Russian homicide detective Arkady Renko's cases have mirrored the historic upheavals within the Soviet Union during the past quarter of a century. He has battled his old-guard bosses and the KGB in Gorky Park, been thrown into exile aboard a Soviet trawler in Polar Star, returned to confront the rise of the post-Soviet Mafia in Red Square and, in a busman's holiday, investigated a friend's murder during a tour of Russia's orphan, Cuba, in Havana Bay.

In his latest adventure, Wolves Eat Dogs, the indomitable inspector confronts crimes against man and nature when a murder trail leads into the frightening, fascinating world of modern man's biggest technological blunder, Chernobyl.

When wealthy New Russian Pasha Ivanov falls (or is pushed) 11 stories to his death, Renko's business-as-usual superiors rule it a suicide, case closed. But a saltshaker found beneath the body leads Renko to an eerie discovery: Ivanov's sumptuous digs are white-hot with cesium 137, a deadly radioactive isotope.

Two years ago, popular suspense writer Martin Cruz Smith visited Chernobyl against the advice of almost everyone. Like his fictional alter ego, Smith listened to his instincts instead.

"When I first broached the subject of Chernobyl, everyone said that's the last thing anyone would want to read about, it's so grim," he says by phone from his home in San Rafael, California. "But when I went there, it was so much more interesting than I first thought. It was interesting to see people under such pressure. There was incredible heroism among the so-called liquidators who were cleaning up that mess. Many of them carried radioactive materials in their hands with absolutely no idea how dangerous that was, but some of them did understand and they sacrificed themselves." Many Americans assume Chernobyl was abandoned after the 1986 disaster. Not so. The 135,000 inhabitants of the two closest towns, Pripyat and Chernobyl, were evacuated, but the workers who manned the three functioning reactors and the liquidators who tried to contain the damage within the fourth reactor stayed behind. The last of the active Chernobyl reactors was finally shut down last year.

Smith recalls his first look at the sarcophagus that surrounds, though hardly "contains," the world-famous number four reactor; radioactivity from it continues to seep into the groundwater that feeds the Dnepr River.

"It looks like a monument to a disaster," he says. "It strongly resembles a cage, a cage that looks very impressive at first sight but then the more you study and know about it, the flimsier it becomes." In fact, Chernobyl has become the unofficial sick joke of the once-proud Ukraine. There was the unnecessary low-power test that triggered the chain reaction that caused a deadly fireball to blow the roof off the tower, contaminating the Northern Hemisphere. Then came an unexplainable three-day silence from Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev during which children played in the green foam, the plant's protection against radioactive release. After the forced evacuation of Pripyat, the government built a new town, Slavutych, on a radioactive site it called its "cesium patch." "Pripyat really lets you know that things have gone very much awry; you walk into a city of 50,000 and you're the only one," Smith recalls. "But then they moved the workers to Slavutych and planted them on radioactive ground. How could they screw up so badly?" Workers clad in camouflage commute daily from Slavutych to the reactors, passing through radiation detectors frequently. A microdot of cesium or plutonium invisible to the naked eye is enough to send a Geiger counter needle off the gage. In his week inside the Zone of Exclusion, Smith carried a dosimeter constantly.

"Some of the veterans get these cavalier attitudes. I had a guide with me in a Pripyat amusement park who called me over and said, Put your dosimeter here.' So I put it down and the needle just flew off, a thousand times normal. I said, why are we standing here?! It was just a random spot in the town that was not marked by a stake and warnings." In Smith's new novel, one of Ivanov's vice presidents is found in Pripyat with his throat slashed. Murder means little in a town that has seen so much death. To solve the case, Renko enlists the help of Eva, a sexy but deeply cynical physician who treats the scavengers and old Ukrainians who have returned to Chernobyl despite its deadly toxicity.

The title of the novel, Wolves Eat Dogs, refers to a leitmotif expertly woven throughout the narrative. Wolves in fact have returned to Chernobyl in great numbers, as have wild boar, deer and other wildlife, all of it radioactive from wandering through the so-called "black villages" and numerous hot zones that will remain for thousands of years. For Chernobyl, and indeed the former Soviet Union, explosive change has brought about a new natural order, a wolf-eat-dog world.

In retrospect, Smith considers Chernobyl one of the first irreparable cracks that eventually led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. "The Russian authorities would like to say it was human error, that 15 fools got together and did this thing," he says. "But in fact, the reactor was unstable at low levels of output and this piece of information had not been relayed to the technicians who were running the test." Smith says the catastrophic events at Chernobyl brought to light the secrecy at the heart of the Soviet system. "The Russian people definitely saw it as the worst example of that," he notes, and the three-day delay before the general alarm was issued led to "a real collapse in the credibility and belief in the state." Jay MacDonald happened to be driving through Middletown, Pennsylvania, during the Three Mile Island nuclear incident.

Literary novelist takes on the Corleone family Mark Winegardner is dead tired. The past two years of his life have been spent holed up in monastic artist colonies like Yaddo for months at a time, writing around the clock. Down the stretch, during the last eight weeks of writing, he literally slept every other night, a man on fire determined to make the most of an opportunity most writers would kill for: to write the sequel to The Godfather.

For years, Random House editor Jonathan Karp had urged Mario Puzo to revisit the Corleone family: What happened to crooner Johnny Fon-tane? Irish consigliere Tom Hagen? Michael and Kay? Puzo wasn’t interested, but he had no objection to his family continuing the saga after his death. Three years ago, Karp, Puzo’s oldest son Anthony and literary agent Neil Olson discretely contacted dozens of writers, some household names, soliciting proposals for the first sequel, The Godfather Returns. Short of cloning, they could not have found a better successor than Winegardner. Like Puzo when he wrote his 1969 runaway bestseller, Winegardner is a highly regarded literary novelist (Crooked River Burning, Veracruz Blues) in his early 40s who hasn’t delved previously into the Sicilian underworld. He is also at the top of his game, eager for a broader audience and fully cognizant of the pressure and perils of following in oversized footsteps.

“When I saw the request for proposals, I asked Jon to level with me. I said, Look, before I invest a lot of time into this, tell me the truth: at the end of the day, you’re just going to pick some super-famous crime novelist, aren’t you?” Winegardner says from his home in Tallahassee, where he heads the creative writing program at Florida State University. “And he said, Nope. I can’t promise you we’ll choose you, but I can promise you we will choose a writer a lot like you.” Many of the proposals played it safe by suggesting prequels about the life of the godfather, Vito Corleone, affording the author a relatively blank canvas. Wine-gardner, however, accepted the greater challenge: to devise a story that accommodates not only the original novel but also the two popular film sequels.

“That was the crazy part. I didn’t have to do that; I just decided to do that,” he says.

