Joy Castro’s debut thriller, Hell or High Water, is set in New Orleans almost three years after Hurricane Katrina’s devastation. In this page-turner, Times-Picayune reporter Nola Céspedes is longing for a story that will launch her career as a serious journalist, but an assignment on missing registered sex offenders is not what she had in mind. When she discovers that the recent outbreak of abductions in the city may be linked to her story, Nola sets out to find the culprit—uncovering much about her own past in the process.

In a Q&A with BookPage, Castro explains her love for New Orleans and the challenges of writing a crime novel.

Hell or High Water is very vividly set in New Orleans, after Hurricane Katrina. On your website you explain that your husband is from Louisiana, and you’ve been visiting the city for 20 years. Why does post-Katrina New Orleans make a good setting for a crime novel?
Thank you! Katrina hit in August, 2005, and the book is set in April, 2008.

Hell or High Water works particularly well in post-Katrina New Orleans because the novel looks specifically at sex crimes, which have a long aftermath. There’s the initial trauma, and then there’s the long, difficult, uncertain process of coming back, of healing. Just because offenders are caught and convicted—and often they’re not—does not mean the damage is somehow magically healed. Recovering is a process. It takes time, and it’s frustrating and painful to the survivors, who often don’t get the help they need.

You’re probably already anticipating the analogy. The city of New Orleans, which is still wrestling with the aftermath of Katrina’s devastation, experienced a similar story writ large. The storm itself was over by September, but its fallout, both in terms of the emotional trauma and the practical difficulties of rebuilding, has lasted for years.

No matter how committed they are, survivors can become exhausted, frustrated, heartbroken, fed up. That’s the story I wanted to tell: the story of aftermath.

What do you love most about the city?
The people. They’re gritty, resilient, smart, strong and passionate. There’s also a tremendous, joyous insistence on pleasure in New Orleans, as well as a hard-boiled gallows humor, which my protagonist Nola shares.

The city is also very beautiful, and its layered cultural history is dense, conflicted and complicated: Native American, French, Senegalese, Congolese, Spanish, Anglo, Italian, Irish and more. I wanted to honor that beauty and complexity.

Like almost everyone, I also love the spectacular music and food of New Orleans. That was the most delicious part of the research—eating, drinking and going out everywhere that Nola would go.

There’s a tremendous, joyous insistence on pleasure in New Orleans, as well as a hard-boiled gallows humor, which my protagonist Nola shares.

This is your first novel. How was the experience of writing Hell or High Water different from writing the nonfiction or short fiction you’ve published?
I’d never worked from an outline before, but I did so with this novel, because it was very important to make sure all the pieces fit together precisely.

When I wrote my memoir The Truth Book, I already knew the story, since I had lived it; I just had to write it. With short fiction, I generally write toward a line or an image, and discover the story as I go.

But a novel—especially a plot-driven novel like a thriller—is a much more complicated organism, with a lot of moving parts. I had to make the story up from scratch, and I had to test the logic of the narrative. Writing an outline let me do that.

In the novel, Nola, a reporter, researches a story about the registered sex offenders who have gone off the grid since Katrina. How did you come up with this plot? What sort of research did you do?
It’s rooted in fact. During the hurricane evacuation, over 1,300 registered sex offenders went off the grid. By early 2008, when Hell or High Water is set, 800 had still not been relocated. That’s true, and that was provocative to me. I thought, That’s a story. What happened to those people? Where are they now? Are they back in New Orleans? Are they a threat? So I thought it would be interesting to have a reporter investigate the story, to see where it took her and what she learned.

I have so much respect for newspapers and journalism in general and for the Times-Picayune in particular, so I made Nola a Times-Picayune reporter.

In terms of research, I learned a lot about various sexual offenses, including nonviolent, non-threatening ones, and the psychology of different kinds of sexual criminals. I also learned about various methods of rehabilitation: what works, what really doesn’t. I was helped by some great university research librarians. All of the information and statistics in the book are drawn from recently published scholarship.

Finally, I researched the long-term effects of sexual crimes on survivors, such as the increased incidence of depression, suicide attempts, drug and alcohol abuse and destructive relationships even long after the assault takes place.

This is a serious problem that our society faces. Sending a rapist to jail does not solve everything for the person who’s been raped.

The interviews with sex offenders in the novel stay away from cliché and portray these characters as real human beings. To what extent did you base Nola’s interactions on reality?
Thank you. I’m glad you think so.

Well, sex offenders are real human beings, so I started there. Let me first clarify that Nola does distinguish in the novel between mild, nonviolent offenses, like consensual sex between a 19-year-old and a younger teenager who are in a relationship together, and the kinds of serious, violent sex offenses, like rape and molestation, of which we usually think in these discussions.

But even regarding these serious, damaging offenders, I wanted to write compassionately and realistically about people who, because they do things that are so heinous, are often written off as monsters, as being too horrifying to contemplate or simply unworthy of our interest or concern. This isn’t true, of course. Rapists and child molesters are not uncommon, and they often pass for normal. They’re often people who’ve been hurt and damaged themselves, and they’re as varied and complex as any other population, so I wanted to show that.

I’m not particularly sympathetic; they need to be stopped. But while demonizing someone can satisfy our sense of moral outrage, it’s not very illuminating or interesting, and it doesn’t make for very good fiction.

Of course, the terror and trauma caused by sexual assaults are devastating, and many people react to sexual criminals in an extremely negative way. I understand that, and I tried to give that perspective a voice in the novel, too, by letting various characters express those feelings of pure revulsion and fear.

I didn’t interview any sex offenders myself for the purposes of writing this book. However, I had the unfortunate opportunity to observe one closely for two years during my early adolescence. After my parents divorced, my mother married a man who was later convicted and imprisoned for child molesting. I ran away at 14, an experience that The Truth Book details. It was a difficult experience, and I’ve been curious about the topic ever since.

What was the most challenging aspect of writing a crime novel?
Plot. Definitely.

My literary training was in high modernism: Faulkner, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf. That’s what I did my scholarly doctorate in, and that’s what I’ve been teaching at the college level for the last 15 years. So even though I wanted to write a thriller because I’ve always loved mysteries, I was initially drawn toward lyrical language and the interior, subjective world of imagery, memory and psychology rather than to plot and action.

Instead of implementing the law of cause and effect, I wanted my characters to sit around having epiphanies and profound thoughts—not a lot of suspense there! So I had to learn how to plot, to make one thing lead to another. It was a grueling process, and I went through many drafts of my outline and many drafts of the manuscript. I learned a lot.

Hell or High Water is the first in a series. What happens next? Do you have an arc in mind for how the series will play out?
Yes, I think so. Nola’s got her own demons, and in each book, the crimes she investigates affect her personally in some way.

