Intensely proud

I opened Finding Flopsie tonight, skipped past the soap opera set-up and went straight to Chris on his own, losing his teaching job, his office, his p.i. license, and his pride, all in one afternoon. Absolutely terrific -- and then the story takes off on urgent business, active and grim, Chris Cable at his best, age 64. Whether I got Peachy's story right is debatable, but it simply had to be that way, role reversal with her evil sister, a tortured animal.

Not much to say about Partners, my masterwork.

I cleaned up Mars Shall Thunder for the anthology Eight Ruthless Novels, happy with it and proud of it, my first full-length novel. The Good Walk Alone was a rolicking comedy, free as a lark, fun to write, drove me crazy writing a serial to weekly deadline. DiMarco remains my favorite character of all, a tough female homicide cop, age 38. I don't know quite what to say about First Feature. Personal stories are holy, if anything pertaining to show business is.

The Case Files trilogy (Valor, Tar Pit, and Charity) are what they had to be, a modern Nick and Nora Charles, to honor Dashiell Hammett's final novel The Thin Man, a burlesque that broke the noir genre, gave us penthouse cocktail parties and sexy women as a backdrop to murder. Chris and Peachy are a little different, equals in life, an unbeatable team. A Portrait of Valor tests them to the limit of human daring and spiritual endurance at the peak of their vitality, 30-something, deeply in love for the first time, perfectly matched in marriage. In many ways Valor is my favorite story. Boy meets girl and they go to heaven and hell to earn each other. Being childless opens the door to an important truth, the wider moral horizons of Charity. In our calm, clever 50s, new life happens if we embrace it.

I suppose it's true that all of my stories are aspects of my personal life, things that happened to me, one way or another, amplified a notch or two. I wrote about people and places I knew well enough to speak confidently. I had a life full of adventure. A little sad that it's over, but that's part of life, too. No one likes to talk about the end, and it would be wrong to paint the final chapter of any fictional character's slow demise. Bad enough that I have to do it.

Nice to leave a literary legacy, the splendor of young adulthood and active middle age, great eagerness to thrive, a whole world to gamble and win -- or to lose, in the tragedy of Partners, a story that I did not expect to create. Partners was costly, in time and talent and weight of burden, everything I had to give and endure, the capstone of my career. I know it for a fact, I worked 20 years to prepare myself to write Partners. Completely unexpected and worth it.

Truthfully, I don't recommend that anyone else pursue a creative career. The field is occupied by hostile assholes and pusillanimous slime. Indie self-publishing is a fake solution, gateway to obscurity, sandbagged by Amazon and Google if you stand up for straight white wildcats. I cared about my characters and their circumstances, emptied my wallet to let them breathe and stand fully erect, a proud race of titans. "Old fashioned," Cass declared. So be it. We owe our industrial preeminence and military power to such people, men and women who face a world of tawdry evasion, ritual, and inertia, and kick it into the gutter, where it belongs.

A pity that I wasn't born rich, but if I had been there would be no Chris and Peachy, no Janet DiMarco, no Harry Faraday and Laura Oak, no Kyle and Karen, no Freeman's Constitution to honor and defend them. Pretty good bargain. Those who fight for the future live in it today, Ayn Rand said. True, false, or purple, I'm satisfied that I did everything I could to advance the idea of defacto liberty. Whether sterling hero or hardened criminal, nothing displaces human potential, personal choice, stern perception of values, to live free or to die a coward's quiet, anonymous, meaningless end on earth. The gift of life is not to be thrown away cheaply.

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