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Mystery Author David Handler to Speak at Essex Library

Stewart Hoag is back from the dead—and once again the fictional detective is investigating, no surprise here, death. Mystery author David Handler wrote eight popular novels based on Hoagy, as the detective is known, in the 1980s and ‘90s, but he thought that the world Hoagy occupied was so foreign to today’s readers that the sleuth and his exploits would make no sense in the second decade of the 21st century.

Wrong. After a hiatus of more than 20 years, Hoagy is once again solving crimes in Handler’s ninth novel to feature the detective, The Girl with the Kaleidoscope Eyes. Handler will talk about the book at the Essex Library on Saturday, Sept. 16 at 4 p.m.

The novel features a mysterious celebrity author, two estranged daughters, a book with false charge of sexual abuse, a Los Angeles mansion, and, of course, murder. It’s up to Hoagy and his faithful sidekick Lulu to put things to right.

They are an unusual crime-solving team. Hoagy is a once-celebrated novelist who turned to cocaine when writer’s block made it impossible for him to follow up his success. He has found new literary life as a ghost author of celebrity tell-alls, but when some people don’t want the secrets told, murder is one way to ensure silence. Lulu is a different kind of partner, one with an unusual voice. A bark, actually. Lulu is a bassett hound.

Handler thought that technology had done Hoagy in. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, he said, celebrity biographies, particularly those with revealing intimate secrets, were big earners for publishing companies. Most had ghostwriters doing the actual authoring, so Hoagy’s literary life made real-life sense.

Handler had long believed social media made the celebrity tell-all obsolete. With platforms like email, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, secrets today have a shelf life of minutes.

“I felt I couldn’t write about secrets because they don’t exist anymore,” he said.

Enter Dan Mallory, executive editor of William Morrow Press. In talking with Handler’s agent, Dominick Abel, who represents a number of big name mystery authors, Mallory told Abel that the agent represented his mother’s favorite crime writer. Abel began to reel off a list of his noted authors. Was it Sarah Paretsky? No. Ian Rankin? Who then? David Handler, of course. Mallory himself confessed that he had read his first Handler mystery, a Hoagy novel, at the age of 14 and loved it.

Mallory had a suggestion: Why not bring the detective and the dog back? Handler admitted he was intrigued by the idea and even more fascinated when Mallory proposed a two-book contract.

“I said to my agent that things like this don’t happen very often. He agreed,” Handler recalled. “It’s like a bucket list thing to go back and have another chance.”

Handler has lived in Old Lyme for the past 31 years.

“I grew up in Los Angeles and lived in New York, where nobody knows anybody. In those cities, people don’t have deep roots. It was nice and different to come to a place where everybody knows everybody,” he said.

He has used Connecticut for a mystery series featuring New York film critic Mitch Berger and resident state trooper Desiree Mitry.

There’s some of Handler’s own history in the 11 Berger-Mitry novels. He was once a New York culture critic for the Scripps Howard newspaper chain.

The Berger-Mitry mysteries are set in Dorset, a Connecticut village that closely resembles Old Lyme. While he doesn’t usually use real Old Lyme residents, Handler said he had mentioned Lew the plumber by name along with two now retired Post Office employees, Billie Laplace and Glenn Sticht. Laplace, referred to as “the postal lady” in one of the mysteries, remembered Handler even asked her if she wanted to be either the murderer or the murder victim.

“I told him I didn’t want him to kill me off,” she recalled.

She also thought he described her figure as “ample.” Other unnamed local residents often form the basis for his fictional characters.

The Writer’s Process

Handler usually gets up at five or six o’clock in the morning and works until noon. When he moved to Old Lyme, he was not only starting out as a mystery novelist, he was also writing movie scripts and television sitcoms, most notably as one of the writers on Kate & Allie.

“In those days I could work seven days a week, 18 hours a day. No more,” he said.

Now he finishes about noon, takes a walk, and spends the afternoon doing social media promotion for his new book. He tries to get to four yoga classes a week.

“Great to take kinks out of your back and also it’s calming,” he said.

Handler starts a book by taking two or three months to write a rough draft. Then he goes back and reworks it.

“The second draft is where I really put my tool belt on,” he explained.

The challenge for him in writing is getting almost no feedback for at least a year. Except for his longtime partner Diana Drake, nobody reads the manuscript until it is done. Handler himself doesn’t know every detail as he starts a book. He explains it’s like driving from Old Lyme to Los Angeles.

“You know where you are going, but you don’t necessarily know what roads you are going to take and who you are going to encounter,” he explained.

Still, he enjoys the uncertainty.

“Each novel is like a year-long journey and part of the joy is discovery, not knowing what is going to happen tomorrow,” he said.

At the moment, Handler is polishing the second Hoagy novel that he contracted for with Morrow, The Man Who Couldn’t Miss. Beyond that, he will not guess. The opportunity to write the two Hoagy novels was so unexpected it has left him unwilling to chart the future.

“I’m so amazed that this experience arose for me,” he said. “I’m completely out of the prediction business now.”

David Handler, author of The Girl With The Kaleidoscope Eyes, speaks at the Essex Library, 33 West Avenue, Essex, on Saturday, Sept. 16 at 4 p.m. For more information, call 860-767-1560 or visit www. youressexlibrary.org.