“I could have theoretically ignored everything in the movies that didn’t come from the book. Instead, I kind of maneuver around them. I decided early on that I would neither mention the stuff that happens in the movies but not the book, nor would I contradict it. It took me a long time to work out.” Winegardner found his setting and main inspiration in the late 1950s, when Don Michael Corleone is struggling for a way out of organized crime. “I knew for sure that I could do this when I realized that Michael Corleone’s greatest yearning, to be legitimate, was an aspect of the story that had never been resolved. It is somehow resolved by the time Godfather III starts; he’s succeeded in a mixed way that he’s resigned to, but it is absolutely unresolved in Godfather II. I thought, holy cow, we need to see how he succeeds or fails. When did he get to the half-baked success that, at the beginning of Godfather III, it seems he has had for decades?” Winegardner picks up numerous secondary characters from the cutting room floor, including Michael Corleone’s contentious brother Fredo, Sonny’s widow and family (Sonny’s son Frankie here becomes a Notre Dame star linebacker nicknamed “The Hit-man”) and yes, the lovable Johnny Fontane. (For readers who feel a bit lost, The Godfather Returns includes a chronology of the two novels and the films, as well as an extensive list of characters.) Puzo would have approved of the way Winegardner seamlessly weaves his plot into the Godfather story to produce a singularly enjoyable mid-quel that’s lighter on its feet than the original. Winegardner freely acknowledges that the hundreds of post-Godfather novels, films and TV shows, from Donnie Brasco and Goodfellas to “The Sopranos,” enabled him to infuse The Godfather Returns with both humor and realistic sex that weren’t possible in 1969.

“The Godfather is a masterpiece of storytelling, but it is a little bit of a humorless book,” he says. “I know about the Mafia, both from talking with some minor guys and reading more than a hundred books about it, and these are not humorless men. I had the benefit of all the Mafia lore and was better able to go for a certain realism. Puzo just didn’t have access to that at the New York Public Library.” Winegardner isn’t concerned that he’ll lose his own fans by continuing Puzo’s tale. “This is my own work,” he insists. “I was circling around this subject matter my entire career. If they had hired a novelist who had written a lot about the Mafia already, they would have somebody who had already spent some of his capital on this. I had a clean plate. Heap it on, I’m ready to go.” He certainly wouldn’t refuse an offer to write another sequel. “I think people thought it was easier to not have to weave in around the movies, but I feel like hey, wait a minute, I just did the hardest part I weaved around one of the greatest movies of all time and came out the other side,” he says. “If anyone is going to advance the ball down the field from here, it’s going to be me.”

There is a sense of symmetry as I sit in a cozy cabin overlooking the Grand Canyon's Bright Angel Trail and begin collating the notes of my interview with Southwestern mystery author Tony Hillerman. Hillerman's latest novel, Skeleton Man, takes place in the Grand Canyon, reuniting veteran Native American policemen Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee for an investigation into the aftermath of a plane crash, the worst airline disaster of its day, which took place more than 40 years before. Among the victims was a diamond dealer carrying a briefcase full of diamonds, one of which has recently surfaced in a local crime.

It's another fascinating scenario from Hillerman, an Oklahoma native and longtime journalist who launched his Native American mystery series in 1970 with the publication of The Blessing Way. Since then, he has turned out 15 more Navajo mysteries, as well as several other novels, nonfiction books about the West, essay collections and a memoir. From his home in Albuquerque, Hillerman talked to BookPage about his long career and his new book. What was intended as a short interview turned into an hour-long conversation on a variety of topics, ranging from Grand Canyon history to homeland security, only a small portion of which are covered here.

BookPage: Can you tell us a bit about the 1956 airline crash over the Grand Canyon that plays a pivotal role in Skeleton Man?
Tony Hillerman: Sure. The crash took place on June 30, 1956. Two planes were involved, a United Airlines DC-7 and a TWA Constellation. There has been speculation that one of the passengers requested that the pilot turn the plane a bit to afford a better view of the canyon, but I think that is largely speculation. In any event, there was a midair crash, and 128 passengers and crew were killed. It actually caused the FAA to revamp their regulations regarding airspace usage, regulations that remain in place to this day.

BP : You've summoned Joe Leaphorn out of retirement to take part in Skeleton Man. Are there any parallels between Leaphorn and yourself in this regard?
TH: [laughs] I am 82 years old. I imagine that I will keep on writing as long as anyone wants to keep reading. In fact, Leaphorn figures quite prominently in my upcoming novel [a follow-up to Skeleton Man], which will tie up some loose ends such as the ongoing romance between Jim Chee and Bernie Manuelito.

BP: Jim Chee is, as you say, something of a romantic, while Joe Leaphorn is a bit of a pragmatist by comparison. Do you identify more with one than the other?
TH: I would say that Leaphorn is more an extension of my personality than Chee. He is closer to me in age and attitude, and he can be a bit grouchy from time to time.

BP: Your books are icons of mystery fiction; you have virtually invented the subgenre of Native American mysteries. How do you account for their ongoing popularity?
TH: You write for two people, yourself and your audience, who are usually better educated and at least as smart. But an author knows his landscape best; he can stand around, smell the wind, get a feel for his place. You try to create characters who invite a strong reaction from readers, whether pity, contempt, empathy, whatever.

BP: A number of television adaptations of your Leaphorn/Chee novels have been aired over the past few years. What is your reaction to seeing your characters on the big (or small) screen?
TH: Well, Wes Studi [who plays Joe Leaphorn in PBS adaptations] is perfect. In fact, when an image of Joe Leaphorn crosses my mind, it is Wes Studi's face I see. Adam Beach [who plays Jim Chee] is an excellent actor as well, but much too handsome.

BP: This has nothing whatsoever to do with the current book, but Finding Moon, the tale of an average fellow who goes to Vietnam to discover what has happened to his missing brother, has always been a particular favorite of mine. Can you give us some insight into how that book came about?
TH: [laughs again] Well, you certainly know the right questions to ask! Finding Moon is a favorite of mine as well. It would have been my first book. It was originally set in the Belgian Congo during their civil war in the aftermath of the Belgian armed forces' pullout. What with work and family obligations, I wasn't able to get it finished quickly, and then the situation changed in the Belgian Congo, rendering some of my plot ideas unworkable. I kept it on a shelf for all those years, and was able to rework the bones of the story using Vietnam as the geographic focal point. Although I wasn't able to get a visa for Vietnam, I was able to talk with swift boat veterans and others to get a feel for the time and place, and I visited a tropical prison in the Philippines to get a sense of what a Vietnamese prison might have been like.

BP: Now that I've posed a number of questions that either I or our readers were curious about, is there anything that you would like to add?
TH: Well, I have another new book called Kilroy Was There. It was published by Kent State University as a World War II memorial. I was asked to write the text for the book, but I replied that I was "much too busy." Then I saw some of the photographs by Frank Kessler and I knew I had to do it. The photos depict down-and-dirty street fighting, the realities of war with no sugarcoating or romanticizing.

Back in the late 1970s, when Jeff Lindsay was in graduate school in theater at Carnegie Mellon, he had a directing teacher from Romania who had a concept called "illegal laughter." "Ve are making the audience to laugh," the funny, theatrical Lindsay says, imitating the accent of his former professor, "and then ve are making them to feel they haff broken the law for doing it."

That, essentially, is the effect Lindsay strives for in Dearly Devoted Dexter, his second detective thriller featuring Dexter Morgan, who assumes the guise of a "mild-mannered forensic lab rat," working by day as a blood-spatter analyst for the Miami police department, but by night as a serial killer, albeit one who only goes after bad guys. Here, as in his well-regarded first novel, Darkly Dreaming Dexter, Lindsay achieves his ends with a pleasing mix of grisly description, devious wit and clever wordplay.

"I want somebody to laugh, then feel the goose bumps on the back of their neck," Lindsay says, elaborating on his premise during a call to his home near Sarasota, Florida. "To go: that’s funny – who’s behind me?"

