By David Handler
The Man Who Swore He’d Never Go Home Again is my sixteenth mystery featuring the dapper celebrity ghostwriter Stewart Hoag and his faithful, breath-challenged basset hound Lulu. I’m often asked by readers how it’s possible to keep a crime series that I launched way back in 1988 fresh. Actually, there’s a peculiar wrinkle in the Hoagy series: It has led two lives.
I’ll explain.
Hoagy is a gifted writer who exploded out of the gate with his first novel. He was widely hailed as the first major new literary voice of the 1980s. He married beautiful, Oscar-winning actress Merilee Nash, and they became the young superstar New York couple—right up until Hoagy developed writer’s block. He lost his voice. Lost Merilee, too.
When we first encounter him, he’s living with Lulu in his crappy unheated fifth floor walk-up on West 93rd Street and is so broke that he accepts a lowly offer to ghostwrite the memoir of a famously obnoxious 1950s comic. The memoir sells so well that he is now in demand as a pen for hire, helping celebrities spill their long-held, juicy secrets. Secrets that have stayed secret for a reason, as in someone close to them considers murder an option.
I wrote eight novels about Hoagy and Lulu between 1988 and 1997, then abruptly decided to end the series even though readers seemed to love it. And not just readers. My third book, The Man Who Would Be F. Scott Fitzgerald, won an Edgar and an American Mystery Award.
But the world of technology changed dramatically in those years. In 1988 there was no such thing as email, cell phones, twenty-four-hour cable news or the Internet. I still remember the famous televised news conference in 1986 when a gaunt, haggard Rock Hudson announced to America that he had AIDs. Rock Hudson had been a MAJOR Hollywood star for thirty years yet no one in America knew he was gay. Everyone in Hollywood knew he was gay. So did everyone in the Hollywood press corps. But the press corps served as gate keepers in those days. They kept secrets.
The latest addition to the thrilling adventures of Stewart Hoag.
With the advent of the Internet there were no more gate keepers, no more secrets and no more juicy celebrity memoirs for Hoagy to ghost. I moved on.
Wrote eleven Berger-Mitry novels set in a historic village on the Connecticut gold coast based on the village that I call home. When that well ran dry in 2013, I moved on to Runaway Man, the first of a promising new series. I was hard at work on the second novel, Phantom Angel, when my agent, Dominick Abel, called me to say he’d just had lunch with Dan Mallory, an executive editor at William Morrow, who’d told him that the Hoagy novels were his all-time favorites and demanded to know why in the hell I didn’t revive the series.
Dominick explained to him that I’d retired Hoagy because of the arrival of the Internet. Dan suggested I write them as period novels. Set them in, say, 1992.
I must confess that I didn’t consider a book set in 1992 a period novel. After all, I was still wearing a lot of the same clothes. But the idea genuinely intrigued me. I missed Hoagy. He was a part of me. His voice was my voice. I yearned to write Lulu again.
And so, after a brief twenty-year hiatus, Hoagy and Lulu were reborn in 2017 in The Girl With Kaleidoscope Eyes. And now here I am eight books later in 2025 with The Man Who Swore He’d Never Go Home Again.
My writer friends wondered if it was hard to pick up Hoagy’s quirky first-person narrative voice again after so many years. It wasn’t. I just sat down and started writing him as if no time had passed. He is me, after all. But I did notice a new-found maturity in him. After all, I was twenty years older. That’s a lot of real life battering and bruising. I also noticed more maturity in his relationship with Merilee, whose character has really blossomed.
Hoagy’s new lease on life gave me an opportunity to explore who he’d been before he became a literary superstar. It turns out that Merilee was not the first great love of his life. In The Girl with Kaleidoscope Eyes he is reunited with Reggie Aintree, a gifted poet, gorgeous wild child, and fellow punk rock devotee who helps him find his voice again.oHoag
I’ve also kept the series fresh by time travelling. The Girl Who Took What She Wanted takes Hoagy back to 1989 and a Hollywood ghosting project that never came to fruition. Merilee happens to be out in Hollywood at the very same time talking to Rob Reiner about filming a remake of Random Harvest. She tearfully informs Hoagy that she’s divorcing her second husband, that fabulously successful English playwright Zack somebody. Some sparks are rekindled.
But I’ve really time travelled in The Man Who Swore He’d Never Go Home Again. It’s the ultimate flashback novel that takes us all of the way back to the night in 1982 when Hoagy and Merilee first set eyes on each other.
I hope you have as much fun reading this one as I did writing it.
Find out more about Edgar Award-winning mystery writer David Handler and his books at his website. For more author interviews and insights, explore The Strand Magazine.