In the next novel in the series, Nearer Home, which is also set in New Orleans (the title comes from a Robert Frost poem), Nola becomes uncomfortably involved in the murder of a journalist—one of her former teachers, in fact. She decides to solve the crime, but there’s a political angle, and things get complicated. She becomes a target herself.

In a long-term sense, Nola yearns to understand herself and her past, and since she’s Cuban American, the locale where the books are set may shift in the future. I’m really interested in politics and the environment, so those issues keep working themselves into the novels, too.

Are there any crime series or authors who inspired you to write in this genre?
Oh, yes. I’ve always loved mysteries and thrillers, beginning as a young child with the Bobbsey Twins series and moving on to Sherlock Holmes and others.

In adulthood, I’ve most loved the work of Dashiell Hammett, Dennis Lehane and Kate Atkinson. Those three knockout writers remain both inspirational and aspirational for me.

I also really enjoy the novels of Patricia Highsmith, Tana French and John Banville writing as Benjamin Black. After writing Hell or High Water, I found Raymond Chandler (where had he been all my life?), so he’s been an influence on Nearer Home. To relax and feel cozy, I like Alexander McCall Smith’s Isabel Dalhousie series, which is set in Edinburgh. His books are so gentle. Comfort crime.

What are you reading now?
John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Though I’d read a couple of le Carré’s novels in high school, I had sort of forgotten about him. However, my husband and I recently stayed in an apartment in Spain that happened to have several of his books on the shelves. I started with A Murder of Quality, which was marvelous, and have been bingeing since then. They’re terrific.

The July 2012 Women of Mystery are getting plenty of attention, but only one gets to be our Top Pick. Linda Castillo’s Gone Missing, the newest installment in her Amish thriller series, earns that honor with its gripping tale of murder and Rumspringa gone wrong. Whodunit columnist Bruce Tierney writes, “With its wonderfully conflicted protagonist, and its incisive look into a society most of us know little about, Gone Missing is the unquestioned high point of one of the most compelling series in modern suspense fiction.”

Castillo talks Amish country, great books and great characters in a Q&A with BookPage.

Describe your book in one sentence.
Formerly Amish chief of police Kate Burkholder is asked to consult on a missing person case involving an Amish teenager by state agent John Tomasetti, and they discover links to cold cases that go back years—and soon become a murder investigation.

What is it about Amish Country that inspires such great thrillers?
Ohio’s Amish Country is a peaceful and bucolic place of rolling hills, farms and quaint towns. The Amish make it unique—there’s no place like it in the world. I think the element that makes it such a terrific setting for a thriller is the juxtaposition of the beautiful setting and the introduction of evil into it. That contrast is one of the things that prompted me to set my books among the Amish.

What is one book people might be surprised to know you have read?
The Road by Cormac McCarthy. It’s a post-apocalyptic book I couldn’t put it down. Epic.

What’s your favorite thing about being a writer?
It’s hard to name just one thing. I love writing stories, creating characters and the world in which they live. I love cooking up mysteries and having my characters work their way through all the red herrings to solve them—the scarier the better. Most of all, I love sharing all of those things with readers. For a writer, there’s no better feeling than to hear from a reader who loved the book.

If you had to be stranded on a desert island with one fictional character, who would you choose?
That’s a tough one because I’ve read so many books with intriguing characters. I’m thinking this is a toss-up between Lucas Davenport [from John Sandford‘s Prey series] and John Tomasetti. (I have huge crushes on both!) If I had to choose, I’d probably go with Tomasetti because I find him endlessly fascinating, and I know if I had the chance to sit down and talk to him, he’d end up surprising the hell out of me.

If you could take one of Kate Burkholder’s characteristics for yourself, what would it be?
It takes courage to be a police officer. Kate is a lot braver than I could ever be. She’s tackled and solved some tough cases that required a good bit of chutzpah. I think I’d like to have her courage.

What are you working on next?
I have two projects in the works. I’m nearly finished with the fifth book in my Kate Burkholder series. No title yet, but it’s a fascinating story that gives us a glimpse into Kate’s childhood and pits her against a villain like she’s never faced before. I’m also working on a standalone novel that has been calling to me for quite some time.

Whodunit columnist Bruce Tierney has reviewed four of Timothy Hallinan’s fantastic thrillers—and each one has earned Mystery of the Month. His latest Poke Rafferty novel, The Fear Artist, earns that title for August 2012 with its tale of murder on the streets of Bangkok. Writes Tierney, “The pacing is intense, the characters are among the best in modern suspense fiction and the atmosphere is steamy and dangerous throughout.”

We talked with Hallinan about tough guys, great books and the seamy Bangkok setting.

Describe your book in one sentence.
It’s a thriller set in Bangkok about what happens when someone innocently draws the attention of the War on Terror and becomes possible “collateral damage,” which is a 21st-century euphemism for “dead.”

If you could take one of Poke Rafferty’s characteristics for yourself, what would it be?
Oh, boy. Poke is braver than I am, more resourceful, funnier, younger, better-looking, with better hair . . . I suppose it would be bravery. Most thriller writers are wusses. I just finished a bookstore tour with a well-known (and very good) writer whose series features not one but two brave guys, and it was a real thrill to learn that he’s just as big a doily as I am. Here we are, launching our characters across these lethal landscapes with death waiting at every misstep, and in real life we both get flustered when we miss a turn.

What is the best writing advice you’ve ever received?
Finish. A writer is someone who finishes. Whatever it takes, finish. Inspiration exists, as Picasso said, but it has to find you working.

What is one book everyone needs to read?
This is a hard one. I read pretty much everything. At the risk of being pretentious, I’m going to say Anthony Trollope’s six-volume novel The Palliser, which tells one great love story over the course of an entire adult lifetime and sets it against a panorama of life in Victorian England and Ireland. And Trollope could write women, which Dickens (in my opinion) couldn’t.

What is it about Bangkok that inspires such great suspense fiction?
Extremes. Bangkok is, as Maugham said about Monaco, “A sunny place for shady people.” Bangkok is rich and poor, sinful and spiritual, noisy and serene, heartless and cheerful. And it’s growing at the rate of one million people a year as family and community structures in the countryside break down. These people are handmade for exploitation. And yet most Thais manage to maintain a kind of equanimity I can only envy.

How do you conquer writer’s block?
By writing my way through it. I don’t actually get traditional writer’s block. What I get is total book collapse as I write my way into something that seems completely impossible to solve, at which point I toss the book and start something else, only to realize (usually) that I DO know how to solve the problem. This happens to me three or four times on every book. I can always write something—it’s just usually not the thing I’m supposed to be writing.

