The Line Up (24 page)

DISMAS HARDY

BY JOHN LESCROART

I wrote my first book in college.

It was what would now be called a legal thriller, based on the idea that capital punishment was cruel and unusual because the condemned person knew that the execution was coming. I developed the conceit that the death penalty would be more humane if the condemned didn’t know about the sentence, if one day he merely went to the prison doctor for a routine injection or vaccination, and instead the “medication” was a fatal one. No doubt it’s for the best that this book remains unpublished, but in it, I named the condemned man Dismas Hardy. He appeared for about one page, was dispatched, and disappeared.

But the name struck me as particularly memorable, in the mold of, say, Travis McGee or Sherlock Holmes. (It was probably the single best thing in the book.) In any event, I resolved that if I ever did get to writing a mystery series, my hero would be called Dismas Hardy. I knew that Dismas was the name of the good thief on Calvary, who was crucified next to Jesus, and it was always good to have a biblical antecedent to help provide kind of an instant sense of gravitas in a hero. As for the surname Hardy, I had grown up with the Hardy Boys—Frank and Joe—and it seemed to me that there really couldn’t be a better all-American, highly-pedigreed last name for a detective. So that was settled; my hero would be called Dismas Hardy.

Of course, I wasn’t planning on becoming a mystery writer in those days. After all, I was studying the continental novel in translation at UC Berkeley—Stendahl, Camus, Tolstoy, etc. I was serious. But I was a confident cuss, and a part of me thought that I could probably write a Nobel-quality literary work every few years and pay the bills by whipping out a steady stream of entertaining mystery fiction (under a pseudonym, of course) at the rate of about a book a year. And in that case, it was good to have a ready-made name for my protagonist.

But meanwhile, I had to get working on the craft of novel writing. I had already finished the aforementioned legal thriller, which I knew to be literarily dubious in qualitative terms. It lacked certain elements that seemed to be a feature of other books I wanted to emulate, both “literary” and not, such as humor, irony, verisimilitude, and—most strikingly—plot. Seeking to correct these deficiencies, I sat down and wrote a book-length Sherlock Holmes–Nero Wolfe pastiche that I entitled Recipe for Murder. It was, granted, a mystery, and so would be outside the main thrust of my serious work—in fact, I wrote it under the pen name Dan Sherb. I never really thought that this novel would be published either. In fact, after I’d finished it, I showed it to one or two readers, who were universally enthusiastic (parents tend to be!). Then I put the manuscript in my sock drawer and forgot about it.

For the next seven years, I worked as a musician. My creative life mostly revolved around the songs I was writing. After my first two attempts at novel writing—one faintly literary and one a derivative mystery—I had realized that I needed to garner a little life experience before embarking on the serious phase of my art.

I had to see the world.

And I did, traveling all over the United States and overseas in Europe and Africa. Returning to the United States in 1976, I gave the whole singer-songwriter thing a good effort, forming a band—Johnny Capo (me!) and His Real Good Band—that performed regularly for about two years in the San Francisco Bay Area. In fact, we weren’t too bad, and we worked consistently.

Gradually, though, the old familiar but long-suppressed urge to write fiction began to nudge out music’s prominence in my creative life. I started to write short scenes, to experiment with form, to sketch characters, to play with voice and point of view. No plot yet, but still.

Over the course of seven years, I’d written hundreds of songs, and I had become proficient at the craft. Ironically, though, the songs often left me creatively unfulfilled and frustrated. The expression that called to me more and more was fiction. I didn’t even know what I would write about, but I sensed that I was getting close to the point where I might have something important, something serious, to say. I’d almost died in Africa, I’d been cheated out of half a summer’s pay in Spain, I’d had friends die (and even commit suicide). Beyond that, I was married and thought I was getting some understanding of the complexities of adult relationships, of commitment and responsibility.

Hell, I was almost thirty!

Time was running out.

It was time to get serious about my art and my life. If I couldn’t start writing my literary books now, maybe I never would.

On my thirtieth birthday, I bit the bullet and told my band I was quitting to write books. Over about the next two months, I threw everything I had into my first “real” book. Based loosely on some of my experiences in Spain (for that old Hemingway feel), Sunburn fell rather neatly into the classic “first novel” matrix—sensitive young man sees the real world for the first time and comes of age while tragedy and political turmoil rage around him.

In Sunburn, I took the opportunity to write in all three persons. I experimented. I was daring, pushing the fictional envelope. It was heady and wonderful and literary and above all serious—this was clearly what I was meant to be doing with my life and my art. To top it all off, Sunburn went on to win the San Francisco Foundation’s Joseph Henry Jackson Award for best novel by a California author, beating out Interview with a Vampire, among 280 other entries.

Next stop, Sweden. I began working on my Nobel acceptance speech. They’d never chosen a thirty-year-old before, but…

So I’d written the first of my literary works, the start of my oeuvre. While I waited for the publishing world to discover Sunburn, I wanted to keep the creative flame burning, so I quit my daytime job (always a bad idea) at Guitar Player magazine and immediately began another novel, Liner Notes, about some of my experiences in the music and performing world.

Flush with confidence, enamored of my own first-person writer’s voice, I produced this six-hundred-plus-page tome in four or five months and started sending it out to the same literary agents who, much to my surprise, had been turning down Sunburn with a frustrating regularity. My prizewinning literary book, they said, was not “commercial.”

And neither, by the way, was Liner Notes.

Well, what did they know? Great writers have always had to suffer for their art. This would be yet another life experience that would only enrich my later work. My critics would be sorry. I piss in the milk of these commercial cretins.

When Sunburn eventually found a paperback publisher, I realized that the $2,000 advance would not go very far toward giving me the time to write another comparable masterpiece. In the meanwhile, I had to make a living, and I decided that it was time to move to Plan B—to whip out a quick mystery under a pseudonym.

