Dennis Latham: Life, Fiction, and the Pursuit of Madness

I'm kind of at the end of a long writing journey that began when I was a Marine in Vietnam. I've never had what a person would call an amazing output in terms of volume. Some writers can write a story in two days and a novel in a week. I worked on Lord of Homicides for two years before the rewrite. Since I rewrite each day when creating the novel, my rewrites were never too difficult, but they were time consuming.  Michael In Hell and The Bad Season each took about six months. Last Chance of a Crazy Virgin , Waiting For An Open Bed , and Sudden Victims took years of collected writing. Bad Night In The Holding Cell took less than a year. My absolute favorite is Last Chance of a Crazy Virgin. I had a ball with this comedy. I wrote the first sentence in 1976 and probably finished the novel in the 80s. It made a final marketing meeting at Bantam "over the transom" and was rejected in favor of a book by a more famous writer. It was originally published as Driving