The Man Who Swore He’d Never Go Home Again, David Handler Interview

Huge thanks to David Handler and Julia O'Connell at Mysterious Press for the early access to this novel and the chance to write some questions to ask David. I really feel these questions give great insight into both David and Hoagy! Read the full blog post over at The Strand Magazine website.

Buy the book directly from Mysterious Press HERE.

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Book Blurb

Stewart “Hoagy” Hoag always swore that he would never return to Oakmont, Connecticut, the small mill town where his family lived for generations. He certainly has no desire to interrupt his high life as the newest great American novelist to revisit the town that hates his family and will only bring back memories of his unhappy childhood. But when his childhood sweetheart phones to say that her mother, Mary McKenna, the librarian who inspired Hoagy’s dream to be a writer, has died, Hoagy knows he has to return for her funeral. Especially when Maggie adds that her mother didn’t die of natural causes.

Author Interview

You frequently utilise repetition in your storytelling, both in dialogue and narration. Notably, Hoagy tells us three times that he ‘would bet on it if he were a gambling man, but he’s not’. For me this paints a vivid picture of his character and almost dad-joke-eseque humour, was this the intention?

You probably won’t believe me there truly is no intention. I’m just a conduit for Hoagy’s voice, which is something of a compost heap of American popular culture dating back to the 1950s. Whatever his first-person voice narrative says and however he says it just comes pouring out of me. I did spend twenty years writing prime time TV sitcoms before devoting myself to novels full time, so that experience no doubt creeps its way in. But I was also a Broadway critic, syndicated columnist, essayist and humorist. It all creeps its way in. See above re: compost heap!

Hoagy and Merilee’s VERY new whirlwind romance sees them travelling together to Connecticut mere days after meeting. What was your reason for having this new relationship with Merilee be so new and fresh?

When I began the series in 1988 with “The Man Who Died Laughing” Hoagy, the author who’d been proclaimed as “the first major new literary voice of the 1980s,” had already run headfirst into a severe case of writer’s block, gotten hooked on cocaine, destroyed his marriage to Merilee and had moved back into his crappy, unheated fifth-floor walk-up apartment with only Lulu and his ego for company.

Since he had no money to pay next month’s rent and was facing the prospect of living out of a shopping cart in Riverside Park, he very reluctantly agreed to his agent’s suggestion that he ghostwrite a celebrity memoir for a famous comic of the 1950s. And so my crime series about a celebrity ghostwriter was born.

When I was walking on the beach last year, mulling over ideas for my sixteenth Hoagy novel, it suddenly dawned on me that we’d never known Hoagy and Merilee when they were happy together. Had no idea how they’d met, no idea how Lulu had come into their lives, no idea about any of it. I decided to write a flashback novel to the autumn of 1982 when Hoagy walks into the Blue Mill restaurant in Greenwich Village, and he and Merilee first set eyes on each other and can’t stop staring. I found their whirlwind romance to be giddy fun and it gave Merilee a chance to shine like she never had before in the series. I truly love her in this book.

The tragedy of the old brass mill provides a rich background for this novel. Did you draw inspiration from any similar real-life examples?

Connecticut was a major American manufacturing state in the 19th century filled with mill towns that made everything from armaments to clothing, clocks, fine furniture and, yes, brass. Many of those towns are no longer safe to live and work in due to the dye, lead and other toxic chemicals that polluted the ground water and rivers for decades.

Two years ago I gave a library reading at a beautiful little 1884 red brick library in a small former mill town 20 miles inland from the historic shoreline village where I live. I’d never heard of the town. There was an old water tower on its outskirts. When I asked the librarian about the water tower she told me it was actually an ink tower because there had been a paper mill there that was long gone. But not the ink tower. Anyway, that was my inspiration for Hoagy’s home town of Oakmont.

I had mentioned several times over the course of the series that Hoagy’s family had operated a brass mill for five generations and that he and his father had a major falling out when he refused to take his position with the firm, which subsequently went belly up. But I’d never talked in any great detail about his childhood, or Oakmont. When he gets a phone call in this book that compels him to return, this seemed like a perfect opportunity.

Without giving spoilers – As a human anatomy fan, I loved Doctor Joe’s detailed description during the hospital debrief. Because of the detail I wondered, did you have to research the anatomy or ask a doctor, or did you already have this interest and knowledge?

I did do quite a bit of medical research on my own but I got most of the critical details from my personal physician, who is a fan of my work and is always happy to take the time to talk to me and exchange text messages. He’s a great guy and he gets a kick of it

It was interesting how, only a couple of times, you, provided small insights into the future without straying from the current narration. Such as when referencing a future film of Merilee’s and towards the end. What was your thought process behind that?

