Country-singer-turned-mystery-writer Kinky Friedman rises each morning in his little green trailer deep in the heart of the Texas hill country and tilts at America’s sacred cows like a modern-day Don Quixote on mood elevators. His warped mysteries, together with a catalog of highly irreverent country songs from his wasted-minstrel days, represent the most wickedly funny sustained attack on racism, bigotry, and hypocrisy since Lenny Bruce.

Starting with his first mystery, Greenwich Killing Time, in 1986, through such fractured who-cares-who-done-its as Armadillos & Old Lace, Elvis, Jesus & Coca-Cola and The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover, Friedman’s eponymous black-Stetsoned, cigar-chomping alter ego has stumbled ever blindly toward, if not exactly enlightenment, then random illumination. He may eventually solve the crime, but more often than not the clues seek him out as he holes up in his Greenwich Village walk-up with a disinterested cat and copious amounts of Jameson’s Irish whiskey to assist cogitation. The reluctant sleuth is aided by a loose assemblage of New Yawk barroom denizens collectively known as the Village Irregulars. Messrs. Ratso, Rambam, McGovern and the rest also are real people, rendered, one suspects, just slightly more irregular as they pass through the author’s Wal-Mart typewriter. ("About the last typewriter in Texas," he says proudly, having returned to the Austin area several books ago).

When last we visited the cockeyed world of country-singer-turned-amateur-sleuth Kinky Friedman (in Blast from the Past), a chunk of ceiling plaster, dislodged by Winnie Katz’s lesbian dance class upstairs, had transported the vicar of Vandam Street on a comatose trip back to the ’70s. His 12th misadventure, Spanking Watson, continues in the Sherlock-Holmes-on-a-bender tradition. The Kinkster concocts a cold revenge on his upstairs neighbor, and of course things go immediately awry. With an almost criminal glee, Kinky dupes and recruits his colorful cronies to find a would-be assassin of Katz, then unleashes them on the unsuspecting Winnie and her Danskin-clad students like a horde of locusts on a summer field. When he learns that someone actually is intent on killing Katz, the merry chase begins in earnest.

"Spanking Watson is the search for the perfect Watson," Kinky explains in his smoke-sanded baritone. "It’s a challenge I put out to all of the Village Irregulars to try and infiltrate the lesbian dance class upstairs. Ratso becomes one of those guys you always see in an all-female aerobics class, the kind of feminine nerds that get involved in that. And all of these idiots do infiltrate the dance class. They get up there and then Rambam bugs the loft for me. They do it under the belief that a death threat has been written to Winnie Katz, which I’ve shown them. Of course, I’ve written it myself when I was drunk. It’s kind of Machiavellian. A little darker. But I think it’s funnier."

Kinky’s is perhaps the least likely of modern literary success stories. In the ’70s, young Richard Friedman parlayed his musical talent, knack for social satire, and Semitic birthright into semi-success on the fringes of country music as Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys. The band’s stage shows were outrageous, thanks to Friedman’s redneck-baiting, chauvinistic stage persona, and such bitingly hilarious anthems as "They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore" and the tongue-in-cheek, anti-feminist ode, "Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed." Country music has never been fertile soil for comedy, much less satire, so it was little wonder Kinky’s music delighted the critics and offended almost everyone else. Let us note here that his "Ride ‘Em, Jewboy" remains the only country song ever recorded about the Holocaust.

"It took courage back then," he admits. "It did. That was before Howard Stern. It took pawn-shop balls. We were a country band with a social conscience — always very dangerous."

The band came to make its home in perhaps the only country bar on the planet that would have them, New York’s Lone Star Cafe. By all accounts, the party was great. "I met everybody in those days. Andy Warhol. Everybody came by," he says. But by 1976, the party was over. It took Kinky a few years to, uh, refocus and try his hand at a new medium — mystery writing. To borrow a title from one of his songs, when the Lord closes the door, he opens a little window.

"I think it was more like desperation," he admits. "I was searching for a lifestyle that did not require my presence. The Texas Jewboys had disbanded a decade earlier and I was living in New York, flying on 11 kinds of herbs and spices, and broke. So I attempted to write the first book by borrowing my friend McGovern’s typewriter."

Another pal, radio talk-jock Don Imus, pulled strings to get Greenwich Killing Time to Simon & Schuster. Since then, Kinky mysteries frequently appear on the New York Times bestseller list and have been translated into 17 foreign languages.

"It has definitely been a financial pleasure for the Kinkster," he admits. "It’s more than music has really ever been. Of course, as I always say, money can buy you a fine dog but only love can make it wag its tail."

Both Kinkys shamelessly traffic in such bons mots. "This is a Cuban cigar," he’ll say. "I’m not supporting their economy, I’m burning their fields." Or "I’m the oldest Jew in Texas who doesn’t own real estate." Some avid readers contend that these politically incorrect witticisms and rapier-like turns-of-phrase are the real reason to pick up a Kinky mystery. In fact, in tales such as Roadkill, which takes place on tour with Kinky’s compadre Willie Nelson, the plot seems to disappear altogether in a cloud of peculiar-smelling smoke.

"The problem with the Willie book was that I lost so much by taking the detective out of his natural setting. I lost all the Village Irregulars and the cat. And I only found that out halfway through. I fly by Jewish radar. I write like Oscar Wilde behind bars. I don’t structure a lot of this, and I think, in part, that if there is any freshness to these books, any flavor, that’s the reason."

If Roadkill fell short by Holmesian standards, it nonetheless brought Hollywood calling. "The latest idea is to do Roadkill with F. Murray Abraham as Willie and Lionel Richie as me," Kinky says, giving no hint as to whether he’s serious. (Asked whether he would consider playing himself, Nelson replies, "Stranger things have happened. Kinky starts these rumors, you know. And then they come true.")

In fact, the movie idea got its initial boost from a surprising source: President Clinton. "He invited me to the White House for an awards dinner honoring the arts. He must have been on medication because, out of several hundred people, he sat me right next to him at the power table there. He proceeded to try to get my books made into movies with the lady who’s the head of Paramount Pictures, Sherry Lansing."

