When at a loss, write. The only writing materials around were pen and paper-pen and postcard to begin with, but we upgraded-and so I wound up doing, in longhand, "A Midsummer Daydream," in which John Dortmunder finds himself at loose ends outside New York City, not knowing what to do in this strange locale. I typed it when I got home, since my handwriting looks like a ball of string a kitten has played with, and Playboy took that one, too, like the others.

Then there came an anomaly. The Sunday edition of the New York Times doesn't weigh enough all by itself to satisfy its editors, so they add special sections now and again, and sometimes this special section is a Health supplement to the Magazine. An editor from there phoned me, one day in 1989, wondering if John Dortmunder had any thoughts about health, and I had to admit I didn't know but I'd ask. I did, and when "The Dortmunder Workout" was published, in the Health supplement to the New York Times Magazine, in the spring of 1990, John was the only guy in the issue without a sweatband around his brow. The editor told me afterward that the staffers who already knew Dortmunder thought it was a nice piece, but those who hadn't previously met my boy were baffled. Well, that seems fair.

After "The Dortmunder Workout" and its preceding four short stories during the '80s, I expected the two of us would really be content from now on to stay forever in the land of long-form, but no. A thought came to me, in the early '90s, that a person being chased, wanting to hide, coming across a party, might hide in that milieu not by pretending to be a partygoer- won't the other partygoers realize they don't know him?-but by becoming a member of the caterer's crew, moving among the revelers with little trays of ringer food. The other waiters, being temps themselves, won't be surprised to see an unfamiliar face within their group, so maybe the pursued person could blend into this party tapestry until the baying of hounds has receded into the distance. For John and me, it seemed worth the try.