DISMAS HARDY
BY JOHN LESCROART
I wrote my first book in college.
It was what would now be called a legal thriller, based on the idea that capital punishment was cruel and unusual because the condemned person knew that the execution was coming. I developed the conceit that the death penalty would be more humane if the condemned didn’t know about the sentence, if one day he merely went to the prison doctor for a routine injection or vaccination, and instead the “medication” was a fatal one. No doubt it’s for the best that this book remains unpublished, but in it, I named the condemned man Dismas Hardy. He appeared for about one page, was dispatched, and disappeared.
But the name struck me as particularly memorable, in the mold of, say, Travis McGee or Sherlock Holmes. (It was probably the single best thing in the book.) In any event, I resolved that if I ever did get to writing a mystery series, my hero would be called Dismas Hardy. I knew that Dismas was the name of the good thief on Calvary, who was crucified next to Jesus, and it was always good to have a biblical antecedent to help provide kind of an instant sense of gravitas in a hero. As for the surname Hardy, I had grown up with the Hardy Boys-Frank and Joe-and it seemed to me that there really couldn’t be a better all-American, highly-pedigreed last name for a detective. So that was settled; my hero would be called Dismas Hardy.
Of course, I wasn’t planning on becoming a mystery writer in those days. After all, I was studying the continental novel in translation at UC Berkeley-Stendahl, Camus, Tolstoy, etc. I was serious. But I was a confident cuss, and a part of me thought that I could probably write a Nobel-quality literary work every few years and pay the bills by whipping out a steady stream of entertaining mystery fiction (under a pseudonym, of course) at the rate of about a book a year. And in that case, it was good to have a ready-made name for my protagonist.
But meanwhile, I had to get working on the craft of novel writing. I had already finished the aforementioned legal thriller, which I knew to be literarily dubious in qualitative terms. It lacked certain elements that seemed to be a feature of other books I wanted to emulate, both “literary” and not, such as humor, irony, verisimilitude, and-most strikingly-plot. Seeking to correct these deficiencies, I sat down and wrote a book-length Sherlock Holmes-Nero Wolfe pastiche that I entitled Recipe for Murder. It was, granted, a mystery, and so would be outside the main thrust of my serious work-in fact, I wrote it under the pen name Dan Sherb. I never really thought that this novel would be published either. In fact, after I’d finished it, I showed it to one or two readers, who were universally enthusiastic (parents tend to be!). Then I put the manuscript in my sock drawer and forgot about it.
For the next seven years, I worked as a musician. My creative life mostly revolved around the songs I was writing. After my first two attempts at novel writing-one faintly literary and one a derivative mystery-I had realized that I needed to garner a little life experience before embarking on the serious phase of my art.
I had to see the world.
And I did, traveling all over the United States and overseas in Europe and Africa. Returning to the United States in 1976, I gave the whole singer-songwriter thing a good effort, forming a band-Johnny Capo (me!) and His Real Good Band-that performed regularly for about two years in the San Francisco Bay Area. In fact, we weren’t too bad, and we worked consistently.
Gradually, though, the old familiar but long-suppressed urge to write fiction began to nudge out music’s prominence in my creative life. I started to write short scenes, to experiment with form, to sketch characters, to play with voice and point of view. No plot yet, but still.
Over the course of seven years, I’d written hundreds of songs, and I had become proficient at the craft. Ironically, though, the songs often left me creatively unfulfilled and frustrated. The expression that called to me more and more was fiction. I didn’t even know what I would write about, but I sensed that I was getting close to the point where I might have something important, something serious, to say. I’d almost died in Africa, I’d been cheated out of half a summer’s pay in Spain, I’d had friends die (and even commit suicide). Beyond that, I was married and thought I was getting some understanding of the complexities of adult relationships, of commitment and responsibility.
Hell, I was almost thirty!
Time was running out.
It was time to get serious about my art and my life. If I couldn’t start writing my literary books now, maybe I never would.
On my thirtieth birthday, I bit the bullet and told my band I was quitting to write books. Over about the next two months, I threw everything I had into my first “real” book. Based loosely on some of my experiences in Spain (for that old Hemingway feel), Sunburn fell rather neatly into the classic “first novel” matrix-sensitive young man sees the real world for the first time and comes of age while tragedy and political turmoil rage around him.
In Sunburn, I took the opportunity to write in all three persons. I experimented. I was daring, pushing the fictional envelope. It was heady and wonderful and literary and above all serious-this was clearly what I was meant to be doing with my life and my art. To top it all off, Sunburn went on to win the San Francisco Foundation’s Joseph Henry Jackson Award for best novel by a California author, beating out Interview with a Vampire, among 280 other entries.
Next stop, Sweden. I began working on my Nobel acceptance speech. They’d never chosen a thirty-year-old before, but…
So I’d written the first of my literary works, the start of my oeuvre. While I waited for the publishing world to discover Sunburn, I wanted to keep the creative flame burning, so I quit my daytime job (always a bad idea) at Guitar Player magazine and immediately began another novel, Liner Notes, about some of my experiences in the music and performing world.
Flush with confidence, enamored of my own first-person writer’s voice, I produced this six-hundred-plus-page tome in four or five months and started sending it out to the same literary agents who, much to my surprise, had been turning down Sunburn with a frustrating regularity. My prizewinning literary book, they said, was not “commercial.”
And neither, by the way, was Liner Notes.
Well, what did they know? Great writers have always had to suffer for their art. This would be yet another life experience that would only enrich my later work. My critics would be sorry. I piss in the milk of these commercial cretins.
When Sunburn eventually found a paperback publisher, I realized that the $2,000 advance would not go very far toward giving me the time to write another comparable masterpiece. In the meanwhile, I had to make a living, and I decided that it was time to move to Plan B-to whip out a quick mystery under a pseudonym.
I began working on a novel about San Francisco ’s famous Zodiac Killer. Entitled Imperfect Knowledge, this book imagined that the Zodiac, who to this day has not been caught, simply retired from his first spate of killings and emerged from retirement a decade later, only to be pursued and apprehended finally by… private investigator Dismas Hardy.
“But wait!” you say. “Hardy is not a private investigator. He’s an ex-cop, yes. An ex-Marine, a father and husband and attorney.”
Yes, he is, all of those. But he wasn’t then. It wasn’t yet time for him to be born.
When I had finished the first draft of my Plan B non-literary mystery, featuring Dismas Hardy, I sent it out first to the publisher that had taken Sunburn, certain that my award-winning writing skills would carry the day and that Imperfect Knowledge, though nothing like Sunburn, would be snapped up as a matter of course. I would then take the money and live on that while I wrote my next literary offering, my next “real” book.