In the early eighties I moved from Miami to Key Largo, fifty miles south. I’d fallen in love with the Keys many years before and finally figured out a way to live there.

I lived a block from the water and spent many hours on my small fishing boat exploring the mangrove canals. I fished for bonefish and snapper and grouper and trout and worked part-time in a local bait shop while teaching during the week at Florida International University.

When I began to work on Under Cover, I was enthralled with Key Largo. The light, the birds and water, the endless sky.

I wanted to write the kind of book I’d always cherished, Travis McGee novels and work by Chandler and Hammett, and Ross MacDonald, Robert Parker and Elmore Leonard.

But I also wanted to use the Keys as my backdrop and to make that place as much of a character as the people in the novel. Thorn was the hero of Under Cover. At that time he had no other name. He’s a simple guy, a little grumpy sometimes, who mainly wants to be left alone. I thought of him as Travis without a houseboat and without even the semblance of a job. He’s no knight errant, just a guy who fishes for a living and scrapes by in a kind of Walden Pond existence. But violence has haunted Thorn since almost the day of his birth and it takes over his life again in Under Cover.

He wasn’t just a version of Travis McGee. Thorn was also modeled on various characters I got to know in Key Largo. Tough people who eked out a living on that coral rock. People who fished and crabbed and lobstered for a living. Who came to Key Largo to escape something or other. The law, the pressures of the mainland, or something much darker. I knew a lot of Thorns at that time and treasured them all.

I only meant for Thorn to be a character in one novel, but somehow he’s managed to survive for sixteen. He’s a tough guy with a lyrical love for the water and the sky and the birds of the Keys.