Quote

I wrote a fan e-mail to Michael Chabon.

With the crime novels, it's delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. It's like having a fictitious family.

I'm drawn particularly to stories that evolve out of the character of the protagonist.

I love mystery novels... I love seeing the dramas played out in academic departments, particularly English departments. I started reading these when I was going up for tenure.

Conflict and character are the heart of good fiction, and good mystery has both of those in spades.

I love novels where not much 'happens' but where the interest is in the ideas and analyses of characters.

Every journalist has a novel in him, which is an excellent place for it.

Don Quixote is one that comes to mind in comparison to mine, in that they both involve journeys undertaken by older men. That is unusual, because generally the hero of a journey story is very young.

I definitely have an affection for detective fiction, and when I first read Dashiell Hammett's 'The Maltese Falcon,' that book and its author made an enormous impression on me as a reader and a writer, and led me to other hard-boiled American writers like Raymond Chandler and Ross McDonald, among many.

The writer of stories or of novels settles on men and imitates them; he exhausts the possibilities of his characters.