Cases

Author’s Note

The central characters of all novels lurk inside their creators’ psyches, otherwise they couldn’t emerge on the printed page. But Pierce Duncan, the protagonist of Cases, is — dare I say it? — a special case.

Dunc stole my grandfather’s name and much of my early life. He claimed that, like me, he was raised in Rochester, Minnesota, graduated from Notre Dame in the summer of 1953, and worked his way west through Las Vegas to Los Angeles, where he dug graves, wheelbarrowed cement, and fell in love for the first time.

Eventually, like me, he got to San Francisco and became a private detective with the L.A. Walker Company (he called it Edward D. Cope Investigations) at 1610 Bush Street. He and I both lived in Ma Booger’s rooming house at 1117 Geary just up from Tommy’s Joynt. Dunc’s first week as a P.I. was my first week, most of his investigations were really mine.

Cases began in my office storeroom when I unearthed three forgotten notebooks from the early fifties, plus the case files and field reports from my first months at L.A. Walker. I even found the old snapshot, taken on the day of my arrival in Eagle Rock from Las Vegas, that we have used as our author’s photo.

Cases became real through the generosity of others.

First, always and forever, is Dori, wife and lover, the largest soul I have ever known, who works with me on all of my novels. But with Cases it was a virtual collaboration.

Fellow writer Dick Lupoff dug out the week-by-week Hit Parade songs from the ten months covered by the novel. Bill Malloy, editor in chief of Mysterious Press, furnished expertise on the blues, jazz, and bop musicians of the era. Along with my agents, Henry Morrison and Danny Baror, Bill also bought me the time I needed for the novel at no small personal expense.

Tim Gould worked the internet for material to strengthen my memories of the red-light district in Juárez, and of Van de Kamp’s pioneering Los Angeles drive-in restaurant. Sportswriter Royce Feour shared his memories of the early prizefighting scene in Las Vegas. Frank Glover of the Sutro Library found me a list of such marvelous old San Francisco phone exchanges as ORdway, TUxedo, and Mission. Pat Holt triggered many forgotten detective memories with her wonderful book about P.I. Hal Lipset’s pioneering San Francisco years, The Bug in the Martini Olive.

In Cases I have tried to mix fact and fiction so thoroughly that nobody — not even myself — can now untangle them. I have also tried to honestly re-create the language, raw prejudices, hopes, dreams, despairs, sentimentality, violence, and social and marital attitudes of America’s early fifties as seen through the eyes of a somewhat naive twenty-one-year-old man.

Portions of Cases previously appeared in markedly different form in three long-defunct magazines: Manhunt, last of the pulps; Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine; and Rogue, one of the early slick-paper Playboy clones.