At the age of 64, Steven Forman decided to finally scratch a longtime itch and become a writer. (Richard Graulich / Palm Beach Post)

The tone is set early in Steven M. Forman’s Boca Daze: "The median age in Boca is much higher than the national average. Violent crime is below the national average. Rape is rare and so is consensual sex."

And we’re off with Forman’s third novel involving his alter ego Eddie Perlmutter, a man on the cusp of age in a South Florida geritocracy he doesn’t particularly care for.

Before he decided to reinvent himself as a novelist with a taste for the comic, Forman made a fortune in the food service business – his company provides tuna and other fish for all Subway sandwich shops – which means that he happily violates the central premise of every writing teacher: Write what you know.

Four years ago, at the age of 64, Forman decided to scratch an itch he’d had for, oh, about 55 years, and write a novel.

"I always believed, even when I was a kid, that I could be a writer," says the affable, voluble Boca Raton resident. "I read a lot, but when I got out of college, I decided on a business career because I was more suited for that. I was more adventuresome than I was literate. But at a certain point, I decided I couldn’t wait any longer."

Forman dreamed up a guy named Eddie Perlmutter, a retired Boston cop, "rough, tough, highly promoted, highly demoted." When we meet him, Perlmutter is 59, starting to get a little creaky, and he decides to bail rather than take a desk job.

In the first book, Boca Knights, Eddie moves to Boca Raton, rents an apartment, goes to a Publix to buy some groceries and sees a woman who looks old but isn’t. She’s passing a phony $100 bill. One thing leads to another, and he ends up dealing with the Russian mafia.

Forman wrote the entire book, then started the search for an agent. He knew one man who had written one book, so he asked about his agent. The agent said, "Tell him to send me three pages, and I’ll tell him what’s wrong with it."

Forman sent him all 300 pages, figuring he could read any three pages he wanted. Lo and behold, the agent signed him up. The manuscript went out to 12 publishers, and Forman got a two-book deal from Forge.

The Perlmutter novels involve lots of cracking wise, and an occasional cracking skull. Beneath that, they’re stories of a man adapting to people in a strange environment (Florida) and the people in a strange environment adapting to him.

Forman went through this transition 20 years ago, when he and his wife moved to Boca Raton. "My daughter followed us, got married, had two kids and still lives here. And my son came down here a few months ago, and now he’s around the corner." Between them, they’ve presented Forman with five grandchildren.

Despite writing a book a year, Forman is still in the food business, which he learned from his father, who was the first to import beef from Australia and New Zealand.

Forman eventually started his own business in 1968. The great lesson he learned is simple: "If you do what everybody else is doing, you never make serious money."

The makings of Forman’s food career came when a man showed him tail meat from a king crab. "It was a rough, tough, little piece of meat, 3 ounces. What value is that? Nobody carried it."

But Forman bought boxes of the fish and began experimenting. It was tough and didn’t taste particularly good, but Forman ran it through a grinder and mixed it with mayonnaise. The new texture and ingredients made it delicious.

So Forman went to Seattle, where he got crab fisherman to give him the tails they were throwing away. He paid them 50 cents a pound and sold them for $2.50 a pound. Result: happiness.

But demand soon outstripped supply, and then he discovered imitation crab, a tasteless, high protein whitefish that sold for $1.50 to $2 a pound. He was able to convert every customer to imitation crab, and he was the only show in town.

Subway started to be a worthwhile customer when they hit 200 stores. Subway now has 35,000 stores, and Forman has a fish-processing plant in Thailand.

In other words, this is a man with the knack of getting what he goes after. He wanted to be a writer – presto – he became a writer.

Forman talks about his main character as if he were a real person – "He calls it ‘The Land of the Used to Be,’ " he says of Perlmutter. " ‘I used to be a doctor,’ ‘I used to be a lawyer.’ Nobody identifies themselves as being something now. People close the door on themselves, and he tries to bring them back to themselves."

Forman finds the book-a-year schedule demanded by publishers of series novels to be difficult. "Some people can tear through them. Janet Evanovich pours them out; (James) Patterson pours them out. But I’m not prolific; each book takes me about a year.

"I read My Reading Life, by Pat Conroy, a great author. The book is about all the books that affected his life and writing style. And one of the things he says in the book is ‘Never write a lazy sentence.’ And that’s what I try to do: a sentence that is the best I can write. And that takes a lot of work."

Forman says there’s something else he’s learned the hard way, something Pat Conroy didn’t mention. "You have to know when you stink!"