That's the kind of motif I bring to the books - that people take charge of their own lives.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
What I've always tried to find in my books are points at which the private lives of the characters, and also my own, intersect with the public life of the culture.
In one book, CACHALOT, just for my own amusement, every character is based directly on someone I have known.
There is a common theme, though, in the stories I have told, which are usually associations of characters or families that are formed outside of a family circle.
I have the power to write these books where I invent characters that I really like, and it gets to come out the way they want it to come out, and I get to make it happen.
With the crime novels, it's delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. It's like having a fictitious family.
There's definitely a fascination with crime stories and stories of characters acting out against authority.
I think that the idea that I'm writing for many more people than I ever imagined has created a certain general responsibility that is literary and political. There's even pride involved, in not wanting to fall short of what I did before.
Every one of my books is written from the viewpoint of cops, with the exception of my book Killer on the Road, which is written from the viewpoint of a serial killer.
An author's characters do what he wants them to do.
That's not the part of the story that I'm interested in, anyway. The part that I'm interested in is all the personal stuff. I tried to base the powers on family archetypes.