So he was my age, thirty-eight.
He’d gone to a Catholic all-male high school, quite possibly my own Serra High in San Mateo, California.
He lived on Thirty-fourth Avenue at Clement in San Francisco.
He was a bartender at the Little Shamrock, as I had been.
He was divorced.
Though not an alcoholic, he tended to kill his pain with drink.
The arc of this book was to be Hardy’s resurrection and redemption-two good Catholic themes about which I knew plenty. I also knew that Hardy’s life and career had been shattered, but I didn’t know why.
(Except that it wasn’t because he’d failed as a writer. I wanted to identify with his failure, though I knew it wasn’t going to be the same as mine. He was to be the appealing Everyman, not the effete artist type his creator had once and no longer fancied himself.)
Did I know enough about Dismas Hardy to begin? I thought so. The great thing about the actual experience of writing is its revelatory character. Though I had no idea how I was going to get a thirty-eight-year-old bartender involved in a crime that would somehow redeem him and restore the equilibrium and happiness to his life, I had written enough to believe that the process would provide the answers.
And within the first three pages of Dead Irish, these words appeared on the screen in front of me:
“It was the first time Hardy’d had a woman’s arms around him in four and a half years. And that time had been just the once, with Frannie née McGuire now Cochran, after a New Year’s Eve party.”
And then:
“In a way, he thought, it was too bad the plane hadn’t crashed. There would have been some symmetry in that-both of his parents had died in a plane crash when he’d been nineteen, a sophomore at Caltech.”
And finally:
He just felt he’d lost track of who he was. He knew what he did-he was a damn good bartender, a thrower of darts, a medium worker of wood.
He was also divorced, an ex-marine, ex-cop, ex-attorney. He’d even, for a time, been a father. Thirty-eight and some months and he didn’t know who he was.
He tipped up the glass. Yeah, he thought, that wouldn’t have been so bad, the plane crashing. Not good, not something to shoot for, but really not the worst tragedy in the world.
He figured he’d already had that one.
That was how long it took-three pages-for Hardy to assert that, for all our similarities, he wasn’t me. I, for example, had not been orphaned. I’d never even visited Caltech. I hadn’t been a cop or been in the service. I wasn’t an attorney. I sucked at darts. I’d never carved a piece of wood in my life.
Where did all this come from?
And, more important, what was the tragedy Hardy was talking about, the worst tragedy in the world, the one he figured he’d already had?
I didn’t know.
I wouldn’t know until I’d finished the entire first draft of the book and started the second. This is all the more amazing considering that the tragedy-the death of his young son, Michael, in a crib accident-is what caused the breakup of his marriage, the collapse of his legal career, his decade-long hibernation as a bartender in the bar owned by his friend Moses McGuire, whose life Hardy had saved in Vietnam.
See? Even when I hadn’t known him, he’d always been a hero.
Other things began to happen. Hardy goes to a Giants baseball game, where a fan plunges to his death from the upper deck, and there at the ballpark he runs into a Jewish mulatto cop named Abe Glitsky, with whom he used to walk a beat in his policeman days. I am blessed with two great brothers and several very close male friends, without whom life wouldn’t be nearly as fun or interesting. And suddenly, writing what I knew, I watched as Hardy and Glitsky fell into the patter of a long-standing and deep bond. These were old friends, connected in some nearly spiritual way. I didn’t know Abe yet, but I knew the relationship.
And Abe’s job gave me a way to connect Hardy to a crime.
Except, apparently, it’s not a crime. It’s a suicide. The suicide of Eddie Cochran, an idealistic young man who is married to Frannie, the sister of Hardy’s boss, Moses McGuire. Frannie has just found out she is pregnant.
Hardy doesn’t believe Eddie would have ever killed himself. And there is insurance money for Frannie if someone murdered him. Though it’s formally none of his business, Hardy-as Everyman thirsting for justice-must find the answer.
And in searching for that answer, he discovers to his surprise that the active grieving period for his son has somehow come to an end, and that there can be meaning and even joy in reconnecting with life and getting to know the people around him. Hardy is redeemed, reborn, and ready to take up the role in life that he’d planned and prepared for before his personal tragedy derailed him-a man who lives and if necessary fights to see justice done.
Dead Irish reveals Dismas Hardy as the lead character in a novel that happens to have a crime in the center of it. At that time, and unlike many of the young people who come to the profession of writing today, I did not have a game plan for how I would pursue my career. I was not aware enough of the publishing business to even have an agent yet, much less the savvy to decide to write a series for which I would supply the next six plots and maybe a second one featuring cats. For me, when I wrote it, Dead Irish was a stand-alone novel, not the first book in a series. Though it meant abandoning the well-loved name Dismas Hardy, I felt sure that I would find another name for a character in my next book that would please me. I’d say good-bye to Diz, thank him for the yeoman efforts, and move on.
Then Dead Irish got nominated for the Shamus Award for best novel (which I found highly ironic, Shamus being a synonym for private eye), and Donald Fine asked me to write a true sequel featuring Dismas Hardy.
I didn’t know how I was going to do that. I’d already written Hardy’s character arc. He was redeemed, he was back together with his first wife, he was happy bartending at the Shamrock, which he now owned a quarter of.
What would be the conflict? How would he grow as a character? I didn’t know, and I didn’t think that revisiting him in a new setting was a particularly great idea.
But here I was, four published books into my career, and if I wanted to keep getting paid to write, this was a bird in the hand-a bona fide offer from a New York hardcover publisher. It was still not even close to enough money to live on, mind you-just a small step up from Dead Irish. But it would give me another chance to see if I could write a commercially successful novel. And I could look at both the Dismas Hardy character and the plot as challenges in pure storytelling.
In the course of writing The Vig, I continued to learn a little more about Hardy, and to be surprised by these discoveries. The most surprising element was his love life. Although in Dead Irish, he’d reconnected with his first wife, Jane Fowler, The Vig wasn’t twenty pages old when Hardy found himself drawn to the much younger Frannie Cochran, widow of Eddie from Dead Irish, the sister of Moses McGuire. The whole time I was writing this book, I didn’t know what would finally transpire in Hardy’s choice of his mate. Jane was certainly a worthy person, smart and sensitive. But there was lots of baggage there with Jane. And a certain idealism and freshness in Frannie.
Beyond that, simply in plot terms, I was wrestling with the question of romance. It never hurts the readability of a novel-even a serious literary novel-if one of the plot or subplot elements is romance. Will the boy get the girl or vice versa? My experiences writing both Rasputin’s Revenge and Dead Irish had taught me that this was a powerful, perhaps even essential, device to elicit empathy for main characters and also to create suspense and a level of humanity without which a book might seem dry and lifeless.