True Detective

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For the first few years of my writing career, I taught part-time at a community college. One of the ways I kept my sanity was by teaching a course on mystery fiction. It was in my capacity as a college instructor, then, that I re-read my favorite mystery novel, Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, for the umpteenth time.

Perhaps it was that academic mode of thought that made me glance at the indicia page, note the copyright, and muse, "Nineteen twenty-nine… that's the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. That means Sam Spade and Al Capone were contemporaries."

In the comics field (where I also occasionally toil), this moment might be marked by a lightbulb going on in a balloon over my head. It was that kind of idea- the stray thought that lights up the world and changes everything, or at least a career.

For a long time I had been looking for a way to write private eye novels in the classic mode. I grew up on Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane and dozens of their imitators, but my first published novels did not include the private detective narrator those writers made famous. Instead, at the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop, I wrote a trio of novels about three different protagonists: a thief, a hitman and a mystery writer; but in each case, the novels had roots in the P.I. form as much as the crime novel.

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