I wanted to quietly remind readers that Hoagy was looking back from the vantage point of 1995 and that this was a flashback novel.

Although based in the 80s, the novel has a definite old Hollywood feel. Was this intentional? If you could travel back in time, to what time would you travel?

I’ve been a huge fan of vintage Hollywood movies ever since I was a kid, and it shows up not only in the Hoagy novels but in my series of eleven Berger-Mitry mysteries. Des Mitry is the Connecticut State Police resident trooper in a historic shoreline village very much like the one where I live. The love of her life, Mitch Berger, is a New York film critic who sees the entire world through the prism of old movies, as do I. I’d love to travel back in time and live in the world of those giddy 1930s Cary Grant screwball comedies and Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals. But that was fantasy, not reality. The reality is that the 1930s was the depths of the Great Depression in America. In Europe the Nazis were sending the Jewish people off to concentration camps.

If I were to time travel I’d be very happy to return to my childhood in Los Angeles in the 1950s. It was a sunny, joyful time. A time of new-found prosperity and hope for the future. Life isn’t like that in 2025. Not in Los Angeles. Not anywhere.

Again, without giving spoilers – when leaving the hospital, Hoagy finds it easier to get in another character’s car rather than the Jaguar. Was this an intentional red herring? I was convinced that this character was the culprit all along!

That was intentional. And it was indeed my hope that discerning readers would zero in on this character as the culprit.

I understand you are actually a cat person. As a dog lover myself I totally comprehend the reasons for giving Hoagy a lovable companion but do you think it also might have worked in an alternative universe, albeit differently, if he had a feline friend?

It’s true, I’m a cat person. My Berger-Mitry series is bursting with cats because Des Mitry rescues feral kittens, raises them and finds home for them. She’s known as The Cat Lady from Hell. Her fellow troopers run when they see her coming. Mitch has ended up with three and he doesn’t even like cats.

Being honest, I don’t think of Lulu as a dog. I write her as a full-fledged character who happens to possess extraordinary powers of hearing and smell but doesn’t speak. She goes everywhere Hoagy goes. Airplanes. Hotels. Restaurants. Broadway theatres. I can’t imagine a cat doing any of that without yowling its head off. Mind you there have been cat sidekicks in crime fiction over the decades. Dolores Hitchens had great success back in the 1940s with the elderly amateur sleuth Rachel Murdock and her cat Samantha.

Your writing regarding Kevin, Destiny, and their drug addiction is very vivid and visceral at moments. Where did you draw inspiration from this? Did you also have to check the terminology fit with the time period? For example, you taught me about ‘freebasing’, I had never heard of that before.

You’d never heard of freebasing? Really? We’ve clearly lived very different lives in very different decades. I was a wild youth of the Sixties and Seventies who, along with my friends, experimented with every illegal drug you can think of — with the notable exception of heroin. I was working in television and films both in New York and Los Angeles in the early Eighties when cocaine became the showbiz drug of choice, and destroyed the careers – and sometimes the lives – of countless actors, musicians and writers. It’s an incredibly intoxicating drug that makes you feel so great that as soon as you’ve had some you want more. I tried it a few times and immediately swore off of it because I felt quite certain it would destroy me. Being a writer, I did make use of the experience. Witness what it did to Hoagy.

These days, I limit my vices to Guinness Extra Stout and 21-year-old Balvenie single malt Scotch. Although I don’t consider them vices. They’re life-giving forces.

Hoagy swearing to never ever return home seems a tad melodramatic until we learn he has many good reasons. Looking to your own past, have you ever felt as strongly about a location you wished to leave behind? On that note, if Hoagy can no longer even think of Southern Comfort, and I can’t think of Fireball Whisky, what’s your no-go beverage?

I left Los Angeles for New York City when I was 21 because I was fortunate enough to be admitted to the prestigious Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, which had admitted only two students from the entire state of California. After I got my degree I thumbed my way through Europe for a year, flew from London back to New York and decided I belonged there. For an aspiring novelist, New York was so much more exciting than Los Angeles. Plus I didn’t have to spend two hours a day in my car. But I don’t hate Los Angeles. I returned there many times for work and to visit my parents. It just didn’t feel like home anymore. New York did.

My personal no-go beverage? No surprise there. It’s Southern Comfort. If I get one whiff of it my stomach still does cartwheels.

PRODUCT INFORMATION:

Release Date: March 18, 2025

ISBN: 9781613166130

Publishers: Mysterious Press