The dreams started that summer. Nightmares, really. Intense and dark, with me always alone. It was always the same scene: I entered the tunnel, ready for the challenge, but a few steps in, the brick walls suddenly started to contract. Then, rippling violently in front of me, up out of the mud, a giant tongue lashed about at me.
And then I would wake up just as I realized I had stepped into the mouth of a great waiting beast.
I didn’t have to go to an analyst then or now to know why the dream had manifested or what it was about. It interrupted my sleep often that summer and then disappeared once I made the journey through the tunnel. Strangely, I have no memory of my actual passage. I cannot confirm the spiderwebs. But I can confirm that I made it and, once through, became one of the boys who taunted those who had not yet passed the test.
A few years later, my family had moved from Highland Avenue in suburban Philadelphia to Twenty-sixth Avenue in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, as my father chased a series of jobs in the sun. The Vietnam War was the backdrop to life then. I was in high school and not a good student, so I paid attention to Vietnam because I thought it could be my destiny. I remember the principal on the loudspeaker in the classroom calling for a moment of silence and prayer in memory of a former student who had been killed over there. William Fennel. I didn’t know him, but years later I would look his name up on the wall of the memorial in Washington, DC.
One summer I remember my father talking about a man he worked with in a real-estate office. He said the man had to wear a full beard to cover facial scarring from wounds he’d received while he was a soldier in Vietnam. He told my father he had been something they called a tunnel rat. His job was to go into the underground labyrinths where the enemy hid and waited.
The man refused to tell my father all the details, but my teenage imagination filled in the story and was possibly more powerful than the truth. It seemed to me that no war assignment could be more frightening or dangerous than being a tunnel rat. And that summer, after so many years, the dream came back to me. Once more I dreamed of being in the mouth of the underground monster.
Soon after high school I knew I wanted to be a writer. I loved reading detective stories, and those were what I wanted to write. I went to journalism school in college and hoped that a job at a newspaper would teach me the craft of writing while at the same time giving me entrée into the world I wanted to write about: the police department. For several years after college I lived and worked in Florida and tried to write a couple of detective novels on the side. They didn’t work. They are about men who specialize in finding runaways but who themselves have run away from things in their own lives. Sure, I learned more about writing and the form of the detective novel as I moved from one draft to the next, but the manuscripts never got past the bottom drawer of my desk. I remain the only one who has ever read them.
At thirty years old, I knew I had it in me to take one more shot at a novel. But I gave myself an ultimatum. If the book didn’t work and was not published, I would shelve my aspirations and rededicate myself to my career as a journalist. In preparation for taking final aim at my goal, I decided to shake everything up in my life. I sent out résumés to California, three thousand miles away, the land of my literary heroes-Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, and Joseph Wambaugh. It was my conviction that I had to start this novel and stage this part of my journey in Los Angeles.
On the day I interviewed for a job as a police reporter at the Los Angeles Times, the editor handed me the Metro section and pointed to a story bannered across the top. He gave me fifteen minutes to read it and tell him how I would follow up the story. It was a test. He wanted to see how well and how fast I could think on my feet.
The story was about a bold bank heist. Thieves had cleverly used the city’s labyrinthine storm water tunnel system to move under downtown and into close proximity of the target bank. They then drilled through the wall of the city tunnel and dug their own line to a position directly beneath the bank’s safe-deposit vault. They went up and in and spent a night in the vault drilling open boxes and bagging their contents. Then they got away.
Whatever I told the editor must have impressed him. I got the job and moved to Los Angeles. Soon after starting on the police beat, I was allowed to sit in on a detective squad briefing on the unsolved tunnel caper. The case investigators showed photographs that depicted the thieves’ route through the tunnels. It was a dark and shadowy netherworld and eerily reminiscent of the mysterious tunnel I had dreamed of when I was a kid.
My plan had been to spend a year or two getting to know Los Angeles before daring to write about this huge, sprawling, and intriguing place my heroes had trodden and known so well. But that night after the police briefing, I went into the spare bedroom of the apartment I shared with my wife by the 101 freeway and started writing. I’d had an epiphany: I would write about a detective who has a recurring dream of tunnels, who has experience in those tunnels, and whose past informs his present. Now the tendrils of my life were coming together, and I felt that at last I had the true baseline for a character and story that could travel the distance and be published, and live on in readers’ imaginations.
I called him Pierce. I had read something, somewhere, in which Raymond Chandler had described the fictional detective as someone who must be willing and able to pierce all veils and layers of society. My detective would be such a man, and so I called him Pierce.
I wrote with the window open most of the time and wanted to play music that would filter out the disruptive noise of the nearby freeway. I grew up on rock and roll, but as a writer I found that music with lyrics could intrude upon the writing process in its own way. I was going to write about a detective who was alone in the world, so I gravitated toward music that invoked loneliness in me. Jazz. More to the point, the sound of the jazz saxophone. I started with the essentials-John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Wayne Shorter-and branched out from there. Along the way I read a piece in Time magazine about a musician named Frank Morgan, a protégé of Charlie Parker’s who had overcome heroin addiction and imprisonment to record again after thirty years. It was in Frank Morgan’s alto sax that I found the soundtrack of my detective. In his sad but uplifting ballad “Lullaby,” written by pianist George Cables, I discovered my detective’s anthem. For many years I played that song at the start of each writing day.
My detective, like Frank Morgan, was to be a survivor, a man who overcomes his past to ensure his present-and his future. So I chose his music carefully. Pierce would listen to music created by artists who had overcome great obstacles in order to make it. Whether it was beating drug addiction, fighting racism, surmounting poverty, or rising above medical disability, the jazz musicians I drew inspiration from were survivors. And I gave the whole playlist to Detective Pierce.
By day I was a news reporter on the crime beat. By night and weekend I was an amateur novelist trying to finally make it happen. I viewed my day job as research for the night shift. It was as if I were dropping into a gold mine, down a tunnel where I could look for whatever glittered. The sights and sounds of police stations and jails, the cop slang, the internal politics. I would come out each day and bury the gold in my book that night.