Cases

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The central characters of all novels lurk inside their creators’ psyches, otherwise they couldn’t emerge on the printed page. But Pierce Duncan, the protagonist of Cases, is — dare I say it? — a special case.

Dunc stole my grandfather’s name and much of my early life. He claimed that, like me, he was raised in Rochester, Minnesota, graduated from Notre Dame in the summer of 1953, and worked his way west through Las Vegas to Los Angeles, where he dug graves, wheelbarrowed cement, and fell in love for the first time.

Eventually, like me, he got to San Francisco and became a private detective with the L.A. Walker Company (he called it Edward D. Cope Investigations) at 1610 Bush Street. He and I both lived in Ma Booger’s rooming house at 1117 Geary just up from Tommy’s Joynt. Dunc’s first week as a P.I. was my first week, most of his investigations were really mine.

Cases began in my office storeroom when I unearthed three forgotten notebooks from the early fifties, plus the case files and field reports from my first months at L.A. Walker. I even found the old snapshot, taken on the day of my arrival in Eagle Rock from Las Vegas, that we have used as our author’s photo.

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