In his early teens, Robert Goldsborough began reading Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe mysteries. It was during his tenure with the Chicago Tribune that the paper printed the obituary of Rex Stout. On reading it, his mother lamented that "Now there won't be any more Nero Wolfe stories." "There might be one more," Goldsborough mused, and began writing an original Wolfe novel for his mother. As much as he enjoyed writing these books, Goldsborough longed to create his own characters, which he has done in Three Strikes You're Dead, set in the gang-ridden Chicago of the late 1930s and narrated by a Tribune police reporter. Goldsborough, a lifelong Chicagoan who has logged 45 years as a writer and editor with the Tribune and with marketing journal Advertising Age, says it was "Probably inevitable that I would end up using a newspaperman as my protagonist.
