HIT ON THE HOUSE was my first novel for my present publisher, Atlantic Monthly Press. This is a great publisher and I’m delighted to be with them. My original editor was Carl Navarre, who was then the owner of the press. It is now formally Grove/Atlantic Press and my editor is Morgan Entrekin, who is one of the owners of this, one of the last of the independent major publishers. I wrote this novel at my then home, which I had built with three or four of my old carpentry buddies, Eric Johnson, Neil McMahon (himself a published novelist -- look for his Adversary, under the pseudonym, Daniel Rhodes), and Larry Pierce. Eric was the contractor. It was a great place to write, with a spectacular view of the Bitterroot Mountains. Ultimately, however, I decided to sell and move into Missoula, where I now live.

          I wrote this novel in 1991. I remember driving around San Francisco with Clay Wilson, the brilliant underground cartoonist, and telling him the story. At that time, I envisioned it as a story about a weird guy who decides to assassinate known drug trade and other racket villains, ostensibly as a favor to Mulheisen, who hardly knows the guy. Mulheisen had been a high school admirer of the killer’s wife and now gets him out of trouble on some minor scrape, as a favor to her. This is how the guy repaid the favor, although Mulheisen isn’t aware, at first, of what is going on. Anyway, that was the initial story. Clay Wilson liked it and said, "Call it Hit On the House!" The story got quite a bit more complex as I wrote it, but the title stayed.

          This story kicked off a new phase of my Mulheisen series. At the time I wrote it I was reading the wonderful British novelist, Patrick O’Brian. He had, at that time, written a series of about ten novels about two terrific characters, Captain Jack Aubrey and his friend, the physician and naturalist, and anti-Bonaparte spy, Stephen Maturin, during the Napoleonic Wars. O’Brian is something of a phenomenon. He had taken a sub-genre, the historical naval adventure tale, and elevated it the status of serious literature. He did this through uncompromising literary ability and intellectual vigor. I was and remain impressed. One of the problems I saw with continuing to write mystery novels was that, with few exceptions, the genre lacked genuine literary value. In the eyes of most critics it was mere hackwork and not to be mentioned in the same breath with works of real literary merit. And yet, most of the "literary" novels that one read were hardly more serious or better written than the best of the mystery field; indeed, many if not most, were all but unreadable. Yet even the weakest of them was regarded with more seriousness than the best mystery novels. Obviously, O’Brian had managed to avoid being ghettoized, while at the same time writing books that were clearly popular and entertaining. I certainly aspired to that position. I had noticed that in Europe, there was nothing like the condescension of American reviewers and critics for work that had genre qualities. The idea of genre had nothing like our haughty disregard.

          Another thing I liked about O’Brian’s books was the way the novels blithely ignored the problem of closure. This had long been one of my bugaboos about the novel, in general. There was and is a convention that a story must have pretty much a full and complete conclusion. And yet, the primary strain of fiction was and is, "realistic": i.e, it purports to tell us about events that could and might happen in real life. But as we know, except for incidents, most lives do not play out in just that way: one event leads inevitably to another, and yet another. The only closure is death, and even then the ramifications of the events of one life lead on to other events. There is a long and interesting tradition in literary criticism about the nature of closure. Frank Kermode, for instance, wrote an entire book called The Sense of an Ending, in which he addresses this problem in fascinating detail. He suggests, for instance, that Western literature only acquired this notion from the Hebrews and their concept of an end to time, which found its apotheosis in their religious heirs, the Christians, with their apocalyptic view of history that begins Here, and will end There (sooner than you think!). Other literatures tended, and still tend, to see the human experience as endlessly repeated and cyclical.

          O’Brian’s books are wedded to a historical period, of course, and there is a suggestion at least that, with the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and presumably, with the deaths of Aubrey and Maturin, the story will naturally close. But, in practice, they seem to just go on and on, with characters dying, new ones coming in, others becoming important, then fading. Conceivably, O’Brian could go on writing these stories until he, himself, dies. By now, in fact, he is up to volume nineteen, I believe. He’s getting pretty advanced in age, but I hope he goes on for years to come.

          Anyway, beginning with Hit On the House, I began to see that these books could avoid that dreaded closure, could go on somewhat like O’Brian’s books. Certain discreet incidents could culminate, but that needn’t mean that the basic story wouldn’t continue. Very early on, Mulheisen had observed that crimes were never completely solved. We might find out who did what, and why, but the greater story of the crime would continue to evolve, as it were. By now, the events that take place in this novel have led to the stories in Deadman, Deadfolks, Man With An Axe (at least in part), and my newest novel, La Donna Detroit. Whether this will go on, I’m not sure. The novel I’m now working on, Mo Free, seems to step outside this chain, to be another reminiscence of Grootka’s, but I haven’t precluded continuing the main stream of the Mulheisen epic, so to speak.

          Anyway, Hit On the House, seems to me to be one of my better efforts. I hope you like it. There’s more to come.