Jack Starkey, a Chicago cop who has retired to Florida, is the inspiration for a fictional cop, Jack Stoney, in William Wells’s Detective Fiction.

After a long career in media—newspaperman, radio broadcaster, speechwriter—what impelled you to become a novelist?

I always thought of myself as a novelist and that those other things were day jobs. Over the years I started and stopped a number of books. Three years ago I decided it was time to either finish a book or stop thinking of myself as an author. The hard part was finding the discipline to write most every day. Since then, I’ve finished two other novels in addition to Detective Fiction: Ride Away Home, published in 2014 by the Permanent Press, and Face of the Devil, to be published in 2016 by Riverdale Avenue Books. The hard part was to find the discipline to hit the keyboard five to six days a week.

Many of the characters in Detective Fiction aren’t who they seem. Do you see the world as full of people masquerading under false identities?

Not really. Those were plot devices that fit the story. However, I believe that the world is full of people doing one thing who feel that they were really meant to do something else. Like me.

You seem to take an acerbic view of the lifestyles of the rich and ultrarich. Is this just a literary device or are they really that shallow and self-indulgent?

It was a literary device for Detective Fiction. The upper one-percenters are just people who picked the right professions and worked hard enough to be successful, or who picked the right parents or won the lottery.

Do you think you’ll be popular in Naples, Florida, when Detective Fiction turns up in the local bookstore?

Unless the book makes the bestseller lists, I will remain as anonymous in my hometown as I am now. If it does, I’ll gladly trade anonymity as a writer with unpopularity.

How did you find the Permanent Press?

I read a New York Times article about them, which described TPP as a preeminent small press interested in quality fiction and which got 5,000 submissions a year and picked 16. I sent them Ride Away Home and was surprised and delighted that they bought it.

When will we see Jack Starkey again?

I’m now at work on a sequel to Detective Fiction. The story involves environmental threats to the Everglades and the corrupt politicians who allow it for personal gain.