I didn’t want that. I started sending out résumés for career-oriented jobs. Donald Fine asked for another sequel, and I told him no. I wasn’t going to do another formulaic mystery. I’d learned my lesson. My writing life was over.

This was where things stood until one Sunday in August of 1989, when I woke up with a severe earache, bad enough that I couldn’t rouse myself to go to a Dodgers game for which we had tickets. By that evening, I had a good fever and an even better headache. At 3:00 a.m., Lisa packed our two infant kids in the backseat and drove me to the emergency room of our local hospital, where the doctor told her that I had spinal meningitis. His prognosis was that I would probably not survive the next two hours.

For the next eleven days, I was mostly unconscious in St. Luke Hospital ’s intensive-care unit. After they released me, I spent another thirty days at home recuperating, intravenously treating myself with 90 million units of penicillin a day. (For the next year, I smelled like a mushroom.) Finally, when I returned to my day job at the word-processing department of my law firm, I found that the office manager-believing that I would probably die-had hired three full-time, permanent employees to take my place. This left me in an awkward position that realistically could not continue for long. This job-my one constant source of income over the past six years-was going to end soon. None of the résumés I’d sent out had borne fruit.

Lisa and I had to make some decisions.

We felt we’d given LA a good try. I’d worked six years with my law firm, and in that time had published three novels. But living there was expensive and in many ways dispiriting. Our daughter was about a year away from kindergarten, and the public schools in our area of LA were dismal. Last but certainly not least, nobody was breaking down my door with any kind of a job offer. We decided we would move to northern California, where life was much less expensive, and that before I got another full-time day job, I would give full-time writing one last good try. This was really in my heart what I wanted to do; further, it was what I was getting to be good at. I thought that if I could just focus on the right kind of Plan A book-something like Dead Irish but with a bigger canvas and wider-ranging themes, I might have a chance of finding an audience.

By now, with the meningitis and recovery, I’d given Dismas Hardy nearly two years off. I knew from Dead Irish that he could carry the weight of a big story, and I would no longer sell him short, as I felt I had with The Vig. I would plumb the depths of his Everyman persona in this new book.

To do it, of course, I was aware that I had to find those last personal elements that I knew so intimately from my own life. I was a father of two, and now Hardy would be a father of two. I would know his home life, and it would be central to who he was. Since having my own children, I had come to understand something that no one can know until they have the experience-that children and family are the center of life for most people. Though these domestic relationships didn’t provide quite the zing of romantic entanglements, and although the role of husband and father certainly wasn’t the expected reality for a hard-boiled hero in a mystery, nevertheless it was central in everyday life. In the life of Everyman. As so it would be in that of Dismas Hardy.

Beyond that, I had worked in a business legal environment for six years and knew the basic routines of lawyers’ lives, the stresses of the job, the conflicts, the hours, the betrayals, the moral ambiguities. I didn’t know much, if anything, about criminal law, but then again, I realized that after ten years away from the law field tending bar, Hardy wouldn’t be so hot on the details himself. And, in fact, his interest was never so much in fighting crime and prosecuting criminals as it was in seeking justice.

As I started Hard Evidence, featuring no longer a bartender, but a married working attorney named Dismas Hardy walking a shark, trying to keep it alive in the Steinhart Aquarium, I knew that he had finally revealed the last secrets of his nature to me. He was not and could not be a larger-than-life superhero. He was a regular guy, a working-stiff, nonglamorous defense attorney with a closely knit (yet often conflicted) family and a coterie of loyal friends. You’d like him-he might beat you at darts, but he’d buy you a drink afterward. He was the kind of person you’d care about if he showed up in any kind of novel at all, not just a mystery.

And in fact, while I was writing Hard Evidence, I discovered to my joy and satisfaction that the distinction in my mind between so-called genre work and “real” novels had somehow all but disappeared. I was writing a Plan A novel now, a serious, grown-up novel about the human condition, and that’s what I’d be writing in the future.

And whenever Dismas Hardy came up and told me he was ready to shoulder the load again, he’d be my man.

There is a last chapter, a postscript, to the story of Dismas Hardy.

Hard Evidence was published to a minimum of fanfare with a relatively small print run. Nevertheless, because I believed that Dismas Hardy had become a fully self-actualized character, and because I had what I thought was a terrific plot idea for another book, I started working almost immediately on The 13th Juror.

The vagaries of publishing being what they are, there is usually a significant lag between sending a book to a publisher and its actual publication. Likewise, there is often a further hiatus between publication and the sale of any subsidiary rights, such as paperback or foreign deals. I sent Hard Evidence to my publisher in about March of 1993, and it was published in 1994, by which time I was nearly finished with The 13th Juror. In the summer of 1994, I offered The 13th Juror to Donald I. Fine, but the advance he offered was unacceptable-actually less than he’d offered for Hard Evidence-so I decided to take The 13th Juror to the open market.

It was a depressing experience.

Although twelve publishers had indicated that they would be willing to take part in an auction for the book, on the actual day, none of them made a bid. Eventually, I received more than twenty rejection notices. They were from just about every New York publisher except two, William Morrow and Donald I. Fine. In the end, Fine outbid Morrow, but my decision to accept Fine’s offer was a long, drawn-out, and exhausting one.

And reluctantly, with those twenty or so rejections of the best I could do with Dismas Hardy hanging heavily in my heart, I decided that much as I liked him, I would have to let him fade into the background. He was clearly not a commercial character. There was no sign that he’d resonated in any important way with readers or with publishers.

It was time to give another character a shot.

Abe Glitsky-Hardy’s long-standing friend from his days as a cop and already a major character in the earlier Hardy novels-couldn’t have been more different from Hardy, but he was a pretty fascinating guy in his own right. I decided to explore his life and character first in A Certain Justice and then, because I enjoyed being with his cursed and curmudgeonly self so much, in Guilt.

But a funny thing happened two years after I’d initially submitted The 13th Juror, when I was halfway through the process of writing Guilt. The 13th Juror finally came out in paperback and jumped onto the New York Times bestseller list, where it stayed and stayed and stayed. By this time, I had changed publishers to Delacorte, and that house’s paperback imprint, Dell/Island, had published The 13th Juror, which was suddenly a very hot property.