Lewis Westerly was the author of Broadside, Ferocious Wind, and The Bright, Bold Beginning, to mention only three of his twenty-three novels. He was one of a breed of writers that flourished in the early 1950s; burly, chainsmoking men who, in between drinking binges and divorces, churned out dozens of vast novels that attacked a variety of white-hot social concerns: Drug Addiction, Interracial Marriage, Juvenile Delinquency, Anti-Semitism. And they didn’t just attack them, they sank their teeth into them and wrestled them to the ground, and made the reader feel he’d heard everything he ever needed to hear on the subject. On to Incest! Decades earlier, readers were in awe of these men and their massive, virile tomes. They couldn’t get enough of them. The more rugged and verbose the better. Men had made the world safe for democracy, so they must be worth listening to. Before sensibilities were forever altered by feminism and LSD, these cartoonishly manly men were gods.

Desmond had first read The Crowded Room, one of Westerly’s earliest novels, this one on the subject of schizophrenia. He’d come across the book on a sale table at a library and had bought it, feeling he was offering a last meal to an author whose work hadn’t been checked out in nearly twenty years. By current standards, the psychology was laughable, and the happy ending, in which lobotomy is made to seem like a minor surgical procedure with fewer downsides than a nose job, was deplorable at best. Still, there were sections of the novel that were so stirring and powerful, Desmond had nearly wept reading them.

No one would accuse Westerly of being a brilliant stylist. He had a haphazard approach to sentences and an undisguised disdain for the logic of paragraphs. Out of my way! he bellows to the commonsense rules of grammar. I’m trying to make a point here! But he had the secret magic of a writer who could hold you to your chair and toss you into the middle of his imagined world, no matter how ludicrous or even offensive, and Desmond had been drawn to him immediately. As soon as he’d finished that first book, he haunted used bookstores trying to acquire the complete body of work.

As Desmond was purchasing a foxed copy of The Hard Road to Hell in an especially dilapidated shop off Halstead, the ancient owner glanced at it casually and said, while writing up a sales slip, “I didn’t know we had any Lewis Westerly left in stock. We used to have shelves of him. I thought I’d cleared them all out.”

“He’s underrated,” Desmond said. “Have you read him?”

“I skimmed a couple. He used to come in here sometimes. Kind of a sloppy old queen, usually drunk off his ass and slobbering on about some sixteen-year-old boy he was obsessed with. I wonder what happened to him?”