A long time ago, when I attended community college, I’d show up for classes I liked and either drop or take “incompletes” for those I didn’t. Later, I drifted over to State U, where, bolstered by stupidity and pride, I tried to fashion a degree program unaligned with anything the institution had on offer, and hence, did not graduate. But I did receive the Fitzgerald Award in Short Fiction, named not for F. Scott, but for Gregory S., who held an English department sinecure. Gratitude for this hotly contested win dented the armor of my arrogance. As it does to this day.

Thanks to State U and the federal government, I “studied” in Paris for a time. After the novelty of the French capital wore off—this took the better part of a year—and the money ran out, I returned briefly to my hometown, cobbled together odd jobs and a slender bankroll, then lit out for New York City, dreaming the dreams one dreams when one is dreaming of being a writer.

It was the 1980s, and both Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett were enjoying revivals and reprints, their reputations and influence enhanced as the film noir genre underwent another revivification. I read a stack of their books, and others by dimmer lights they inspired. I then pounded out a detective story derived from the material I was absorbing, self-consciously bleak and cynical (I’ve come by my current cynicism honestly) but the work hung together well enough to attract the interest of an established if down-on-his-luck agent who tried to sell it. Nobody went for the book, and the manuscript lies entombed at the bottom of a box somewhere in my apartment.

In the middle of my second or third reworking of that effort, Harper’s Magazine published an essay by Tom Wolfe titled “Stalking the billion-footed beast.”  Wolfe was outlining a lesson I had yet to learn, but the questions he raised in me would loom over the remainder of what I like to think of as my career.

“The young person,” wrote Wolfe,

who decides to become a writer because he has a subject or an issue in mind, because he has ‘something to say,’ is a rare bird. Most make that decision because they realize they have a certain musical facility with words. Since poetry is the music of language, outstanding young poets are by no means rare. As he grows older, however, our young genius keeps running into this damnable problem of material, of what to write about, since by now he realizes that literature’s main arena is prose, whether in fiction or the essay. Even so, he keeps things in proportion. He tells himself that 95 percent of literary genius is the unique talent that is secure inside some sort of crucible in his skull and 5 percent is the material, the clay his talent will mold.

Wolfe’s essay appeared in 1989, and by then I was deep into Elmore Leonard, a writer who toiled for years producing Western stories, publishing here and there in magazines dedicated to the genre. “3:10 to Yuma” inspired the movie Hombre, starring Paul Newman. But when Western fiction ebbed in popularity, Leonard lost chances to see his work in print, and, critically, to cash checks the work no longer generated. He was on the verge of quitting; about to go back to writing ad copy. And then he started writing crime novels.

Tight with dramatic irony—we always know more than his characters do—Leonard’s first few books, Unknown Man #89, and City Primeval to name two, which took place in a declining Detroit, were a revelation.  Process servers, loan sharks, bounty hunters—the characters barely adhered to a moral code, but when compared to the criminals they encountered, they didn’t have to work too hard to earn our sympathy. They talked like people I knew; their pop culture references were on point. Leonard pitted these not-so-bad guys against a “system,” one that seemed created solely to grind them down.

While grafting a touch of Leonard onto my own work, in my other hand I clutched the Wolfe essay, in which the author had also had quite a bit to say about “reporting.” Wolfe thought of himself first as a journalist, witnessing, questioning, devoting painstaking weeks to learning what the story might be before attempting to write it. He trotted out two Big Names, Emile Zola and Leo Tolstoy, Zola for the breadth of reportage and “documentation” that made up Germinal, a novel about the lives of miners, and Tolstoy for the sweeping nature of his narratives, qualities Wolfe himself was aiming for in his oft-frustrated attempts at writing a Novel with a capital N.

