John Lescroart

• Born: January 14, 1948
• Place of Birth: Houston, Texas

TYPES OF PLOT: Police procedural; thriller

PRINCIPAL SERIES: Auguste Lupa, 1986-; Dismas Hardy, 1989-; Abe Glitsky, 1995-

Contribution

John Lescroart created Dismas Hardy as a detective looking for a sense of direction. In other words, the detective’s involvement in crime solving is inseparable from his maturation as a man. Hardy is a man who has had several careers and is troubled about how to maintain a well-rounded family life. He finds help in the form of Abe Glitsky, a homicide detective whose major failing is that he is all too sure about himself and his ability to solve crimes. The two men need each other—Hardy supplying the doubt, Glitsky the confidence. Unlike earlier two-man detective teams (Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, as examples), there is no master/mentor relationship. Hardy solves crimes by asking endless questions while keeping his theories of what happened open to constant revision, whereas Glitsky tends to press his perception of what happened and who did it until all the facts fit or he has to start again with a different set of premises.

Thus, this unusual duo upsets the conventional format of the crime story, allowing Lescroart to combine the police procedural (Glitsky) with the legal thriller (Hardy). The friendship of Hardy and Glitsky—in spite of the conflicting roles of defense attorney and homicide detective—injects a level of intensity and complexity that is unique for crime fiction.

Biography

John Lescroart was born in Houston, Texas, on January 14, 1948. He has said that writing has always been in his blood. His father, a businessman, was a frustrated writer who regretted never writing the novel he believed he had in him. Lescroart published plays, poems, and essays in high school and college. Majoring in English at the University of California at Berkeley, he completed his first novel with heavy influences from and . A year later, he wrote a second novel, but he did not attempt to get his work published as he regarded writing as a means of self-expression, not as a career. He then developed an interest in music that led him to composing songs and performing in the 1970s in Europe. He returned to Los Angeles intent on becoming a rock star.

By the late 1970s, though, Lescroart began to realize that his dreams of rock stardom were unlikely to be realized, and he stopped performing. He wrote one novel about his experiences in Europe but did not seek a publisher. Then, he wrote a few novels experimenting with the mystery and detective genre (pastiches of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries). When his novel Sunburn (1982) won a writing prize and was later published, he began to think more about a full-time writing career. However, Lescroart had not yet found his voice, which was a troubling for him. In 1979, he divorced his first wife, Leslee Ann Miller, after a three-year marriage and married Lisa Marie Sawyer in 1984. Together, they had one son and one daughter. Lescroart continued to write and supported himself as a editor and writing consultant. His wife encouraged him to submit his Lupa series for publication, and within six weeks he had a contract.

Lescroart has attributed his increasing productivity and success to a life-changing event in 1989. He went bodysurfing in Seal Beach, California, was exposed to contaminated seawater, and contracted spinal meningitis. The doctors gave him only two hours to live, but he emerged from an eleven-day coma and a near-death experience that, he suggests, led to a creative rebirth. He then built on the experience of working as an administrator in a law firm for seven years by developing the Hardy and Glitsky series. In 1991, Lescroart became a full-time writer.

In addition to his years working in a law firm, Lescroart has attributed the authenticity of his legal thrillers to a lifelong friendship with Al Gianini, a violent-crime prosecutor in the San Francisco Bay area. The two men have known each other since Lescroart was fourteen, which perhaps accounts for Lescroart’s deft handling of the friendship between Hardy and Glitsky.

As of 2024, Lescroart had written thirty novels, twenty-two of which featured the Hardy/Glitsky duo and nineteen of which were New York Times Bestsellers. In 2022, after the publication of his novel The Missing Piece (2022), Lescroart took a sabbatical to travel and spend time with family. In a letter to readers on his website, Lescroart explains that he feels no compulsion to continue the stories of his beloved protagonists, but is open to the possibility of his novels becoming screenplays.

