Perhaps the one aspect of Sarasota's literary past that confused me into thinking I could be a writer had to do with the 1950's. It isn't a decade studied much in the academies where the serious professors and writers circulate, but careers happened, awards were given, movies made. In a very small way I intersected with this past at a restaurant called Coley's, at the other end of Main Street near the docks, where the once famous Liar's Club met to play poker. You ducked under a green awning, and saw an interior shaped like a shoebox—walls, tables and chairs made of dark, polished walnut. I brought Leah to a booth in the back room. She wore her blue dress that showed her freckled shoulders. I bought her a blackened grouper filet, a cold Corona with a lime wedge and told her about Mackinley Kantor, Joseph Hayes and John D. McDonald. This could have been the exact spot where they'd bluffed through straights and smoked Churchills, bragged about movie deals and book sales. Leah was my only audience.

Kantor won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955 for his novel, Andersonville, about the infamous Civil War prison for Union soldiers. This was just one year after Faulkner won, and two years after Hemingway. Kantor also wrote, Long Remember as well as Arouse and Beware. He died in 1977. Joseph Hayes' first novel, The Desperate Hours, was a best seller in 1954 and just one year later made into a movie starring Humphrey Bogart. Hayes also wrote eleven Broadway plays, and eleven more novels. Some of the titles include: The Hours After Midnight, The Long Dark Night, Island on Fire, and Come into My Parlor. But the member of the Liar's Club who fascinated me the most was John D. McDonald.

McDonald graduated from Harvard with an MBA and later served as a Lieutenant Colonel during WWII with the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the C.I.A. His area of concern was the Burma-China-India theatre. He started to write fiction then and published his first short story in the legendary Story magazine. Perhaps today he's best known for his Travis McGee mystery novels—all of which are set on Florida's gulf coast.

The first McGee novel, The Deep Blue Good-Bye, was McDonald's forty-fourth book. He wrote 66 in all. The last was, The Lonely Silver Rain, published in 1984, two years before McDonald's death in Sarasota in 1986. McDonald didn't shy away from movies either. He wrote: Cape Fear, The Executioners starring Robert Mitchum, Man-Trap, Kona Coast and A Flash of Green. But the sheer volume of work does not reflect diminishing quality. In fact, just the opposite. He seemed to catch his stride as he forged on and faced the mounting numbers. If anything, this astonishing productivity warped my sense of accomplishment, of how much work a writer produces, more than any other experience.

In some ways John D. McDonald looked like my father. Pictures I've seen of McDonald show his wild, white hair, sideburns curving around his ears, and his black-rimmed glasses. In the pictures he is playing chess at a concrete table under Royal palm trees. In the foreground I see a lagoon, mangroves, a bright sky. McDonald holds his chin and stares at a clotted chessboard. There is a cold drink near his right elbow. Though McDonald was almost twenty years older at the time and close to his death, my father's hair turned white in the mid-eighties when it was clear his career could not be resuscitated.

I remember him mostly behind his desk in the house. I have a picture of him there: he sits shirtless in a green, vinyl chair. Coffee cans full of paint brushes hold down stacks of yellowed paper—drawings, letters, notes, bills. There is a typewriter, a mug full of green tea, and a white sheet draped over the window behind him. The sheet almost hides the filthy wallpaper and the brown water stains along the walls. His smile is strained, pushing against his teeth and lips. He's trying to look busy with a sketch pad and a Scripto pen. His grey hair covers his ears. His beard is as white as the sheet behind him. These were my two models. McDonald made movies, lived on a barrier reef island, and wrote mysteries. On the other hand, my father was trying to have the house declared a historical site to avoid condemnation by the Orleans parish board of health.