Equally surprising, the idiosyncratic musings of a Lone Star Jewish iconoclast have been bestsellers in Germany, Holland, and England. Explanation, please? "The rest of the world sees these books as a commentary on America," Kinky says. "It’s unconscious commentary on America. I find that women and little old ladies are really picking up the books. Even though the books are becoming increasingly profane, they’re also possibly becoming increasingly profound."

How close is the fictional Kinkster to his creator? "I think the books are very close to home. They represent an inward turning. I often write with an utter disregard for the reader. That’s the most honest way to write. At the moment, the books I’m writing, each one seems to be the best one. All I have to do is continue to be unhappy and I’ll be fine."

Jay MacDonald is a writer in Naples, Florida.

How many 70-year-olds can also claim the title of best-selling debut novelist? We know of at least one: Canadian author Alan Bradley, whose first novel (after two nonfiction projects), The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, became a word-of-mouth hit in early 2009. Set in Britain just after World War II and starring Flavia de Luce, a fiercely intelligent 11-year-old with a talent for chemistry and a nose for mystery, the book was nominated for a handful of awards—and won the hearts of more than a handful of readers. Now Bradley has released the second Flavia de Luce mystery, The Weed that Strings the Hangman’s Bag. This time, Flavia is investigating the murder of a traveling puppeteer whose death might drag a skeleton from the closet of her small English community.

We contacted Bradley, who now lives in Malta with his family, to find out more about the series, his inspiration for Flavia and the many reasons women make better detectives than men.

You’ve said that Flavia just showed up while you were writing a different novel and “hijacked the book.” What was it about her that fired up your imagination? Do children like Flavia still exist today?
I loved Flavia’s undimmed enthusiasm: that powerful sense of self that 11-year-olds can sometimes have. That and the intense focus. I believe that children of that caliber haven’t changed at all over the years, because they tend to be not much influenced by outside demands upon their attention.

At 71 years old, did you ever worry about finding the voice of an 11-year-old girl?
No. There must be a lot of the 11-year-old Alan Bradley left inside me!

Growing up in Canada in the 1950s, was your childhood in any way similar to Flavia’s?
I suppose it was, in the sense that, as a child, I was left alone a lot. And I like to think that I had that kind of burning enthusiasm. My passion was lenses and mirrors—I loved to play with light.

You had never been to England before writing the first Flavia de Luce book—how did you create such an evocative setting?
I grew up in a family of English expatriates who never stopped talking about “back home.” Books about England have always been a favorite read—I have a wonderful collection of them!

Flavia knows a good deal more about science than your average tween—it’s how she makes sense of the world. Was this an interest of yours already, or did you have to study to write the book? Why did you choose chemistry as Flavia’s obsession?
I chose chemistry because it is a subject about which I know absolutely nothing. As I’ve said before, Flavia knows everything there is to be known about chemistry, while what I know about it could be put in a thimble with room left over for a finger. I’m learning, though! I’ve actually come to love poring over ancient chemistry books.

Rights to the first Flavia de Luce novel have been sold in several countries. Which cover is your favorite? How does it feel to be an international success? And do you have any overseas publicity tours planned for book #2?
Rights to the first book in the series, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie have been sold in 31 countries, and to The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag, in 19, so far. I love all of the covers—but for different reasons. The U.S. edition, from Delacorte Press, set an incredibly high standard to which every other country has aspired. I’ve just seen the Turkish cover today, and it’s breathtaking.

It’s lovely to know that so many readers love Flavia so fiercely. I’ve even heard from a couple of ladies in Washington who have formed The Flavia de Luce Adoration Society!

I often find when I meet Flavia’s fans that we have a lot in common, so it’s extremely gratifying to know that she’s being welcomed into such compatible company.
Besides the upcoming tour of Canada and the U.S., I’ll be visiting London in April, with two trips to Germany planned for later in the year.

You are also the co-author of Ms. Holmes of Baker Street, a book that presents the hypothesis that Sherlock Holmes was a woman. Do you think women are better suited to detection than men?

Yes. I’m surprised that no one’s ever spotted that before. Women are equipped by nature for the task: for example they have a better sense of smell, hearing, touch and taste than men. What is remarkable in a man is commonplace in a woman: it’s sometimes called “intuition,” but it’s really a kind of secret brain power. If more detectives were women there’d be fewer unsolved crimes.

You’ve planned six Flavia novels—without giving away too much, how do you see the character changing over the course of the series? How has she changed between books 1 and 2?
Since book two takes place barely a month after the first, there’s not a lot of change in Flavia. But she’s definitely growing up as she learns more and more about her place in the world. And it’s not all pleasant.

What books did you enjoy as a child?
I was an early reader. My two older sisters taught me to read before I went to Kindergarten, and once I’d worked my way through Huckleberry Finn and the set of Mark Twain books my mother owned, I read anything I could lay my hands on. One of my sisters had a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses. I didn’t understand it, but I loved the words. After Ulysses, Dick & Jane were crashing bores.

What mystery writers influenced you?
Dorothy L. Sayers, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Ngaio Marsh, Agatha Christie—also, many of the mystery novelists who were writing during the 1960’s and ‘70’s, such as Laurence Meynell, Peter Lovesey, Catherine Aird—the list goes on and on.

What’s next for Flavia?
I’m currently working on book three, which is called A Red Herring Without Mustard. I can’t say much about it except that a Gypsy caravan is involved and that Flavia stumbles upon a particularly gruesome murder. I love that word, “gruesome”—don’t you?

Donald Westlake was recently treated to a special big-screen viewing of The Hot Rock, a 1972 film based on his novel of the same name. The credits rolled and when the screen flashed Based on the novel by Donald E. Westlake, a loud cheer erupted from the assorted mix of best-selling mystery authors and journalists in the audience. Twenty-five years since his last viewing, Westlake flashed a grin as a young Robert Redford filled the screen with his jaunty gait, bringing to life Westlake’s ever-challenged burglar Dortmunder.

No stranger to the big screen, Westlake has seen several of his novels make their way to the multiplexes, including the classic Point Blank!, the Mel Gibson remake Payback and his Oscar-winning screen adaptation of The Grifters.