What are you working on next?
The next Poke Rafferty (the sixth), which is tentatively titled For the Dead. I’m in the great phase, which is to say the first 35 to 40 percent, where I haven’t made any enormous mistakes yet, or if I have, I haven’t recognized them. And a book called King Maybe, which is the fourth book in another series, set in Los Angeles.

Julia Keller loathed the assignment. What editor in his right mind would send her, cultural critic for the Chicago Tribune, to cover the aftermath of a tornado two hours west in Utica that had already been thoroughly chronicled by the paper’s own news staff? Did they need an emergency book review?

But it turns out there was one angle the news crew had overlooked, one that only a small-town West Virginia girl who at age nine once ran her own Encyclopedia Brown-inspired detective agency could have sleuthed out.

“What impressed me immediately was, how do you deal with the randomness of catastrophe? How do you wrap your mind around this?” Keller recalls. “Small towns are where there are many, many overlapping lives constantly rubbing up against each other; you’re constantly bumping up against other people’s joys and sorrows. It wasn’t my spiritual journey, but instead my journey to understand how the human spirit deals with the randomness of fate. As I got deeper into that idea, it propelled me back and back to Utica.”

Keller not only won a Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for her moving three-part Tribune series about the town’s resurrection, she also came away inspired to create a mystery series set in the fictional West Virginia hamlet of Acker’s Gap that would explore what she calls “Appalachian fatalism.”

The series debut, A Killing in the Hills, kicks off with just such random carnage: A gunman ducks into the town’s coffee shop just long enough to fire three shots, killing three senior regulars. Waitress Carly Elkins, the teenage daughter of county prosecuting attorney Belfa “Bell” Elkins, not only witnesses the shooting but recognizes the killer.

"Are you going to leave or are you going to stay? That is the essential question, the ground beneath your feet."

To varying degrees, the central characters—including aging sheriff Nick Fogelsong, Bell’s BFFs Ruthie and Tom Cox and even Charlie Sowards, aka “Chill,” the ne’er-do-well killer—are all victims of a mountain dysphoria that keeps expectations of life in these hills well in check. Bell, whose own horrific past is revealed as she hunts down the mastermind behind the murders, represents the rare few who escaped Appalachia and returned to help improve its fortunes.

“In S.E. Hinton’s wonderful novel, The Outsiders, she has a great line that those characters are very much about who will go and who will stay,” Keller says. “That’s the question, almost more than who you marry or whether you have a family or what your profession will be: Are you going to leave or are you going to stay? And if you stay, will it be with this ever-growing crust of bitterness, or do you stay for the best of reasons? That is the essential question, the ground beneath your feet.”

Don’t misunderstand: Keller’s upbringing in Huntington, West Virginia, was far from hardscrabble. Her father, a math professor at Marshall University, and her mother, a high school English teacher, imbued their daughter with a love of learning and a gift for storytelling. She went on to work as an intern for syndicated columnist Jack Anderson, earned a doctoral degree in English and was awarded a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard.

But what looks great on a resume doesn’t always resonate in the heart.

“There’s a line that a character uses in my next book, which is called Bitter River, that says, ‘The only way out is up,’” Keller says. “That’s a line I’ve heard my whole life and it’s so evocative, certainly in a physical and geographical sense but also in a spiritual sense. You have to overcome barriers even to get somewhere else.”

Keller does a masterful job of leaving spooky little unexplained blanks in each of her characters that prompt the reader to second-guess what they think they know about this slightly inchoate cast. For a central character, Bell remains the most elusive of all, by design.

“As I was writing, it occurred to me that there were these vast gaps where we don’t know a lot about the horrific crucibles she went through. Of course, the town’s name is Acker’s Gap, so you know there is more there,” Keller says.

Like Bell, Keller fled these hills to explore the world, yet finds herself drawn back now that time has sanded off the rougher memories. She recently left the Tribune to accept a teaching position at Ohio University in Athens, just up the road from her hometown in the heart of Appalachia. It’s the perfect vantage point from which to survey the peculiar fatalism of the area.

“A friend of mine who remained in Huntington as an ophthalmologist tells me that the biggest thing she faces in her patients isn’t that they’re lazy or have no willpower, it’s that they will look at her and say, ‘Oh, it doesn’t much matter. My father died in his 40s, my mother died in her 40s, it doesn’t much matter.’ It’s this fatalism, which is very different from cynicism. I thought if I could somehow show that in fiction, it would be a terrific way to address that feeling.”

Jo Nesbø has been called the next Stieg Larsson, and this month, our Whodunit columnist calls his newest thriller, Phantom, “one of the finest suspense novels to come out of Scandinavia to date.” It’s our Top Pick in Mystery, and it’s “easily the most troubling and heartfelt” of the Harry Hole series.

We checked in with Nesbø to talk a bit about reading, Harry Hole and great writing advice.

Describe your book in one sentence.
Harry, back in Oslo from Hong Kong to prove that Rakel’s son Oleg is not a murderer, sets out on a dangerous investigation that takes him deep into the world of the most lethal drug to ever hit Oslo, and into the maze of his own past, where he will find the truth.

If you woke up in Harry Hole’s shoes one morning, what would you do?
I have no idea. Harry is good, and although he may not be my alter ego, I’ve certainly used a lot of my own person in Harry. Let’s say 70%. The best parts. Well, some of the not so good, too. But I must have put some of my analytical abilities in there, I believe.

What is one book readers might be surprised to know you have read?
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. I’m glad it was short.

What is the greatest compliment you’ve received for your books?
When young people says it inspired them to write.

What is the best writing advice you’ve ever received?
Be the psychopath. You have to be able to identify with a character, similar to how an actor works. It might be scary sometimes, but that’s what you have to do. Humans are complex; you’ll be able to find most things within yourself. Just use your imagination.

Some readers might not know that you are also the author of several children’s books in the Doctor Proctor’s Fart Powder series. What was your favorite book as a child?
My favorite book as a child was Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain. It was funny, had bizarre characters and suspense. And a bona fide murder.

What’s next?
Writing. Always writing.

It seems inevitable that Bob Lee Swagger, thriller writer Stephen Hunter’s retired Marine sniper, would one day find a place in the November 22, 1963, assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Swagger isn’t the rumored second gunman, mind you, favored by conspiracy theorists as a more plausible presidential assassin than Lee Harvey Oswald. Quite the contrary; in his latest outing, The Third Bullet, the nation’s top fictional ballistics expert takes his best shot at solving America’s most baffling murder mystery—the assassination that marks its 50th anniversary this year.

As The Third Bullet kicks off, the widow of a prominent thriller writer very much like Hunter tracks Swagger down to his Idaho home to ask him to investigate the death of her husband, who was killed in a late-night hit-and-run that may have had links to the Kennedy assassination. Swagger heads to Dealey Plaza, connects with the JFK conspiracy underground, tracks the author’s killer to Moscow and eventually encounters a CIA operative named Hugh Meachum who provides a shockingly plausible alternate answer to the age-old question: Who killed JFK?

