbled together from what is best about the greatest nation in history, a truth seeker undeterred by Orwellian notions of “diversity” or by base, creativity-murdering political correctness.

All fiction is to some extent autobiographical, but it is also a particularly entertaining variant of the Rorschach test-a series of deliberately hazy images upon which the reader projects his or her own fears, affections, and drives. Vegans want Alex to eschew meat. Liberals, conservatives, libertarians, all shudder at the possibility that he might not agree with every single opinion they possess on any given topic.

Sorry, he’s his own guy.

Nearly thirty years ago, when Alex Delaware popped into my head, I had no idea he’d ever stay alive long enough to serve as the springboard for exploring my own existential questions, let alone those of tens of millions of other people.

The fact that he continues to do his obsessive, heroic thing without adhering to-or even touching upon-any particular orthodoxy brings me tremendous joy as I continue to tell the stories to which Dr. Delaware directs me.

I love my job.

Born in 1948 in Houston, Texas, John Lescroart (it’s pronounced Les-kwah) had a varied career background before becoming a successful author who is a regular on the New York Times bestseller list in both hardcover and paperback. After graduating from the University of California at Berkeley in 1970 with a BA in English with honors, he worked as a computer programmer, advertising director, moving man, housepainter, legal secretary, fund-raiser, management consultant, bartender, and musician. He wrote about five hundred songs and performed for more than two years with Johnny Capo and the Real Good Band (he was Capo). Although the band was somewhat successful, he retired to write full-time. His affection for music never disappeared, though, and he has recently founded his own recording label, CrowArt Records.

His first book, Sunburn (1981), a non-mystery paperback original, was followed by Son of Holmes (1986) and Rasputin’s Revenge (1987), both of which featured Auguste Lupa, the son of Sherlock Holmes (a character reminiscent of Nero Wolfe).

Many of the Dismas Hardy novels also feature Abe Glitsky, a somewhat acerbic and disillusioned San Francisco policeman. Lescroart has recently created yet another popular character, Wyatt Hunt, a private detective who starred in The Hunt Club (2005) and The Suspect (2007).

Lescroart lives with his wife and children in Davis, California.

I wrote my first book in college.

It was what would now be called a legal thriller, based on the idea that capital punishment was cruel and unusual because the condemned person knew that the execution was coming. I developed the conceit that the death penalty would be more humane if the condemned didn’t know about the sentence, if one day he merely went to the prison doctor for a routine injection or vaccination, and instead the “medication” was a fatal one. No doubt it’s for the best that this book remains unpublished, but in it, I named the condemned man Dismas Hardy. He appeared for about one page, was dispatched, and disappeared.

But the name struck me as particularly memorable, in the mold of, say, Travis McGee or Sherlock Holmes. (It was probably the single best thing in the book.) In any event, I resolved that if I ever did get to writing a mystery series, my hero would be called Dismas Hardy. I knew that Dismas was the name of the good thief on Calvary, who was crucified next to Jesus, and it was always good to have a biblical antecedent to help provide kind of an instant sense of gravitas in a hero. As for the surname Hardy, I had grown up with the Hardy Boys-Frank and Joe-and it seemed to me that there really couldn’t be a better all-American, highly-pedigreed last name for a detective. So that was settled; my hero would be called Dismas Hardy.

Of course, I wasn’t planning on becoming a mystery writer in those days. After all, I was studying the continental novel in translation at UC Berkeley-Stendahl, Camus, Tolstoy, etc. I was serious. But I was a confident cuss, and a part of me thought that I could probably write a Nobel-quality literary work every few years and pay the bills by whipping out a steady stream of entertaining mystery fiction (under a pseudonym, of course) at the rate of about a book a year. And in that case, it was good to have a ready-made name for my protagonist.

But meanwhile, I had to get working on the craft of novel writing. I had already finished the aforementioned legal thriller, which I knew to be literarily dubious in qualitative terms. It lacked certain elements that seemed to be a feature of other books I wanted to emulate, both “literary” and not, such as humor, irony, verisimilitude, and-most strikingly-plot. Seeking to correct these deficiencies, I sat down and wrote a book-length Sherlock Holmes-Nero Wolfe pastiche that I entitled Recipe for Murder. It was, granted, a mystery, and so would be outside the main thrust of my serious work-in fact, I wrote it under the pen name Dan Sherb. I never really thought that this novel would be published either. In fact, after I’d finished it, I showed it to one or two readers, who were universally enthusiastic (parents tend to be!). Then I put the manuscript in my sock drawer and forgot about it.