It takes a great deal of skill to provoke simultaneously such divergent responses in a reader. One reason Lindsay is able to pull it off is that he makes the monstrous Dexter understandable, even appealing. Dexter tells his story from his own inimitable perspective. And part of that perspective is his frequent assertion that he is not actually a human being. Of course Dexter only gets involved in the hunt for the murderous Dr. Danco, a veteran of the United States’ covert operations in El Salvador now bent on revenge against those he thinks have betrayed him, because Dexter’s sister, Deb, a Miami police officer, begs him to help her rescue her boyfriend from Danco’s clutches. And then there is the darkly farcical scene – Lindsay’s favorite – in which Dexter stumbles into becoming engaged to his girlfriend Rita. But why ruin a reader’s shocked laughter by saying too much about Lindsay’s deft storytelling?

Of his main character’s belief that he is not human, Lindsay says, "There has to have been a time when instead of saying, thank God I’m not human, Dexter was saying, why can’t I be like everyone else? Nobody is born a villain. You know that about people. That understanding is part of basic acting."

Lindsay’s reference to acting is typical. He spent much of his life pursuing an acting career, including almost 15 years in Hollywood. "One of the reasons that I didn’t really rocket to the top in Hollywood is that I was trying to do a little bit of everything," Lindsay says. "I was running a theater company with some friends, and I was writing plays, and acting and directing and doing comedy. I was in the ABC and Paramount new talent development program for comedy. And, oh yeah, there was my rock and roll band."

Eventually his wife, Hilary Hemingway, a writer and documentary filmmaker herself (and, yes, the niece of that Hemingway), suggested he concentrate on one thing. "All along it seems like I’ve been getting gentle hints about writing," Lindsay says. "When I was an actor, somebody came up to me and said, the guy who was writing our new play got sick. Want to do it? And suddenly I was a playwright. And when I was doing comedy, friends would ask me to help write their routines. So suddenly I was a comedy writer. In everything I tried to do, I ended up writing. So finally I said, okay, I get the message."

After the couple moved back to Florida, where both had been born and raised, Lindsay developed a routine of getting up at 4 a.m. and writing until it was time to get his kids ready for school. Lindsay and Hemingway have three daughters, ages 16, 9 and almost 2. Hemingway worked as a television news producer and Lindsay taught a bit at New University, hosted a couple of PBS shows and wrote what he calls "a semi-syndicated newspaper column" on fatherhood. "It started one year when Hilary was producing the evening news and I was home writing," Lindsay says. "Since she left for work before the kids came home from school and got home after they’d gone to bed, I was the only parent around. So it was about the adventures of a tough, super-macho intellectual with two daughters buying the first bra and so on. I think it ran in four papers."

Lindsay’s bright moment of inspiration for the first Dexter Morgan novel came at a Kiwanis Club luncheon, where he was the guest speaker. "I was vice president of the Key Club in high school," Lindsay assures BookPage readers, "so I don’t have anything against the Kiwanis. But I was sitting there at the head table looking out at the audience getting ready to speak, and the idea just popped into my head that sometimes serial murder isn’t a bad thing. I sort of blew off the talk and started scribbling on napkins."

The success of the first book in the series, Lindsay says, allowed the family to stop living week-to-week. "We’re now going in six-month chunks," he says wryly. "And that’s a big improvement."

But that success also complicated work on his second book, Dearly Devoted Dexter. "Writing at any time is difficult. Because in order to do it you have to leave yourself wide open, which lets in a lot of stuff you don’t want to deal with. That’s always problematic, dealing with the other stuff and still maintaining focus. I am a total neurotic, so there were times when I was thinking, the first book wasn’t very good; why don’t I just die? And there were times when I was thinking, how can I write a book as good as the first book? It went back and forth like that."

But now Dearly Devoted Dexter is finished. It’s a darn good read. And Jeff Lindsay is hard at work on a third book in the Dexter Morgan series.

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

Who would have thought it? A prim 1930s British gumshoe is one of the freshest, most modern heroines in recent memory. With the third installment in author Jacqueline Winspear's mystery series, Maisie Dobbs takes her place in the upper echelon of literary female detectives, right next to Kinsey Millhone and Kay Scarpetta—the main difference being that unlike her thoroughly modern counterparts, Maisie Dobbs lives in post-World War I London. In Pardonable Lies, we find Maisie Dobbs' private investigation practice flourishing. Her compassionate yet methodical approach to her work has made her services much sought after. Still, although more than a decade has passed, her gruesome work as a nurse in a casualty clearing station in France during the war continues to plague her. When the powerful Sir Cecil Lawton hires her to discover the truth about his son's death while serving as a pilot in the war, Dobbs is forced to return to France and face her own awful memories.

When the powerful Sir Cecil Lawton hires her to discover the truth about his son's death while serving as a pilot in the war, Maisie Dobbs is forced to return to France and face her own awful memories.

Rich with historical detail and packing several interwoven mysteries for Maisie to untangle, Pardonable Lies is as stylish as a whodunit gets. Winspear paints a haunting picture of how it must have been to be young at that moment in history, with a gingerly hopeful world still reeling but also slowly rebuilding after the war. The devastating human toll of World War I cannot be overstated the war virtually decimated an entire generation of young men. It is estimated that two million young women faced the prospect of living their lives without husbands. Very much a woman of her time, Maisie in some ways also resembles a single woman circa 2005 she not only owns her own business, she has collected an eclectic group of friends, found herself a handsome young doctor to date and even is considering buying her own home.

"Life was never going to be as these women had expected it to be," says Winspear, who spoke to BookPage from her home in southern California, where she had just returned from back-to-back trips to New York and England to promote her current book and research her next one. "They had to make a life alone, and were fiercely independent. They had to work; they had to find companionship in other ways. The whole period is one of immense change and turmoil."

Long fascinated with the role of women between the first and second world wars, Winspear was eager to continue exploring this new reality for women in Pardonable Lies. Maisie clearly feels the pressure of making her business a success, and she also experiences the subtle prejudice against spinster women when she seeks a loan to buy a home. Winspear's fascinating peek into the life of a long-ago generation adds depth that makes the Maisie Dobbs series so difficult to define: it's part mystery and part historical fiction, with a dash of love story thrown in.

Although Winspear has won Agatha Awards for both Maisie Dobbs and Birds of a Feather, the first two books in the series, she is still amazed when she hears one of her books described as a mystery that reads like a novel. "Well, why shouldn't it?" asks Winspear.

Although she's a fan of mystery writers such as Patricia Cornwell and Jonathan Kellerman, Winspear admits she is more likely to read nonfiction, particularly biographies, which satisfy her nosy tendencies. "Because I write mysteries, I very rarely read mysteries," she says. "I know that's a sin—or is it?" She finds herself drawn to the genre as an author because of the particular challenges of writing a compelling mystery that also captures human elements.

"A mystery offers an enormous landscape with which to work," she says. "With a mystery, everything must come right in the end as much as possible. Yet life doesn't give perfect endings. Life is a journey. So this challenges an author: give readers something that rings true, and that also satisfies them." To make sure Pardonable Lies did ring true, Winspear paid a visit to the site of a casualty clearing station cemetery in Belgium. It was to these mobile hospitals that the wounded were brought in the middle of combat, and they were the scenes of some of the bloodiest, most horrific moments of the war as doctors and nurses of many nationalities worked to save as many lives as possible.