In a mystery bits of information slowly reveal themselves like developing photographs. As a reader you study the puzzle of images; you try and follow the veins to the source; you try to fit the clues together. In a way, the mystery is an illusion the detective unravels. Travis McGee unraveled his illusions, his cases with a coastal charm that said, no matter if I fail here, I'm having a blast. It's exactly the kind of attitude I couldn't seem to cultivate. No matter that my wife was beautiful and charming, or that my dog admired me, or that we lived close to the beach in a sprawling, paid-for house. If my stories failed to win the praise of my peers, of publishers, I was sullen and perplexed.

My admiration of Travis McGee eventually found its true course and migrated to an admiration, naturally, of McGee's creator. But the truth is, I didn't learn of John D. McDonald on my own. McDonald came around by default, luck perhaps, a strange gesture of time and place and coincidence. But the thing about coincidence is this: there is none. What I'm trying to get to is the seemingly inconsequential job. The antiquarian book store that keeps a piece of my mystery, my illusion that slowly unravels. If I am the detective now, what do I see? Three bitter, failing fathers.

First there's Jay, my new boss, with his shiny, thinning hair and white teeth, his closely-trimmed, clean-cut beard and slightly almond eyes. He was an articulate, quiet talker and reader, a slacker, a romantic, a handsome man who would have been an exporter from Far Point Station in another time. He introduced me to James Lee Burke and Julian Barnes. He showed me the pulp covers of McDonald's McGee series. I fell in love with The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper. I ate the hardcore prose of John Fante and Charles Bukowski. J.P DonLeavy's Ginger Man and Joyce Cary's Gully Jimson were my imaginary characters, my alternate, un-tapped identity. Behind the counter of the Book Bazaar we talked about Hemingway in Cuba, Shakespeare & Company, bone fishing in the Bahamas. We became friends. The other J, Joe, the older brother and the owner, was a shrewd, well-traveled mumbler. When I was hired Joe was assembling Book Bazaar's twin in my hometown, the French Quarter of New Orleans, and calling it to no one's surprise, Crescent City Books. At Book Bazaar, we worked with the constant feeling that we were simply holding things together until Joe returned.

The few times I met Joe he was sideways, talking from an angles. I remember his derisive, bearded grin, the lights flashing in his glasses. I'd heard the story of Joe designing Book Bazaar in one, long night. How he had pulled the acoustic tiles and aluminum framing from the ceiling of the former dance studio, then painted the raw ceiling black. How he had built the shelves and stained them from scrap lumber abandoned off Highway 301 near an airport warehouse. How, over the next few days, all of the artifacts and decorations — old suitcases in the travel section with patches and stickers from all over the United States, an oar with a faded crew insignia nailed into the drywall, fifteen or twenty old cameras with shiny box frames and glistening lenses, as well as pictures of headhunters from the Solomon Islands displayed in the photography sections — had been found in Goodwill and Salvation Army stores around town. He had even installed a hollow, metal bomb with tail fins using ropes in the WWII section which fell one day when I was working, and landed with the sound of a real explosion just two inches from a very old woman's toes.

To me, the collection —the idea of first editions and antique cameras, rowing crews, exotic travel, expensive books — was an idea, a culture of intelligence just as exotic as the items they represented. When I learned the two J's father was somewhere in Rhode Island, where they all came from, in federal prison for real estate crimes, I imagined him an eccentric, genius millionaire. Even as a prisoner, he seemed to be a better father than mine. Maybe it was my fault. I stayed in touch through phone calls and letters. But it wasn't there; I just went through the motions because my father was not John D. McDonald, because I thought he wanted to be and had failed.

And maybe that's where it landed. Just going through the motions, a holding pattern so blurry, so misconstrued, that everything around me, every project every important thing was stalled too. Leah spent more time at work, watched a lot of television. At least to me, so self-absorbed, so determined to write something worthwhile, and yet at the same time so stuck in the mud, so stagnant, so un-alive—I missed her. I let her slip into an indistinct presence in our old house, a casualty of my detective work. Now, I see that maybe all that life right there in my lap was just the thing that was missing from my writing, a kind of vibrancy and seething and realness that often translates to tension and immediacy on the page.