Rogers, Arthur

An architect and a city planner walked into a bar. The bartender said, "We don't serve your kind-only writers and birds here."

The two old friends, both seventy something, said in unison, "We know how to write," and they sat down at the bar and began to collaborate on a detective novel. Art the architect lived in Dallas, Texas, and Ed the planner lived in Oakland, California, but no problem, they could exchange their jottings via e-mail.

And so over the next five years, chapters multiplied and flew back and forth through cyberspace, until one day, from the end of the bar, an Owl said, "E...