The character was a famous author, serving as writer-in-residence at a workshop in northern Wisconsin. Cook's famous author did not suffer from an inferiority complex.

"I decided to make him a pompous ass and kill him," Cook was saying Monday. "It was very satisfying."

The irony is that Cook, who will sign copies of "Obsessions" at a launch event at 6 p.m. July 31 at Booked for Murder, has hosted dozens if not hundreds of writing workshops -- yet remains as unpretentious as the day he arrived in Madison from his native California three decades ago.

In fact, if he wasn't so engaging, Cook would be an easy guy to dislike, especially for anyone who has labored over a blank sheet of paper, trying to coax words into sentences and then paragraphs.

Cook makes it look too easy. The rest of us -- blocked, whining, besieged by demons, complaining about idiot editors and publishers -- might have a leg to stand on if not for the presence on the UW-Madison campus of Cook, who turns out a book or so a year on a multitude of subjects while teaching and never turning away an aspiring writer who shows up at his door.

You want more? The guy gets up at 4 a.m. every day. And works out! Then he's typing, and before the sun's up, there are more pages in the stack that will be the next of his more than two dozen books.

The truly terrible thing is, he likes it -- writing, I mean.

"I love writing," Cook said. Fiction, non-fiction, grocery lists, doesn't matter.

"It's all fun," he said.

See what I mean?

Having grown up on the Hardy Boys, Cook had always wanted to write a mystery, so one pre-dawn morning about six years ago, his fingers began tapping out a story involving a small-town Wisconsin newspaper editor named Monona Quinn. The stack of pages grew into "Murder Over Easy," a fictionalized take on the real-life murder of a diner owner in Marshall, and the first novel grew into a series.

"Obsessions," the new book, is the fourth. They've all been published by Madison-based Bleak House Books, the small publisher that hit the big time earlier this year with three Edgar Award nominations. The Edgars are the Oscars of the mystery book business.

The relationship began while Cook was helping a young man named Ben LeRoy with a manuscript LeRoy had written. That's not unusual; Cook has helped untold numbers of aspiring writers. In this instance, however, during their chat LeRoy mentioned that he and a partner were thinking of starting a publishing enterprise devoted to mystery fiction.

"I've been working on a mystery," Cook said.

"Murder Over Easy" was published by LeRoy and Bleak House. Cook credits senior editor Alison Janssen with making his books better, including suggesting on a couple of the occasions that Cook had chosen the wrong character as the murderer. In both cases, Cook concurred and made the revisions.

That may be partly a function of Cook not outlining his fiction. He likes the freedom of discovering where the characters take him.

"I never advise people to do it this way," he said, while adding that it works for him.

It's not surprising to learn Cook has writing in his blood. The day after Marshall was born in 1944, his grandfather, William Gilmore Beymer, had a novel, "12:20 P.M.," excerpted in the Saturday Evening Post. Cook has a copy of the magazine and noted, "You will not be seeing it offered for sale on eBay."

Marshall, who grew up in Southern California, was more interested in baseball than writing until he was 12, when an illness put him in bed for a long stretch and he discovered and devoured the Hardy Boys. He earned journalism and creative-writing degrees at Stanford, and came to Madison because his wife, Ellen, got a job here.

Cook has taught journalism and writing at various stations under the UW-Madison umbrella, and last year he received the Van Hise Outreach Distinguished Teaching Award.

His books have included "how to" works on writing and time management; novels and non-fiction about baseball, an enduring passion; and a true-crime account of a notorious killing and manhunt in the Wisconsin Dells in 1961.

And now, mystery fiction. Is there anything this guy can't write? Cook smiled and recalled another pretty fair mystery writer, Elmore Leonard, whom Cook once brought to a conference in Madison. In answer to a question, Leonard said: "Writing is easy. Just leave out the boring parts."

Contact Doug Moe at 608-252-6446 or dmoe@madison.com.