Notes from Michael

Everything has led to this

I’ve been trying to figure out how to tell you something important.

And I keep coming back to one thought—

I feel like I was born to write this.

I know that’s a big thing to say after more than thirty years and fifty novels. But when I look back now, it feels as if everything I’ve experienced, everything I’ve read and watched, and everything I’ve written has somehow led me here.

To this place.

To these characters.

To these series.

So much about all of this has felt serendipitous. As if different parts of my life have been quietly moving toward one another for years.

And somehow they all met in Los Angeles.

I’ve told you about my trip out to LA to see my dear friend Michael Connelly and how my visit unexpectedly turned into a pilgrimage.

Almost from the moment I arrived, I had the strangest sensation.

I felt like I had come home.

Not literally. Florida is home and always will be.

But Los Angeles felt like my literary home.

Streets I had never driven seemed familiar. Places I had never visited felt haunted by memories I couldn’t possibly have.

And then I realized why.

I had been going to Los Angeles my entire life.

I went there in the pages of Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, Michael Connelly, and so many others.

And I went there in the movies.

I’ve spent countless hours in the Los Angeles of film noir, of Chinatown, The Big Sleep, and Blade Runner.

Everything feels connected—the books I’ve read, the movies I’ve watched, the characters I’ve created, the mysteries I’ve written.

Everything I’ve experienced.

It all feels as though it has been leading me here.

To Mase McKnight in Los Angeles in 1945.

To The Dume of Night.

To Michael McKnight in present-day Los Angeles.

To Crime Writer.

I’ve created two connected Los Angeles crime series spanning two eras.

After more than thirty years of writing crime fiction set largely in Florida, I’m beginning something new.

I’m going to Los Angeles.

And I hope you’ll come with me.

Both The Dume of Night and Crime Writer are coming in 2027.

The Dume of Night brings together so much of what I’ve loved my entire life: private detectives, hard-boiled crime fiction, classic Hollywood, film noir, mystery, and Los Angeles itself.

But it brings together something else, too—the writer I’ve spent over thirty years becoming.

Which makes the timing feel almost impossibly perfect.

2027 is my 30th anniversary as a novelist.

Thirty years. More than fifty novels. Millions of books in the hands of readers.

And as I enter my fourth decade of doing the thing I love most, I get to begin again.

I get to introduce you to Mason “Mase” McKnight and his grandson, Michael McKnight.

Booklist once wrote, “Michael Lister writes some of the best hard-boiled prose going. Nothing short of amazing.”

With The Dume of Night, I’ve gone back to the world that made me fall in love with this kind of storytelling in the first place.

Hollywood sells dreams. Mase McKnight makes nightmares disappear.

Los Angeles, 1945.

Mase is a private detective and fixer for Premiere Pictures, cleaning up scandals the studio can’t afford to see in the papers.

When a naked dead man turns up in the bungalow of a rising Western star, Mase is ordered to make the problem disappear.

Then Premiere’s biggest movie star, Dina Leigh, vanishes.

And her six-year-old son is kidnapped.

Suddenly Mase isn’t protecting a studio.

He’s hunting for a missing child.

The search takes him down mean streets and into movie-star mansions, across studio backlots and through smoky jazz clubs, all the way to the precipice of Point Dume high above the Pacific.

In a city built on illusion, some truths are dangerous enough to kill for.

Later in 2027 comes Crime Writer, a contemporary LA mystery featuring Michael McKnight—Mase’s grandson.

Michael is a crime novelist who comes to present-day Los Angeles and finds himself trapped inside the kind of mystery he usually only writes about.

The two series stand on their own, but they’re connected across generations.

Two McKnights.
Two Los Angeleses.
Two eras of crime.
One family legacy.

There’s something wonderfully circular about reaching my 30th anniversary, looking back at where I’ve been while discovering a new road ahead.

I’ve been preparing for this since the first time I picked up a hard-boiled detective novel.

Since the first film noir I ever saw.

Through every book I’ve ever written.

It really has all been leading here.

Some of you have been reading my books for decades. Some have only recently discovered my work.

However you got here, thank you.

Thirty years of writing books doesn’t happen without readers.

You’ve been right here with me. And now I’m asking you to take another journey with me.

We’re going to Hollywood.

We’re going back to 1945.

We’re going down those mean streets.

And we’re just getting started.

Thank you for reading—and for taking this journey with me.