In June, an adaptation of the 1996 Dortmunder caper What’s the Worst That Could Happen? debuts at the box office, and this time Martin Lawrence takes over for Robert Redford as the bad luck burglar.

Popular and prolific, Westlake is widely credited with creating two of the most memorable characters in crime fiction — the cold-hearted, professional crook Parker and the bumbling burglar Dortmunder. This month Dortmunder makes his 10th appearance in print in the new mystery novel, Bad News.

Westlake, 67, has been making readers laugh at the foibles of his professional criminals since his smashing debut, The Mercenaries, in 1960. His career took off, and he was soon publishing three to four books a year. So prolific was his output that his publisher warned him not to publish so many books under his own name. Rather than slow down, he developed a myriad of pen names (Richard Stark, Tucker Coe, Samuel Holt and Curt Clark to name a few) to keep up with the overflow. After 40 years, even Westlake himself has lost track of how many books he has written. "I don’t know. I believe we might be in the 90s — not 100 yet though," he says.

You get the sense when talking with Westlake that he doesn’t have time for trivial matters like tracking his workflow. His conversation frequently veers off track, sentences tripping off his tongue unfinished. With all those books and characters in his head, who can blame him?

The Parker character made his first appearance in 1961. "I hadn’t even bothered to give him a first name because I thought that [book] would be the only one," he says. With a new ending that let the bad guy get away, the series was born. Written under the name Richard Stark, Westlake’s Parker novels don’t waste words or spend much time dealing with emotions; Parker is a true tough guy.

A plot idea originally intended for the hard-hearted anti-hero led Westlake to create Dortmunder, another life-long crook and the polar opposite of Parker. Westlake thought it would be fun to have Parker grapple with the challenge of stealing the same thing over and over. But he realized that "as soon a tough guy becomes inadvertently funny, he isn’t tough anymore; he’s just ridiculous. I liked the idea, so I said, well, let’s switch it around and give it to somebody else."

The Hot Rock was the first novel featuring the comic efforts of Dortmunder (named after a German beer) and his merry band of thieves. With plenty of puns and gags, this guy can’t quite get his act together to pull off the perfect crime. Whether it’s a scheme to nab a priceless bone or steal a bank (yes, the whole thing), the endless plot twists are a natural antidepressant.

In Bad News, Dortmunder’s problems start right off the bat when he and his friend Andy Kelp are hired by shady businessman Fitzroy Guilderpost to do a little graverobbing. Soon they’re caught up in a DNA switcheroo meant to prove that ex-Vegas showgirl Little Feather Redcorn is a long lost member of the Pottaknobbee Indian tribe. If they can pull off their scam, Little Feather will become one-third owner of the largest casino in the East. As with all Dortmunder novels, things never go according to plan, and plenty of hilarity ensues.

Westlake is famous for his comic touch, but in 1997, he had something of a career breakthrough with the publication of The Ax, a savage tale of a man caught in the era of corporate downsizing. He began getting a lot more attention, and suddenly the guy who could crank out three books a year was struggling with writer’s block.

"I realized that for 35 years I’d been flying under the radar and always able to do whatever I wanted to do — just successful enough so that I didn’t have to have a day job and not successful enough so that they were watching me. So all of a sudden, after 35 years, I was having second novel problems," he says.

Not wanting to follow the critical and commercial success of The Ax with a light Dortmunder novel, Westlake spent over a year trying to figure out what to write next. "I was spending several hours playing solitaire in my office, which can really get to you. I think I’d rather be a drunk," he laughs.

He had given up and moved on to a different project when a snippet of conversation with a friend got the wheels turning. Soon The Hook, a tale that ironically involves a best-selling author suffering from writer’s block, was under way. His editor took one look at the manuscript and announced, "That’s the book that follows The Ax."

Which brings up another dilemma. "Now I have to think about what book will come after The Ax, after The Hook, after Bad News. Has enough time gone by? Can I go back under the radar now?" he laughs.

But Hollywood isn’t about to let that happen. When the film adaptation of What’s the Worst That Could Happen? debuts at the box office in June, Westlake will have to venture out for one more trip to the theater.

Author photo by Lisa Berg.

For the past several years, writer Walter Mosley has been exploring and experimenting. Widely known and widely praised for his best-selling Easy Rawlins series of crime novels, Mosley restlessly delved into speculative fiction with Blue Light (1998), wrote two books featuring his urban philosopher, Socrates Fortlow, Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (1998) and Walkin' the Dog (1999), and produced an edgy nonfiction critique of American capitalism called Workin' on the Chain Gang: Shaking Off the Dead Hand of History (2000).

"In a funny kind of negative way, I'm representative of a new breed of crime writers and fiction writers — because I write so many different kinds of books," Mosley says during a call to his home in New York, where he has lived for nearly 20 years after growing up in Los Angeles.

During our conversation, I've been pressing Mosley on whether or not, as an African-American, he feels he's expanded the boundaries for black writers. He has been thoughtful and polite, but he obviously does not want to make large statements about his contribution. More to the point, he doesn't want to be neatly and narrowly categorized. So Mosley talks about the impact of Chester Himes and Donald Goins and notes that there are about 40 black mystery writers publishing in America today. "I kind of took on the job of doing the type of hardboiled fiction that originated with Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald," he finally allows. "I may have been, if not the first one, maybe the most defined person to do that."

In his new novel, Fearless Jones, Mosley moves beyond the Easy Rawlins series and creates a new cast of characters in the same hardboiled genre — with a twist. "I consider Fearless Jones to be in the genre of comic noir," Mosley says. "Even though these terrible things happen, very often you end up laughing."

Mosley is right. You do laugh, and the reason you laugh is because you see events through the eyes of Paris Minton. Paris is a slight, intelligent, inveterate reader who opens a used bookstore in the Watts section of Los Angeles in the 1950s. When Elana Love walks through his door, very bad things start happening to Paris Minton. How Paris responds to these events is quite different from how Easy Rawlins would respond.

"Paris is at once more practical and more cowardly than Easy," Mosley says. "In most hardboiled and noir fiction, the voice of the narrator is a very tough voice. I wanted to do something different. I wanted there to be the same tough, hardboiled character, but he's not the one telling the story. So Fearless Jones is the guy who does the rough stuff, and Paris is the guy who hides from it."

