earlemerson.com

In the late eighties when my agent and I decided it would be a good idea to come up with a second mystery series, I mentioned this to an editor I’d worked with at William Morrow, Co. His only comment was that whatever I did, I should never, never put a dog or a kid in the series. His claim was that mystery writers didn’t know how to handle kids or animals in their stories. I later suspected he had no particular fondness for either kids or animals.

I knew right then I had to have both in my second series, thus Brendan, Mac Fontana’s son,  and Satan, the German Shepherd he inherits as the first book unfolds. The series went well, with the first book, Black Hearts and Slow Dancing, tagged as one of the ten most notable crime and mystery novels that year by The New York Times. I enjoyed writing it and stopped the series only because I wanted to do a series of stand-alones and didn’t have the time to keep up two mystery series while working on the longer, more-difficult-to-write stand-alones.

The editor who warned me not to include a kid or a dog in the series ended up buying the series and successfully edited the first two books without complaint. The structure of the series is based very loosely on the old television series, The Rifleman, in which a widower raises a young boy in tumultuous times in a small town.

All five of the Mac Fontana titles can now be found on Kindle and Nook.