The most dangerous tool I wield nowadays is a ’65 Fender Stratocaster.
Delaware, on the other hand, throws caution to the Santa Anas. Therefore, he will forever remain single and just a bit alienated from the loyalties and routines of domestic life.
For some reason, there is a cadre of readers that really want him to get hitched. Sometimes they write me requesting nuptials in an upcoming book. I appreciate their loyalty, but my response is consistent: when wedding bells chime for Alex, you can be sure the series is over. Unlike a police officer, whose involvement in crime is part of his routine, Dr. D’s entrée to murder necessitates a deft suspension of caution. He simply must be maritally untrammeled in order to take the kinds of risks that contribute to a gripping story.
When, after thirteen years of failure, I began writing When the Bough Breaks, I believed the process to be my final attempt at breaking in as a novelist. Maybe it would’ve been. Who knows? Thank God that hypothesis was never put to the test. The point is, because I saw the book as my final audition, I obsessed about coming up with something fresh and different. If I wasn’t able to come up with something new, I didn’t deserve to break in. As part of that scheme, I set out consciously to sidestep as many of the conventions of the hard-boiled-detective novel as I could while preserving the guts and soul of the genre.
Write what you know meant there was no other kind of book I could’ve written.
My day job as a psychologist was nothing but sleuthing-hour by hour (forty-five-minute segment by forty-five-minute segment) I conducted investigations that traversed the back alleys of the unconscious. Every time a new patient arrived in my office, the process unfolded: solving a psychosocial whodunit in order to ameliorate suffering. A lot of nasty stuff got unearthed along the way.
What I was attempting to achieve as a psychologist were daily triumphs of psychic archaeology: digging up long-buried shards of experience in an attempt to build a coherent picture of a troubled human being, in order to help that human being. If that’s not detective work, I don’t know what is. I’m anything but a Freudian, but I do believe that we ignore the past at our peril. That belief has informed every novel I’ve written.
Still, detective story or not, When the Bough Breaks might very well have turned out as the gravestone marking the death of my literary aspirations. This was do or die, dude; clichés needed to be shunned.
Hence, a troubled psychologist in a nice home office, instead of a wisecracking PI with a seedy inner-city office, a chronic drinking problem, and a buxom secretary whose barely secret love for the boss inexplicably evades the boss’s notice.
Hence, a detailed, accurate, compelling investigation that didn’t test the limits of reality more than it had to.
Most important: my book would feature no effete amateur prancing about as he shows up the pros. Because I detest books that treat murder like a parlor game. You know the type: plummy-voiced, tuxedoed twits with all the character depth of a sandwich sign huff-huffing in the parlor as a body molders yards away.
What could be more dehumanizing than viewing homicide as just another fatuous riddle, easily solved by applying the flimsiest approximation of logic?
Having witnessed the effects of violence as a psychologist and court consultant, I was determined to communicate the nightmare that is homicide and its repercussions. That proved easy, because Alex Delaware, like me, turned out to be a driven perfectionist whose persistence often draws him into some rather extreme territory. (Several years ago, I delivered the keynote address at the national convention of the American Psychological Association. Facing an audience of a couple thousand shrinks, I felt like the ultimate clinical demonstration. Maybe that’s why I began my speech, “I stand before you as living proof of the positive aspects of the obsessive-compulsive personality.”)
Driven, yes. Able to leap tall buildings by himself, no.
My hero would eschew a tortured relationship with the cops. Not only was that the most hackneyed of plot devices, but experiences working with the courts and the criminal-justice system had taught me that detectives from the private and public sectors often meshed quite well and that experts were well received.
This was going to be a crime novel. I needed a cop.
The problem was, yet another gruff, world-weary homicide dick was the woolliest cliché of all.
On the other hand, a gruff, world-weary gay homicide detective… interesting.
Enter Milo Sturgis.
One of the questions I’m asked most frequently is what led me to make Milo homosexual. The answer is simple: the quest for something new and interesting and original. And what could be more compelling than a man, newly open about his sexuality, whose very presence in the Los Angeles Police Department would engender tension.
The timing was right. Long gone were the days when LA cops routinely busted gay bars-and gay heads. (Though I was able to plumb that brutal territory for flashback scenes in The Murder Book-a novel about which I will have more to say.) Which doesn’t mean that the Los Angeles Police Department during the early eighties was in any way gay friendly. Quite the contrary. Even nowadays, when a handful of gay cops have gone public, I’m doubtful that homosexuality will ever be totally accepted in the paramilitary organization that is the LAPD.
In 1981, there were… ahem… no gay cops in the LAPD. If you believed the official account. I knew from my contacts that there were several gay cops in the LAPD. And that, for the most part, they went about their jobs without much fuss-neither running from nor flaunting their sexuality.
Just cops, like any others, doing the job.
In 1981, “gay but so what” seemed to me a revolutionary concept.
The more I thought about it, the fresher and more innovative became the notion of a homosexual homicide detective operating within a homophobic organization that tolerated him, barely, because he did the job better than anyone else.
But Milo couldn’t be gay-the feather boa, lisping, limp-wristed gay of camp theater and episodic TV and West Hollywood Halloween parades. Because, apart from being the worst sort of cliché, a guy like that wouldn’t survive a single shift in the LAPD. No matter how high his solve rate.
No, the cop I conceptualized would be different: tough, grumpy, sloppy, and also altogether professional and highly intelligent. A homicide veteran with a precarious foothold in the world of law enforcement based on nothing other than raw talent.
Milo ’s homosexuality is right out in the open in When the Bough Breaks, as he announces it to Alex because he doesn’t want Alex to find out some other way and freak out. Alex reacts with surprise, then acceptance. The two of them become friends.
After the book was published, I received a ton of nice mail from gay people along the lines of “I’ve always loved mystery novels, but they’re so homophobic. Thanks so much for Milo.”
Bear in mind that in 1985, gay characters in mainstream fiction were just about nonexistent. No Will & Grace, no Brokeback Mountain . No Project Runway.
Was I out to create a social revolution? Hell, no. With thirteen years of abject failure behind me, I never even expected to publish the darn thing, let alone write a series or build the foundation of a durable career. Looking back, I realize that low expectations fed my courage: with nothing to lose, I had the fortitude to create a novel that, at first glance, had absolutely no commercial potential.