After Paris has been beaten up and robbed and his bookstore has been torched, he finally agrees to bail his friend Fearless Jones out of jail, having refused to do so before. "Friends are people who overlook your flaws and whose flaws you overlook," Mosley says. "Paris tells Fearless he's getting him out of jail just to save his ass, and Fearless says, 'I understand that. You're not perfect and neither am I.' I think that's a very satisfying moment, and it's a kind of moment that's often lacking in America."

Mosley has a reputation for weaving this sort of social and political commentary into the background of his novels. "I've always been pretty political," he says. "But I don't think there's any book that I've written — except possibly my book of nonfiction — to convince somebody else of my point of view. Very often I say 'this is the way things happen.' So if I talk about a black man named Paris Minton who lives in California in 1954 and has the entrepreneurial wherewithal to start himself a little business out of nothing, I'm going to have to mention that this doesn't necessarily go down easy with the guardians of the community. When Paris is rousted by the police it's just natural. He's not particularly angry. He's actually smart enough to have gone off and gotten a letter of explanation, because he knows what they are going to blame him for. If I didn't write about this, I wouldn't be writing really about our time."

Mosley, who didn't start writing until he was in his 30s, is also known for the economy and expressiveness of the language he uses. "When I decided to become a writer," he says, "I went to the writing program at City College. The one class I took every semester while I was there was a poetry workshop with a poet named Bill Matthews. I'm not a good poet, believe me — and that's stating it mildly. But studying poetry taught me the major things I needed to know about fiction. I already had a narrative voice, and I already loved characters and character development. But the other stuff I had to think about was condensation, the music in language, how simile works, how metaphor works, how to make a sentence say one thing and mean two other things also."

Discovering the other things his sentences and books are about is the challenge he always faces, Mosley says. "A mystery that is just a mystery will work. I read books like that all the time: a man gets killed and the whole book is finding out who that man is and how he got killed. That's OK, but for me it's not good enough to have written a book like that. There have to be other things going on.

"Fearless Jones is a mystery but it's also about black entrepreneurs in Los Angeles in the 1950s," Mosley adds. "That's a class of people who are almost never talked about or thought about or wondered about. But this story is full of them. . . . I also talk about a lot of other things, about people falling in love and how different people approach falling in love. I talk about friendship. And I talk about what intelligence is and the different kinds of intelligence that exist. Paris and Fearless really need each other. And part of that has to do with intelligence. Fearless is one of those old kind of heroes like Achilles, and Paris is more like Ulysses. One has a smart heart and the other a smart head. If it weren't for their friendship, Fearless would still be in jail and Paris would be dead," says Mosley, who plans to feature the characters in an ongoing series.

Mosley thinks of novels as documents of the history of the time and believes that people are more likely to read a novel for an understanding of a historical period than a history book. So he strives for a kind of fundamental accuracy.

"But the real job of the novel is character and character development," he says. "I try my best to bring my characters off the page." In Fearless Jones Mosley does exactly that.

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

Author photo by Anthony Barbosa.

Two-time Edgar Award winner James Lee Burke’s  latest novel, Rain Gods, finds the crime master at the top of his game. Burke, best known as the author of numerous books starring his Southern sleuths Dave Robicheaux and Billy Bob Holland, has also crafted other works of fiction that transcend the mystery genre, including the Pulitzer Prize-nominated Lost Get-Back Boogie. Burke is that rare thriller writer who can combine gritty plotting with colorful characters and poetic descriptions of physical settings, while also managing to neatly circumscribe the action with a noirish sense of the sociopolitical American landscape.

Rain Gods is set into motion when the dead bodies of nine young Thai women—human “mules” in a heroin smuggling scheme—are discovered in a remote South Texas churchyard. Sheriff Hackberry Holland—Korean War vet, former ACLU lawyer, and reformed drinker and contrite ex-womanizer—takes on the investigation, which reaches into many sleazy worlds but mainly pits him against a formidable yet strangely compelling madman named Preacher Collins. The strong narrative offers a starkly realized Texas backdrop with occasional echoes of his beloved Louisiana, a healthy amount of violence and suspense, and a continuously intriguing whodunit feel that will satisfy his many fans. Burke took the time to answer a few questions about the new novel from his home in Montana.

Your protagonist, Sheriff Hackberry Holland, is 74, has chronic back pain, night terrors about his Korean War POW experience, has sworn off drink, and now doggedly chases bad guys in a wide-open—some might say godforsaken—Texas landscape. What inspired you to develop this character, and can we expect to see him as the star of future novels?
Hack first appears in my work in three short stories contained in the collection titled The Convict. He is also the narrator of my third published novel, Lay Down my Sword and Shield. I think he's one of most intriguing characters I have written about, and I suspect I will be writing more about him as well as the rest of the Holland family.

In the course of Rain Gods, it is suggested that Holland and his nemesis, Preacher Collins, are “two sides of the same coin.” Does either one bear any resemblance to the coin that is James Lee Burke?
My own life is an enormous yawn. I think that's the reason I'm often invited to speak before groups of insomniacs.

Two current events are referenced in Rain Gods that seem crucial to the narrative and character development: Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War. How do you think these events have affected American society?
The antagonist in the novel is a man known as Preacher Jack Collins. He's narcissistic, messianic, and convinced that he is the left hand of god. Needless to say, he's an extremely dangerous man. The novel has many symbolic overtones. We live in a time when men who in my view are absolutely ruthless have hijacked Christianity and used it for their own agenda.

With its South Texas setting, Rain Gods automatically conjures a strong sense of border politics and the issue of Hispanic immigration. Holland’s investigation directly—and often uneasily—involves the FBI and ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement). Do you have a personal view on the immigration issue or any cynicism regarding the related work of federal agencies?
I think the people who serve in federal law enforcement do the best they can with what they have. I used to work for the United States Forest Service and the Job Corps, and I was always impressed with the quality of men and women who serve our government. I think the immigration difficulties we are experiencing today are directly related to our policies in Latin America, and also the wish on the part of many business interests to see an end to labor unions.

