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The dreams started that summer. Nightmares, really. Intense and dark, with me always alone. It was always the same scene: I entered the tu
And then I would wake up just as I realized I had stepped into the mouth of a great waiting beast.
I didn’t have to go to an analyst then or now to know why the dream had manifested or what it was about. It interrupted my sleep often that summer and then disappeared once I made the journey through the tu
A few years later, my family had moved from Highland Avenue in suburban Philadelphia to Twenty-sixth Avenue in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, as my father chased a series of jobs in the sun. The Vietnam War was the backdrop to life then. I was in high school and not a good student, so I paid attention to Vietnam because I thought it could be my destiny. I remember the principal on the loudspeaker in the classroom calling for a moment of silence and prayer in memory of a former student who had been killed over there. William Fe
One summer I remember my father talking about a man he worked with in a real-estate office. He said the man had to wear a full beard to cover facial scarring from wounds he’d received while he was a soldier in Vietnam. He told my father he had been something they called a tu
The man refused to tell my father all the details, but my teenage imagination filled in the story and was possibly more powerful than the truth. It seemed to me that no war assignment could be more frightening or dangerous than being a tu
Soon after high school I knew I wanted to be a writer. I loved reading detective stories, and those were what I wanted to write. I went to journalism school in college and hoped that a job at a newspaper would teach me the craft of writing while at the same time giving me entrée into the world I wanted to write about: the police department. For several years after college I lived and worked in Florida and tried to write a couple of detective novels on the side. They didn’t work. They are about men who specialize in finding runaways but who themselves have run away from things in their own lives. Sure, I learned more about writing and the form of the detective novel as I moved from one draft to the next, but the manuscripts never got past the bottom drawer of my desk. I remain the only one who has ever read them.
At thirty years old, I knew I had it in me to take one more shot at a novel. But I gave myself an ultimatum. If the book didn’t work and was not published, I would shelve my aspirations and rededicate myself to my career as a journalist. In preparation for taking final aim at my goal, I decided to shake everything up in my life. I sent out résumés to California, three thousand miles away, the land of my literary heroes-Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, and Joseph Wambaugh. It was my conviction that I had to start this novel and stage this part of my journey in Los Angeles.
On the day I interviewed for a job as a police reporter at the Los Angeles Times, the editor handed me the Metro section and pointed to a story ba
The story was about a bold bank heist. Thieves had cleverly used the city’s labyrinthine storm water tu
Whatever I told the editor must have impressed him. I got the job and moved to Los Angeles. Soon after starting on the police beat, I was allowed to sit in on a detective squad briefing on the unsolved tu
My plan had been to spend a year or two getting to know Los Angeles before daring to write about this huge, sprawling, and intriguing place my heroes had trodden and known so well. But that night after the police briefing, I went into the spare bedroom of the apartment I shared with my wife by the 101 freeway and started writing. I’d had an epiphany: I would write about a detective who has a recurring dream of tu
I called him Pierce. I had read something, somewhere, in which Raymond Chandler had described the fictional detective as someone who must be willing and able to pierce all veils and layers of society. My detective would be such a man, and so I called him Pierce.
I wrote with the window open most of the time and wanted to play music that would filter out the disruptive noise of the nearby freeway. I grew up on rock and roll, but as a writer I found that music with lyrics could intrude upon the writing process in its own way. I was going to write about a detective who was alone in the world, so I gravitated toward music that invoked loneliness in me. Jazz. More to the point, the sound of the jazz saxophone. I started with the essentials-John Coltrane, So
My detective, like Frank Morgan, was to be a survivor, a man who overcomes his past to ensure his present-and his future. So I chose his music carefully. Pierce would listen to music created by artists who had overcome great obstacles in order to make it. Whether it was beating drug addiction, fighting racism, surmounting poverty, or rising above medical disability, the jazz musicians I drew inspiration from were survivors. And I gave the whole playlist to Detective Pierce.
By day I was a news reporter on the crime beat. By night and weekend I was an amateur novelist trying to finally make it happen. I viewed my day job as research for the night shift. It was as if I were dropping into a gold mine, down a tu