I hadn’t written short fiction since I was in college in the early ’60s. But in the summer of ’89 I started writing spec fiction short stories. “On Death and the Deuce” was the fifth story I wrote and the third one I sold. However it was the first to appear in print (F&SF, May 1992). It was included in a couple of “Best Of” anthologies and reprinted years later in the ’zine, Sybil’s Garage (March, 2007).
The narrator is Kevin Grierson and over the next five or six years I wrote and published nine more “Kevin Grierson” stories, all but two of them for F&SF. One novelette, “Streetcar Dreams,” won a World Fantasy Award and is included in a couple of my earlier collections. All ten of them became my novel Minions of the Moon, which won the Lambda Award and was nominated for the International Horror Guild and the Dublin Impac awards.
The location for this story is New York City but it’s the hard and damaged city of 1974 when I (like Kevin Grierson) was thirty. The dream of being murdered by a doppelganger is one I had. The therapist Leo Dunn is strongly based on Vincent Tracy, who helped me break my drug and drink addictions that year. I wasn’t as tough or desperate as Kevin Grierson. But I was, I assure you, every bit as stupid.