It’s a proposition requiring a certain amount of ill-advised nerve—launching a mystery series using a spectacularly famous person as your protagonist sleuth. Double that if your celebrity is a world-renowned writer. There’s no limit to the amount of scat that could fly your way: fans irked, scholars betrayed, traditions subverted, biographers crossed. That fact hasn’t, of course, prevented it from being something of a trend, what with mystery series under way centering on Oscar Wilde, Edna Ferber, Edgar Allen Poe, and Mark Twain. (One shots include Sigmund Freud, H.G. Wells, Jane Austen, Lester Dent, Humphrey Bogart and… Elvis Presley!)

The genre seems to have been pioneered by one George Baxt, a gay pulp novelist and screenwriter from the midcentury, whose paperback series of Hollywood whodunits starred, for one novel each, Noel Coward, George Raft, Dorothy Parker, Tallulah Bankhead, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and Alfred Hitchcock. It didn’t catch on then, but who knows, Baxt might be due for rediscovery.

The ground is, as they say, well-trammeled enough. It’s not difficult to fathom the allure of the celebrity-writer-sleuth genre-twist—the heady combustible brew formed by mixing genre violence and structure with the biography and personality of a beloved public artist. Who wouldn’t want in? My choice, which wasn’t a choice at all given the biographical real estate it bought me, was Ernest Hemingway. Search fruitlessly for another writer who has traveled as much, knew as many famous contemporaries, plunged headfirst into as many risk zones and war theaters, pissed as many people off, earned as many devoted friends, took as many women to bed, and still had psychosexual conflicts enough for a cast of Dostoyevsky characters and enough for it to kill him in the end. There’s so much seething stuff there it seemed hard to believe, once I researched it a bit, that no one had employed him as a fictional hero before.

“‘Ira Glass’ is the easiest thing for me to point to when people ask me what my music stands for. It’s a funny, cheeky concept, making the name of the popular public radio host into a slangy catchphrase. But it’s a serious, sentimental song about the art of storytelling, and how that art is changing. It’s a metaphor for the process of taking our life experiences, both the triumphant and the painful, and creating art. It’s about striving to do something with your life that’s greater than yourself. It’s about being as classy and intelligent as the man himself (whom I have spoken to via email, and is ever as classy and good spirited as you could imagine).”