See? Even when I hadn’t known him, he’d always been a hero.

Other things began to happen. Hardy goes to a Giants baseball game, where a fan plunges to his death from the upper deck, and there at the ballpark he runs into a Jewish mulatto cop named Abe Glitsky, with whom he used to walk a beat in his policeman days. I am blessed with two great brothers and several very close male friends, without whom life wouldn’t be nearly as fun or interesting. And suddenly, writing what I knew, I watched as Hardy and Glitsky fell into the patter of a long-standing and deep bond. These were old friends, connected in some nearly spiritual way. I didn’t know Abe yet, but I knew the relationship.

And Abe’s job gave me a way to connect Hardy to a crime.

Except, apparently, it’s not a crime. It’s a suicide. The suicide of Eddie Cochran, an idealistic young man who is married to Frannie, the sister of Hardy’s boss, Moses McGuire. Frannie has just found out she is pregnant.

Hardy doesn’t believe Eddie would have ever killed himself. And there is insurance money for Frannie if someone murdered him. Though it’s formally none of his business, Hardy-as Everyman thirsting for justice-must find the answer.

And in searching for that answer, he discovers to his surprise that the active grieving period for his son has somehow come to an end, and that there can be meaning and even joy in reconnecting with life and getting to know the people around him. Hardy is redeemed, reborn, and ready to take up the role in life that he’d planned and prepared for before his personal tragedy derailed him-a man who lives and if necessary fights to see justice done.

Dead Irish reveals Dismas Hardy as the lead character in a novel that happens to have a crime in the center of it. At that time, and unlike many of the young people who come to the profession of writing today, I did not have a game plan for how I would pursue my career. I was not aware enough of the publishing business to even have an agent yet, much less the savvy to decide to write a series for which I would supply the next six plots and maybe a second one featuring cats. For me, when I wrote it, Dead Irish was a stand-alone novel, not the first book in a series. Though it meant abandoning the well-loved name Dismas Hardy, I felt sure that I would find another name for a character in my next book that would please me. I’d say good-bye to Diz, thank him for the yeoman efforts, and move on.

Then Dead Irish got nominated for the Shamus Award for best novel (which I found highly ironic, Shamus being a synonym for private eye), and Donald Fine asked me to write a true sequel featuring Dismas Hardy.

I didn’t know how I was going to do that. I’d already written Hardy’s character arc. He was redeemed, he was back together with his first wife, he was happy bartending at the Shamrock, which he now owned a quarter of.

What would be the conflict? How would he grow as a character? I didn’t know, and I didn’t think that revisiting him in a new setting was a particularly great idea.

But here I was, four published books into my career, and if I wanted to keep getting paid to write, this was a bird in the hand-a bona fide offer from a New York hardcover publisher. It was still not even close to enough money to live on, mind you-just a small step up from Dead Irish. But it would give me another chance to see if I could write a commercially successful novel. And I could look at both the Dismas Hardy character and the plot as challenges in pure storytelling.

In the course of writing The Vig, I continued to learn a little more about Hardy, and to be surprised by these discoveries. The most surprising element was his love life. Although in Dead Irish, he’d reconnected with his first wife, Jane Fowler, The Vig wasn’t twenty pages old when Hardy found himself drawn to the much younger Frannie Cochran, widow of Eddie from Dead Irish, the sister of Moses McGuire. The whole time I was writing this book, I didn’t know what would finally transpire in Hardy’s choice of his mate. Jane was certainly a worthy person, smart and sensitive. But there was lots of baggage there with Jane. And a certain idealism and freshness in Frannie.

Beyond that, simply in plot terms, I was wrestling with the question of romance. It never hurts the readability of a novel-even a serious literary novel-if one of the plot or subplot elements is romance. Will the boy get the girl or vice versa? My experiences writing both Rasputin’s Revenge and Dead Irish had taught me that this was a powerful, perhaps even essential, device to elicit empathy for main characters and also to create suspense and a level of humanity without which a book might seem dry and lifeless.

Finally, I was still trying to write what I knew, and I was married to a woman who was eleven years younger than I. The issues and decisions that Hardy and Frannie would face and make together might in many ways be similar to those Lisa and I were confronting. Drawing upon our personal experiences might inform the character of Hardy in a way that would simply be impossible if he chose Jane.

And so in this fundamental way, Hardy’s character development took another step-albeit a very small one-in The Vig. But as I wrote that book, I couldn’t escape the feeling that it lacked the depth of its predecessor. I thought it was a good read, with a strong plot and interesting characters, yes, but to me it lacked the inherent gravitas that had characterized Dead Irish.

Perhaps this was because I’d approached its writing as an academic exercise, much the same way I’d written Son of Holmes right after college. It other words, though I took the craft of it seriously, I treated it almost as a Plan B work that in an earlier incarnation I probably would have written and published under a pseudonym, and with a different more or less generic mystery protagonist, certainly not my Everyman, Dismas Hardy, as its main character. (Despite that, since the book’s publication, I’ve watched with a somewhat bemused eye as The Vig continues to attract new readers and remains healthily in print nearly twenty years after its first publication.)

Ironically, this was probably the time that I came closest to giving up on Dismas Hardy, and on what was now at least a fledgling career as an acknowledged mystery author. I was forty-one years old and had published five books-four of them mysteries. I couldn’t pretend, and certainly no one in the publishing industry thought, that I was a “literary” author. Why was I kidding myself?

I was making very little money writing, which I did out in my garage in Altadena between 6:00 and 8:00 a.m., five days a week. My other two day jobs included full-time work as the word-processing supervisor at a large Los Angeles law firm, and then piecemeal typing every night at other law firms among the towers that made up the LA skyline. My days began at 5:30 and often ended at 11:30. By now, Lisa and I had two children, and I rarely got to see them except on weekends. And even with all the hours I was working, and the books I was publishing, we were struggling financially. Maybe it was time I got a professional career-track job. Go to law school. Quit writing and recognize it for what it was-a foolish, youthful dream that hadn’t quite worked out.

Of course, in the LA area, there was also the ever-present distraction and lure of the screenwriting-movie business. And as a published author, I was able to “take a few meetings.” I got paid to write a screenplay for a B-movie producer. I wrote a few synopses for TV pilots. More piecemeal work. Hackwork.

My lofty ideals had atrophied; the serious writer I’d once wanted to become was nowhere to be found. I needed to make money so my family could survive, and I probably could have been talked into writing a snuff film if it paid enough. And when I realized that this was what it had gotten to, I decided to stop writing altogether. If it wasn’t a noble and beautiful calling, some kind of artistic expression, what was the point? Was it all just the ability to juggle words?