A pivotal scene in the book has Maisie returning to such a spot, and Winspear wanted to be sure she got it right.

"The rain was sideways across the land," Winspear recalls of her pilgrimage. "The cemetery was no bigger than someone's backyard garden. It was a very emotional experience. I wanted to know, how would it be if you had spent a significant point in your girlhood where you saw such terrible things?" This painstaking research and loyalty to the truth of the time in which Maisie lives is important to Winspear, but she is careful never to sacrifice story for the sake of historical accuracy. A graceful writer, Winspear brings 1930s London alive, describing the clothes, the food and the manners of the era without ever getting bogged down in details.

"The truth of the matter is, I'm a storyteller first and foremost," she says. "Everything else has to be in support of the story. I just want to reflect the spirit of the era." She suspects current events might have something to do with the success of the Maisie Dobbs series. "We're living in what are perceived as uncertain times in this country," Winspear said. " When you read something historical, you know we got through it and life goes on. When you read a mystery, you know that in the end everything will be right in the world. We need some of that."

Winspear, who moved to the United States from England in 1990, is already at work on the fourth Maisie Dobbs book. She pledges to continue the series as long as she feels the stories continue to offer something original.

"It has to be fresh for me," she said. "Maisie Dobbs has to grow and change like we all do. If she's not, it's stagnant. A reader comes back to serial characters to see how they've changed."

Amy Scribner writes from Olympia, Washington.

Laura Lippman’s crime fiction isn’t torn from the headlines in quite the way one might expect from a former news reporter for the Baltimore Sun. In fact, Lippman’s well-crafted, thought-provoking private eye series featuring Tess Monaghan, as well as her equally compelling stand-alone mysteries, tend to focus on the very people who don’t make the headlines: the poor, the disenfranchised, the minorities and the young people who frequently fall through the sometimes gaping cracks in our human services.

Though she long ago clocked out of daily journalism, Lippman stays close to the poverty and social issues she used to cover by working at a Baltimore soup kitchen on weekends. It was there that she met the struggling teens that inspired Lloyd Jupiter, a homeless, 15-year-old African American who stumbles into very big trouble in Lippman’s ninth Tess Monaghan adventure, No Good Deeds.

It is Tess’ live-in boyfriend Crow who performs good deeds by delivering food to local food kitchens. On his rounds, he encounters Lloyd, who tries to jack him for $5 to change a flat tire that Crow suspects the teenager had caused just minutes before. Instead, Crow offers him shelter from the winter cold. Tess is wary of the troubled kid at her dinner table until, by chance, he indicates he has secret knowledge about the death of Assistant U.S. Attorney Gregory Youssef, whose recent murder has all the earmarks of an unofficial cover-up. When word of Lloyd’s secret brings the feds, the DEA and the FBI down on Tess, Crow takes Lloyd into hiding in hopes of keeping him alive until the case is solved. As the saying goes, no good deed goes unpunished.

" This novel started out as a straight-up homage to Robert Parker’s Early Autumn, in which Spenser takes this kid out into the country and they build a house together and he changes his life. I just loved that book," Lippman says. "But once I created Lloyd Jupiter, I just realized that it would be utterly false to solve all the problems in Lloyd’s life."

Realism above all is central to Lippman’s fiction, even if it means sacrificing the warm-fuzzy endings we all wish for.

"When you’re 15, you find your parents embarrassing no matter what; imagine being 15 and your mom is a heroin addict who is nodding off next to you at the soup kitchen. I don’t know how to say to that kid, well, just work harder, go to school and you’ll be fine. I feel like that is just a callous lie in some ways," she says.

"We’re asking these kids to be geniuses of survival. We don’t expect every kid coming up in a poor neighborhood to have the amazing skills of a LeBron James, we don’t view that as reasonable, but we do kind of ask or assume that they can be in the 99th percentile of survival ability. I was hoping in writing No Good Deeds that people would open their hearts just a little bit to just how difficult it is."

Lippman is equally committed to keeping Tess real.

"The joke in my household is that I like to write characters that are smaller than life," she says. "She’s really flawed; she was always meant to be that, because personally, I don’t like reading about perfect people. I don’t know any, and if I did I would probably find them annoying. I didn’t want Tess to be my fantasy projection. In some ways, I’m a lot smarter than Tess. I always wanted her to be realistic. She throws up in trash cans," Lippman laughs.

An interesting metamorphosis does occur for Tess over the course of No Good Deeds.

"For the average person, the kinds of choices that a kid like Lloyd Jupiter makes are just baffling, they go against everything we think we know about the value of hard work and going to school and paying attention. But as time goes on, Tess herself becomes increasingly skeptical of authority, is scared to tell the truth, doesn’t know who she can trust, and her situation comes to mirror Lloyd’s."

Lippman has always had a strong affinity for the juvenile characters that manage to work their way into the heart of her stories. But expect Tess to have a child of her own any time soon. "I don’t think Tess can have a baby and continue in this series," Lippman says. "I think she could get married but I think the minute you give your character a child, the reader’s tolerance for some of the things Tess does just disappears. If she risks herself, then she risks her child losing a mother. I’ll never say never, but I can’t see it for Tess right now."

After all, Tess has taken on iconic status for Baltimore in the same way Spenser did for Boston and Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch did for Los Angeles. "One of the spoilers I tell readers is, if you see a character of mine who doesn’t like Baltimore very much, you know there’s something wrong with that guy," Lippman chuckles.

Her reportorial eye for detail, understated prose style and emotional realism have elevated Lippman to the A-list of literary crime writers alongside Lehane, Connelly, Harlan Coben, Robert Crais and George Pelecanos. Lippman suspects the best contemporary literature can now be found in the mystery genre.

"Raymond Chandler said that the difference between literary fiction and crime fiction is that the ordinary mystery gets published and the ordinary literary novel does not. I don’t think that’s true anymore. I love my genre. Why would I want to transcend it? Why would I want to break out of it? It’s a big territory, but the really interesting work is being done at the borderlands."

Jay MacDonald is a writer in Oxford, Mississippi.

Kate Atkinson has spent her afternoon stuck in traffic. It's hardly an ideal way to pass a day, but after finally making it to her home in Edinburgh, Scotland, the best-selling author sounds undaunted even effervescent in a telephone interview. The cheerful Scottish lilt in her voice probably doesn't hurt.

Of course, Atkinson has a lot to be happy about. She rocketed to success with her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, which beat out Salman Rushdie to win the Whitbread Book of the Year in 1995. Critics heaped more accolades on her most recent novel Case Histories, including some unimaginably high praise from Stephen King (more on that later). In her latest book, One Good Turn, we revisit Jackson Brodie, the now retired detective from Case Histories. Brodie finds himself at the Edinburgh Arts Festival just in time to become enmeshed in a growing scandal that includes a frightening road-rage incident and the murder of a has-been comic.

Atkinson manages to keep tabs on a host of engaging characters in addition to Brodie, including depressed mystery writer Martin Canning, police detective Louise Monroe and feisty Gloria Hatter, wife of an unscrupulous homebuilder whose illegal practices are about to catch up with him. It's Gloria a 60-something woman who is arguably the soul of the book with whom Atkinson most identifies.

