Authors: Otto Penzler
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.
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.
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.
art
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.