Ben, I have read 5 1/2 books of your Leo Hagerty series. (All
the Old Bargains fell out of my jacket pocket yesterday so I
will have to find it again to finish the book.) I have a few
comments and questions:
In the first book of the series, Embrace the Wolf, Leo
already has infirmities and old injuries so severe that they
impede his physical abilities. Spenser is in better shape
after thirty years. Why did you choose to have Leo like that?
Did you originally plan on Arnie having a greater role? I
don't think he morally could be compared to Hawk, but he
ceertainly has a lot in common with Joe Pike.
A Handful of Empty is a pretty grim book in which Leo loses
the two people he cares about most. It reminds me somewhat of
what Robert Crais did in LA Requiem, but was written ten
years before that book. Mexico is Forever, in which Leo
possibly is losing everything else, could almost have been
its extension. As that is the last of the books as of now,
did you plan that as a natural way to end the series? If so,
do you plan on starting another?
Do you think your being a practicing psychologist. has helped
you in writing the books? If so, how? Do you think of
yourself as a psychologist and author in that field who
happens to write hard boiled books, or a hard boiled author
who needs to do something else to pay the bills?
Mark Sullivan mentioined Leo consults James Grady's Rankin at
one point. Never having read that series I missed that. I
couldn't miss that in Mexico is Forever Leo hires Dan
Kearney's Agency to investigate in California. A nice touch
is that Leo met him at a private investigator's convention.
That is to my knowledge the third appearance of Dan or his
employees in another author's books. He really gets
around.
I want to second Mark's thanks for your agreeing to be our
guest author for this month. Now that you have an email
account I'm sure everybody on the list would like you stay on
after 2001 if you have the time. If you did you could just
contribute when you felt like it and would not have to answer
to the type of intensive grilling I subjected you to above.
Mark
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