Some crime fiction aficionados will tell you a traditional mystery featuring an amateur sleuth is by definition a cozy. (Think Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple.) Not so. At the beginning of Death Will Get You Sober, Bruce wakes up in detox on the Bowery, New York’s Skid Row. I even included the word "puke" in the first sentence. It was appropriate. But my intention was not to write a dark and gritty mystery. I dedicated the book "to recovering people everywhere, whose courage and honesty are a constant inspiration." I wanted to write about getting a second chance and how people get beyond not drinking to the transformation that makes recovery so deeply moving.

I’ve had my work cut out to make sure my fellow panelists on the booze panel get it. They include Ken Bruen, the award-winning Irish master of literary noir, the even noirer Jason Starr, Con Lehane, whose protagonist is a New York bartender, and thriller writer Michelle Gagnon, who used to be a bartender herself. When moderator Ali Karim emailed us his first draft of possible subjects to discuss, he included such questions as "What’s your favorite poison?", "What’s the funniest thing that ever happened to you while you were drunk?", and "Do you write better when you’ve had a few?" I’ve paraphrased, but that was the gist. Clearly, I had to fight back.

I’ve been called for jury duty many times, but never gotten onto a jury, and it’s usually because I’m an expert on alcoholism and substance abuse. When they describe the case, I can’t help focusing on the role addictive substances have played in it. Even if they don’t mention drugs or alcohol, my mind immediately moves beyond what jurors are instructed to consider. Once, a judge who was determined not to dismiss anyone called me up to the bench. She asked if I couldn’t put my professional expertise aside as I considered the case. I couldn’t — no more than she could have put aside her knowledge of the law.

The same thing happens when I read a mystery. When characters struggle hopelessly with alcohol, I long to get them into treatment and/or to an AA meeting. Sometimes it’s apparent to me that the author is aware the character is alcoholic. Sometimes it’s not. Alcoholism is a progressive disease, and the falling down drunk stage comes late in the progression — or not at all, since that hard head or hollow leg heavy drinkers boast about is a sign of increased tolerance, one of alcoholism’s hallmark symptoms.

Consider my fellow panelists’ fictional characters. Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor, for example, has been dry for the last two books. But terrible things keep happening to him. Does he go to AA? No. He periodically goes into a bar, where he orders a shot of Jameson’s and a pint of beer and sits there glaring at them. So his rage is unabated, his head remains clouded, and he can’t see the use of sobriety.

Jack’s a loner who’s experienced more than his fair share of tragedy. But if he went to AA and tried to explain that’s why recovery is not for him, they’d laugh. "Get over it," they’d tell him. "We were all terminal loners when we came in here. Every one of us has had devastating losses. You say bad things happened when you weren’t even drinking? You’d been off the sauce for five minutes when a child died because you couldn’t focus. Of course you couldn’t focus. Sobriety takes time, and not drinking is just the beginning. Forgiveness takes time too, but there’s no merit in never forgiving yourself."

Con Lehane’s fictional New York bartender, Brian McNulty, sees plenty of alcoholics in his work. They’re the guys who have to be carried home, the women in a blackout who can’t remember in the morning whom they slept with the night before. But Brian himself is not an alcoholic—or so he thinks. He doesn’t drink to oblivion every time. Sometimes he lets days go by without a drink. When he does drink, he continues to function, a sign of tolerance. He’s had blackouts, a sign of alcohol dependence. As he works, we see him topping up not just the alcohol but a little "blow"—cocaine—all evening just to feel normal. That’s characteristic of the mid-stage chemical dependent. Brian’s a decent guy, so in addition to solving murders, he struggles to be a good son, a good father, a good friend. I want to tell him, "Trying to work on relationships in your condition is like trying to swim through oatmeal. Get into recovery, stay clean and sober for a while, and see what happens in the rest of your life. If you don’t like it, as they say in AA, ‘we’ll gladly refund your misery.’"

Zelvin's Death Will Get You Sober (St. Martin’s Minotaur/Thomas Dunne Books), came out this year. St. Martin’s will also publish the second in the series, Death Will Help You Leave Him. A related short story was nominated for an Agatha award for Best Short Story. Liz blogs on Poe’s Deadly Daughters. 

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