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It's hard not to love this place. Mount Rainier in July. It was even more spectacular than it looks here.

I remember years ago reading a story about one of my then favorite writers, John D. MacDonald, who wrote over seventy gritty thrillers with titles such as The Brass Cupcake and  A Bullet for Cinderella. He also penned a series about a character named Travis McGee where he used a color in every title; Nightmare in Pink, Pale Gray for Guilt, The Long Lavender Look. Wonderful titles. Wonderful books, too, though some of the language and attitudes seem dated when read now. Not his fault. He didn’t have a time machine. He wrote the first three Travis McGee books quickly and they were put out within months of each other. The thinking was that if one was to start a series, it was good to get some product out there right away and get the readers hooked.
Oh, yes. People get hooked on a series. Once a reader finds some characters they don’t mind spending time with, they want to return. Familiarity breeds . . . well, familiarity. The majority of mystery authors write at least one series. The mystery format is perfect for the notion since the framework of a mystery doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for exploration of the main characters. That means in a series, the main character or characters can be developed in a more leisurely pace over the course of several books.
My first three Thomas Black titles came out within a year and a half of each other. This wasn’t by design, but by accident. I wrote The Rainy City and by the time it was purchased, I’d already completed Poverty Bay and was well into Nervous Laughter. The Black series got a fair amount of free publicity and thus was launched as gracefully as possible. I believe it was the first really popular Seattle PI series in quite a while. The Seattle Times gave the series a boost with several articles about Black and about me. With the fourth title, Fat Tuesday, Adams News Service, a local and now defunct distribution company, turned the Black series in regional bestsellers. At the time, I didn’t truly appreciate how lucky this was for me.
Then, in 1999, using my background as a Seattle firefighter, (retired in 2010 after 32 years) I moved on to other things and wrote a series of thrillers centered around firefighters. . The time gap between Catfish Café and Cape Disappointment, numbers eleven and twelve in the Thomas Black series, was just over ten years. During that span I received many requests for more Thomas Blacks.  Disappointingly, there were even people who refused to read the fire thrillers. “I’m waiting for another Black,” they would tell me. So, I was always going to write another Black. It was just a matter of when.
We’re in a depression, arguably the greatest depression of our lifetimes. My stepfather lived through the first depression in the thirties and I believe this one has already been as unkind to him as that one was.
During the depression in the thirties, genre fiction got a toehold in the American psyche. Mysteries were particularly popular. I don’t think this was an accident. Mysteries have several things going for them that serve the populace in times of stress, not the least of which is that they tend to order a disordered universe. They put things into perspective. After all, they center around death and death is usually worse than anything we’re going through in our own lives. Also, in most mysteries, good wins out. Justice is forthcoming. When you can’t have it in life, you grab it in fiction. I had long thought if and when this country was plunged into another depression, it would be time to write mysteries.
So, as a writer and as an avid reader of other people’s work, I find myself gravitating towards mysteries again. And towards a series. Thus, I’m hard at work finishing up Thomas Black #13.