Your treatment of women in Rain Gods might be viewed as extreme. Juxtaposed with the dead Thai drug mules and strippers and escorts are tremendously strong figures like Holland’s devoted deputy Pam Tibbs, the defiantly combative strip-club owner’s wife Esther Dolan and the feisty country singer Vicki Gaddis.
The three women you mention are among the strongest characters in my work. The victims of the sex trade are not dealt with individually because they are not central players in the story. However, my experience has been, as Orwell once said, that people are always much better than we think they are, no matter what roles they occupy.

Deputy Tibbs, though young enough to be Holland’s daughter, has romantic designs on him. The age difference bothers him, yet we’re tantalizingly left hanging about exactly what happens between the two of them. Any hints about what happens between the two of them?
I never know what lies next in the story. I believe the story is written in the unconscious and the artist is its incremental discoverer rather than its creator. At least, that is the way it has always been for me.

Three of your previous books—In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead, Two for Texas and Heaven's Prisoners—have been adapted for the screen, and Rain Gods would also seem to be a logical candidate for a film. Have you been satisfied with Hollywood’s treatment of your work?
My experience with the film industry has always been a good one. In each instance, the creative people involved in the project treated the work with respect and did the best job they could. A writer shouldn't ask for more.

You’ve been referred to as “a Faulkner of crime writing.” How do you feel about that designation? And, since you began your career as a writer of “serious” fiction, has your work in the crime genre fulfilled your literary ambitions?
The comparison with William Faulker is very complimentary, but Faulkner's work is on a level with the work of Shakespeare and Chaucer and Homer and Keats. The only change that has taken place in my work is the fact that with the writing of The Neon Rain, some of my novels were narrated by a police officer, namely Dave Robicheaux. The themes, the settings, the type of people I write about are the same as the ones we encounter in my first novel, Half of Paradise.

Rain Gods is chock-full of details on myriad topics—the Korean War, the drug trade, seedy night clubs, firearms, federal law enforcement, all manner of Texas geography and flora and fauna, etc. How much research do you do, or is it all second nature by now?
I do little if any research. Most of the people I write about are composites of people I have known. Hemingway once said that once the author knows his characters, he can place them in any setting or era he wishes.

Holland’s antagonists in Rain Gods are a motley bunch of lowlifes, all fit for a Tarantino film. Have you known many people like this in the course of your life?
I was a social worker in California and handled the cases of many parolees and mental patients, some of whom were among the most interesting people I have ever known. I also made recordings of the inmates in the work camps and what was called "the block" at Angola Penitentiary in 1961. I was occasionally a police reporter and worked a bit in the oil patch, and lived in an urban slum and the poorest part of the southern mountains. I may have had few other talents, but I was always a good listener. The great stories are in the air, all around us, everyday, no matter where we're located. All we have to do is listen.

What the heck is creosote?
It's a viscous oil produced by the creosote bush. It's often used to treat wood, particularly railroad ties.

You were born in Houston but have a home in Louisiana, which one would assume is your spiritual literary base given your many Robicheaux novels. Still, you’ve written about Texas in the Holland stories. Which locale do you prefer to bring to life in fiction, and is there another Robicheaux tale on the horizon?
To me, the South and the American West represent the entirety of our experience as a nation, for good or bad. The challenge for the artist is to see the larger story in its smallest component, like coming to know a beach through a grain of sand. I'm writing another novel narrated by Dave Robicheaux now. I hope to write many more stories before I catch the train. In fact, when the latter event occurs, I'm taking my notebook and pen with me.

RELATED CONTENT

Read all our reviews featuring the novels of James Lee Burke.
 

Michael Connelly’s new book, The Scarecrow, hits bookstores this month, having garnered pre-release acclaim from every quarter. It is Connelly’s first novel to feature reporter Jack McEvoy since the runaway bestseller The Poet in 1996. Of all of the characters in Connelly books over the years, McEvoy has the trajectory that most closely resembles Connelly’s own: reporter for a small-town newspaper, a move to the Los Angeles Times, a successful book deal, fame and fortune; analogous events, albeit in a slightly different order.

I recently had the opportunity to interview Connelly via a crackly Tokyo-to-Florida cell phone connection. In addition to having read most of his books over the years, I did some research and learned that Connelly once lived in Raymond Chandler’s old apartment, a factoid I thought worth pursuing.

“Ah, you must have visited Wikipedia,” Connelly begins, with a knowing chuckle. “As so often happens with the Internet, they got the germ of the story right, but they missed out on the details.” Connelly says he was inspired to start writing mysteries after seeing Robert Altman’s film The Long Goodbye, in which Elliott Gould stars as the Chandler detective Philip Marlowe. “When I moved to L.A., I thought it would be cool to live in the apartment where Marlowe/Gould had lived in the movie,” he says. The apartment wasn’t available at the time, but years later it became vacant and Connelly moved in. “On the plus side, it had a great view overlooking L.A., and I could walk to the Hollywood Bowl to see the Rolling Stones. On, the minus side, it wasn’t air-conditioned, and it always smelled a bit like a gas leak,” Connelly recalls.

Connelly’s character, Jack McEvoy, lives in a Craftsman home south of Sunset, and does his writing from the pressroom of the Los Angeles Times. This is a room with which Connelly is intimately familiar from his years as a crime reporter, and one of his aims in writing The Scarecrow was to focus on the sad decline of newspapers like the Times. The real-life closing in February of the Rocky Mountain News, the site of McEvoy’s previous posting, forced the recall of The Scarecrow manuscript so Connelly could make last-minute changes to the book. As more newspapers around the country shut down, Connelly says, “I think what is lost is a community center, a place of news and ideas and debate. It will be splintered among websites and blogs. Perhaps more important is the loss of a watchdog. Who will keep an eye on the small stuff? Who will uncover the small corruptions that lead to the big ones? Will the bloggers do it? Will websites do it? I’m not sure.”

