In even the most charmed life there are missteps.You look back and wish you had the opportunity to be back in the moment when you messed up, knowing that you’d make it all right the next time.

One of my numerous foul-ups, of which there have been far too many to count, occurred in the 1980s, when I ran The Mysterious Press. Two full-time editors worked for me and, once a week, we would have an editorial meeting to discuss, among other things, the manuscripts we had read since the previous meeting.

It was my practice to have my editors reject the books they didn’t like at all. If either one found one they really liked, the other editor read it, too. If there were two positive readings, I’d read it and make the final decision about whether to acquire it.

Although both editors were intelligent and had terrific editorial instincts, there was always the element of subjectivity, for which there was (and is) no antidote. This is a roundabout way of saying we rejected the first book by one of my favorite writers.

That first novel, which I regret to say never had a second reading, was “The Monkey’s Raincoat,” one of the funniest books I’ve ever read, by Robert Crais, who has gone on to become one of my favorite writers, one of the bestselling mystery writers in America, as well as enjoying tremendous success all around the globe.

At first blush the novels may appear to be merely straightforward genre works. Elvis Cole, his protagonist, is a Los Angeles private eye. How many times have we heard that before? These novels long ago made the leap from good detective fiction to serious literature, though, exploring such issues as friendship, lost love, and – in the most recent entry in this distinguished series – paternal and filial love and loss.

Elvis is a reticent man who doesn’t talk much about his youth. He’s very cool – a smart, good-looking, witty martial-arts expert – and when he finished up a particularly tough and bloody case the newspapers called him “The World’s Greatest Detective,” which is how he now refers to himself (tongue affixed to cheek). So do his friends and colleagues. In fact, he’s no superman, and he has issues with his father that have remained unexplored until now.

In “The Forgotten Man” (Doubleday, 337 pages, $24.95), a man is shot to death in an alley and his dying words are that he is looking for his son, Elvis Cole. The detective’s father abandoned his mother and him when he was very young, it seems, and he has never known anything about him – except that his mother described him once as a human cannonball.

Elvis’s name was Philip James Cole (he called himself Jimmie) until one day, pretty much out of the blue, his mother changed it to Elvis. He was a young teenager when he ran away to join a traveling carnival so that he could find his father, the headliner of the show: the human cannonball. A detective was dispatched to find him and bring him home, but he ran away again and again, never finding the father who so painfully left his family.

When the unidentified man in the alley asks for him, Elvis thinks it might be the phone call he’s waited for his entire life. He sets out to identify the murder victim, hopeful and doubtful at the same time. He doesn’t realize that the investigation into the man’s past will unleash a crazed killer who thinks Cole is searching for him.

“The Forgotten Man” is the detective novel at its apex, one that “transcends the genre.” Permit me to give you a tip. When you read any critic or reviewer, now or for the rest of your life, who uses that phrase, stop reading. It’s written by someone who thinks “The Old Man and the Sea” and “Moby Dick” are fishing stories. All outstanding examples of their genre transcend it.

Mr. Crais has done this before. His “L.A. Requiem” is one of the great modern classics of crime fiction, and “The Last Detective” isn’t far behind it. Good fiction may be defined as the translation of ideas into the language of life as it is lived, with enough universality that readers understand it and relate to it.

In this one book, we are shown the depth of one friend’s love for another, one man’s need to know from whose seed he emanated, and the length someone will go for an object of love. If that’s not serious literature, I don’t know what is.

As is true of so much significant literature, there are elements in “The Forgotten Man” that appear to be drawn from the author’s life. He will not speak about his childhood (and many interviewers have asked), but he will concede that he ran away to join a traveling circus when he was 15.

When he was hanging out with some friends, he loudly gave away the secret of the human cannonball, yelling that it was all a fraud. That night, the human cannonball came up behind him, pulled out “the longest knife in the world,” as Mr. Crais remembers it, and told him if he saw him again he would cut off his head. The young Mr. Crais packed his bag that night and skedaddled.

How many other elements of this book, or the previous seven Elvis Cole novels, are autobiographical, only Mr. Crais can know. But the emotional impact of these books is often so profound it would be difficult to imagine that it is all conjured out of thin air (or any other air, for that matter).

Elvis Cole may not actually be “The World’s Greatest Detective” but he’s good enough that quibbling about it seems petty. Robert Crais may not be “The World’s Greatest Mystery Writer” but he’s good enough that – well, you get the idea.

Mr. Penzler is the proprietor of the Mysterious Book Shop. He can be reached at openzler@nysun.com.