“Why haven’t we had you on before?” Johnny frowned, cocking his head so that the question was directed to me and also to director Freddy DeCordova, sitting off camera in the left front row with his headphones and face mike.

“I’ve never done much radio or television, Johnny. Fortunately for me, the books have always sold so well I think my publishers suspected that all I could possibly do by making personal appearances would be to foul up a good thing. Most authors, from what I’ve seen, should be locked up as soon as their books are published anyway, because every time they open their mouths their book sales drop.”

Johnny grinned and nodded. “I’ll buy that. How many of your books have been sold—do you have any idea?”

“Not exactly, because they’re also in so many foreign languages, but I would estimate somewhere around eighty million copies in all editions.”

The audience moaned admiringly.

“Eighty million? Let’s see now.” Johnny picked up a pencil and wet its lead tip on his tongue. “If your royalty is a quarter apiece, that would be twenty-five cents times eighty million … good heavens!” The audience giggled.

We discussed several of my books that had become motion pictures. Johnny’s favorite had been The Century Plant, and Jimmy said he had most enjoyed the Academy Award winner, Scarecrow. Then Johnny checked his notes and briefly touched on several real-life crimes where police had called me in to act as consultant. My most celebrated case, of course, had been the solution of the terrible Houston hammer murders, five years after they had been committed.

Following another break for commercials, Johnny shifted his discussion and moved to a first-name basis. “Matt, have you ever started a book that you couldn’t finish—one where your own plot got so complicated that you couldn’t even unravel it yourself?”

I hesitated. All my little internal self-preservation bells were ringing, warning me that we were approaching perilous waters. My instincts told me to shut up and just answer in the negative, but instead I replied, “Yes, as a matter of fact I’ve been struggling with that kind of a book since long before I wrote my first murder mystery—for more than twenty years.”

“Twenty years! Wow! Can you tell us about it?”