As The Scarecrow opens, McEvoy’s career is in flux: thanks to the double whammy of his large paycheck and the L.A. Times’ plummeting fortunes, he is about to be given the heave-ho. Asked to stay on for a brief period to train his replacement, Mc-Evoy faces a conundrum: on the one hand, he would love to leave his boss twisting in the wind, but he is working on an article that might well garner him the Pulitzer Prize, and he’d really like to stick around long enough to see it in print. His story focuses on Alonzo Winslow, a 16-year-old journeyman felon charged with rape and murder. It takes McEvoy next to no time to deduce that Winslow’s so-called confession is bogus, which begs the bigger question: if this fledgling thug isn’t the killer, then who is the Scarecrow? And how can one write about this stuff without giving real-life villains usable ideas?

“I think you always have to have some responsibility when you write up the bad guys,” Connelly says. “For example, I never give every step in a crime because I don’t want the books to be a primer for anybody. Most of the time, unfortunately, I am not plowing new ground. The bad guy in The Scarecrow may be unique, but the use of the Internet for nefarious deeds is nothing new. This so-called Craigslist Killer would be a case in point. The real thing is always much worse in reality than anything I put into fiction.”

A longtime cinema fan, Connelly has had only one of his books made into a movie thus far, the 2002 Clint Eastwood adaptation of Blood Work. It makes one wonder how Hollywood can pass over such intelligent and action-packed novels in favor of, say, a remake of Bewitched. “Hey, I liked Bewitched,” Connelly says with a laugh. “Seriously, though, I don’t think my books lend themselves to being made into movies, because so much of what happens in the book is in the head of the protagonist. You could do it with voice-overs, but Hollywood doesn’t like voice-overs.”

Asked if he has ever considered doing a Hitchcockian cameo role in a film of his work, Connelly says, “I visited the set of Blood Work a couple of times, but Clint Eastwood never offered me a role as an extra, and I never really thought much about it. Then Eastwood directed Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River, and toward the end of the movie, Dennis was in a great cameo in the parade scene, alongside the mayor, no less! Dennis is a friend of mine, and I have given him a good deal of grief about that.”

Speaking of cameo appearances, the McEvoy character has made several, in books featuring longtime Connelly stalwarts Harry Bosch and Mickey Haller. “The idea was that all my books would be part of one big mosaic of time and place. So I consciously look for places to cross-pollinate,” Connelly says. “I needed to have a reporter in The Brass Verdict so I made him Jack McEvoy because I knew I would be writing about him next and it sort of set the table for the next book. I wish there was a device for tracking all of this. I could use one.”

Connelly is not one to rest on his laurels. Indeed, it seems he is not one to rest at all; his next book, 9 Dragons, featuring L.A. cop Harry Bosch, is due out in the fall.
 

Tony Hillerman wrote of C.J. Box's first novel: "Buy two copies of Open Season, and save one in mint condition to sell to first-edition collectors." In his well-crafted debut, Box decisively set himself apart from the crowd of freshman mystery writers. Deftly sidestepping the dreaded sophomore slump, he is back with a vengeance in Savage Run, the second book featuring Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett.

Box, a Wyoming native who has worked as a ranch hand, a surveyor and a fishing guide, focuses his latest book on the battle between conservationists and ranchers for control of the West's open range. The scales tip one way, then the other, in this ongoing struggle, with neither side seeming to gain lasting advantage. In Savage Run the stakes have been raised, as an organization of zealous environmentalists locks horns with the Stockman's Trust, a well-heeled clandestine association of ranchers who will stop at nothing in pursuit of their objectives. When several "tree huggers" meet with foul play in rapid succession, the investigation falls to Joe Pickett. It will prove to be the toughest assignment of his career.

"People seem to see environmental issues as black and white," says Box ("Chuck" to his friends) via telephone from his Wyoming office. "I hoped to present a fair look at both sides of the issue." The environment is certainly a running theme in both Open Season and Savage Run, but more compelling are the characters on either side of the fence: the ranchers who depend upon the use of government lands for grazing their cattle; the newcomers from out of state who hanker after a taste of the Old West; the environmentalists bent on conserving the dwindling natural resources of the region; and finally, the game wardens, who stir the simmering pot in an attempt to keep it from boiling over.

So, are the protagonist and the supporting characters drawn from people in Box's daily life? "Well, there are any number of game wardens who are absolutely sure that Joe Pickett is based on them, and their wives think so as well!" Box says, laughing. "But the truth is that he is a composite of several different people. A game warden has a unique and autonomous job, and that lifestyle attracts a certain type of individual, someone like Joe Pickett."

On a more personal note, Box reveals that his 15-year-old twin daughters are convinced that they are the models for Pickett's older daughter, Sheridan: "I guess there's more than a little resemblance between my youngest daughter and Lucy Pickett, as well," he says with a chuckle. "The girls take a bit of ribbing from their friends at school, because all their friends read the books to see if there is anything potentially embarrassing."

How does it feel to be an overnight success? "It's weird. Open Season sat on my shelf for three and a half years before anyone showed any interest in it. I went to a conference hosted by the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Association, and they had agents on hand to critique new writers' work. The deal was, you could sign up to meet with two agents, so I signed up with two as C.J. Box, two more as Chuck Box. I think I signed up for eight in all. That was in November of 1999, and by the following May I had a publishing deal." Now, two years down the road, Open Season has been optioned for a movie, and Savage Run has received rave advance reviews. "Originally, I was signed to do three books in the Joe Pickett series; we have just signed for an additional three, plus another book that is not part of the series."

Things are nothing if not hectic for Box these days. He has not given up his day job (organizing tours of the western U.S. for European travelers), but writing demands more and more of his time: "I try to devote two entire days a week to writing. The rest of the time, I go in to the office and work just like before." And has he at done something wonderful to celebrate his new success-a round-the-world cruise, a Mercedes? "No time," he says ruefully. "I did take my wife out to dinner, though. Does that count?"

Tops on his wish list: "I hope that someday I have the opportunity to meet Tony Hillerman and thank him personally for his great review!"

For almost 20 years Stephen L. Carter has been carrying a powerful character around in his imagination.

"He was a cold, distant person of enormously strong political views," Carter says during a call to his office at Yale University Law School, "the patriarch of his family, pretty conservative in the sense that a lot of old, traditional black families are conservative. A judge."

