For their generous help with this manuscript, I wish to thank a number of persons. Barry Cosgrove, one of Cardinal Spellman’s most illustrious alumni, gave me an intimate tour of his hometown, Brockton, Massachusetts, bought me a beer at the Lit, and told me all the lore surrounding Dee Dubs. John Pomerance hung around and was a general nuisance during our time in Brockton, especially in the bar, so I thought I’d mention him, too. Barry Fabius, M.D., examined, diagnosed, and treated Jesse Carl for me before he transferred the patient to Dr. Hellmann. Lloyd L. Reynolds, Commander USNR (Ret), was instrumental in giving me a history of, and a sense of what it feels like to be inside, the SS United States as it currently sits on the Philadelphia waterfront. Victor’s references to the ship as a boat are not the commander’s fault. The SS United States has recently been purchased by Norwegian Cruise Lines and, though it still sits as Victor describes, a seemingly ruined hulk on Pier 84, it appears to have a future as bright as its past. Much thanks also to Ronald Eisenberg, chief of the Law Division of the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office, for discussing with me the statute of limitations as it currently applies to Philadelphia. Many thanks also to Josh Marwell, Penn fencing class of 1978, for fixing my sabers. My editor, Carolyn Marino, has been an extraordinary partner, and I can’t thank her enough for the kindness and wisdom she has shown me. I also wish to thank the entire crew at William Morrow, including Lisa Gallagher, Debbie Stier, Jennifer Civiletto, and Claire Greenspan for their tremendous enthusiasm and support. My literary agent, Wendy Sherman, has been unfailingly encouraging to my literary efforts. Finally, the most important support I have is my family, who give me more than they could ever imagine. Much gratitude especially to my mother, who continues to instruct me on grammar; to my children, Nora, Jack, and Michael; and to my partner and love, Pam.

Question: How do you come up with your ideas?

Lashner: Ideas are easy to come by, they tumble out of the newspaper, they fall out of the sky. Almost every day I get an idea for a story. The trick is finding an idea that can sustain a year or more of work, that can grow and mutate into something compelling enough to be the center of a novel. So the real question is: how do I know if an idea is worth working on for a couple months to see if I might want to use if for a book? That’s not so easily answered. The idea has to speak to me somehow, it has to contain within it the characters that can bring it to life, and it has to embody a pair of contrasting ideas that can fight it out over the course of the story. This last bit is crucial. Every story has a main idea and a counter idea. Both ideas should be strong and have merit and the way they battle through the course of the book is what gives the novel its power. In Past Due, the ideas that are fighting it out through the book are all about how we can avoid becoming slaves to our pasts, whether it is better to put it behind us and move on or to fight to understand it and embrace it, with all its pain and failures.

Question: How do you turn an idea into a novel?

Lashner: For me it’s a three-part process. First I work with the idea, build it into a story, outline as much as I can. I don’t really do any of the hard work of writing until I have a beginning and an ending. Endings are important; they tell which of the contrasting ideas came out the winner or if the two ideas battle it out to a draw. In that way, they contain the ultimate meaning of the work. I don’t start the actual writing until I know the ending, even though the ending most often changes before I get there.

Once I have the basic outline, I begin the hard part, the first draft. I have kids and I spend the weekends with them, but five days a week I’m in my office, outlining and writing. I like to do between four to six pages a day. If I do much more, the writing is usually flabby. If I do much less, there’s no momentum to the pages. It is slower in the beginning, it speeds up at the end, but pretty much four to six pages, and I try to write them as well as I can. I don’t figure I’ll pretty it up in the rewrite. The major unit of prose writing, I think, is the paragraph so I spend a lot of time on each paragraph, keeping it taut and interesting and trying to find the humor it in. Four to six pages a day. And on each page I try to have a gem or two, something in the dialogue, a turn of phrase, something funny. Sometimes I sit around and nothing gets done, but the key is that I’m there, putting in the time. Often, after a day of nothing, I get so frustrated with myself I start banging out stuff at the end and it’s pretty good because I’ve been thinking about it all day.

After the first draft comes the most crucial part, the rewrite. I take what I have and then I imagine it all over again. What if this happens? What if that happens? How can I make it stronger, more structured, more interesting? It’s like I’m back to the first part, the outlining part, but this time I have a lump of prose to work with. When I figure out how to make the changes, then I go through it again and again until it works. Hostile Witness took ten rewrites, but I had never written a mystery before and so I left out some crucial stuff the first time through, stuff like suspects. In my rewrite for Past Due I emphasized some characters and themes that hadn’t been given enough attention in the first draft. For instance, the picture of Joey Cheaps is much more in depth after the rewrite; before he was just a petty hood who gets himself into trouble, but after the rewrite he became a more tragic figure, a guy who wasn’t smart enough or good enough and who let one failed crime, and the lie behind it, ruin his entire life.

Question: Do you write on computer?

Lashner: I’m not sure why this question comes up so much. Every writer has to figure out his own process and so you should end up doing what works for you. I write on a computer because I rewrite as I write, rearranging sentences, chopping clauses, and it makes the process go more smoothly. Also, I can type almost as fast I can think and that helps getting out ideas when I’m in the flow.

The interesting thing about process, however, is that the tools you use to get the words down do make a difference. When I write in longhand my sentences are sharper, terser. Maybe that is why I write a lot of dialogue out longhand. On the other hand, the ease of writing on computer gives my sentences a rhythm and tone that I don’t get writing longhand.

Question: What writers have had the most influence on you?

Lashner: One of the best ways for a young writer to get a hold on their own style is to start by writing like the authors they most admire. It’s an amazing thing, you start out by sounding like someone else but as the words pile up something slowly changes and after a couple of hundred thousand words you end up sounding like yourself. It’s a lot of work, and a lot of words, but it is worth it. By the time I started Hostile Witness, my first published novel, I had written close to half a million words of unpublished stuff and so by then I had a sense of my own style, but before then there were a number of writers I had spent time copying.