My apologies for the delay in this reply.Holidays and my
son's wedding intervened.The last two novels in the series,A
Fistful of Empty and Mexico is Forever were written with one
eye on the trajectory of my commercial viability.By the time
I arrived at book no. 5 I had serious doubts about how long I
would have the opportunity to be published.Sales had never
been good and hadn't grown at all.Early publisher
enthusiasm
(paperback sales ,foreign rights) had dried up.I had always
wanted to write a version of the Maltese Falcon, my favorite
hardboiled tale.I figured that it was as good a time as any.I
wanted to return to the story of what you do when someone
kills your partner and explore it from the perspective of a
man more connected than Sam Spade.His pursuit puts people he
cares about in harm's way.Samantha decides that she won't
play the sap for him.Anyway it's a tale of loss . After that
was released my publisher decided to pay me off to get out of
our contract rather than publish the next book.I now had 5
different publishers for the six books.I couldn't see the
wall for all the writing. I wrote Mexico as a swan song.Five
years later ,I was invited to write a short story with a long
enough word count that I could contemplate wrapping up the
loose ends of the Haggerty series. That story "Lost and
Found" also allowed me to return to one of the Haggerty short
stories I had written with a loose end(Mary, Mary, Shut the
Door). Lost and Found is a story of redemption after loss and
was the way I wanted to end the work featuring Leo
Haggerty.
Leo started out with the kind
of infirmities you accumulate if you really do practice the
violent arts.I had wanted him to be of the
"regular guy" school of protagonists, not a superhero.Arnie
was always a counterweight to Leo.A man of great moral
clarity . The courage of his convictions made him capable of
great violence.Leo struggles to achieve that kind of clarity
throughout the series.Bergson wrote : Think like a man of
action, act like a man of thought. That was Leo's quest at
all times.Arnie and Leo pursued a dialogue about the morality
of violence throughout the books.Imagine Lew Archer with Mike
Hammer for a partner.
After writing the Haggerty
books, I switched to writing short stories. They provided me
with a way to explore narrative options and genre types that
I hadn't tried before.My sons both worked as private eyes for
a couple of years during college.I saw ways to explore old
issues from a new perspective and entirely new issues as I
watched two middle class suburban youths encounter the meaner
streets.I started with a short story based on their
experiences and hope to do a novel using the Ellis
brothers.
Being a psychologist and
writing detective fiction are two sides of the same coin.Only
the mysteries change. In the therapy hour, it's why do I do
these self destructive things? In the forensic arena it's Do
we accept the pedophile's claim that there are no other
victims?.Being a therapist teaches a great respect for the
power of language.The right words at the right time can heal
people.It's not a big jump to the power of the written word
and it's ability to enthrall.As a forensic investigator you
learn that the devil and everyone else is in the
details.Building a case is often described as the process of
piling up a big wall of small facts and then pushing them
over on someone.That approach helps immeasurably with
plotting.Being a therapist and a forensic investigator gives
you first-hand experience with the lies and evasions people
use to avoid confronting the truth about themselves That's
enormously useful in understanding how to peel back the
layers of motivation as you develop character. Finally being
a therapist reminds you that living people always escape the
trap of our theories, are always surprising us and that our
fictional characters should do the same if they are truly
alive.
As for the "intensive grilling"
it's very gratifying to find that people remember the books
and think well of them.I hope that I have answered your
questions.
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 02 Jan 2002 EST