"Gloria is me," Atkinson says with a laugh. "She's the closest to me of all characters I've ever written. She's very strong and secretive, although she doesn't appear to be secretive. She's powerful yet disenfranchised. She likes rules and likes to obey rules. She wants people to do things properly. She's become fascist in her old age. I really feel myself becoming that way." Gloria, who despises her husband's deplorable business dealings and yearns for a clean break, also happens to live in the same Edinburgh suburb, known as the Grange, where Atkinson lives. "I've never brought a character so close to home," she says.

The characters of One Good Turn, including Brodie, who is drifting through retirement, seem to be struggling to find their way. Atkinson sees this as a reflection of the ups and downs of real life.

"I never see them as miserable, unhappy characters," she says. "They're just complex. Most people have fractured lives and are unhappy. I kind of see them as normal people." Such richly imagined characters set Atkinson's books apart from many mysteries, in which the unsolved case generally takes precedence over character development. Despite the success of Case Histories and the subject matter of One Good Turn, Atkinson actually does not consider herself a crime writer.

"People always want to ask a genre question when I write a book," she said. "It's just the book I'm writing. I was aware when I wrote Case Histories that it would be perceived as crime fiction. But I didn't feel I was writing a crime novel. It was just my novel with crime in it." As it turns out, the genre question is not the only thing readers want to ask Atkinson about when she hits the road to promote a new book. While grateful for the support of her fans, Atkinson still is shocked at the level of familiarity some people assume when she appears at book readings. In fact, the character of Martin Canning reflects Atkinson's fascination with the dilemma of being a well-known author who is actually quite private.

"I was once asked by two women at an event how often I had sex!" she recalls. "People think they're intimate with you from reading your books. I never think of giving myself away like that." What Atkinson does give consistently is clever, intoxicating storytelling that keeps readers guessing until the end. One Good Turn is a fast-paced, intricately woven tale of mistaken identity and bad behavior. Atkinson's new novel is even more intriguing thanks to its colorful backdrop: Edinburgh's annual arts festival, a booming mix of dance, music, theater and opera that takes over the Scottish capital (and in fact was responsible for the traffic jam that tied her up all afternoon). Atkinson brings her hometown's quirky festival to life, offering the perfect setting for murder and mayhem. It is a romp of a read that makes good on the promise of Atkinson's earlier efforts.

Which brings us back to Stephen King. In 2005, the author and Entertainment Weekly columnist named Case Histories his favorite book of the year, calling it the literary equivalent of a triple axel and the best mystery of the decade. In King's opinion, this placed Atkinson head and shoulders above some of his other favorite authors from that year, including heavy hitters J.K. Rowling, Ian McEwan, George Pelecanos and Cormac McCarthy. When this is mentioned, Atkinson laughs uproariously, still sounding more than a bit disbelieving.

When King's column appeared, Atkinson recalled, her publicist "forwarded the quote to me in an e-mail, and wrote 'Holy Cow!' with 100 exclamation points. It's a quote you could not buy. That was just a gift, really. It will now be on every book!" And may there be many more Atkinson books on which to plaster that gift. 

Amy Scribner is a writer in Olympia, Washington.

Just weeks away from moving into her new dream home, best-selling mystery writer Elizabeth George is having second thoughts about the weather. Said dream home, you see, is situated on Whidbey Island in the shadow of the rainy Cascade Mountains of Washington State. She and her husband Tom have been overseeing its construction for three years from their Seattle condo and are ready to embrace the bucolic country life. Still, George is worried about the notorious Northwest rain—she’s afraid there may not be enough of it.

"I’m a [stormy] weather girl, I love weather," George admits. "The 34 years I spent in Southern California were really torture for me because I love it when it rains. I always have, ever since I was a child, because when it was rainy out, we were allowed to read and when it was sunny out, my mom always wanted us to go out and play. I’m exactly the opposite of most people; I find extended sunshine very, very depressing. It’s very weird."

Her atmospheric preference certainly helps lend a soaked-to-the-skin authenticity to her 14 best-selling British mysteries that feature noble-born Scotland Yard Inspector Thomas Lynley, his working-class assistant Barbara Havers and his wife, Lady Helen Clyde Lynley, who was shot and killed by a young assailant in last year’s shocker With No One as Witness.

Fans left wondering about Lady Helen’s murderer will be richly rewarded in What Came Before He Shot Her, a prequel of sorts that tracks the events leading up to the crime from the assailant’s point of view.

As the story opens, three siblings—15-year-old Ness Campbell, 11-year-old Joel and seven-year-old Toby—are left to fend for themselves in racially mixed North Kensington when their grandmother dumps them on their decidedly non-parental Aunt Kendra and jets back to Jamaica. When Ness becomes tragically involved with sex and drugs and Toby retreats into an imaginary world of his own, Joel tries desperately to keep his family out of the child welfare system by seeking protection from Blade, a neighborhood drug dealer. Events beyond his control eventually lead him to the Lynley doorstep in Belgravia with a pistol in his hand.

In Joel’s descent, the author explores some heartbreaking truths about disenfranchisement, race, poverty and the plight of children caught in a world they can neither understand nor escape.

"There are so many kids who are basically good people to whom life has dealt a very, very difficult hand of cards that they play as best they can, sometimes with tragic results," she says.

George initially planned to incorporate Joel’s story in With No One as Witness. "My original intention in the previous book was to create something called an hourglass plot, in which two parallel novels run along and then meet in one terrible moment in time, which of course would be Helen Lynley’s death, and then they go on their separate ways again," she explains. "But as I wrote, I began to see that, in order to do the Joel story justice, I was going to end up with a novel that was about 1,500 pages long with a cast of characters like something out of a Russian novel. I thought that what might be more interesting would be to remove the Joel story and then create an entire novel just about this little boy, so that’s what I did."

George is no stranger to working with children, having taught English for 14 years in Southern California. She’s also familiar with the Kensington area of London, where she’s had a flat since 1995. But it took a variety of influences to capture the Anglo-Caribbean patois of the streets.

"I have always watched a great deal of British television, so that was helpful. Also, having read a couple of novels where that was used also helped. The work of Courttia Newland, a young British writer, was extremely helpful to me, because his entire book, The Scholar, is written this way. I was able to examine that and see how he was structuring language," she says.

By now, George is comfortable being known as the most famous British writer who is not British—she was born in Ohio and raised in what is now California’s Silicon Valley. Still, new fans are often shocked to hear her American accent.

"Stylistically, I have always written more like a British or European writer than an American writer," she says. "Setting the books in England gives me much more leeway to do that, I think."

George became an Anglophile at an early age during the British invasion.

"It was right at the time that almost everything associated with pop culture in the United States was British in origin. There was the Beatles and all the groups that followed them, and Mary Quant from London was defining fashion, and motion pictures were introducing us to Michael Caine and Terence Stamp and the Redgraves. My cultural awareness was really informed by things British, so I had a natural interest and inclination toward that part of the world and it just never died."

Although her next novel will return to the Lynley series, George is open to attempting another stand-alone if the opportunity presents itself. "If I did a book similar to this, I would probably choose something tangentially related to another novel, and write that character’s story," she says.

Would this "British" writer ever set a novel in the U.S.?

