"Party Animal," for thus it came to be called, did not begin life as a Christmas story, but merely as a party story. However, Playboy had a hole in its holiday issue that year, and what better thing do these people have to celebrate than Christmas? So there we have it.

But then, just to complicate things, the next story John and I embarked on was supposed from the very beginning to be about Christmas. I, who can go years without writing a word about Christmas, and John Dortmunder, who dislikes all holidays indiscriminately because everybody's home, combined to make two Christmas stories in a row.

What happened, I got a call from Otto Penzler, founder of Mysterious Press and owner-operator of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan. He explained that his store had a large mailorder business, that the Christmas season was a potent part of that business, and that he'd thought it would be a nice thing to give his regular customers a bonus, a Christmas present of a short story just for them, once every year, each time out with a different writer they might have heard of. Would I like to write the first one?

I consulted with John, and it turned out he'd always wanted to attend the occasional poker game in which Otto and I and a few others are regulars (it's the game itself, sans scheduled time slot or location, that's irregular), and which is sometimes played in the library behind Otto's shop. So John dropped in, played the hand he was dealt, and "Give Till It Hurts" was the result.

Until this point, all these briefer travails had involved John either by himself or in company with Andy Kelp, but no one else from his extended unfamily had ever shown up. But there was one particular character who'd appeared in a few of the novels- a fence with a heart of tin, a sourpuss named Arnie Albright- and in thinking about him one day I saw a little something he could do that didn't lend itself to novel treatment, but which could certainly be the basis for a short story.