While he struggled and experimented with ways to free this character to tell his story, while bits and pieces of novels accumulated in a trunk in his basement, Carter pursued his career as a professor of law and a public intellectual. He wrote such widely praised nonfiction books as The Culture of Disbelief and Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby. He appeared frequently as an expert commentator on Nightline and Face the Nation. He wrote often in the popular press and legal journals. He was named William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale.

Finally, about five years ago, Carter, who has known since childhood that he wanted to write novels, discovered the fictional vehicle that would allow the judge—and all the other characters associated with this powerful, controversial personality—to come alive. Well, almost alive. Because one of the intriguing things about The Emperor of Ocean Park is that the dominant personality of the novel—Judge Oliver Garland—dies at home in his study in Washington, D.C., at the beginning of the story.

When Carter finally completed his first novel, its mix of character and action so thrilled those in the publishing world that they clamored to buy the whopping doorstop of a book. Knopf outbid 11 other publishers with a $4 million, two-book deal, and movie makers fell in line soon thereafter, offering a hefty sum for the film rights. The competition garnered newspaper headlines and predictions that the book would be one of the biggest hits of the summer. Adding to the hoopla is Knopf’s decision to launch The Emperor of Ocean Park with a staggering 500,000 first printing.

It’s a hefty gamble on a first-time fiction author, but the publisher is confident readers will flock to this complex literary thriller. Carter deftly weaves together several strands, from the relationships of fathers and sons and husbands and wives to the politics of the Nixon and Reagan eras.

At the center of it all is the recently deceased Judge Garland, who had been nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court, then forced to withdraw because of his association with a shadowy figure named Jack Ziegler.

Embittered by his treatment by liberals in the Senate, Judge Garland became a darling of the Republican Right and grew increasingly distant from his three surviving children. One of the three, Mariah, does not believe the judge has died of natural causes. She inveigles her brother Talcott, a law professor at a fictional Ivy League law school in an equally fictional town called Elm Harbor, Connecticut, to join her in an investigation of her father’s death. Talcott—Misha to his friends—is the narrator of The Emperor of Ocean Park.

And Talcott has problems of his own. He struggles to hold together his marriage with his disloyal wife, Kimmer, an ambitious attorney on the president’s short-list for the federal bench. As he tries to unravel the clues his father left him in the form of chess problems, he grows increasingly alienated from his colleagues at the law school. His relationship with his young son worsens. He is pursued by a maddening array of people who demand to know about his father’s "arrangements." And, finally, he must contend with the awesome task of discovering who his father really was.

One of the most interesting threads of the book is Carter’s portrayal of the black upper class and black professionals.

"I didn’t grow up around that kind of wealth in the black community, but many people do," Carter says. "Many of these professional families, with their big houses, imported cars and vacation homes, have had money for generations. That is something we don’t hear about very much, and I wanted to talk about that experience a little bit. Another thing I wanted to talk about are some of the day-to-day perceptions of black professionals who work in predominately white places."

Carter says that much of the novel is about perceptions. And he cautions, "It’s not a book of opinion. These things emerged as I began to let my characters tell their stories. In fact, there are things in the book that I don’t agree with. The point was not to persuade the reader but to provoke the reader, to put in these asides, these subtleties, these themes that people don’t think about so much. The different ways in which people very often see the same event is important. What fascinates me in relationships between people is how so much of life is misunderstanding."

Asked about the surface similarities between his character Talcott, a professor of law at an Ivy League school, and himself, Carter is quick to remind his reader that this is a work of fiction, of imagination.

"Talcott is a deeply obsessive person who is constantly interrogating the world," Carter says. "I have a much more laid-back view of the world. And I think I have a greater acceptance of human frailty than Talcott does. It’s very important for me to portray people in ways that they are not a captive of their weaknesses. What is of real interest to me about life— and therefore was of interest to me in writing this novel—is the notion that people succeed not because they undergo fundamental changes of character, but because they transcend their weaknesses."

Continuing in that vein, Carter says, "I’m interested in constancy. I’m interested in how people stay the same. Indeed, I’m interested in the virtue of staying the same sometimes when the world is changing around you. That’s why so much of the book is about love and loyalty," he says. "Talcott’s attitude about love in the book is an old notion in Christianity and Judaism and a lot of traditional societies. It’s the idea that love is an activity, an act of will, rather than a feeling or desire. Talcott and other characters . . . cling to decisions to be loyal or loving, as opposed to simply being moved by what they happen to be feeling. Love is something you decide to do."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, Caifornia.

Some say that the practice of law is the art of compromise. Crafting a successful legal thriller involves a similar process of discovery, rebuttal and the occasional 11th-hour revelation for Mary and Pamela O'Shaughnessy. Eight years ago, the two sisters invented fictitious Lake Tahoe attorney Nina Reilly, who summarily argued her way onto the bestseller lists. They chose the pen name Perri by combining their first names, with a nod to a certain fictional barrister.

"We were inspired by the Perry Mason series to have a lawyer who continued through a lot of different cases," Mary says. "But he never changed; he was suave, urbane, he had his little martinis and his calm relationships that were just suggested and never really fulfilled. Nina's not like that; she's much more a character in transition." Indeed. Between running her business, juggling her love life with Carmel private investigator Paul van Wagoner, keeping her teenage son Bob out of trouble with his cyber-punk girlfriend Nikki and maintaining ties to her ex-husband, San Francisco attorney Jack McIntyre, Nina is one lawyer who has little time for happy hour.

In the new thriller Unfit to Practice, Nina's career takes a dramatic turn when her truck is stolen with three sensitive case files inside. Slowly and with sinister intent, someone begins to leak information from the confidential files to sabotage Nina's cases. When her own clients complain to the California State Bar, Nina faces disbarment and turns to the best defense lawyer she knows, ex-husband Jack. The O'Shaughnessys grew up imagining gripping crime scenarios together as kids in the suburbs of Los Angeles. Pam went on to earn a law degree from Harvard and worked for 16 years as a trial lawyer in private practice in the very Lake Tahoe Starlake Building where Counselor Reilly now resides. Mary took her English degree east to Boston, where she worked on multimedia projects in New York, Washington, D.C., and the Virgin Islands.

Somewhere in mid-career, each reached a personal crossroads. For Pam, raising a toddler sparked dreams of a more creative life. For Mary, the prospect of returning to work with three children under the age of five seemed unimaginable.

