This was not to be.
My publisher passed on Imperfect Knowledge. After about ten more rejections, I went back and reworked the manuscript from beginning to end, cutting about two hundred pages, working mostly on plot and pacing issues that agents and editors had suggested.
Among the things I did not consider changing was Dismas Hardy, who happened to be the linchpin of the book. He was a private eye, very much out of the gumshoe mold, the kind of guy I didn’t want readers to have to think much about. He did what other PIs had done, in pretty much the way they had done it. My vision of mysteries in those days was that there was a kind of generic private-eye template, and if one followed it religiously, the hero would “work,” the book would get published, everybody would be happy. In this benighted view, originality wasn’t really part of the equation, and so I created a Dismas Hardy who, though he wasn’t an out-and-out cliché, failed to sustain interest.
I must have thought it was somehow “mysterious” that he was such a loner and had no history and, really, no life. No love interest. No pets, no kids, no friends. I was saving all that good human stuff for my serious work. And so I sent out another round of submissions with a completely revised manuscript (essentially a new book) and probably shouldn’t have been so surprised with the by now predictable results.
Although, of course, I was.
Devastated was more like it. I had tried to make a career in music and failed, and now I had written at least four complete manuscripts, only one of which had been published, and published as a paperback original at that. The heady confidence that characterized my attitude toward writing up until then was beginning to erode. Could it be that I wasn’t, after all, a genius?
But there seemed to be no other interpretation.
Sunburn had certainly failed to attract a readership. The other manuscripts-even the two drafts of my Plan B mystery-weren’t exciting anyone in the publishing business either. I started to consider the possibility that I wasn’t meant to be any kind of a writer after all. Even more portentously, I didn’t have any more ideas of what I wanted to write about, literary or otherwise.
Three years passed. I remarried well. I took a lucrative day job writing technical papers and put my literary aspirations aside. I was going to be an adult and wear a suit to work every day and not think about my earlier foolish ambitions.
But I knew it was a lie, and my wife knew it too. “You want to write,” she said. “You want to be a writer. You are a writer.”
“But I don’t even have anything to submit,” I told her. “Everything’s been rejected many times over.”
“Not everything,” she said. “You’ve never even submitted your first book.” This was Recipe for Murder, the Sherlock Holmes-Nero Wolfe pastiche I’d written fourteen years before.
“Of course I haven’t sent that out,” I said. “That’s a mystery. I don’t do mystery. I’m a literary writer. And I didn’t even write Recipe for Murder as a book. That was just an exercise to see if I could sustain a plot and characters over a book-length work.”
“I thought it was good,” Lisa said. “I thought it was a book.”
She was right. I scanned the old brittle typed pages into a computer, reprinted them with a new copyright date, and sent them off to New York. Six weeks later, Donald I. Fine bought the book and published it in hardcover under the title Son of Holmes. Better yet, he asked for a sequel, which he’d release as Rasputin’s Revenge the next year.
At last, somebody was paying me to write novels. True, they were mystery stories prominently featuring characters-Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe-that had been created by someone else. Plus, they were both set during World War I in Europe. As entertainments, they could not have been more non-serious. But after my earlier disappointments with publishing, I was glad to be on the boards at last, glad to be getting the chance to write regularly.
Donald I. Fine asked me for another book, and I told him I wanted to change directions and write a story set in the present day, and in the United States, with a modern protagonist. I didn’t envision it as a mystery, but as a story of one lost man’s redemption after his world is suddenly shattered by… what? What literary conceit could drive a plot, or shatter a world?
The idea-startling in its clarity, profound in its implications-hit me like a thunderbolt.
A crime!
In fact, a murder.
And a murder turned my serious “literary” idea into a mystery.
Suddenly the inherent and irreconcilable dichotomy I had always perceived-maybe projected is a better word-between serious literature and the mystery genre vanished. I could tell an important story, perhaps even one containing a universal truth or two, and at the same time provide the kind of narrative drive that a strong plot could guarantee, or at least facilitate. I could talk about moral and social and character issues-surely the province of serious literature-and write a fast-moving and entertaining story at the same time. This was an enormous revelation-I didn’t need to pursue a Plan A for my serious work and a Plan B for stuff people might enjoy reading. They could be the same thing!
And Dismas Hardy, waiting in the wings all this time, began to reveal himself to me not just as a (snooty literary word) protagonist, but as a hero.
At this point, fate stepped in. I had begun subscribing to the Mystery Writers of America’s newsletter, The Third Degree. Sometime in the late 1980s, the writer and critic Dick Lochte wrote a cover story for that periodical, urging writers to stop writing about “private eyes.” The world didn’t need any more private eyes, he said. They had been done, and done to death. He pleaded for originality, new voices, a new approach to the mystery novel.
He couldn’t have hit me (and Dismas Hardy) at a better time.
Suddenly, Dismas Hardy the San Francisco private eye had to become what he in his wisdom always knew he was meant to become-a full-fledged human being. He wasn’t a private eye. He’d never been a private eye. No wonder those agents and editors hadn’t bought him back in the day. He hadn’t been original or authentic. He’d been a hackneyed literary conceit in those earlier manuscripts, little more than a cartoon. Now, if I wanted to write about him, first I had to find out who he was, why he was important, and how he was worthy to carry the moral weight with which I was about to burden him.
Dismas Hardy was not going to be my Plan B character. Dismas Hardy was going to be no less than my Everyman. He would carry the hopes and dreams of every man, suffer the losses, savor the triumphs. He would have a family, friends, and enemies. He would get sick, make mistakes, drink too much, work too hard, fail to understand. But mostly he would hunger and thirst for what we all ultimately desire-justice.
All writers have heard the admonition to “write what you know.” My confidence had taken a big enough hit during the rejection years that I no longer felt like any kind of a genius. If I wanted to create a memorable character, and I did, I’d take whatever advice was out there. And I decided that if he was to be authentic, Hardy had to be full of stuff I knew, and knew intimately. That was the main thing. I had to know him.