Afterword to “The Miracle of Ivar Avenue” (1996)
Preston Sturges is my hero. In attempting a screwball comedy in Dr. Nice, I had occasion to study the masters of this form, and that led me to read up on the life of this brilliant man, which turned out to be as wild, haphazard, and unlikely, as full of triumphs and pratfalls, as any of his films. When I went back to the novel, but still could not get it going, I considered another Detlev Gruber story, and came up with “Ivar Avenue.”
For this one I wanted to turn the plot inside out and bury the science fiction element.
I love classic detective fiction, and this gave me the opportunity to indulge that Southern California, late 1940s form in a film noir about a comedy director. I loved looking at old Los Angeles street maps, locating a copy of the January 6, 1946 issue of Life magazine, finding out what the phase the moon was on May 2, 1948, trying to get photos of The Players restaurant (which no longer exists) from the 1940s. I needed a detective, so I invented detective Lemoyne Kinlaw and his own troubled life.
The only other element it needed was the change that came over my life with the birth of my daughter Emma. When I wrote “Ivar Avenue” Emma was a year old, and I was acutely aware (as I still am today) of how to have a child is to give a hostage to fortune. I have to thank Karen Joy Fowler for saying the one thing I remember anyone saying about this story at that year’s Sycamore Hill Workshop: “You cannot put a time machine and a man with a lost child into the same story and then ignore the implications.” Her comment profoundly changed the story, much for the better.
The story originally appeared in Intersections, which I edited with Mark Van Name and Richard Butner, and from which Bruce Sterling's "Bicycle Repairman" won the Hugo Award. “Ivar Avenue” earned me my sixth Nebula nomination and fifth loss.
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