Analysis

John Lescroart’s Dismas Hardy is an unusual defense attorney. He often asks his clients if they are guilty (the best defense lawyers, as Hardy knows, disapprove of this kind of interrogation), and he confesses to considerable sympathy with the prosecution. This behavior may be due to Hardy’s having been a police officer before entering law school and his having a homicide detective, Abe Glitsky, as his best friend. The need to see justice done is what motivates Hardy and Glitsky. Therefore, even when Hardy believes he has a guilty client—or when the client has confessed—problems with police procedure or with the prosecution’s methods arouse Hardy’s anger. Consequently, he has acquired a reputation for taking on cases that put him at odds with the legal system and with his friend Glitsky.

The desire of these two men to maintain their friendship and to solve crimes together results in complex psychological stories that get at the heart of the personalities who pursue crime and at the way justice is administered. Lescroart’s own experience in a law firm has contributed significantly to his dramatization of how the legal system functions—often to the detriment of suspects unless indefatigable attorneys like Hardy represent them.

Dead Irish

Dead Irish (1989), the first novel in the Dismas Hardy series, begins with the main character at a low point. His careers as a police officer and an attorney are gone. He has also failed as a family man (his infant son dies in a tragic accident). He now works as a bartender for his old Vietnam War buddy, Moses, at the Little Shamrock Bar near Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. However, Hardy’s spirits start to revive as he begins to investigate the death of his friend Eddie Cochran, a young man with a promising future who dies in circumstances that suggest suicide. Hardy cannot believe his friend killed himself. To investigate, he has to deal with a police department that clearly wants no vigilante detective barging in on its case. Hardy's persistence not only restores a measure of his own dignity but also recovers the truth of Eddie’s death for his family, allowing them to heal as well.

The Mercy Rule

In The Mercy Rule (1998), Graham Russo is accused of killing his father Sal, a down-and-out loner suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. It is known that Sal was thinking of suicide and that he had a stash of morphine that he vowed to use when life became unbearable. Did Graham merely assist his father’s desire to end his suffering? Graham is charged with murder when fifty thousand dollars in cash and a valuable baseball card collection (both belonging to Sal) are found in Graham’s safe deposit box. Even Graham’s family suspects him of criminal intent. Although trained as a lawyer, Graham has given up the profession, first pursuing his dream of playing in major league baseball and then, when he failed to make the cut, indulging in a helter-skelter life that makes it seem probable that his father’s cash and card collection were too much of a temptation for him.

Even Dismas Hardy thinks Graham may be guilty, although Graham steadfastly refuses any deal with the prosecutor. To understand the nature of the crime and who is really guilty, Hardy must take several tangents. He must look at what happened to Sal, who was once an upstanding member of his community, and what happened to Graham, whose abrupt rejection of the law has made him persona non grata among the San Francisco legal community. Essentially, Hardy is called on to research the lives of father and son and their friends, finding out, in the process, that Sal’s dropping out of society is connected to an overwhelming sense of guilt over a restaurant fire that somehow shattered his faith in himself and in society. Hardy’s work is complicated by his fraught relationship with Abe Glitsky, who has little patience for the attorney’s roundabout way of gathering evidence and interpreting his client’s gestalt. Psychological analysis dominates legal procedure in this absorbing mystery.

The Hearing

In The Hearing (2000), Cole Burgess, a drug addict, is caught standing over the dead body of Elaine Wager, with the proverbial smoking gun in his hand. Normal procedure is to send drug-addict suspects to the hospital and to detox before they are interrogated. However, Elaine is Abe Glitsky’s daughter, the result of a liaison with Loretta Wager, who later became a United States senator and then killed herself. Loretta did not tell Glitsky that Elaine was his child because he refused to marry her, and Elaine died before Glitsky was able to figure out whether he should contact his daughter. Grieving and angry about Elaine, Glitsky makes a major mistake, turning Burgess over to detectives, who grill him for hours until the exhausted suspect, who is in withdrawal, confesses to the crime.