By Hunter’s own admission, The Third Bullet was a tough slog between a mountain of hard evidence and a valley of public doubt about what actually happened on that long-ago Dallas afternoon. To flesh out his storyline, the author immersed himself in the Warren Commission Report, took inventory of the various conspiracy theories, then set off like Swagger for Dealey Plaza to have a look for himself.

Fictional ballistics expert Bob Lee Swagger takes a shot at an age-old question: Who killed JFK?

“What I tried to do from the very beginning was establish hard data points, things that everyone knew and all investigators agreed had happened,” he says. “Then I tried to plot between and around them.”

As he looked down from the famous sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository, then sat on the park bench directly below it facing the 90-degree turn that the Kennedy motorcade negotiated before the fatal shot, Hunter’s own hunter’s instinct interceded. The motorcade had slowed to a near-stop for the turn, offering a fish-in-the-barrel shot that even a mediocre marksman like Oswald could have made, compared to the much longer, extremely difficult shot at a moving target as the motorcade pulled away.

“I was stunned,” he recalls. “I looked up and saw the window was about 75 feet away and I thought to myself, good God, why did he not take the easy shot?”

That epiphany unlocked the central mystery of The Third Bullet: If not Oswald, who?

To find a plausible explanation, Hunter recalled a book written by ballistics expert Howard Donahue that theorized Kennedy had been killed by a rogue Secret Service agent shooting from a trailing car.

“It was a thoroughly absurd book and was immediately condemned to purgatory by sentient people, but he understood the science of what happens when a bullet is fired at a man,” Hunter says. In the case of the Kennedy assassination, the third bullet, unlike the previous two, exploded on impact when it hit and killed the president. How could that happen if all three bullets came from the same rifle?

To answer that question, Hunter introduces us to Meachum, a vainglorious Yale-educated veteran of the CIA’s Plans Division with his own secret plans. As frighteningly cold and calculating as Meachum’s story is, Hunter challenged himself by presenting it as excerpts from the man’s diary, his first foray into first-person narrative.

“I wrote that first and I really enjoyed that but there were all kinds of problems,” he admits. “A lot of the effects I get come from cutting and juxtaposing points of view, and it frightened me to get away from those points of view and be stuck in a single head, and yet I found the voice right away. In the end, my problem was shutting Hugh up, not getting him to talk. I discovered a lot of the plotting around Hugh while writing him.”

Hunter, who lives in Baltimore, wrote for the Baltimore Sun for more than 25 years before moving to the Washington Post, where he won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for film criticism. He launched the Bob Lee Swagger series in 1993 with Point of Impact, incorporating an encyclopedic knowledge of guns and ballistics, and has gone on to write 17 thrillers.

Did conducting his own investigation into the Kennedy assassination change his view on what happened that dark day in Dallas?

“I suppose I confirmed my suspicions,” Hunter allows. “My theory of the world is that nothing works the way it’s supposed to work, so if anyone argues for perfection, they’re barking up the wrong tree. I wanted my Kennedy assassination conspiracy to be small and adept, but at the same time, mistakes were made, improvisations were made, the whole thing is thrown together on the fly and everybody happens to have a very good day on that day. To me, that was far more realistic than a theory that involves the CIA, Czechoslovakian intelligence and the Mattel toy company and their headquarters is under a volcano. You just don’t believe that.”

Does he agree with Stephen King, who concludes in his JFK speculative novel 11/22/63 that there’s a 99-percent chance Oswald did it?

“That’s how I felt when I started, but now I feel that figure is more like 95 percent,” Hunter says. “There’s a much larger chance than we know that something like [what] I came up with actually happened.”

Leighton Gage’s Perfect Hatred, the newest installment in his series featuring Brazilian Federal Police Inspector Mario Silva, is BookPage’s Top Pick in Mystery for March 2013. With an exotic location and perfect plotting, it is “hands down the first ‘do not miss’ mystery of 2013!”

BookPage chatted with Gage about Brazil, the tough lives of cops and To Kill a Mockingbird.

Describe your book in one sentence.
Armchair tourism for crime fiction lovers.

Why does Brazil make such an excellent setting for your thrillers?
Brazil is big, larger than the continental United States, and endlessly variable. From the Amazon region in the north, with the biggest rainforest in the world and a single river that pumps out 20 percent of all the fresh water on earth, to the Pantanal, the largest wetland area on the planet, there are thousands of potential locations I can transport my readers to—and hundreds of issues to explore.

In Perfect Hatred, for example, we range from São Paulo, the largest city in the Southern hemisphere, to the great waterfalls at Iguaçu, where three countries meet. And then we cross over the border into Paraguay, a sad little country where contraband makes up 80 percent of the national economy and human life is cheap.

Would you make a good cop? Why or why not?
I’d make a lousy cop.

In researching my books, I’ve spent a lot of time with cops and their families. And through those experiences, I’ve come to realize how hard the job is. I’m not talking about the technical challenges or the day-to-day investigations. I’m talking about the emotional side, about what working as a cop does to you inside.

By way of illustration, here’s a story I got from one detective’s wife:

“There’s no truth in the adage ‘it’s a small world.’ It is, in fact, a very big world.”

Her husband was assigned to investigate a double murder. A 17-year-old girl claimed she’d returned home from a date to find her parents bludgeoned to death in their bed. But the cop’s instincts told him the girl was lying. Ultimately, she confessed that she and her boyfriend had committed the crime. Not because she’d hated her parents, not because they’d abused her, but because they’d objected to her continuing relationship with the thug who helped kill them. She showed no remorse for what she’d done. She didn’t shed a single tear during the entire interrogation. Her only concern was that she’d been caught.

But the cop was so shocked that he went home, sank into a chair, wrapped his 7-year-old daughter in his arms and bawled like a baby. “Seventeen years old,” he kept saying, over and over again. “Seventeen years old.”

His wife felt helpless. She couldn’t find a way to comfort him.

If you could take one of Mario Silva’s characteristics for yourself, what would it be?
Hmm. That’s a tough one. He’s an amalgam, you see, of the best cops I’ve known. He has integrity. He’s smart. He’s a good team leader, compassionate, intuitive and not cowed by his bosses, the bureaucracy or the largely corrupt system in which he works. So there are a lot of sterling qualities to choose from. But if I had to choose just one, I’d have to say it’s his dogged persistence.

Why?

Because, invariably, when I start a new book, it’s like looking at a cliff I have to climb. All authors know this feeling, know we’ll get to the top eventually, but it requires the expenditure of considerable energy to keep at it, day after day, week after week, scrambling our lonely way up that mental rock face.

If Silva could bottle his dogged persistence, writers would buy it by the caseload.