I began working on a novel about San Francisco’s famous Zodiac Killer. Entitled Imperfect Knowledge, this book imagined that the Zodiac, who to this day has not been caught, simply retired from his first spate of killings and emerged from retirement a decade later, only to be pursued and apprehended finally by… private investigator Dismas Hardy.

“But wait!” you say. “Hardy is not a private investigator. He’s an ex-cop, yes. An ex-Marine, a father and husband and attorney.”

Yes, he is, all of those. But he wasn’t then. It wasn’t yet time for him to be born.

art

When I had finished the first draft of my Plan B non-literary mystery, featuring Dismas Hardy, I sent it out first to the publisher that had taken Sunburn, certain that my award-winning writing skills would carry the day and that Imperfect Knowledge, though nothing like Sunburn, would be snapped up as a matter of course. I would then take the money and live on that while I wrote my next literary offering, my next “real” book.

This was not to be.

My publisher passed on Imperfect Knowledge. After about ten more rejections, I went back and reworked the manuscript from beginning to end, cutting about two hundred pages, working mostly on plot and pacing issues that agents and editors had suggested.

Among the things I did not consider changing was Dismas Hardy, who happened to be the linchpin of the book. He was a private eye, very much out of the gumshoe mold, the kind of guy I didn’t want readers to have to think much about. He did what other PIs had done, in pretty much the way they had done it. My vision of mysteries in those days was that there was a kind of generic private-eye template, and if one followed it religiously, the hero would “work,” the book would get published, everybody would be happy. In this benighted view, originality wasn’t really part of the equation, and so I created a Dismas Hardy who, though he wasn’t an out-and-out cliché, failed to sustain interest.

I must have thought it was somehow “mysterious” that he was such a loner and had no history and, really, no life. No love interest. No pets, no kids, no friends. I was saving all that good human stuff for my serious work. And so I sent out another round of submissions with a completely revised manuscript (essentially a new book) and probably shouldn’t have been so surprised with the by now predictable results.

Although, of course, I was.

Devastated was more like it. I had tried to make a career in music and failed, and now I had written at least four complete manuscripts, only one of which had been published, and published as a paperback original at that. The heady confidence that characterized my attitude toward writing up until then was beginning to erode. Could it be that I wasn’t, after all, a genius?

art

But there seemed to be no other interpretation.

Sunburn had certainly failed to attract a readership. The other manuscripts—even the two drafts of my Plan B mystery—weren’t exciting anyone in the publishing business either. I started to consider the possibility that I wasn’t meant to be any kind of a writer after all. Even more portentously, I didn’t have any more ideas of what I wanted to write about, literary or otherwise.

Three years passed. I remarried well. I took a lucrative day job writing technical papers and put my literary aspirations aside. I was going to be an adult and wear a suit to work every day and not think about my earlier foolish ambitions.

But I knew it was a lie, and my wife knew it too. “You want to write,” she said. “You want to be a writer. You are a writer.”

“But I don’t even have anything to submit,” I told her. “Everything’s been rejected many times over.”

“Not everything,” she said. “You’ve never even submitted your first book.” This was Recipe for Murder, the Sherlock Holmes–Nero Wolfe pastiche I’d written fourteen years before.

“Of course I haven’t sent that out,” I said. “That’s a mystery. I don’t do mystery. I’m a literary writer. And I didn’t even write Recipe for Murder as a book. That was just an exercise to see if I could sustain a plot and characters over a book-length work.”

“I thought it was good,” Lisa said. “I thought it was a book.”

She was right. I scanned the old brittle typed pages into a computer, reprinted them with a new copyright date, and sent them off to New York. Six weeks later, Donald I. Fine bought the book and published it in hardcover under the title Son of Holmes. Better yet, he asked for a sequel, which he’d release as Rasputin’s Revenge the next year.

At last, somebody was paying me to write novels. True, they were mystery stories prominently featuring characters—Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe—that had been created by someone else. Plus, they were both set during World War I in Europe. As entertainments, they could not have been more non-serious. But after my earlier disappointments with publishing, I was glad to be on the boards at last, glad to be getting the chance to write regularly.

Donald I. Fine asked me for another book, and I told him I wanted to change directions and write a story set in the present day, and in the United States, with a modern protagonist. I didn’t envision it as a mystery, but as a story of one lost man’s redemption after his world is suddenly shattered by… what? What literary conceit could drive a plot, or shatter a world?

The idea—startling in its clarity, profound in its implications—hit me like a thunderbolt.

A crime!

In fact, a murder.

And a murder turned my serious “literary” idea into a mystery.

Suddenly the inherent and irreconcilable dichotomy I had always perceived—maybe projected is a better word—between serious literature and the mystery genre vanished. I could tell an important story, perhaps even one containing a universal truth or two, and at the same time provide the kind of narrative drive that a strong plot could guarantee, or at least facilitate. I could talk about moral and social and character issues—surely the province of serious literature—and write a fast-moving and entertaining story at the same time. This was an enormous revelation—I didn’t need to pursue a Plan A for my serious work and a Plan B for stuff people might enjoy reading. They could be the same thing!

And Dismas Hardy, waiting in the wings all this time, began to reveal himself to me not just as a (snooty literary word) protagonist, but as a hero.

At this point, fate stepped in. I had begun subscribing to the Mystery Writers of America’s newsletter, The Third Degree. Sometime in the late 1980s, the writer and critic Dick Lochte wrote a cover story for that periodical, urging writers to stop writing about “private eyes.” The world didn’t need any more private eyes, he said. They had been done, and done to death. He pleaded for originality, new voices, a new approach to the mystery novel.