Can a man ever really get inside a woman's head? If he's M. D. Lake, author of the long-running series of mystery novels featuring campus cop Peggy O'Neill, he can come close.

Since, in his own words, M. D. Lake lived most of his life as "someone else entirely," this may not be as much of a stretch for him as it appears. But Lake says he couldn't pull it off without the help of his readers. For our first issue, Lake talks to Crescent Blues about the power of make-believe, the conspiracy between writers and readers, and what it takes to be a man in a woman's world.

Lake's tenth Peggy O'Neill novel, Death Calls the Tune (Avon), is scheduled for release in April 1999.

Crescent Blues: What was the genesis of Peggy O'Neill? Did the story come first or the character?

M. D. Lake: I've been reading mysteries forever, beginning with the Hardy Boys, but I never wanted to write one until a professor at the university where I taught did something to a student that made me want to kill him. Knowing my limitations, I decided it would be wiser to kill him in a work of fiction than in reality. So neither the story nor Peggy O'Neill came first -- the killer did.

Crescent Blues: You mean the victim did, don't you?

M. D. Lake: No, the killer. I made the man I wanted to kill the killer, so that -- in the end -- I could destroy him in a most satisfying way.

Crescent Blues: Well then, how'd you come up with your protagonist, Peggy O'Neill?

M. D. Lake: I taught at the University of Minnesota for 27 years, before taking early retirement to write full-time. This made me unfit to write about anything real, and besides, the crime I was dealing with had to involve academics.

I didn't want to make my protagonist a professor, because I've never been very fond of professors. So I contacted a campus cop I knew, Regan Metcalf, thinking a campus cop would be a good choice for sleuth, and she was happy to help me.

Like Peggy, she preferred the dog watch -- the 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift -- so we had a lot of time to talk about what campus cops do as we walked or drove in a squad car around the campus in the middle of the night. I was incredibly impressed, since I'd never seen a woman doing the kinds of things Regan did -- especially alone, outside, in the middle of the night. The routine things Peggy does and sees on her patrols, I got from Regan and from a few other cops I spent time with later.

Crescent Blues: And because of Regan, you decided to make your protagonist a woman?

M. D. Lake: Not at first. Since I intended to write in first person, I assumed that my sleuth would be a man. The trouble was, as I tried to write, I kept hearing Regan's voice. So I figured, why not? And at the moment I made that decision -- or it made itself -- Peggy's name came to me, from a song my father used to sing when I was a kid.

Crescent Blues: How does a man get inside a female character's head and learn to speak with her voice?

M. D. Lake: I once read a review in the New Yorker of a novel, Taft, that's narrated by a middle-aged, black, male bartender. The author, Ann Patchett, is a young, white, college-educated woman. The reviewer wrote that this novel "reaffirms a writer's imaginative access to any and all experience."

It helps, of course, to know something about, and appreciate, strong women. Besides Regan Metcalf, my wife spent five years in the Navy and has Peggy's sense of humor, her intellectual curiosity and her lack of interest in exploring her own "uniqueness as a woman." My daughter, an engineer, has a B.A. and M.A. from one of the top science colleges in the country. None of these women...

M. D. Lake(continued)