"I wouldn’t shy away from it if I felt that I had a compelling story to tell in a location that really worked for me," George says. "Location is crucial to my books. I’ve been careful to go to places to make sure that I am going to feel that mystical or visceral connection that allows me to say yes, this is it, this is the place I’m going to write about."

A native of Washington State, Jay MacDonald now makes his home in sunny Austin, Texas.

The town of Fallbrook is tucked into the fertile rolling hills north of San Diego, where temperate climate and rich soil combine to form the perfect growing medium for the region’s avocado, citrus and commercial nursery industries. Incongruously, the roar of Army artillery practice from nearby Camp Pendleton routinely punctuates the peacefulness of this otherwise pastoral setting.

Such unlikely contrasts appeal to T. Jefferson Parker, the town’s resident author, whose 14 thrillers have so rarely left the state that one wonders if they’ve been ordered not to by some suspicious investigating officer. The truth is, Jeff Parker (the "T" is silent) is one native Angeleno who finds all the story ideas he can handle in his own hometown.

Witness his latest thriller, Storm Runners, at once a revenge plot, redemption tale and love story that features the very sort of outrageous contrasts that tempt and tease readers before ultimately reeling them in.

Here’s the back story: Matt Stromsoe and Mike Tavarez are buddies at Santa Ana High, the former a drum major, the latter a marching band member. They part ways at graduation—Stromsoe becomes a San Diego sheriff’s deputy, Tavarez heads east to Harvard, then becomes a chieftain in the Mexican mafia. When Stromsoe directs a manhunt that captures Tavarez but accidentally kills his girlfriend, the kingpin retaliates with a car bomb meant for Matt that instead kills his wife and son. Severely disabled in the blast, Matt descends into self-pity and drink.

Two years later, a buddy pulls Matt back from the brink and offers him a job with his private security firm. Matt’s first assignment: protect Frankie Hatfield, a television meteorologist who is being stalked by a crazed fan. The closer Matt grows to Frankie, the more he suspects that her off-hours tinkering with a formula her eccentric ancestor Charles Hatfield used to make rain may be putting her life in danger.

Farfetched? Actually, Storm Runners is based on true events. As they say: only in California.

"Charles Hatfield is a real guy. Isn’t that amazing?" Parker says. "I’ve known about him for a while. The next village over, Bonsall, is where Hatfield had his secret lab. It’s real easy for me to sit here from a few miles away and go, wow, what if it’s still there, buried down in some old oak trees and grown over with wild cucumber?"

Could the garage scientist actually make it rain?

"Yeah! He was great at it!" Parker says. " The story in the book where he floods San Diego and then has to flee town because they want to hang him instead of pay him, that’s a true story right out of the history books. Of course, for every stupendous rainmaking success that Charles had, he would have a resounding failure also, so the rational scientific community never considered him as anything more than fraudulently lucky. But if you look at his successes, they really were spectacular."

OK, perhaps we’ll accept a beautiful modern-day rainmaker. But a Harvard-educated drug lord?

"The Harvard guy is real, too," Parker chuckles. "Nobody would believe that; I wouldn’t even write that character if, in fact, there hadn’t been a guy doing that right around the corner from where I grew up. He went to Harvard and robbed liquor stores on weekends. Sometimes when you get a little nugget of history or fact underneath you, you feel emboldened to exaggerate it or make it bigger."

Parker often sprinkles deft, defining touches throughout his breakneck tales that keep the characters grounded. In Storm Runners, it’s the Painted Lady butterfly (Vanessa cardui), one of which makes a lovely touchdown on a dead man’s shoe.

"Those are a real phenomenon here, and they’re spectacular and beautiful. It just seemed like a natural thing for the story because I wanted to portray Stromsoe’s re-entry into the world as a return to Eden, almost an idyllic place where it’s fragrant and peaceful. It’s a real starting-over story, and putting in butterflies just seemed a nice touch."

Growing up in suburban Tustin, Parker always had a taste for truths that were stranger than fiction, and nurtured it, after graduating in English from the University of California-Irvine, by signing on as a newspaper reporter in Orange County.

" I was a boyhood admirer of the Guinness Book of World Records, those weird things like the bearded woman and the fattest man," he admits. "I love those obscure facts that are so outlandish you really can’t believe them, but you have to."

After immersing himself in classic L.A. noir fiction, from Raymond Chandler to James Ellroy, Parker set out to reinvent the genre from the sunny, suburban perspective of the O.C. The result was his 1985 debut hit, Laguna Heat.

" I very purposefully tried to avoid all things that had gone before," he says. "It wasn’t a dark, moody, drinking L.A. noir story at all; it was set in Laguna Beach, for crying out loud, with eucalyptus trees and paintings and artists and beautiful waves. Even at that age, I knew you couldn’t put the gumshoe in the phone booth; it just doesn’t work anymore."

Along with a handful of West Coast contemporaries, including Don Winslow and Kem Nunn, Parker continues to refine and redefine what L.A. crime fiction can be.

"I like and respect the mystery genre very much, but I think sometimes you can find yourself handcuffed by convention a little bit if you don’t try to stretch those boundaries, and sometimes break them," he says.

"My last book, The Fallen, is completely noir-free; it’s bright and optimistic and the main character has not an ounce of darkness in him. And I think that’s a legitimate way to look at the world and a legitimate way to write a novel. If at some point during the writing of the book it becomes clear to me that I’m going to have to ignore certain conventions, I’m going to do it, because the book is more important than the genre."

Jay MacDonald writes from Austin, Texas.

Even after 12 installments, readers can’t get enough of Janet Evanovich’s best-selling Stephanie Plum novels. Starting with 1994’s One for the Money, the series injected a healthy dose of humor into the mystery genre and turned the smart-alecky but tough New Jersey bounty hunter into one of fiction’s most memorable characters. Putting her likeable heroine into outrageous situations with hilarious sidekicks (not to mention two sexy love interests) proved to be a winning formula for Evanovich, who is also the author of a NASCAR-themed series set in Miami and three other co-written series. On June 19, Evanovich serves up Lean Mean Thirteen, which finds Stephanie a suspect in the disappearance of her ex-husband, Dickie. We asked Evanovich a few questions about the new book, her work and what really motivates her to write.

Stephanie has bad luck with cars. Have you ever had a car of your own burst into flames? Do any cars bite the big one in the new book?
I’ve never had a car burst into flames, but my daughter has at one time or another driven most of Stephanie’s cars. She doesn’t so much destroy them, as they die their own natural death. Of course cars bite the big one in Thirteen! Will

Stephanie ever choose between the two men in her life? And do fans seem to want her with Ranger or Morelli?
The fans run 50/50 in the Morelli versus Ranger debate. Many don’t want to choose, and I can’t say I blame them. Eventually Stephanie will choose, but not until the end of the series.

Stephanie wouldn’t be caught dead: a) with flat bangs b) at the mall without makeup c) eating pizza without beer d) leaving the house unarmed e) all of the above
A, B and C. Stephanie leaves the house unarmed all the time, not counting her can of hairspray.

Like James Patterson, you take a very practical, businesslike approach to your writing you’ve even referred to your work as carrying the Evanovich brand. Do you get impatient with writers who talk about muses, writer’s block and the like?
I have muses. They just come in the form of birthday cake and the occasional tankard of beer.

