I walked into my first ever creative-writing workshop in September 1987 and after all the introductions had been made our leader, the remarkable Meredith Steinbach (whose too few books you should track down immediately) said, Right, I want you each to write three individual, discrete paragraphs with no deliberate narrative connections among them, all from the point of view of the same character, and inspired by and/or containing these three words. (I don’t remember what the words were.) So that evening I went home and did what she’d asked. The character who spoke to me was a father talking about his young son.

The next meeting, we read our paragraphs aloud and made some off-the-cuff critiques; then Meredith gave us another three words and told us to do the same again—same viewpoint character, still no narrative. The following week, three new words, but this time we were to inhabit a different character, looking at the original. Allen Pasztory started telling me about his long relationship with Jeremy Kent and Jeremy’s son Toby.

As I recall, the exercise kind of petered out around then as we settled in to workshopping more complete fictions (in my case, several chapters of an unfinished novel I no longer care to remember much about). But Allen and Jeremy and Toby stayed in my head, growing more complicated and real. In the spring, when I worked with the late John Hawkes, they stayed in the background while I wrote the first version of Do You Remember Tulum? but that summer I pulled out those nine (or possibly twelve … maybe even fifteen) isolated paragraphs and started moving them around like jigsaw puzzle pieces, trying to find a pattern.

It took four or five years, seven or eight drafts, to discover an organizing pattern that the work’s long-time title should have suggested right away. In the meanwhile, I’d made the acquaintance of my kindly (but very stern) editor at Faber and Faber, Betsy Uhrig, who waited patiently for me to make something remotely publishable out of a huge mangy bag of pages. Finally offered a contract and oversaw the last shaping and polishing. And published the damned thing in the spring of 1995.

Not many people bought Safe as Houses, sadly—I don’t know where to cast the blame because nobody, to my knowledge, ever said anything bad about it and many were extravagant in their praise. For a while I pretended to believe it was because there wasn’t a naked guy on the otherwise lovely cover.

No naked guy on the misbegotten cover of the paperback issued in 1997 by Britain’s (now defunct) Gay Men’s Press either. I’m over being polite about the, ahem, art they did use.

Nor is there a naked guy on the cover of the forthcoming Lethe Press reissue, now I’ve satisfied myself GMP’s edition is well and truly out of print, but don’t let that stop you from purchasing it. It’s pretty. (I designed it myself!) The not-naked guy on the handsome wraparound cover is pretty. The text itself will probably make you cry at least once.