My story as a writer changed with a single phone call in the spring of 1977.

A woman representing the Mystery Writers of America was on the line. I was busy writing ads at J. Walter. She told me she was calling about the Edgar Allan Poe Awards, known as the Edgars, which were to be presented at a ceremony in New York that weekend.

She sounded a little out of sorts, almost like she was mad at me. “We haven’t been able to find you,” she said with a huff and a sigh.

I wasn’t exactly lost, so I didn’t know why she couldn’t find me, but now she had me. And then she had my undivided attention. “James, you’re a finalist in the Best First Mystery Novel category at the Edgars. I mean, your novel The Thomas Berryman Number is a finalist.”

I got that part. But honestly, I wondered if the call was maybe a practical joke. I started thinking about which one of my friends could be the joker. Meanwhile, the woman on the phone was giving me the date and time of the award ceremony.

I knew immediately that I had a work conflict. I told her I couldn’t go. I apologized.

“No, no, no, you’re a finalist,” she repeated a couple of times. “For an Edgar.” I told her again that I couldn’t go. Burt Manning wouldn’t allow it. I actually needed the paycheck from my job in hell.

“You have to go,” she finally said. “You won!”

“I what?

So I went to the Edgars—with my parents, Charles and Isabelle. Charles seemed proud, which was nice. He and Isabelle got dressed to the nines and they were beaming all night. Sitting in the audience, even with the heads-up that I’d won, I kept thinking, Maybe the woman on the phone lied to get me here.

But I did win. I remember it all as clearly as if it happened yesterday.

Let me give you some perspective about my very short and to-the-point acceptance speech that night at the Edgars. It was my experience at the time that if somebody asked you what you did, and you said you were a writer, the next questions would inevitably be something like “What have you published? Have I read any of your work? Do you publish under your own name or under a pseudonym?” If you then said you were unpublished, the person would look at you like you were a fraud and a liar.

So when I went up on the stage to accept my Edgar, all I could think to say was, and this is a direct quote, “I guess I’m a writer now.”