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I know a lot of crime writers feel very underrated, like they're not taken seriously, and they want to be just thought of as writers rather than ghettoised as crime writers, but I love being thought of firmly as a crime writer.

Los Angeles is a good city in which to be a reporter. Always entertaining, always an incubator.

I love my city and I feel like the majority of the people that are in the city are people from other cities. So I think that L.A. sometimes might get a bad rap because it's known to be so Hollywood-oriented and then underneath that you have crime. But that's really the case in pretty much any major city that you go to.

Scottish writers are particularly successful in the crime genre.

What is interesting, as well, is how much power homicide detectives have and how much respect. They are kind of rock stars, especially in New York. There are not that many of them.

Good writers know that crime is an entre into telling a greater story about character. Good crime writing holds up a mirror to the readers and reflects in a darker light the world in which they live.

What crime writers are doing connects deeper into a cultural hunger. Crime is important. When you open up a book that has a body that's dead, that matters. It matters more than a certain level of suburban angst; it really does.

I suppose most crime writing is urban. There's not a lot... certainly not in Australia, people don't often set books in the countryside.

I'm attracted to creative people and train wrecks, and there's no shortage of that in Los Angeles.

Crime fiction makes money. It may be harder for writers to get published, but crime is doing better than most of what we like to call CanLit. It's elementary, plot-driven, character-rich story-telling at its best.