Name one book you think everyone should read.
Everyone? I can’t even come up with a book that I think would appeal equally to my wife and my daughters.

No, wait, I take that back. There’s To Kill a Mockingbird.

For once, I put aside our dissimilar reading preferences and recommended that one to all the members of my family. All of them loved it. As, I think, has everyone who has ever read it.

You’ve done quite a bit of traveling. What’s the greatest thing you’ve learned from all your adventures?
That there’s no truth in the adage “it’s a small world.” It is, in fact, a very big world. No lifetime is long enough to see it all—and 100 lifetimes wouldn’t be enough to learn all its languages and understand all its cultures.

What’s next?
The Ways of Evil Men. Silva and his crew are called in to investigate the extermination of a tribe in the heart of the Amazon rainforest. The good folks from Soho will be publishing it in the early part of next year.

Murder as a Fine Art takes its inspiration from the real-life, unsolved Ratcliffe Highway murders, two bloody attacks on two separate families in 1811. The gory attacks of random, innocent people threw London into a panic, as the homes of good, law-abiding citizens were no longer safe. Thomas De Quincey, author of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, dramatized the murders in a postscript to his essay, “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” which depicted the events in gruesome, intimate detail and portrayed the killer as an artistic genius.

In Murder as a Fine Art, it has been over four decades since the Ratcliffe Highway murders, and deep in the heavy fog of London, someone has begun to commit identical murders. The only man who may be able to stop the new killer is De Quincey, who is not only a suspect in the case but also a clear target. With the help of his resourceful daughter Emily, two Scotland Yard detectives and a steady stream of laudanum, De Quincey goes toe-to-toe with an evil history.

Morrell has created an atmospheric, precise murder mystery with fascinating historical detail. Like De Quincey, his work conveys chilling insight into the mind of a serial killer.

During many months of research, you plunged into the world of 1854 London and the works of De Quincey. You’ve called this process “method” writing, which begs the question: Having immersed yourself in this world and De Quincey’s thoughts, what is your own opinion of murder’s artistic value?

Yes, for two years I had the adventure of immersing myself in 1854 London. The only books I read were related to that time, and I so focused on the period that I managed to convince myself I was there. As for murder being a fine art, Thomas De Quincey argued that some killings evoke so much pity and terror in the Aristotelian sense that they become the equivalent of powerful dramas while the killers themselves become imaginative authors. De Quincey’s famous essay “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth” is one of the first examples of psychological criticism. He explored the effect of a text on an audience’s psyche, and he felt that a certain type of murder, one that paralyzes an entire country the way the Ratcliffe Highway murders did, could be analyzed as if it were a play.

“There needs to be something about the theme, the subject, the research and the way the book is written that makes me fuller. That certainly happened with Murder as a Fine Art.”

One of the most powerful questions in historical fiction is “What if?” When you were researching this novel, which “What if?” were you most excited to explore?

There were a string of “What ifs,” all of them related. A brief reference to De Quincey in a recent movie about Darwin, Creation, made me curious enough to look at some Victorian literature texts that I still have from my college days. My professor hadn’t said much about De Quincey, but now, as I read De Quincey’s work, I became increasingly excited by his brilliance. Then I found his Postscript to “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” which was published in the fall of 1854, and I suddenly thought—I’m not exaggerating about the cascading way this came together—“What if De Quincey came to London in 1854 to publicize his essay? What if someone used that essay as a blueprint for replicating the Ratcliffe Highway murders? What if De Quincey became the logical suspect because of his opium addiction and his obsession about the murders?” Of course, it took two years of research and writing in order to dramatize those questions.

De Quincey suggested that the artistic brilliance of the Ratcliffe Highway murders would raise the aesthetic bar for future murders. Would you call De Quincey the father of the mystery novel? Would you go so far as to call him the father of the modern murder? Why or why not?

We know that De Quincey strongly influenced Edgar Allan Poe, who is generally considered to be the inventor of the detective story with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Poe then influenced Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the creation of Sherlock Holmes. So if De Quincey isn’t the father of the detective mystery genre, he can justly be called the grandfather of it.

Between Poe and Conan Doyle, there’s Wilkie Collins, whose The Moonstone is usually called the first detective novel as opposed to the detective short stories of Poe. In The Moonstone, Collins uses De Quincey and his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater to solve the mystery, so De Quincey certainly had an effect on the genre. At the same time, De Quincey was also one of the originators of Sensation Fiction, which is what we now call thrillers. When I saw the pattern, I realized that De Quincey would make a perfect detective. We can trace a line from Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Lector all the way back to De Quincey’s influence on crime fiction.

De Quincey is best remembered for his addiction to laudanum, a painkilling mixture of opium and alcohol, as memorialized by his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. In Murder as a Fine Art, his addiction is clearly killing him. However, it helped him write beautifully, and in this novel, it makes him a formidable opponent to the murderer. Parallels to Sherlock Holmes must be drawn. Why are drugs a classic element of mysteries?

Laudanum was as common in Victorian medicine cabinets as aspirin is today. It was used for baby colic, back pain, kidney ailments, menstrual cramps, cancer, hay fever—just about anything. It had a skull and crossbones on the bottle, along with a label marked “POISON.” Arguably, many Victorians were drug addicts without realizing it, which explains the dark, muffled rooms of the period. A tablespoon of laudanum would probably be lethal. But De Quincey sometimes drank 16 ounces of the stuff each day. For him it worked as a stimulant rather than a sedative, and under its influence, he wrote amazingly evocative, brilliant prose.

Lest someone decide that this is the key to being a wonderful writer, I should add that De Quincey suffered opium nightmares that made him feel that he endured the horrors of 100 years each night. His stomach and bowels shut down. He had massive debts because he spent so much money on opium.

It’s interesting to note that Sherlock Holmes injects himself with a seven percent solution of cocaine. Wilkie Collins was a prisoner of laudanum. Poe claimed to have tried to commit suicide by using laudanum. His narrators sometimes use laudanum, lending a distinctive tone to the prose. But I don’t see an epidemic of drug-affected detectives after the Victorian era ended.

While drug use plays a role in this book, the roots of the problem are British imperialism, the wars waged in the name of colonialism and the British East India Company’s opium trade. The shady opium dealings detailed in Murder as a Fine Art force the reader to question who really is to blame—and whether or not the murderer is validated in his actions. As deplorable as the opium trade was, was it bad enough to justify murder? Can murder this gruesome ever be validated?