Though you write the Plum series solo, you work on three other series with co-authors. What’s it like writing with someone else?
The co-authored books add variety to my life. I don’t look for a co-author who can clone me, but rather someone who can live with the Evanovich promise (easy to read, entertaining, feel good, happy ending).

Do you do any research for your writing?
I do a lot of research when I’m starting a new series. For instance, I had to attend a lot of NASCAR races for the Metro series. Sort of self-serving since I’m a NASCAR addict.

Your tours draw huge crowds. What’s the craziest thing that’s ever happened to you at a book signing?
That’s hard to say. Crazy is pretty much the norm.

How do you unwind?
Unwind? I’m afraid if I ever unwound I wouldn’t be able to wind again.

Any plans for a Stephanie Plum perfume or line of lingerie?
A perfume that smells like pineapple upside-down cake. I like that idea!

What books are you taking with you on vacation this year?
Vacation???!!! There’s no time for vacationing this year. After Thirteen comes out I have to get ready for the No Chance (co-authored with Stephen Cannell) tour and then my daughter is getting married (hallelujah!) and early next year Plum Lucky (St. Patrick’s Day holiday novella) comes out. The year is packed.

Over the 14 years since she introduced readers to her fictional alter-ego, bounty-hunter Stephanie Plum, Janet Evanovich has gone from obscure romance novelist to international superstar, a writer whose professional concerns include the logistics of keeping 5,000 snapshot-hungry fans moving through a line and preventing her hand from swelling up during marathon autograph signings.

Meanwhile, Stephanie’s life, it is fair to say, has changed less dramatically. "She’s a little bit better bounty hunter and I think she has a better idea of who she is," says Evanovich, speaking by phone from her winter home in Naples, Florida (she migrates north to New Hampshire in the late spring). "She knows that she’s indecisive. She knows she’s in love with two men. She knows that she doesn’t have the world’s best job and she isn’t really great at it."

Out this month, the latest in the series of Plum mysteries, Fearless Fourteen, finds Stephanie still working for her cousin Vinnie, this time in a case involving a $9 million bank robbery committed by a relative of her sometimes-boyfriend Morelli. Working hard to survive in a world filled with gun-toting criminals and eccentric losers, she seems to have little in common with her famous creator. Still, former Jersey girl Evanovich insists, "There is a lot of me in Stephanie." 

Take, for instance, their shared weakness for birthday cake. As Fearless opens, Stephanie confesses, "I used to have a birthday cake in the freezer for emergencies, but I ate it. Truth is, I would dearly love to be a domestic goddess, but the birthday cake keeps getting eaten."

On the day of our interview, Evanovich has just celebrated her 65th birthday, an occasion that was to have included a champagne cruise with her family on their 22-foot Grady-White boat. But by the time they hit the water, Evanovich was too nauseous from an over-consumption of cake to face the bubbly. And she wasn’t using her big day as an excuse. "I’ve been known to go to the supermarket and kind of cruise for abandoned birthday cakes," she says, noting that you can get them for half-off.

Evanovich says she’s found that career success has had surprisingly little to do with her personal life. "I’m still the wife and the mother," says Evanovich, whose husband, son, daughter and son-in-law all play various roles in her career. "I’m still the creative person that I always was. On the outside, what that money has done is made it easier for me to be that person, because I can have someone come into my house to clean twice a week. Or because I can live anywhere I want."

She adds that celebrity didn’t help her avoid gaining 30 pounds while writing Fearless. She ate her way through the novel and has her heroine do the same. Though, despite the many references to junk food spread throughout the book, Stephanie doesn’t gain weight. She doesn’t age either, another advantage of fiction over real life.

With the book behind her, Evanovich says, "I am now in full weight-loss mode. I’m on Atkins. The birthday cake just finished me off." She’s about to embark on a book tour that will include media appearances and meeting thousands of readers in person. But she says that’s not why she wants to shed the pounds. "If I went on the ‘Today’ show and I weighed 170, I don’t think anybody would really care," she says. "For myself personally I don’t feel good at that weight."

Like Stephanie, Evanovich can be refreshingly frank about her vulnerabilities. "Five years ago, I had a facelift. I didn’t have that facelift because I wanted to look good on the ‘Today’ show," she says. "I had it because every time I looked in the mirror, I had no relationship with that woman. I wake up every morning and I think I’m 32."

Evanovich’s work goes beyond the Plum mysteries, of course. There are the Alex Barnaby NASCAR novels, the co-authored romantic suspense novels and the nonfiction book, How I Write. In addition, romances she wrote years ago are in the process of being re-released.

Still, the sexy, struggling bounty hunter remains her signature character. And Evanovich plans to keep her on the job for a long time. "I really have no intention of stopping. And I don’t have to. Why? Because I’m only 32."

Among crime novelists past and present, Elmore Leonard is a prime number, a talent so simple and elemental that it refuses to be divided by comparison to others. Whether he’s hanging with mobsters in Miami Beach, dreamers in Detroit or hustlers in Hollywood, his every dark comedy really takes place in Leonard Land, a closed universe populated by lovable cons, ex-cons and soon-to-be-cons whose dialogue is so spot-on that you hear it rather than read it. The one character you’ll never find in Leonard Land is the author himself. Leonard works hard to stay out of the frame and allow his characters to take over, moving and grooving to their own unpredictable beat.

“When I start a book, I never know how it’s going to end. I never know what’s going to happen,” Leonard admits. “I don’t have a computer. I write in longhand and then I put it on a typewriter, then I rewrite that, and rewrite it and rewrite it. It takes about four pages to get one clean page. I just start writing and keep going.”

The one thing Leonard won’t tolerate is fancy prose. As he states in his 10 Rules of Writing: “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”

At 83, with 30 novels to his credit in a career that spans more than half a century, Leonard remains up to his splendid tricks. In his latest, Road Dogs, he takes characters from three previous novels and combines them into a whole that is greater—and funnier—than the sum of its parts. Road Dogs also serves as something of a Leonard Land retrospective, with shout-outs to everyone from the hanging judge in Maximum Bob to Miami Beach bookie Harry Arno in Pronto to the otherworldly possibilities of Touch.

The “road dogs” in question are Jack Foley, the charming bank robber played to perfection by George Clooney in the film version of Out of Sight, and his prison wingman Cundo Rey, the millionaire Cuban hustler/go-go dancing Cat Prince from LaBrava. Both are facing years behind bars in Florida’s Glades Correctional until Cundo secures the services of a hot young female attorney. She manages to spring Jack first, with Cundo’s release to follow in two weeks.

Since Cundo paid Jack’s $30,000 legal fees, Foley agrees to crash at one of his oceanfront homes in Venice, California, and keep an eye on Dawn Navarro, the professional psychic from Riding the Rap, who has been Cundo’s lady in waiting for seven years. It takes little effort for Dawn to seduce Jack, but he’s cautious when she attempts to enlist him in a scheme to steal Cundo’s off-the-books fortune. The plot starts perking when Cundo arrives home a day early, throwing the dynamics between the three into the spin cycle.

Leonard has occasionally revisited characters in the past, including Raylin Givens (Rum Punch) and Harry Arno (Pronto) in Riding the Rap and Chili Palmer (Get Shorty) in Be Cool.

