Sally Davies (Doctor)

Lescroart lives with his wife and children in Davis, California. DISMAS HARDY BY JOHN LESCROART I wrote my first book in college. It was what would now be called a legal thriller, based on the idea that capital punishment was cruel and unusual because the condemned person knew that the execution was coming. I developed the conceit that the death penalty would be more humane if the condemned didnБЂ™t know about the sentence, if one day he merely went to the prison doctor for a routine injection or vaccination, and instead the БЂњmedicationБЂ«was a fatal one. No doubt itБЂ™s for the best that this book remains unpublished, but in it, I named the condemned man Dismas Hardy. He appeared for about one page, was dispatched, and disappeared. But the name struck me as particularly memorable, in the mold of, say, Travis McGee or Sherlock Holmes. (It was probably the single best thing in the book.) In any event, I resolved that if I ever did get to writing a mystery series, my hero would be called Dismas Hardy. I knew that Dismas was the name of the good thief on Calvary, who was crucified next to Jesus, and it was always good to have a biblical antecedent to help provide kind of an instant sense of gravitas in a hero ...»