Now we get to the central theme of the novel. Because of De Quincey’s opium addiction, the plot pivots around that drug. The concept of physical and mental addiction wasn’t understood for much of the Victorian era. They thought of it as a habit that could be overcome by fortitude. The British East India Company, which was powerful enough to lend money to the British government to finance wars, made most of its money from opium. Some of that opium was shipped home to England (along with opium from Turkey). But much of it was smuggled into China (the emperor didn’t want it in his country) in exchange for Chinese tea, which was more valuable than opium on the international market. Huge fortunes were made in this way. Many universities (including American Ivy league ones) have endowments that started with donations of opium profits. The murderer in my novel isn’t a sociopathic maniac. Without giving away a major twist in the plot, I think it’s safe to say that he’s extremely sympathetic, which is an odd thing to say about a mass murderer, even a fictional one, but given his experiences, his torment seemed heartbreaking.

Throughout Murder as a Fine Art, characters are unable to escape their pasts: De Quincey is haunted by memories on every corner of London; an Irish cop tries to hide his red hair; the killer’s motivations come from secrets in his past; horrifying murders are repeated. How inescapable is our past?

The burden of the past—how we can’t escape our origins—is certainly one aspect of the novel. My own past had nightmarish aspects. After my father died in combat, my mother couldn’t raise me by herself and put me in an orphanage. Later she reclaimed me, although I sometimes felt I was adopted without being told. After she remarried, it turned out that my stepfather disliked children. There were constant terrifying arguments between my mother and him. Fearful, I used to sleep beneath my bed. I went to sleep, telling stories to myself. I’m still telling those stories.

The challenge is to overcome the imperfection of our past. In Murder as a Fine Art, the murderer is as much controlled by his childhood as De Quincey is.

This historical thriller is certainly a departure for you. You took real characters, true works and actual events, but went further: Murder as a Fine Art doesn’t simply recreate the original murders, but even extrapolates theories and solves the original crime altogether. Without giving too much away, do you truly believe you solved it, or did you make fictional leaps in your conclusion?

My solution to the motives for the 1811 Ratcliffe Highway mass murders is consistent with the information that’s available about them. The detail that almost no one addressed is that in the second set of killings, the supposed murderer John Williams killed a tavern-keeper named John Williamson. When I first read this, I thought it was a typo. I’m aware of only one commentator, G.K. Chesterton, who thought that this was weird. “It sounds like a sort of infanticide,” Chesterton said. Because my novel’s main character, Thomas De Quincey, invented the term “subconscious” and anticipated Freud’s theories by more than half a century, I decided that the psychological implication of Williams killing Williamson would provide the explanation for not only that set of killings but the ones that occurred 12 days earlier. I can’t suggest that mine is the only explanation, but my solution is logical and fits the details.

In the book’s afterword, you call Murder as a Fine Art “[your] version of a nineteenth-century novel.” How was writing in this 19th-century style different from crafting your other novels?

Flaubert, Henry James and Hemingway are three authors who drastically changed the way novels came to be written, largely due to their development of the third-person limited viewpoint. Before them, novels tended to be written in an omniscient third-person historian’s voice or else in the first person. The omniscient voice is almost never used these days.  It relies on telling, not showing. Its narrator can be intrusive. It’s so different from the third-person limited viewpoint that these days it draws attention to itself, even though it once was taken for granted. In Bleak House, which Dickens released in 1853, a year before the events in Murder as a Fine Art, he alternates an omniscient viewpoint with a first-person viewpoint. All of this would now probably be rejected in a creative writing class. But I decided that because my novel is set in 1854, it needed to be written in a way that evoked 1854. I needed to make it a modern version of a Victorian novel.

The other thing I realized was that for me the omniscient viewpoint was essential because 1854 London is as foreign to us as Mars. The things that Victorians took for granted are so weird that they need to be explained. What’s a dollymop or a dipper? How much did a respectable woman’s clothes weigh? (Thirty-seven pounds.) Why could physicians be presented at the queen’s court while surgeons were restricted? Why did prison cells have boxes with cranks on the walls? I couldn’t have the characters talking about these things, which they took for granted and would never think about discussing. The only way I knew to solve the problem was to use a Victorian omniscient narrator, who periodically steps forward and in effect says to the reader, “You can’t understand this scene unless I tell you about Victorian burial customs.” It’s a liberating technique that made Murder as a Fine Art a great pleasure to write because by definition the third-person limited viewpoint is limiting.

Where do you hope this book will take you as an author?

My goal has always been to keep moving forward and find new ways to write about action and suspense. A few people were surprised when they learned that I’d done the unexpected and written a Victorian thriller, but it’s very much in keeping with my attitudes. Before I start a project, I write a letter to myself, answering this question: “Why is this book worth a year or two or three of my life?” There needs to be something about the theme, the subject, the research and the way the book is written that makes me fuller. That certainly happened with Murder as a Fine Art. By going to Victorian London, I moved ahead personally and saw the world in a different way. Response to the book has been very encouraging, with numerous requests for me to do another De Quincey novel. I’ve written very few sequels, but in this case, I have much more to say about this remarkable man.

Richard Crompton’s debut mystery novel, Hour of the Red God, is “character-driven from the get-go” according to our Whodunit columnist Bruce Tierney. Crompton introduces Maasai protagonist Detective Mollel, who is “outwardly ritually scarred, inwardly emotionally scarred and always a bit at odds with fellow cops.”

We chatted with Crompton about the fascinating Nairobi setting, Detective Mollel and more in a 7 questions interview.

Describe your book in one sentence.
A gritty thriller and a vivid portrait of a city on the edge.

What do you think readers will most like about Detective Mollel?
He combines two very different worlds. Raised in the tribal Maasai heritage and translocated to the modern city, he feels at home in neither. But his sense of family, duty and justice ring true across all cultures.

Why does Nairobi make for such a compelling mystery setting?
It’s a city of contrasts. Sky-scrapers and slums. Wealth, poverty, corruption and ethnic tension. The police force is strained to its limits. This, however, works for the mystery writer. Instead of relying on high-tech solutions, it’s back-to-basics detective work which will ultimately prevail.

What’s one book you think everyone should read?
1984.

Would you make a good detective?
No. Real-life crime is usually casual, cruel and random. As a writer I would be looking for patterns and motives which do not exist.

Your website’s header states, “Anyone who says they enjoy writing is not trying hard enough.” What does that mean to you?
I want my books to be simple, elegant and effortless to read. The craft of writing is to make the writer invisible. It takes a lot of effort to learn how to disappear.

What’s next?
The sequel, Hell’s Gate. I am also writing a novel set between London and Africa, which is becoming a kind of homage to Bleak House. And my kids are insisting I write a book for them—which fills me with dread, as they’re my toughest critics.

Alafair Burke’s new stand-alone mystery, If You Were Here, is a masterful blend of humanity’s highest and lowest, of heroism and dark secrets. As a former Deputy District Attorney and a current Professor of Law at Hofstra Law School, Burke’s novels are consistently authentic, but her real talent is mixing complex plotlines with nonstop suspense. As Whodunit columnist Bruce Tierney writes, “Nicely crafted, plenty of suspense to go around, a couple of unanticipated twists—what’s not to like?”