Holding up Anna Karenina as the apotheosis of the novel, Wolfe asked: “What is at the core of not only the private dramas but also the very psychology of [the book]?” And answered: “It is Tolstoy’s concept of the heart at war with the structure of society. The dramas of [the characters] would be nothing but slow-moving romances without the panorama of Russian society against which Tolstoy places them. The characters’ electrifying irrational acts are the acts of the heart brought to a desperate edge by the pressure of society.”

While not exactly Russian nobility, Leonard’s characters have something in common with Tolstoy’s: In their own way, they struggle against that indifferent (and hostile) world they’ve either chosen or are forced to confront. Another pointer I took from Wolfe is that even less resplendent stories than Tolstoy’s, including the ones I thought I wanted to tell, demand a social context.

*   *   *

The 1980s slid into the 90s. In Florida, the South Miami Beach redevelopment scheme was acquiring a life of its own, and with free publicity generated by a New York Magazine cover story, the scene boiled over. In the free for all of this Art Deco Shangri-La, Big Money elbowed for room with hedonistic homosexuals and druggie models who had given up their dreams of glamor. Nightclub impresarios made their oily descent, slapping together venues where seasonal arrivals would squander their evening hours and their wages, and dragging with them the servant class required to make a milieu like that go. I belonged to the servant class, but I was taking notes.

Across two years of disciplined writing, I came up with a crime novel set in a world that by then I knew from the inside out, featuring characters whose hearts were surely at war with the structure of society. The book was (eventually) published as part of a popular series. The critics got my Elmore Leonard thing; it would have been hard for them to miss it.

Then, while working as a researcher (reporting!) under somebody else’s contract, I came across evidence of a true-crime-as-history event involving a grizzled cast of World War II veterans—a story that was dying to be told. That book was published, too. And Fortune cast me in her golden glow. For a time.

Not that feeling has anything to do with it, but I felt certain I was capable of better. A crime story, but, you know, a literary one, had been ping-ponging around my brain and typewriter for the better part of twenty years. I’m embarrassed to admit that through innumerable drafts, and rewritings of the rewritings, twenty years isn’t an exaggeration. I went so far as to draw a map of the fictional city where the story was set. The gangsters and the thugs and the psychos toss Molotov cocktails through windows; they get beaten, shot, and blown to kingdom come by car bombs, but really (no, really) the book is about the spiritual world making itself manifest in the temporal one. In all humility—a virtue that doesn’t come easy to me—I think it’s a great book. Those responsible for bringing such works to market disagreed.

Is this where it all went bad? Maybe not. It occurred to me toward the completion of my wrestling with this beast that I could have written five books like the South Beach novel, maybe more, in the time it took me to finish the one that went nowhere. Except that’s not the kind of writer I wanted to be. I admired Leonard’s novels, and I still do, but what he hit upon was a successful formula. All of his books are pretty much the same.

The crime genre is mined out. The shelves of bookstores creak with interminable series featuring the same protagonist. How wonderful for these authors; they don’t have to bother coming up with somebody new. Witness the proliferation of podcasts dedicated, over multiple installments, to the dissection of a single obscure murder, or the sickening fascination with serial killers. It all feels more than a little shopworn.

For my part, in the intervening years I’ve cultivated my own grimy aesthetic, producing pseudonymous rants about stuff that doesn’t matter much, a movie script, a since-abandoned one-act play, and dozens of self-referential, reflective essays like this one. I’ve written a lot about horse racing, too, so for my next trick I thought I’d write a book about it with my uncle George Barone, a tobacco-spitting horseman who died in 1976, in the foreground, part biography, part reportage (there’s Wolfe again) part rumination on the glimmering mysticism of this sport.

Breaking news: The publishing industry couldn’t be less interested in a 65-year-old man of Italian descent with no track record (ha!) in bestsellers who wants to write about horse racing. But I’m not going to let a little thing like that stand in my way, not going to worry or wonder over what shape the material—of which I have plenty—is going to take, how much money I’ll be due when and if it’s published, who’s going to read it and what they might think.

I’ve got the first sentence: “The Oracle of Farmington was missing in action.” There. How do you like it?