David Handler--Hoagie and Lulu Are Back

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Is there anything more fun than a comeback story? For readers who have missed David Handler's charming celebrity ghostwriter Stewart Hoag, Hoagie and his basset hound, Lulu, are back on the case. It seems that the Edgar award-winning series had some REALLY important fans, as David will explain!

DAVID HANDLER:  So Dan Mallory, executive editor of William Morrow, was having lunch one day with my literary agent, Dominick Abel, and I’m told the conversation went like this:

Dan: “Did you know that you represent my mother’s favorite author?”

Dominick: “Sara Paretsky?”

Dan: “No.”

Dominick: “Nevada Barr?”

Dan:  “No.”

Dominick: “Peter Robinson?”

Dan: “No.”

Dominick: “Okay, Dan, you’re going to have to help me out here.”

Dan: “David Handler.”

Dominick:  “David…?  I mean, David, certainly.  Very fine writer, Edgar winner…David?”
  

It turns at that Dan’s mother had been a huge fan of the series of eight novels that I wrote between 1988 and 1997 featuring the witty, dapper celebrity ghostwriter Stewart Hoag and his faithful, neurotic basset hound, Lulu.  She loved the books so much she had even turned Dan on to them.  He recently informed me that he was fourteen when he read, and loved, his first Hoagy, “The Boy Who Never Grew Up.” What a remarkable coincidence, I told him.  That was the same exact age I was when I wrote it!
    
Anyway, back to the lunch. Dan asked Dominick if I’d ever considered bringing back Hoagy and Lulu.  Dominick gave him my standard response, which was that in our modern Internet age of 24-hour-a-day Tweets and viral videos there are no more celebrity secrets, certainly not the sort of juicy secrets that would make readers salivate over a star’s memoir and the failed novelist whose second career was penning those memoirs.  In fact, I’d already begun to see a major shift as far back as 1996 when America became riveted by the live, 24/7 cable news coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial.  The Hoagy series, I felt, belonged to a bygone era. It was over and out.
 
And so I moved on.  I wrote a thriller.  I wrote eleven books in my Berger-Mitry series, an extremely naughty mash-up of the traditional small town New England cozy, that takes place in the historic Connecticut shoreline village where I’ve lived for the past 30 years.  And I recently started another series featuring baby- faced 25-year-old New York City private eye Benji Golden, all 137 pounds of him, who is an ace at finding runaway teens.
 
But Dan Mallory, I quickly discovered, is not a man who takes no for an answer.  He gave a young editor at Morrow named Margaux Weisman a copy of my Hoagy Edgar winner, “The Man Who Would Be F. Scott Fitzgerald,” and asked her to read it.  She did, and reported that she’d gone ga-ga over all of the cool pop cultural references from way, way back in 1991 – when she was diapers – as would all of her friends.  Why didn’t I consider reviving the Hoagy series as period novels? 
 
Right away, I was intrigued.  After all, I did miss Hoagy.  And I really missed Lulu.  So I did some poking around on the Internet and, faster than you can say Joey Buttafuoco, I was transported right back to the year 1992.  Seinfield was on the air and Jerry still had hair.  Big hair.  It was a presidential election year, and candidate Bill Clinton, the former governor of Arkansas, seemed to be fighting off what became known as “bimbo eruptions” seemingly every week.  Speaking of big hair, remember Gennifer Flowers?  Remember Paula Jones? Remember who People magazine’s sexiest man alive was that year? Give up? It was Nick Nolte.
 
We did have personal computers.  I had a Mac LC, which was hooked up to a printer -- but not to anything else.  No modem.  No telephone dial-up.  There was no e-mail. American Online didn’t become popular until 1994 or so.  There were mobile phones for professional use but the wildly popular clamshell cell phone didn’t come along until 1996. The Internet arrived in 1997, Google in 1998.  Back in 1992 our idea of technology was the fax machine, churning, churning away.  That and a telephone answering machine. It seems like yesterday to me.  But it was a quarter-century ago.   Ancient history in techie world.
 
Soon I was more than intrigued – especially when Dominick phoned to say that Dan had just made me a two-book offer.  “Seriously, I would be absolutely nuts to turn this down, wouldn’t I?” I said to Dominick.  He agreed, in his understated British way.
 
And so here we are.  After a brief 20-year hiatus, Hoagy and Lulu are back on the scene in “The Girl With Kaleidoscope Eyes,” which takes them out to Hollywood in search of Richard Aintree, a famous American novelist who disappeared in 1970.  It also brings Hoagy back in contact with the first great love of his life, Reggie Aintree, a gifted poet who Hoagy knew long before he ever met his famous movie star ex-wife, Merilee Nash.
 
A number of people have asked me if it was hard to find Hoagy’s distinctive first-person voice again after so many years.  Not in the least.  I slipped right back into it.  He’s the same as ever, and yet he’s not -- because I’m not.  I’m 20 years older and while I won’t pretend to be wiser I am more battle scarred, wistful and insane.  I can’t begin to tell you how much fun I had writing “The Girl With Kaleidoscope Eyes.” I love this book.  In fact, I think it’s the best book in the series.  But that will be up to Dan’s mother to decide.  I’m just going to continue having fun writing the next one, “The Man Who Couldn’t Miss.”
 
So many fans have written me over the years asking when Hoagy and Lulu were coming back.  I politely responded each and every time that they weren’t coming back, because I truly believed they weren’t.  After all, things like this don’t happen in the publishing industry.

Except for when they do.

DEBS: Um, can I just say, Nick Nolte? Really? 

But, seriously, I love the title and the cover of THE GIRL WITH THE KALEIDOSCOPE EYES, and I can't wait to go back to the days of big hair (and no social media) with Hoagie and Lulu. 

Witty and dapper celebrity ghostwriter Stewart Hoag and his faithful, neurotic basset hound, Lulu, are back on the case in search of the legendary American author Richard Aintree, who vanished in 1970 and has never been seen again. Their hunt takes them out to Hollywood, where they find themselves caught up in a major star’s murder. It also brings Hoagy back in touch with Aintree’s daughter, Reggie, a gifted poet who was the first great love of his life.

And here's more about David, who describes himself as a recovering journalist, and is the author of nine novels about the witty and dapper celebrity ghostwriter Stewart Hoag, including the Edgar and American Mystery Award-winning “The Man Who Would Be F. Scott Fitzgerald.”  He has written eleven Dorset novels featuring the crime-fighting duo of New York film critic Mitch Berger and Connecticut state trooper Desiree Mitry, as well as two featuring New York City private eye Benji Golden.  He is coauthor of the international bestselling thriller Gideon under the pseudonym Russell Andrews. He has also written extensively for television and films on both coasts for many years and was a member of the original writing staff that created the Emmy Award-winning sitcom “Kate and Allie.” He currently lives in a 200-year-old carriage house in Old Lyme, Connecticut.

DEBS: Reds and readers, what do you miss about the 90s? Tell us and say "hi" to David!