Both had been writing independently, pecking away late at night after the kids were in bed. Mary had a book with no plot, Pam a plot with no ending. Why not try collaborating and see what might happen? The idea was terrific, but the collaborative process proved a bit more challenging than it had in childhood, particularly since the two now live in different states. Pam has homes in Hawaii and Lake Tahoe, while Mary lives south of San Francisco. Eight books into their long-distance partnership, they're still working out the kinks of their admittedly idiosyncratic method of writing together.

As a rule, the one who comes up with the premise takes the lead role for that book; the two tend to alternate. The arrangement serves to break creative deadlocks.

"It doesn't mean that we don't each put in equal amounts of work on the draft, we do," says Mary. "But one person has the ultimate say. What that means is they get to do the final draft, so at a certain point you just have to let go, there's no point in arguing." The title comes early on in the story's development, and yes, as a matter of fact, it's getting harder and harder to find suitable three-word legal terms. (Previous titles in the series include Writ of Execution, Invasion of Privacy and Obstruction of Justice.) "We try to choose a legal term that says something about the plot," says Pam. "We seem to be locked into three words, and we're trying to convey some movement, some force of action. It's really difficult." "We look them up to make sure they haven't been used, at least in the last five minutes!" Mary adds.

Next, the sisters draft and submit a detailed outline to their publishers. No problem there? "Just that we throw it out after about the first eight chapters!" quips Pam. In their 1995 debut, Motion to Suppress, they even changed the killer in the fourth draft.

Each writer enjoys the surprises she has come to expect from the other.

"Actually, we're usually very amused," says Mary. "We both love seeing the characters brought to life again. Certainly, the first time you read what the other person has written it's a thrill. Then you begin to look at the nitty gritty and see all of the horrible things they've done, all the mistakes they've made. I think that's just part of the process, to build it up and then tear it down again." The two take turns with the actual writing; generally they will draft eight chapters then pass it to the other to draft the next eight and so on. Pam is the procrastinator, Mary the voice on the phone barking for pages.

"We are real perfectionists and we do have different styles so the book has to go back and forth quite a bit before we're both satisfied," says Mary.

In subsequent drafts (they generally do three complete rewrites before submitting the manuscript to their publisher), the two have learned to correct for each other's blind spots: Pam tends to slip into a passive voice, while Mary's more intricate style and fondness for compound sentences sometimes gets her "buried in language." The O'Shaughnessys say their decision to stay away from graphic sex and violence has been key to the success of the series. "We have some strict standards because we are mothers," says Pam. "We see the books as entertainment, something fun for people, excitement, vicarious adventure. It's important for us to keep the books fun." To keep the writing fun, they've allowed their central character wide berth.

"We're not sure even to this day who that character is in many ways," Mary admits. "She's a little mysterious; she's very impulsive and does things that we did not put in the proposal at any point. She's always changing and always growing, kind of like a real person to us. I'm not sure we always know what she's going to do, and that's always a lot of fun."

Jay Lee MacDonald is a freelance writer in Naples, Florida.

Jessica Speart grew up dreaming of Broadway, preparing for the day she would portray fascinating women with all the nuance and grace of Meryl Streep.

A fiery redhead from New Jersey, Speart trained at the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute, which helped her to land parts in off-Broadway productions, television commercials and eventually the ABC soap opera One Life to Live, where she played the recurring role of Angela Foster.

But when success finally arrived, Speart was no longer content to play a role in someone else’s adventure; she wanted the one life she lived to be her own.

“I had studied acting since I was 13 years old and I was as focused and obsessed with that as I now am with this,” she says by phone from San Francisco, where she is researching her eighth wildlife mystery. “I loved it, but I just reached a point where I realized I wasn’t going to be Meryl Streep. It just wasn’t in the stars.” But what was? She didn’t have a clue.

Then life intervened.

“My epiphany came when I was killed off the soap opera by this one-armed scientist, and I thought, this is great, what do I do now? I had all these really crappy part-time jobs, I had broken up with my boyfriend, and I thought, something has to change. So I took all the money I had saved working catering jobs and I went to Africa I blew it on Africa.” Her travels to Kenya and Tanzania ushered in a decade spent writing magazine articles about the plight of wildlife endangered by poachers, smugglers and corporate polluters. Speart was outraged to learn that wildlife crime, including the traditional Chinese medicine black market in everything from rhino horns to bear gall bladders, is a $12-$15 billion a year industry, second only to illegal drug and arms smuggling.

Through field research, she met and earned the trust of special agents of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. She found them as fascinating and imperiled as the endangered species they try to protect.

“It’s a very closed, tight little network. They are basically battered by their own agency; there are very few of them, they don’t get a lot of money or moral support, they’re fighting their own administration, the bureaucracy, all the powers that be, the politicians. I have always been for the underdog and I really started to tell a lot of stories about what they were up against and the agents started to open up to me.” Her desire to alert a broader readership to the plight of endangered wildlife prompted her to turn to fiction. Her 1997 debut, Gator Aide, launched her wildlife mystery series featuring Rachel Porter, a spunky Fish and Wildlife special agent who is equally at odds with both the bad guys and her own pencil-pushing superiors.

Coastal Disturbance, the latest entry in the series, finds Agent Porter up to her neck in trouble amid the swamps of southern Georgia, where she uncovers an illegal manatee water park. When the docile manatees start dying, she traces the source to toxic discharge from a powerful corporate polluter with sinister friends in high places including Porter’s own agency.

“One of the reasons mystery writers become mystery writers is because they want to see justice done,” Speart says. “You’re really frustrated with the system.” In the course of her research for the series, Speart has had a few brushes with Indiana Jones-style adventure: She’s done tequila shots with a tattooed stripper, visited a drug smuggler’s viper collection and entered a cage alone with two mountain lions.

These days, when this former actress dons a role, she’s doing it for herself and her readers.

“Things that you would never do in real life, you do when you’re researching. Rachel becomes a role; I become Rachel,” she admits. “You trade one unstable future for another, but writing has definitely been better for me.” Jay Lee MacDonald is a professional writer based in Naples, Florida.