THOUGHTS ON WHAT COMES NEXT
Now that I have more or less completed The Devine Trilogy, I’m facing the question that writers dread the most: “What are you gonna do next?” The answer almost every writer wants to give to this question is: “Isn’t it enough that I finished the damn thing and got it published? What else do you […]
THOUGHTS ON BLOWING DEADLINE
When The Devine Trilogy launched in 2023, Level Best Books and I had a simple game plan for rolling out the books. The first one in the series, PUBLIC MORALS, came out in November 2023, shortly after I retired from The New York Times. Its sequel, SPECIAL VICTIM, became available a year later. The third […]
THOUGHTS ON MY FAVORITE MOVIE
It’s “Casablanca,” which is not exactly a groundbreaking choice. “Casablanca” is a movie that shouldn’t work, but does, on just about every level, because of sharp writing, whiz-bang directing and fantastic acting by an international cast that found itself marooned in California during World War II. I saw it again recently (my 20th or 30th […]
THOUGHTS ON BASING BOOKS ON REAL EVENTS
Sometimes I wonder if I’ve ever had an original thought in my life. All my books have been inspired by real events, and my upcoming novel, SPECIAL VICTIM, is based on the notorious Central Park Jogger case. Still, I suspect that the process I go through in finding ideas is a typical one for most […]
THOUGHTS ON MICK HERRON v. JOHN LE CARRE
Mick Herron was a panelist and a featured guest at a couple of sessions I attended at the recently concluded Bouchercon mystery writers’ conference in Nashville. For the uninitiated, Herron is the author of the Slough House series, which is centered on a group of inept spies who have been exiled by British intelligence from […]
THOUGHTS ABOUT WRITING A SERIES, FROM SOMEONE WHO NEVER INTENDED TO WRITE ONE
I always swore I’d only write standalones. I wanted to craft wholly original stories that would end, dammit, and after I finished that story I’d do something entirely different. To my mind, a series, or continually employing the same characters, was something of a cheat. Which is a short way of saying that the second novel […]
THOUGHTS ABOUT FICTION, LITERARY AND OTHERWISE
If you believe any number of critics, readers, pundits and scribes, the people who practice the craft in which I am now engaged (crime and mystery fiction) toil in a literary ghetto. I am, well, mystified as to why some folks feel this way. I’ve always believed that all fiction should at least aspire to […]
THOUGHTS ABOUT THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN JOURNALISM AND FICTION
Now that I’ve retired from The New York Times, I can reveal that one of my favorite lines about the nature of journalism was uttered by Ben Bradlee, the longtime executive editor of The Washington Post and an archnemesis of my former employer. “We’re not in the truth business,” Bradlee said. “We’re in the facts […]