I had already started on Grootka when the accident occurred. I was talking frequently to Jack Webb, who had bought the film rights to my previous novel, The Blind Pig. It looked like things were happening. Seymour Lawrence, then an editor with his own imprint at Delacorte, had told me that he was interested in a multi-book contract if my option with Random House didn’t work out. But ... nothing worked out. Lawrence left Delacorte, Random House didn’t pick up the option for Grootka, Jack Webb died, and then Sam Lawrence died. I was bewildered, to say the least. And, of course, I was raising a child by myself. To be brutally honest, I was also drinking too much.

          I think the rejection of Grootka was particularly stunning, to me. This was a novel that had come to me in a peculiar way. When Cinda and I were still living in Helena -- this was before Butte, when Devin was still a tiny baby -- I was considering several ideas for a novel, when one night I had a strange dream in which I saw this huge, hulking, menacing figure. I knew his name was Grootka. There came to me a powerful sense of the story and I got up and rushed downstairs to my study and groggily typed down as much as I could recall, then went back to bed, confident that I’d preserved at least a large part of the story. In the morning, I found that I’d typed only a few lines, including the name. But I still had a sense of the story. I started writing it. Then a number of other events intervened, as I’ve indicated. When I really got down to the story, in Hamilton, now, after Cinda’s death and moving and making brave plans for the future, it actually went very well. My editor at Random House was very enthusiastic. I remember her saying, after reading the first fifty pages or so: "This is great! Where have you been keeping this stuff?" It was, thus, tremendously disappointing when she reluctantly rejected the novel. I was not to know, for several years, that the reason for the rejection had to do with an editorial shakeup at Random House. Evidently, there had been a change of editors and Barbe Hammer was now out of the mystery division. And so was I, along with several other of "her" writers. But I didn’t know this. I thought it was because the book "didn’t work." And Barbe, loyal to the company, did not tell me differently.

          I struggled along for a couple of years, writing new stuff, but not getting anywhere. I didn’t even rewrite my rough draft of Grootka. I eventually moved to a house out in the country. In, I think, 1986 or 1987, I got a phone call from Dennis McMillan, a young fan of noir fiction, who was also a publisher of small, limited editions, mostly reprints of novels of the thirties and forties. He happened to be a fan of The Diehard and The Blind Pig. He’d bumped into a friend of mine, Richard Ford, at a book convention in Miami, and learned that I was living in Montana and that I had an unpublished novel. I sent him Grootka, although I was not greatly enthusiastic about an obscure publication of this book, which I still thought was pretty good. Dennis really liked the novel, but he couldn’t afford to publish it. He did do a great paperback version of The Blind Pig, with a cover and title page illustrations by my friend, the San Francisco underground cartoonist, S. Clay Wilson. The best thing he did, however, was recommend the book to a small press in Vermont, the Countryman Press, which had an imprint called Foul Play Press. There, two rusticated editors from the publishing wars in New York, named Lou -- Lou Cannenstine and Lou Wilder -- were enthusiastic about the book. Lou Wilder, in particular, loved it. They published it in 1990. Alas, it was the last project for Lou Wilder. He died of a brain tumor before publication, though not before we had galleys. A lovely man. His encouragement was tremendous.

          Subsequently, my novels have been published by Atlantic Monthly Press, and I feel like I’ve gotten back on track, thanks to them, and, of course, to Dennis McMillan and Lou Wilder and Lou Cannenstine.

          The character Grootka has been good to me. It’s hard for me to know how far (if at all) I departed from my initial, dream image of this character and the story. It’s possible that later ideas eclipsed the initial image, but I don’t think so. I feel that it was influenced, to a degree, by characters in some of the works of Swiss novelist, Friedrich Durrenmatt. The key idea was menace. The figure, or character, was to be a kind of force of nature personality. I think I’ve realized that in the character as he exists.

           Another aspect was that as the Mulheisen novels developed, I felt that the detective, Mulheisen, should not carry the story alone. In fact, from the start, this had been something I’d noticed when Joe Service came on the scene. Grootka was another gesture in that direction. Joe, or Grootka, are larger-than-life characters. Or, it may be, they are simply hyper-realistic characters. Mulheisen is meant to be constrained by conventions of realism, but Grootka (and Joe) has less need of "realistic" support. They can do things for the author that Mulheisen can’t: their actions don’t need much background or explanation. Thus, they both simply "know" things that Mulheisen has to figure out. I don’t fret about justifying their sometimes bizarre activities, not in the way that I do for Mulheisen. This frees the action considerably. I don’t mean to be pretentious, but one could see them as a Caliban and an Ariel to Mulheisen’s Prospero.

          Grootka has now appeared in two more novels, as the narrator of notebooks left to Mulheisen, in Man With An Axe, and in a new story-in-progress, as a narrator of the story of Mo Free. The character was drawn in part from stories I heard from my brother, Larry, about some old, legendary hard-ass cops in Detroit.

          Grootka has been an important novel for me. I hope you like it.