And we found the same home with the final story in this assemblage, "Art and Craft," in which, I admit, John did poach on territory not normally his own. Maybe it's that he's been associated in bookstores and libraries with detective stories and their sleuths all these years-though, in his case, mostly in rebuttal- that led him at last to make, in "Art and Craft," the kind of observation of tiny detail that's usually the province of cerebral plainclothesmen and grandmas with cats. Still, his use of the technique remains peculiarly his own.

And I guess Dortmunder remains peculiarly mine, at whatever length. Originally, he was just passing through. He wasn't expected to have legs, and yet here he is, still domitable but bowed, apprentice, it would appear, of both the extended romp and the quick hit, the perhaps-not-exactly-surgical strike.

Through these years of John Dortmunder's brief encounters, there has remained one constant, and her name is Alice Turner. She was the fiction editor at Playboy, where seven of the stories herein first appeared, and through all these travails she continued to look upon John and me with bemused disbelief followed by stoical acceptance. (Acceptance is an important quality in a magazine editor.) Her suggestions have been not onerous and always to the point, and have definitely improved the product. She's also a terrific person who, in her off-hours, wrote a history of Hell, so what's not to like?

Speaking of which, some years ago, as a result of a contractual contretemps with a motion picture studio (the closest thing to evil incarnate left in this secular age), it looked for a while as though I might either have to stop writing about John entirely-a horrible thought-or change his name, which the harpies were claiming for themselves. A pseudonym for John seemed a possibility, since he'd been known to sail under colors other than his own once or twice already, but when I went to choose that new name, nothing worked. John Dortmunder was John Dortmunder, damn it, and nobody else.