“I had no reservations bringing back these three characters. I felt that I hadn’t done quite enough with them,” he says. “I was anxious to use them because I know them. They have personalities of their own and I could make them talk, that’s the main thing.”

But he hit a small snag when it came to Cundo Rey. “I wanted to use him, so I had to open LaBrava to see what happened to him and I went, oh God, he’s dead!” Leonard chuckles. “He’s not pronounced dead, but Joe LaBrava shoots him in the chest three times. So I just have the emergency squad pick him up and say, ‘Hey, he’s still breathing!’ That took care of that.”

Then there was the Clooney factor. Since the success of Steven Soderbergh’s film version of Out of Sight, it’s become virtually impossible to separate Foley from Clooney—not that Leonard minds. “I loved the casting. In fact, I wondered, can I do another Foley picturing Clooney? And I had no problem,” he says.

It may prove a bigger obstacle should a film version of Road Dogs come up for discussion, as it almost certainly will. “Universal owns those characters now, so we either have to sell this to them or get an agreement that allows us to go somewhere else. And they don’t want to do that; they don’t like things to slip out of their hands,” the author says.

Leonard got his start, and perhaps his fascination for fringe dwellers, in the 1950s, writing Westerns on the side while holding down a “real” job in advertising. When the market for Westerns dried up, he switched to crime. “I would read John D. MacDonald’s stories in Cosmopolitan and different places and think, that’s what I should be doing,” he recalls. His early attempts fell somewhere between the giants of the genre.

“The book that changed my style somewhat was The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George Higgins. I think that’s the best crime book ever written. It’s about bank robbers and the guy who supplies clean guns for every job,” Leonard says. “What I learned is, I was already using a lot of dialogue, moving the story with dialogue, but I wasn’t getting into scenes as quickly. I was setting up scenes and then getting the characters talking, instead of getting them talking first. [Afterward] editors would complain, ‘I don’t know what’s going on here, these two people are talking,’ and I would say, just stay with it, you’ll find out where they are.”

Leonard’s books have become increasingly verbal ever since. Where other crime writers mourned the coming of the cell phone as the loss of a suspense tool (“Where’s a pay phone?!”), Leonard loved it. His characters in Road Dog may spend more time yakking on their mobiles than actually speaking face-to-face.

Leonard and his wife Christine, longtime residents of the Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills, have five children and nine grandchildren. Though he’s still in top form, he’s inevitably asked if he plans to retire anytime soon.

“No, there is nothing else I want to do,” he says. “I have no reason to quit. I’d be bored.”

Jay MacDonald writes from Austin, Texas.

Unless you were living under a rock this past Oscar season, you’ve undoubtedly heard the buzz about Slumdog Millionaire. But what you might not know is that Danny Boyle’s beloved film was actually the adaptation of a successful novel, Q&A, from Indian diplomat turned author Vikas Swarup.

Swarup’s new novel, focused on the murder of a high society Indian playboy with a knack for getting out of trouble, is not your typical murder mystery. Instead, Six Suspects intricately weaves the stories of six different people (the six suspects of the murder in question) against a fascinating backdrop of modern India.

Swarup, who comes from a family of lawyers, currently serves as India’s Deputy High Commissioner in South Africa. Adept at juggling his diplomatic career with his writing career, he answered questions from BookPage after completing work on Indian’s recent parliamentiary elections.

Six Suspects narrates the lives of six people—seven, if you count journalist Arun Advani’s columns. What was it like writing from so many different perspectives?
It was quite difficult. The difficulty stemmed not so much from the second book syndrome as from my choice of narrative structure. Writing about the interior lives of six different characters is much more complex than writing about the interior life of one character as in Q&A. I had to experiment with voice, with technique and at the same time ensure that my story remained coherent within the confines of the schematic space signposted by the section headings—Murder, Suspects, Motives, Evidence . . .

In the same vein, you cover such a vast range of characters, occupations and complex legal and social situations. How did you do your research?
I was trying to give the readers a glimpse of modern India through six different eyes. So you had to have a diverse range of characters covering a wide social spectrum. Research meant poring over books dealing with the Onge tribe in the Andaman Islands, learning about the modus operandi of mobile phone thieves, discussions with police officers on firearms, and a crash course in Texan English! The Internet was certainly a big help.

Did any of your characters surprise you as the narration progressed? Or did you plot out exactly who did what and when before you started writing?
I think several did. For instance, when I first started writing the diary of the Bollywood actress I thought of her as a vain, flippant celebrity who couldn’t see below the surface. I had initially conceived of her diary entries as being in the vein of chick-lit. But she surprised me with her erudition and emotional depth. She starts out as a clichéd sex symbol but by the end the reader has started feeling sympathetic towards her. The plot also mutated as the book went along.  

This may be an impossible question for a writer, but do you have a favorite character in Six Suspects?
I think it is the stone-age tribesman Eketi. The choice of Eketi as a character was inspired by a report I had read of how during the 2004 tsunami the primitive tribes of the Andaman had remained safe using their powers of medicine and magic. I was interested in the interplay between two totally diverse cultures; what would happen when a primitive tribesman is confronted by the glittering lights of the modern world. Although I did a lot of research, eventually I had to get under the skin of the character and that proved to be quite difficult. How do you know how a stone-age tribesman behaves, what he thinks?

Despite your career as an Indian diplomat, you’ve been remarkably frank in depicting your home country in your fiction. Do you have any concerns about giving the rest of the world such an honest slice of Indian life?
Well, first of all, what I write is fiction. I do not wear my diplomat’s hat when I write fiction and my government allows me that freedom. As a writer, I have complete liberty to express myself in a literary work as long as it is clear that the views expressed do not represent the views of my government or mine in my official capacity. I also don’t feel defensive about what I write because at core I am extremely optimistic about India and that comes through in my novels, as well.

Tell us about your writing process. When and where do you do your best work?
Because I have a full-time day job, I do not have the luxury of writing whenever I want to. Besides, I can only write when I have a clear horizon ahead of me and no interruptions. So I write early in the mornings and on weekends only. 

Has the success of Slumdog Millionaire had any effect on the way you approach your work as a writer?
When your first novel becomes such a huge success, the pressure on the second novel is much more. But I always ask myself the question, do I have a story to tell? As it turned out, I didn’t have just one story to tell, I had six, hence Six Suspects. The success of the first book has made me somewhat more self-conscious as a writer. But the good thing is, I still see myself primarily as a storyteller.

Six Suspects has already been optioned for film. Do you expect to be any more involved in this adaptation than you were in the making of Slumdog?
Six Suspects is a more ambitious book than Q&A. The characters are very diverse, the resolution is much more complex. So certainly I would take a much closer look at how it is translated onto the screen. In fact, I am myself curious to see how John Hodge (he has just been commissioned as the screenplay writer) adapts it. Whodunits are notoriously difficult to film. You can disguise the murderer in the novel, but how do you disguise it in a film, where everything is in your face?

What do you like to read for pleasure? Any recent favorites?
I have read many authors and many books over the years, from Albert Camus to Irving Wallace. I have been a big fan of the thriller genre, but I have enjoyed contemporary literary works as well, such as Coetzee’s Disgrace, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and the novels of Haruki Murakami.

What can we expect from you next? Do you have plans for a third novel? If so, can you tell us anything about it?
As long as I feel I have stories to tell, I will write. I have already begun my third novel. For a change, it is set outside India.