On Tuesday morning, at midnight plus one second, somewhere in the labyrinthine switch matrix of the Amazon.com computing cloud, a zero became a one, and my new book, The Mighty Lalouche, officially went on sale.

This is my first picture book, a collaboration with the supremely talented illustrator Sophie Blackall. It has been five years in the making.

My part went relatively quickly. I met Sophie at book convention in New York City in 2007. We hit it off, and it wasn’t long before I was scheming to write a story for her to illustrate. It turns out we shared an interest in vintage photographs. She especially liked pictures of 19th century boxers, complete with billowing trunks and outlandish mustaches, posing in front of canvases painted with scenes of the French countryside.

As soon as she described one of her favorite images, a character leaped, fully formed, into my imagination: the mighty Lalouche!

The details surrounding the initial vision of him, however, were somewhat murky.

Who is this plucky little fellow? I wondered. How did he come to be such a brilliant boxer? Who’s the enormous bald man lying on the canvas next to him?

And while we’re at it, what’s with the finch?

This is par for the course — at least for me — when it comes to writing fiction. E. L. Doctorow once described the process this way: “It’s like driving a car at night. You can’t see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

I started with that initial vision — tiny French boxer, abundant mustache; turn-of-the-last-century Paris, postman; invincible child-man, tender feelings for finch — and began my research, radiating outward from what I knew to what I didn’t.

I learned, for instance, that in French boxing, or Boxe Francaise, fighters struck with their feet as well as their fists; that the sport favored speed and agility over raw power; and that a small, nimble fighter often defeated a larger opponent.

I learned all about the French postal service, since it soon became clear that Lalouche’s first love — after his finch and his mustache, of course — was his job delivering the mail. In the 1890s, when the story is set, La Poste offered no fewer than eight collections and deliveries — per day — in Paris on weekdays, and a mere five on Sundays and holidays.

If those eight deliveries didn’t suffice, there was another technological wonder in the wings: an elaborate system of pneumatic tubes that could whisk a letter from one end of town to another in the blink of an eye.

I learned that in Lalouche’s time, the preferred method of delivering mail was changing. Horses were phased out in 1873, thanks to the greater efficiency of trains. Twenty years later, in 1893, La Poste authorized its carriers to use newfangled bicycles for their routes on an experimental basis — although without compensation. Perhaps they were worried the carriers would have too much fun!

In reading about fin-de-siecle Paris, I kept coming across images of amazing electric cars. Electric cars were all the rage back then. For a while, it looked as though there’d be no serious competition from internal combustion engines, which were pathetically weak, unreliable, and stinky. The French loved electric cars. In fact, they coined a new word that captured their magic, “automobile,” as in, “Look, Henri, it drives itself!”

So I imagined the French postal service buying a fleet of these newfangled contraptions, and firing a legion of postmen, including Lalouche.

With Lalouche out of a job, how will he keep his beloved finch Genevieve in birdseed?

While out on a walk, he spots a poster: sparring partners needed. “We pay cash!”

He goes to the gym, overcomes a distaste for striking his opponents, and embarks on a new career as a fight sensation.

There are some more twists and turns, but suffice it to say that the writing and editing of the story took no more than a few months.

The illustration process, on the other hand, was monumental.

Sophie wanted readers to feel as though they were stepping into Lalouche’s world, so instead of flat paintings, she created three dimensional tableaux, almost like a puppet theater, then had the spreads photographed. This involved painting, cutting out, and mounting an entire universe of imagery.

A book usually takes her about four months to illustrate. The Mighty Lalouche took two years!

Our humble Parisian postman has already been out in the world for several months, making the pre-publication rounds at places like Publishers Weekly, School Library Journal, and even the Wall Street Journal. The reviews so far have been extremely kind.

I invite you to read more about him at www.matthewolshan.com.