We chatted with Burke about her heroines, her law career and writing in a 7 questions interview.

Describe your book in one sentence.
Trouble ensues after former prosecutor turned writer catches a glimpse of friend who disappeared 10 years ago.

What do you think readers will most like about McKenna Jordan? How is she different from your past heroines?
Is it fair to say that a character will be liked for becoming more likable? Most of my past books feature series characters who evolve slowly. They grow, like most of us, in increments and with subtlety. McKenna, in contrast, endures more trauma and drama than most people experience in a lifetime, which allows her to make enormous discoveries about herself in one little book. She’s also incredibly tenacious, for better or for worse. I think knowledgable crime fiction readers might also recognize that I’ve borrowed some familiar tropes of the genre and turned them upside down (or at least I hope so).

“The horrible things people do to each other—and the ways those acts can bring out the best in others—is tremendously fertile ground for a writer.”

How has your law career most influenced your career as a writer?
I’ve been teaching criminal law for 12 years and, before that, was absolutely blessed to work as a prosecutor for five years. As luck would have it, I happened to work for a prosecutor who believed in taking lawyers out of the courtroom into the community, so I spent about half that time working out of a police precinct. Without that window of time, I wouldn’t be the same kind of writer. Criminal investigations don’t look like most people expect, and the policing world is really very different than the prosecutorial world. It’s really important to me to write about law enforcement in an authentic way.

What do you love most about writing crime fiction?
What is there not to love?  The horrible things people do to each other—and the ways those acts can bring out the best in others—is tremendously fertile ground for a writer. I wrote a book a few years ago where every single character was motivated by love. We tend to think about people as good or bad, but I think crime fiction challenges those simplistic assumptions.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve received?
Write the best book you can write, and block out everything else. It sounds simple, but it’s a lot harder than it sounds, especially that second part.

What’s one bad habit you have no intention of breaking?
The Internet! Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, all the shopping. It’s ridiculous. I compare it to the brief walks I used to take down the hallway to gossip for a few minutes here and there at the DA’s Office.

What’s next?
I’m working on the next Ellie Hatcher novel. She gets pulled into a possible wrongful conviction case. It’s my 10th novel, and draws a bit on work I’ve done in my life as Professor Burke.

Ingrid Thoft's debut thriller, Loyalty, introduces P.I. Fina Ludlow, a fearless pursuer of the truth and somewhat outcast member of a truly dysfuctional (and very powerful) family. When her brother's wife goes missing, the Ludlows call in Fina's special talents to crack the case—but her search digs deep and tests those familial bonds.

Thoft's research into the world of private investigation led her to attend and graduate from the University of Washington P.I. program. This unique insight makes Loyalty all the more realistic and more thrilling. We chatted with Thoft about P.I. school, her femme fatale Fina and more.

Why did you decide to attend and graduate from a certificate program in private investigation? Do many authors go so far in their research? Does it give you an edge?

Before writing Loyalty, I was working on a series that featured an amateur sleuth. As much as I loved writing that character, I felt limited by her amateur status. I decided to create a professional private investigator but needed to learn the rules of private investigation before my character broke some of them! Fina makes her own rules, but does so knowingly, not because she’s incompetent. The University of Washington had recently started their certificate program in private investigation, so I enrolled and learned the tricks of the trade. There were no other writers in the class, but I highly recommend that kind of research. It gave me a good understanding of the profession, and it was lots of fun!

What's the coolest thing you learned in the P.I. program?

One of the cases that stands out was part of a presentation done by a scientist from the Washington State Police crime lab. She discussed trace evidence and the idea that we all leave things behind wherever we’ve been and pick something up from that location as well, whether it’s fiber, hair or residue of some sort. Her example was ash from the Mount St. Helen’s eruption. The ash that was deposited into a suspect’s car filter could only have come from a particular place at a particular time. Suspects can be fastidious and cunning, but you can’t outsmart Mother Nature!

Do you ever use your P.I. skills in daily life—either intentionally or unintentionally?

I think that both good P.I.s and writers are observant and aware of their surroundings. They use those skills for different purposes, but the ability to have an open mind and take in a variety of information is an asset in both lines of work. In particular, the certificate program educated me about the online resources that exist for gathering information—things like property ownership and criminal records. I’ve been known to do a little digging, but nothing illegal. Two of the random tips I heed to this day are to walk in crosswalks (if you’re hit by a car you’ll have a stronger lawsuit) and to avoid driving in front of tractor trailer trucks. According to an accident reconstructionist who spoke, approximately 50% have faulty brakes. Yikes!  

"I’ve been known to do a little digging, but nothing illegal."

Do you possess the attributes of a great P.I.? Would you make a good P.I. if you had to give up writing?

I possess some of the necessary skills: I’m observant, organized and comfortable talking with people from all walks of life, but I’m not a thrill seeker and definitely not as brave as Fina. I think I would make a solid P.I., but I would never enjoy it as much as writing, so here’s hoping this works out!

Fina is one fearless girl in a male-dominated world. What do you think readers will like most about her?

I think her courage—both physical and in terms of standing up for her beliefs—appeals to readers. Fina says what many of us think and lives her life boldly, if recklessly, at times. But for all of her bravery, she is vulnerable when it comes to the people she loves and anyone she perceives as being an underdog. She doesn’t pretend that she always knows the best course of action or the right answer, but she muddles through and makes the best decision possible, and I think readers can relate to this. In general, people try to do the best they can, and that’s what she does in her own uniquely, imperfect way.

Fina’s walking a fine line between loyalty to her family and doing the right thing. How is she able to navigate that line? How do you approach that line in your own life?

She doesn’t always navigate it gracefully; she checks in with herself often to determine what she can live with and what decisions would keep her up at night. Although Fina massages the truth when it suits her, she’s very honest with herself. There are some things she can’t tolerate, and she’d rather suffer the consequences than keep certain secrets or abet certain behaviors. For her, it’s a matter of identifying the lesser of two evils.

In terms of my own life, thank goodness my family has never made demands on me that require a crisis of conscience! I was definitely raised to value making a good choice versus upholding the status quo or going along with the crowd. Fina and I both believe that there’s no comfort in numbers if you aren’t happy with yourself.

Boston reveals a seedy underbelly in Loyalty, with mobsters and madams running the show. Why is Boston such a great setting for these dark deeds?

Boston offers writers so many opportunities for creating layered, interesting characters who inhabit various mini worlds. There’s the city’s history, its blue-blood roots, ethnic neighborhoods with their strong ethnic pride, medicine, technology, the arts, higher education and even professional sports. These are wonderful pools to dip into and from them, a writer can populate a story with a variety of characters who realistically may pass one another on any given day on the city streets. The city is rich with possibility.

