Finally, I was still trying to write what I knew, and I was married to a woman who was eleven years younger than I. The issues and decisions that Hardy and Frannie would face and make together might in many ways be similar to those Lisa and I were confronting. Drawing upon our personal experiences might inform the character of Hardy in a way that would simply be impossible if he chose Jane.
And so in this fundamental way, Hardy’s character development took another step-albeit a very small one-in The Vig. But as I wrote that book, I couldn’t escape the feeling that it lacked the depth of its predecessor. I thought it was a good read, with a strong plot and interesting characters, yes, but to me it lacked the inherent gravitas that had characterized Dead Irish.
Perhaps this was because I’d approached its writing as an academic exercise, much the same way I’d written Son of Holmes right after college. It other words, though I took the craft of it seriously, I treated it almost as a Plan B work that in an earlier incarnation I probably would have written and published under a pseudonym, and with a different more or less generic mystery protagonist, certainly not my Everyman, Dismas Hardy, as its main character. (Despite that, since the book’s publication, I’ve watched with a somewhat bemused eye as The Vig continues to attract new readers and remains healthily in print nearly twenty years after its first publication.)
Ironically, this was probably the time that I came closest to giving up on Dismas Hardy, and on what was now at least a fledgling career as an acknowledged mystery author. I was forty-one years old and had published five books-four of them mysteries. I couldn’t pretend, and certainly no one in the publishing industry thought, that I was a “literary” author. Why was I kidding myself?
I was making very little money writing, which I did out in my garage in Altadena between 6:00 and 8:00 a.m., five days a week. My other two day jobs included full-time work as the word-processing supervisor at a large Los Angeles law firm, and then piecemeal typing every night at other law firms among the towers that made up the LA skyline. My days began at 5:30 and often ended at 11:30. By now, Lisa and I had two children, and I rarely got to see them except on weekends. And even with all the hours I was working, and the books I was publishing, we were struggling financially. Maybe it was time I got a professional career-track job. Go to law school. Quit writing and recognize it for what it was-a foolish, youthful dream that hadn’t quite worked out.
Of course, in the LA area, there was also the ever-present distraction and lure of the screenwriting-movie business. And as a published author, I was able to “take a few meetings.” I got paid to write a screenplay for a B-movie producer. I wrote a few synopses for TV pilots. More piecemeal work. Hackwork.
My lofty ideals had atrophied; the serious writer I’d once wanted to become was nowhere to be found. I needed to make money so my family could survive, and I probably could have been talked into writing a snuff film if it paid enough. And when I realized that this was what it had gotten to, I decided to stop writing altogether. If it wasn’t a noble and beautiful calling, some kind of artistic expression, what was the point? Was it all just the ability to juggle words?
I didn’t want that. I started sending out résumés for career-oriented jobs. Donald Fine asked for another sequel, and I told him no. I wasn’t going to do another formulaic mystery. I’d learned my lesson. My writing life was over.
This was where things stood until one Sunday in August of 1989, when I woke up with a severe earache, bad enough that I couldn’t rouse myself to go to a Dodgers game for which we had tickets. By that evening, I had a good fever and an even better headache. At 3:00 a.m., Lisa packed our two infant kids in the backseat and drove me to the emergency room of our local hospital, where the doctor told her that I had spinal meningitis. His prognosis was that I would probably not survive the next two hours.
For the next eleven days, I was mostly unconscious in St. Luke Hospital ’s intensive-care unit. After they released me, I spent another thirty days at home recuperating, intravenously treating myself with 90 million units of penicillin a day. (For the next year, I smelled like a mushroom.) Finally, when I returned to my day job at the word-processing department of my law firm, I found that the office manager-believing that I would probably die-had hired three full-time, permanent employees to take my place. This left me in an awkward position that realistically could not continue for long. This job-my one constant source of income over the past six years-was going to end soon. None of the résumés I’d sent out had borne fruit.
Lisa and I had to make some decisions.
We felt we’d given LA a good try. I’d worked six years with my law firm, and in that time had published three novels. But living there was expensive and in many ways dispiriting. Our daughter was about a year away from kindergarten, and the public schools in our area of LA were dismal. Last but certainly not least, nobody was breaking down my door with any kind of a job offer. We decided we would move to northern California, where life was much less expensive, and that before I got another full-time day job, I would give full-time writing one last good try. This was really in my heart what I wanted to do; further, it was what I was getting to be good at. I thought that if I could just focus on the right kind of Plan A book-something like Dead Irish but with a bigger canvas and wider-ranging themes, I might have a chance of finding an audience.
By now, with the meningitis and recovery, I’d given Dismas Hardy nearly two years off. I knew from Dead Irish that he could carry the weight of a big story, and I would no longer sell him short, as I felt I had with The Vig. I would plumb the depths of his Everyman persona in this new book.
To do it, of course, I was aware that I had to find those last personal elements that I knew so intimately from my own life. I was a father of two, and now Hardy would be a father of two. I would know his home life, and it would be central to who he was. Since having my own children, I had come to understand something that no one can know until they have the experience-that children and family are the center of life for most people. Though these domestic relationships didn’t provide quite the zing of romantic entanglements, and although the role of husband and father certainly wasn’t the expected reality for a hard-boiled hero in a mystery, nevertheless it was central in everyday life. In the life of Everyman. As so it would be in that of Dismas Hardy.
Beyond that, I had worked in a business legal environment for six years and knew the basic routines of lawyers’ lives, the stresses of the job, the conflicts, the hours, the betrayals, the moral ambiguities. I didn’t know much, if anything, about criminal law, but then again, I realized that after ten years away from the law field tending bar, Hardy wouldn’t be so hot on the details himself. And, in fact, his interest was never so much in fighting crime and prosecuting criminals as it was in seeking justice.
As I started Hard Evidence, featuring no longer a bartender, but a married working attorney named Dismas Hardy walking a shark, trying to keep it alive in the Steinhart Aquarium, I knew that he had finally revealed the last secrets of his nature to me. He was not and could not be a larger-than-life superhero. He was a regular guy, a working-stiff, nonglamorous defense attorney with a closely knit (yet often conflicted) family and a coterie of loyal friends. You’d like him-he might beat you at darts, but he’d buy you a drink afterward. He was the kind of person you’d care about if he showed up in any kind of novel at all, not just a mystery.