Three or four times over the years, I got to hear Ross Thomas tell how he got started in the writing game. It was a pretty good story all by itself, but the best part about it for me was watching the faces of the wannabes in the audience.

Ross would explain that he'd been at loose ends after a job ended -- maybe he'd just finished running a political campaign for a friend in Jamestown, North Dakota, or maybe he had recently returned from Africa - - and he'd decided to try his hand at a novel. So he sat down and wrote one, and after a month or two he was done. It occurred to him that it might be nice to have it published, but he wasn't sure how to proceed. So he called up a knowledgeable friend.

"I've written a book," he said, "and wondered what I ought to do next."

"Have a drink," the friend suggested. "Take an aspirin. Lie down, put your feet up."

"I thought I'd try to have it published," Ross told him.

"It has to be typewritten. And double-spaced."

It already was, Ross said. Whereupon, he told his listeners, the fellow told him how to proceed. He was to get some brown wrapping paper, wrap the manuscript neatly in it, and send it to a particular editor at a particular publishing house.

So he did.

And, two weeks later, there was a letter in his mailbox, from the editor to whom he'd sent the manuscript in its plain brown wrapper. "He said they would like to publish my novel," Ross reported, "and that they would be sending a contract."

No wannabe wants to hear a story like that. If you want to win the hearts and minds of struggling writers, you're better advised to tell them of your own struggles -- the failures and false starts, the endless parade of rejections, the paralyzing bouts with writer's block and alcoholism and the heartbreak of psoriasis. Finally, against long odds, after enduring and somehow surviving more perils than Pauline and more tsuris than Job, finally the writer prevails, the book is published, and can't you hear the violins?

Well, tough. Ross told it as it happened, and he could have been a lot harder on them. He could have gone on to say that the manuscript in question was published as The Cold War Swap, that it was widely praised and won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best first novel of the year, and that it launched a career that brought him no end of awards, an army of fiercely loyal readers, and a whole shelf of books with his name on them, in none of which one will ever encounter an ill-chosen word, an infelicitous phrase, or a clunky sentence.

Because Ross was far too modest to say any of that, some of those wannabes shook their heads and told themselves how lucky he'd been. Yeah, right. The way Ted Williams was lucky at baseball, or Nijinsky at ballet. Lucky bastards, the lot of them.

When Ross died, many years sooner than anyone would have wished, one of the things we told each other at his memorial service was that, while we wouldn't have the presence of this dear friend, wouldn't have a new book to look forward to each year, we'd still have the books he'd written.

I suppose we always say that when a writer dies, and, while it's as inarguable as that Bogie and Bergman will always have Paris, it's generally about as much comfort. Because most books, however enjoyable and compulsively readable as they are first time around, don't offer that much when reread.

But there are exceptions. I'm not sure what it is that makes a writer re-readable, but I do know that I especially cherish those writers whose books I can read with pleasure over and over and over. There aren't many of them, and I'm grateful for every one.

Ross Thomas is high on that short list. I've read some of his books three and four times, and expect to read them again.

Briarpatch, as it happens, was one I'd read only once. It was published in 1984, and I bought it as soon as it came out, and must have read it as soon as I had an uninterrupted evening. My library has been purged several times since then, in the course of several relocations, but I always kept all of Ross's books, so my copy was on the shelf when Ruth Cavin invited me to write an introduction for it. (The opportunity to read it again was not the least of my reasons for agreeing.)

And, wonder of wonders, I did not remember one single word of it!

While I'm not entirely thrilled with what this may imply about my ongoing mental capacity, it meant I had the great pleasure of reading a new Ross Thomas novel. And it was a pleasure indeed, and one I shoud cease to detain you from having for yourself. I don't know if I have more treats of this nature in store for me -- a quick glance at my Ross Thomas shelf would seem to suggest that I have retained at least a little of all the others, but who's to say what a few more years of senescence might not accomplish for me?

Enough! I invite you to enjoy Briarpatch, whether for the first or the tenth time. It's a wonderful book by a man who wrote no other sort.

Copyright © 2003 by Lawrence Block