Ask a silly question. No, I mean "Ask a Silly Question," the first John Dortmunder short story, containing the elegant man and his class-ridden attitudes, which Playboy published in February 1981. Unlike in the novels, Dortmunder worked single-o in the short story, except for a phone-in from his friend Andy Kelp. Anyway, it looked to me like a one-off. I wasn't writing short stories that decade, or at least hardly ever, and Dortmunder was clearly more comfortable in a setting where he could have his gang around him. So that was it.

Except. Except it kept happening, one way and another. For instance, I was thinking one day about things John might purloin, and I thought of a horse, and I got a picture in my mind of John Dortmunder and a horse gazing deep into each other's eyes, and I loved it. But I couldn't do it. I haven't met enough horses to be able to write an entire novel about a horse. But, come to think of it, I could write a short story. And did.

More time went by, and then, as occasionally happens (my one link to Joan of Arc), another fragment of conversation wafted through my brain one day in 1988-"What's that noise?" "Maybe it's the wind." "What wind? We're in a tunnel."-and that became "Too Many Crooks," mainly because I wanted to know what those two were doing in a tunnel.

A year later, I myself had occasion to wonder what I was doing in Italy, where, in fact, I was on vacation. The trouble is, I don't know how to go on vacation. From what? I don't have a job, I don't have a boss, and if I have a schedule, it's self-imposed and mostly ignored. So there we were, my wife Abby and I, in a rented house in Tuscany for the month of August, and I didn't quite know what to do with myself.