Members of Burgess’s family—one of whom is a reporter and Hardy’s close friend—call on Dismas Hardy to defend Burgess. Dismas would prefer not to get involved not only because he believes Burgess is guilty but also because he has promised his wife, Frannie, not to take on any more high-profile murder cases because they disrupt their marriage and family life. However, Hardy cannot help himself when he learns that District Attorney Sharon Pratt is going to make the prosecution of Burgess a political issue in her campaign for reelection. She is way behind in the polls and decides she needs to look tough on crime, especially because her administration has never called for the death penalty during her term in office. Hardy’s ire, then, stems from this perversion of the criminal justice system. Burgess has no criminal record, and Pratt’s grandstanding aggravates Hardy so much that he runs afoul of the judge at Burgess’s hearing. In open court, Hardy accuses the district attorney of turning the trial into a political circus. In his chambers, Judge Hill admonishes Hardy that if he makes one more outburst, he will be charged with contempt of court.

Unlike some of the other Hardy and Glitsky mysteries, The Hearing adheres closely to the format of a legal thriller in which legal procedure is paramount. The narrative explains in fascinating detail what “probable cause” means, how the defense has to prove, in effect, that the prosecution does not have enough evidence to bring a case to trial before a jury.

In this case, Hardy finds Glitsky more of an ally than adversary because Glitsky comes to his senses and realizes that Burgess’s confession is not “righteous”—a term the police use to mean a confession is ethically and legally obtained. Hardy’s fellow attorney, David Freeman, a master of legal procedure and courtroom histrionics, is another memorable character.

It is also in this novel that Glitsky meets Treya Ghent, Elaine’s paralegal, who not only contributes significantly to Burgess’s exoneration but also captures Glitsky’s heart. Finally coming out of mourning for Flo (his first wife who died of cancer), Glitsky now seems ready to start a new family and a new life with the compassionate but confident Treya.

The Oath

In The Oath (2002), when Tim Markham, the head of a health maintenance organization (HMO), is struck by a hit-and-run driver and dies in his own hospital, his death seems to be an accident. Then, however, Markham’s wife and family are murdered. Suspicion turns toward Dr. Eric Kensing, a doctor on Markham’s staff whose conflicts with Markham are well known—not to mention that Markham had also been having an affair with Kensing’s wife.

As usual Hardy and Glitsky begin to unravel a complex set of motivations and cross-purposes that make Kensing only one of several suspects. Much closer to a police procedural than a legal thriller (there are no courtroom scenes), this novel provides an in-depth look at how the efforts of HMOs to cut costs can jeopardize sound medical practice.

Principal Series Characters:

• Auguste Lupa is a British Secret Service agent who works for Mycroft Holmes, the brother of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. He is also patterned after Rex Stout’s detective, Nero Wolfe, whose orchid-growing hobby Lupa emulates.
• Dismas Hardy, a Vietnam War veteran, is a former police officer turned defense attorney who specializes in homicide cases, often relying on police detective Abe Glitsky, even though their jobs also lead them into conflict.
• Abe Glitsky, a half–African American, half-Jewish homicide detective, is a rather dour yet sensitive man. He has a rigid code of behavior, forbidding colleagues to swear in his presence, and adheres to a set of methods and ethics that sometimes puts him in conflict with district attorneys and defense attorneys who work the system but are not necessarily as single-minded as Glitsky is about finding and convicting the real criminals.

Bibliography

Anderson, Patrick. The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction. New York: Random House, 2007.

Lescroart, John. John Lescroart: Website of the Author. www.johnlescroart.com.

Pickard, Nancy, and Lynn Lott. Seven Steps on the Writer’s Path: The Journey from Frustration to Fulfillment. New York: Ballantine Books, 2003.

White, Terry, ed. Justice Denoted: The Legal Thriller in American, British, and Continental Courtroom Literature. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003.

Whittaker, Max, et al. “A Life of Crime (the Perfectly Legal Kind).” Sactown Magazine, 29 Mar. 2022, www.sactownmag.com/life-of-crime-john-lescroart/. Accessed 22 Aug. 2024.