It started one afternoon in seminary when I began writing the opening scene of a book to keep from falling asleep in Old Testament class. Well, no, that’s not exactly true. It all began one autumn day in my college creative writing class. Nope, that’s a lie. It began one day when I came across a copy of a book entitled Pale Kings and Princes by Robert B. Parker. Oops, no, that’s not quite right either. In reality, my love for detective fiction goes all the way back to childhood when I was introduced to a sleuth you may have heard of–Sherlock Holmes. Okay, that’s not, strictly speaking, accurate either. The absolutely honest-to-goodness origin of my love for mysteries goes all the way back to the Saturdays of my childhood, when my favorite cartoon was all about a gang of teenagers who drove around in their tricked-out van with their Great Dane looking for clues and figuring out who was behind the plot to run the charming local inn out of business by making people think it was haunted. Yes, that’s right. My passion for detective fiction goes all the way back to Scooby Doo. His original iteration, and still the best, as far as I’m concerned was entitled Scooby Doo, Where Are You? It premiered exactly 4 days before my sixth birthday in 1969. I don’t specifically remember watching that particular episode on that exact day, but do I ever remember loving that show. I adored the talking dog and his best buddy, Shaggy, and how, no matter what, they solved the mystery every single week.

To be completely transparent, I don’t remember which of the next two influences I was exposed to first. But they had to be really close together. Somewhere around my twelfth year, I began watching one classic detective and reading another. About the same time I discovered the true granddaddy of them all, Sherlock Holmes(no idea how, though it may well have been one of the great old black-and-white movies with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce), I also fell in love with a short-lived series on NBC starring Jim Hutton as Ellery Queen. These classic mysteries were solved through deductive reasoning and the fun was that, in the course of the story, all the information needed to solve the crime was presented to the reader/watcher. The problem for the audience was to sort through all the red herrings to pick out the truly useful clues and ferret out the murderer. Being honest once more, I wasn’t really very good at it. But I loved the stories nonetheless, not in least part because I grew up with a strong sense of justice, the importance of standing up for the right, and defending the weak from those who would prey on them. I didn’t have the ability to clearly enunciate those feelings, but it was there nonetheless.

And then, one day, in my college years, a cataclysmic event happened. I discovered a voice. A voice much darker and more cynical than my own, but still one with which I resonated like none I’d ever encountered. It was the voice of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser. He was a detective, but not really in the sense that Holmes and Queen are. He solves crimes, but less with deductive reasoning and more with brute force and dauntless fortitude. That part is fun, but the two things that really hit me right between the eyes were his sense of being a knight born out of time and his ridiculously sharp tongue. Ever since I learned about King Arthur and Knights of the Round Table, I’ve been attracted to the Chivalric Code, a code that governs the life of the knight. It dictates that a knight live a life of honor, treat all with respect, raise women up as not weaker but fairer and deserving of extra honor, stand up for the right, and defend the defenseless. Spenser embodies this. Something else he embodies is the complete inability to filter his smart mouth. This is another way in which he and I are very much alike.

So, when the time came that I decided I was going to write a book, I knew two things. First, it was going to be a detective a la Spenser, but second, it was going to be a man who has a much brighter view of the world and his place in it than Spenser. One area of Spenser’s attitude with which I struggle is the belief that the world is chaotic and meaningless, with no external source, from which to derive any moral guidance. The problem with that, though, is with no external source of morality, any code one makes for oneself is too prone to situational ethics. And the idea of there not being an eternal being from whom I derive immutable concepts of good and evil, of right and wrong, of moral and immoral, leaves me completely cold. That makes for a world of survival of the fittest, of the strong dominating the weak, of right being determined by the group with the most weapons. That’s a world I’m not interested in.

And another way in which Spenser and I differ is in the importance of marriage. Spenser is exclusive with his beloved, Susan Silveran, but his definition of exclusive is pretty loose. They’re not married, and he has had sex with other women over the years, with the excuse that it was only physical recreation, so he didn’t break their contract, which they don’t really have anyway. I, on the other hand, couldn’t manage to date two women at the same time, even if both relationships were completely casual and there wasn’t even any kissing involved. To me, marriage is iron clad and all encompassing. Sarah’s and my marriage is the one relationship for which the most intimate aspects, including sex, are reserved. We talk about things I could never talk about with anyone else, we know things about each other no one else knows, and we share our bodies fully, unreservedly, and exclusively.

So my hero needed to have all the toughness and skill and wit of Spenser, but with a much different understanding of the world and his role in it, a man who follows the same chivalric code, but who does it with a completely different motivation. Rather than trying to decide what’s right and wrong for himself, my hero has a higher being that is a universal good and has given us a code by which to live. All he needs to figure out is how to live that code out. I’m not trying to say everyone has to follow that rule. But he’s my main character. And while main characters don’t absolutely have to share a moral code with their creators, in fiction like this, the narrator is often, if not nearly always, the author’s alter ego. Harry is definitely mine. He’s a younger, smarter, faster, healthier version of me, who has a full head of hair and can shoot a gun straighter than I can and is a martial arts black belt. He’s a better cook than I am. He’s a better singer and even a better lover. He’s better in nearly every way because, as a detective in this genre, he is, by definition, a human but one who is quite a bit above the average. He doesn’t have superpowers, but he comes awfully close.

And he must have, or at least end up with, a wife rather than a live-in. If he is in a romantic relationship, it must be a chaste one until marriage. But when he marries, he is free to be completely open and intimate with his wife in every single aspect, spiritual, emotional, and physical. At their best, they are best friends, confidants, and have a sex life that is fun and free, but is also held up as a sacred form of intimacy. It is completely exclusive, not because God wants to punish humans but because the surest path to a good, healthy, fulfilling sex life is when it’s exclusively with the one person on the entire planet you trust with your thoughts, your bank account, your home, your body, your soul, and your heart.

And hence were born Harry and Dee Shalan. For a short time while I was in college, Harry was going to be a completely different character, one who was a cross between Mike Hammer or Eddie Valiant from Who Framed Roger Rabbit and someone more akin to Inspector Clouseau or the imbecilic Maxwell Smart. A guy in a black suit and fedora with fists of steel and brains of mush. But it didn’t take long to realize there was really nowhere to go with a flat character like that, so he became my Spenser. What Spenser would have been if he’d gone to church all his life. As for Dee, how she and Harry met is modeled loosely on a real event from my life, but other than that, I thought Dee was pretty much my fantasy, as no woman could be as pretty and smart and sexy and kind and loving and tough as Dee. But then I met my Sarah and realized I’d been writing about her all along. My Sarah is the real-life version of Harry’s Dee. The only difference is that, while Harry’s prowess is fictional, Dee’s is nothing compared to her real-life counterpart. While I based my male lead on me, I was basing my female lead on a woman who, as far as I knew didn’t–indeed, couldn’t–exist. Little did I know I was shooting way too low, that my fantasy of the perfect woman was feeble compared to this remarkable, beautiful, funny, sexy, smart, real woman who walked into my life and completely swept me off my feet.

But I digress. That’s where Harry and Dee came from. Hope you enjoyed it. Let me know if I left any questions unanswered.