In the summer of 1960 my father announced, “We’re taking a whole month’s vacation!” His voice was hoarse with promise, his canny grin the same as when he flipped over four aces in poker. But luck had nothing to do with it—we could afford a month in a cabin on Mount Desert Island because of his Guggenheim grant, the product of a decade editing by day and writing books and magazine articles by night.

I know now that he was beat and what those 28 days promised my father was rest. I couldn’t sit still long enough to know what the word “rest” meant. Today I’d have been diagnosed with a raging case of ADHD, and likely would have been stoked to the gills on Ritalin. Then there was no remedy for the constant ansties except to keep moving, keep doing stuff, keep running from that feeling of wanting to jump out of my skin. So what a whole month’s vacation meant for me was excitement! Adventure!

What I found was boredom. There were no kids my age to play with. My father erected a pup tent in the field outside our cabin. I rushed in there first thing in the morning and sat waiting for something to happen. By nine it was too hot. I staggered outside blinking, my tee shirt soaked, the sun beating mercilessly on my crew cut head.

I set off down the dirt driveway and discovered the only form of life—dusty grasshoppers that no matter how fast I ran always stayed a yard ahead of me.

And then it rained. Like other cabins we’d rented this one was full of holes. There was a brief flurry of excitement as my father ran from the kitchen with a stack of pans and placed them under the leaks, each sounding its own note in its own time. I listened as my parents lounged in armchairs—reading.

At the Bar Harbor library my father pointed to a book with two boys on the cover, saying “You’ll like this!” It was my first Hardy Boy book. A secret passage from boredom that had been hiding in plain sight as my parents sat, apparently comatose in their chairs. When I was done I thanked my father profusely, hiding my disappointment and real fear of the rest of that whole month stretching pitiless before me. My father smiled. “There’s a series.” A what? Back at the library we took out all seven of the remaining Hardy Boys books. I couldn’t believe there wasn’t some law against such profligacy and as we walked to the car hugged them like the lifesavers they were.

Sometime later my mother slipped me some Nancy Drews. I hid them when friends came over. It wouldn’t do in those macho times for word to get out on the street, where the price for reading would be ridicule and possibly a face full of fists.

I read a Fu Manchu paperback by Sax Rohmer. All I remember of it is a scene where the protagonist goes to the insidious doctor’s office to confront him. Upon leaving, Fu Manchu opens a secret door in a bookcase and enters the inner sanctum of his wicked world. This trope was undoubtedly creaky even at the time. But it was my first encounter with it. That moment of surprise, of awe, had me hooked. In the back of the book was an address. Mail them enough cash and they’d send me the whole series. The books came. I chased through the pages looking to relive that moment of awe, but it never came. Yet when I was done there was that old disappointment and fear again I’d felt upon finishing my first Hardy Boy book.

But soon I had Ian Fleming’s James Bond books, which were better, then John D. Macdonald’s Travis Mcgee series. When I came home after college, I’d borrow them from the shelves in my father’s office, along with the scores of non-series thrillers Macdonald wrote. I read every one of his books. A handful sit across from me now as I write my own Ray of Darkness series.

John D.’s enduring fame is in no small part thanks to Stephen King, who’s a huge fan. In King’s On Writing he nails the job of a writer—to hook the reader then pull them through the pages with that invisible line, the story. A good series has a line that pulls you through the whole thing. The books are same enough to provide the buzz of literary comfort food while different enough to keep your interest.

Travis Mcgee had a sidekick, the economist Mayer Mayer. As I began the Ray of Darkness series, I was aware that I owed Macdonald for my characters Ray and Bodine. But it had been so long that I’d forgotten to thank Frank and Joe Hardy. Though I can’t imagine those straight fellows would be happy thinking they inspired a couple of refugees from the counterculture.

I write my series in order to hopefully pay back for the countless hours of reading pleasure I enjoyed. But there’s also something in it for me. I don’t write in order to escape from boredom, exactly. No, it’s the promise of what I might escape to that’s had me punching these keys for the last sixteen years. Excitement, adventure, with luck that jaw-dropping moment of surprise. There’s a line pulling me through these books as I write them. And I’ve got no more idea where it’s dragging me than the reader.