But I knew it was a lie, and my wife knew it too. “You want to write,” she said. “You want to be a writer. You are a writer.”

“But I don’t even have anything to submit,” I told her. “Everything’s been rejected many times over.”

“Not everything,” she said. “You’ve never even submitted your first book.” This was Recipe for Murder, the Sherlock Holmes-Nero Wolfe pastiche I’d written fourteen years before.

“Of course I haven’t sent that out,” I said. “That’s a mystery. I don’t do mystery. I’m a literary writer. And I didn’t even write Recipe for Murder as a book. That was just an exercise to see if I could sustain a plot and characters over a book-length work.”

“I thought it was good,” Lisa said. “I thought it was a book.”

She was right. I scanned the old brittle typed pages into a computer, reprinted them with a new copyright date, and sent them off to New York. Six weeks later, Donald I. Fine bought the book and published it in hardcover under the title Son of Holmes. Better yet, he asked for a sequel, which he’d release as Rasputin’s Revenge the next year.

At last, somebody was paying me to write novels. True, they were mystery stories prominently featuring characters-Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe-that had been created by someone else. Plus, they were both set during World War I in Europe. As entertainments, they could not have been more non-serious. But after my earlier disappointments with publishing, I was glad to be on the boards at last, glad to be getting the chance to write regularly.

Donald I. Fine asked me for another book, and I told him I wanted to change directions and write a story set in the present day, and in the United States, with a modern protagonist. I didn’t envision it as a mystery, but as a story of one lost man’s redemption after his world is suddenly shattered by… what? What literary conceit could drive a plot, or shatter a world?

The idea-startling in its clarity, profound in its implications-hit me like a thunderbolt.

A crime!

In fact, a murder.

And a murder turned my serious “literary” idea into a mystery.

Suddenly the inherent and irreconcilable dichotomy I had always perceived-maybe projected is a better word-between serious literature and the mystery genre vanished. I could tell an important story, perhaps even one containing a universal truth or two, and at the same time provide the kind of narrative drive that a strong plot could guarantee, or at least facilitate. I could talk about moral and social and character issues-surely the province of serious literature-and write a fast-moving and entertaining story at the same time. This was an enormous revelation-I didn’t need to pursue a Plan A for my serious work and a Plan B for stuff people might enjoy reading. They could be the same thing!

And Dismas Hardy, waiting in the wings all this time, began to reveal himself to me not just as a (snooty literary word) protagonist, but as a hero.

At this point, fate stepped in. I had begun subscribing to the Mystery Writers of America’s newsletter, The Third Degree. Sometime in the late 1980s, the writer and critic Dick Lochte wrote a cover story for that periodical, urging writers to stop writing about “private eyes.” The world didn’t need any more private eyes, he said. They had been done, and done to death. He pleaded for originality, new voices, a new approach to the mystery novel.

He couldn’t have hit me (and Dismas Hardy) at a better time.

Suddenly, Dismas Hardy the San Francisco private eye had to become what he in his wisdom always knew he was meant to become-a full-fledged human being. He wasn’t a private eye. He’d never been a private eye. No wonder those agents and editors hadn’t bought him back in the day. He hadn’t been original or authentic. He’d been a hackneyed literary conceit in those earlier manuscripts, little more than a cartoon. Now, if I wanted to write about him, first I had to find out who he was, why he was important, and how he was worthy to carry the moral weight with which I was about to burden him.

Dismas Hardy was not going to be my Plan B character. Dismas Hardy was going to be no less than my Everyman. He would carry the hopes and dreams of every man, suffer the losses, savor the triumphs. He would have a family, friends, and enemies. He would get sick, make mistakes, drink too much, work too hard, fail to understand. But mostly he would hunger and thirst for what we all ultimately desire-justice.

All writers have heard the admonition to “write what you know.” My confidence had taken a big enough hit during the rejection years that I no longer felt like any kind of a genius. If I wanted to create a memorable character, and I did, I’d take whatever advice was out there. And I decided that if he was to be authentic, Hardy had to be full of stuff I knew, and knew intimately. That was the main thing. I had to know him.

So he was my age, thirty-eight.

He’d gone to a Catholic all-male high school, quite possibly my own Serra High in San Mateo, California.

He lived on Thirty-fourth Avenue at Clement in San Francisco.

He was a bartender at the Little Shamrock, as I had been.

He was divorced.

Though not an alcoholic, he tended to kill his pain with drink.

The arc of this book was to be Hardy’s resurrection and redemption-two good Catholic themes about which I knew plenty. I also knew that Hardy’s life and career had been shattered, but I didn’t know why.

(Except that it wasn’t because he’d failed as a writer. I wanted to identify with his failure, though I knew it wasn’t going to be the same as mine. He was to be the appealing Everyman, not the effete artist type his creator had once and no longer fancied himself.)

Did I know enough about Dismas Hardy to begin? I thought so. The great thing about the actual experience of writing is its revelatory character. Though I had no idea how I was going to get a thirty-eight-year-old bartender involved in a crime that would somehow redeem him and restore the equilibrium and happiness to his life, I had written enough to believe that the process would provide the answers.

And within the first three pages of Dead Irish, these words appeared on the screen in front of me:

“It was the first time Hardy’d had a woman’s arms around him in four and a half years. And that time had been just the once, with Frannie née McGuire now Cochran, after a New Year’s Eve party.”

And then:

“In a way, he thought, it was too bad the plane hadn’t crashed. There would have been some symmetry in that-both of his parents had died in a plane crash when he’d been nineteen, a sophomore at Caltech.”

And finally:

He just felt he’d lost track of who he was. He knew what he did-he was a damn good bartender, a thrower of darts, a medium worker of wood.

He was also divorced, an ex-marine, ex-cop, ex-attorney. He’d even, for a time, been a father. Thirty-eight and some months and he didn’t know who he was.

He tipped up the glass. Yeah, he thought, that wouldn’t have been so bad, the plane crashing. Not good, not something to shoot for, but really not the worst tragedy in the world.

He figured he’d already had that one.

That was how long it took-three pages-for Hardy to assert that, for all our similarities, he wasn’t me. I, for example, had not been orphaned. I’d never even visited Caltech. I hadn’t been a cop or been in the service. I wasn’t an attorney. I sucked at darts. I’d never carved a piece of wood in my life.

Where did all this come from?

And, more important, what was the tragedy Hardy was talking about, the worst tragedy in the world, the one he figured he’d already had?

I didn’t know.

I wouldn’t know until I’d finished the entire first draft of the book and started the second. This is all the more amazing considering that the tragedy-the death of his young son, Michael, in a crib accident-is what caused the breakup of his marriage, the collapse of his legal career, his decade-long hibernation as a bartender in the bar owned by his friend Moses McGuire, whose life Hardy had saved in Vietnam.