What do you know about writing now that you didn’t know before publishing your first novel?

I don’t think I appreciated how much work goes into the publication of a novel before witnessing that process first-hand. So many people are involved at every stage, working incredibly hard to make the book as good as it can be and working to connect readers with it.

And I finally understand why books have typos! I used to wonder, as a reader, how misprints would slip by in the publication process, but I totally get it; after reading your own book a dozen times, your eyes glaze over! That’s why it’s important to have lots of eyes on the page. Hopefully, someone else will catch the errors I missed.

What’s next for Fina?

Fina’s next big case finds her embroiled in an investigation that poses new complicated questions: What makes you who you are? Are you defined by what you have or what you’re lacking? She grapples with these issues, and of course, the Ludlows continue to complicate her life. But she still has fun and doesn’t shy away from a fight. There’s never a dull moment with Fina.

Martin Walker’s mystery series starring Bruno, Chief of Police, will make readers’ mouths water and keep those pages turning with an entertaining blend of fine food and murder. Walker sets his series in the French province of Dordogne where he spends much of his time, and through this series, gives the idyllic little village of St. Denis a rather sinister side.

We chatted with Walker about writing, the French countryside and the fifth book in his series, The Devil’s Cave. After reading these answers, we suggest giving Walker a seat at your fantasy dinner party—and letting him choose the wine!

Describe your book in one sentence.
The body of a lovely nude woman, daubed with a pentagram, floats down the river into the picturesque French town of St. Denis, plunging the dashing local police chief Bruno into an investigation that includes Satanism, the French defense industry, prostitution, a shady property empire, a famous cave and an elderly and very left-wing French countess, along with some splendid meals, fine wine and dangerously attractive women.

Bruno has his hands full with all these murders in the French countryside. Why such dark deeds in this charming atmosphere?
This is the very question put to me by my friend Pierrot, the local police chief. But crime takes place anywhere, and this gentle valley in southwestern France has more history packed within it than anywhere on earth, from the prehistoric cave paintings of the Cro-Magnons, the hundreds of medieval châteaus and the importance of the local Resistance during World War II. And with the prevalence of hunters and shotguns, lethal farm tools, property disputes and France’s complex inheritance laws, there is no shortage of means or motives.

“With the prevalence of hunters and shotguns, lethal farm tools, property disputes and France’s complex inheritance laws, there is no shortage of means or motives.”

If you had to swap places with Bruno for a day, how would that day go?
I’d probably be able to win my tennis games and maybe even cook meals as well as he does. But my inability to match Bruno’s ability to combine policing with humor, common sense and his very idiosyncratic sense of justice might well cause a riot in our placid small town. And I’d certainly bring about a horrendous traffic jam.

You’ve said that Bruno is inspired by the real Chief of Police in the Dordogne, who is also your tennis partner. How does your friend feel about the Bruno books?
Now that he’s appearing in TV shows and tourists are flocking to the town market and asking him to sign their books and pose for photos, he’s delighted with the attention, and so are the town’s small business owners. But his wife wants to know why I made my hero such an attractive and appealing bachelor. For the same reason that she married him, is my reply.

What do you love most about writing?
There sometimes comes a moment of pure magic, when a character I invented simply refuses to do what the synopsis and plot says he or she should. On one level, it’s a problem because it means re-thinking the story, but it’s marvelous to realize that fictional characters can take on a life of their own.

If someone were visiting the Dordogne this summer, what would you insist that they eat and drink for their first meal?
I’d start with a fresh vegetable soup made with stock from chicken bones, and then serve a glass of golden Monbazillac wine with a slice of foie gras. The main course would be a duck roasted with honey and mustard and served with pommes sarladaises (made with truffles and parsley and cooked in duck fat), with a bottle of a Pecharmant red wine from Château de Tiregand, 2009, followed by salad from my garden, a slice of my friend Stephane’s Tomme d’Audrix cheese and fresh strawberries with cream from Stephane. (In fact, that’s what I’m cooking for tonight.)

What’s next?
I start a U.S. book tour in mid-July, and I’m currently writing the seventh Bruno novel, which starts with a corpse in the woods and goes on to the secrets behind the sanctuary a local farm gave to some Jewish children during the war, while also working on the Bruno cookbook and preparing to welcome a German film crew who are making a TV series.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Devil’s Cave.

David Gordon’s uproarious, clever Mystery Girl is our Top Pick in Mystery for August 2013. It’s a fun blend of literary and cinematic references with nods to classic detective fiction, as well as some “Woody Allen-esque” humor to keep it all rolling. In a 7 questions interview with Gordon, we talked about writing, great movies and more.

Describe your book in one sentence.
In an effort to win back his wife, failed novelist Sam Kornberg becomes assistant to a brilliant and bizarre detective who sends him to trail a mysterious woman, and ends up stumbling into a plot involving murder, madness, Satanists, Mexican shootouts, video store geeks and the mysteries of love and literature.

Sam Kornberg and Solar Lonsky are quite the pair: Sam’s a bit of a mess, and Solar is house-bound. What makes them a good team?
Each one has strengths and weaknesses that can help the other. Lonsky is not only house-bound; he is trapped in his own formidable mind, and Sam is a connection to a more human if messy world. Sam, as you say, is a mess—or at least his life is at the moment—and Lonsky becomes the guide who leads him through the crisis to the other side.

“I think there’s something very beautiful and exciting about THE FORM, the sense of an unfolding mystery.”

What do you love about writing mysteries?
The same thing I love about reading them. [[I just love the form.]] I think there’s something very beautiful and exciting about THE FORM, the sense of an unfolding mystery. Constructing the solutions is a lot harder than reading them though.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve received?
The best advice for me has been practical: Have an envelope (this was pre-Internet!) stamped and ready to send rejected work right back out. Have a regular writing schedule and stick to it. Sit there even if I don’t write a word. Know what I am going to write tomorrow so I don’t get stuck. And, from an older friend, the assurance that all my personal misadventures and disasters would just end up as funny stuff to write about.

What book are you embarrassed to have not read?
Anna Karenina—I keep saving it for the big vacation that never comes.

What’s your favorite movie based on a book?
An impossible question. I could spend a week making lists. My favorites are great films that tackle great books by creating something new, like The Shining, Naked Lunch, Lolita, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex. I could also be sneaky and say my favorite is the new Japanese movie based on my book The Serialist. But that’s cheating.

What’s next?
I am working on a story collection with my editor, which is really exciting. It covers all sorts of genres, styles and subjects. Also I just started a new novel. I can’t say what it is about yet, but my goal is funnier, sadder, more beautiful and more thrilling. And more disturbing.