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Did I write these stories?

That was my first thought when I read the galley for The Detective: And Other True Stories, in which Mike Sager and Alex Belth, both of Esquire lineage, collect eight of my magazine articles from as long as 35 years ago. It was as if I were reading the stories for the first time, so distant that I had forgotten the arduous research, interviews, notes, transcribing, writing, re-writing, editing, and re-writing again that had gone into them. I had forgotten the muck of craft. And when I came across the words of the frail 84-year-old preacher I had portrayed in one of the stories as he listened to taped sermons he had given as a young man, his words had new meaning to me, now a man not so many years short of the preacher’s age then.

“I was,” he said hesitantly, “good.”

“Be that it made some contribution.”