The Dread Line (Liam Mulligan) by Bruce DeSilva

Liam Mulligan started out as a fairly standard hardboiled reporter, but since last novel he's a PI AND a bookmaker. That earns the guy some extra cool points. Add the banter and pretty hardboiled attitude he and his pals share and this is one interesting book in the series. It takes the series in a new direction that makes sure Mulligan isn't just an imitation of those who came before but an unique character all his own.
There's a lot of cases he's taking on in this one too. There's a serial-killer cat, some creep torturing animals, and a background check on a football player.
Some moments are cute, like the scenes with his new dog. Some moments are harsh, like when he encounters the tortured animals or faces some scumballs with extreme prejudice. It's a mix that makes this novel a joy to read. It never gets too bleak or too Spenser-cute.

A Scourge of Vipers (Liam Mulligan) by Bruce DeSilva

This one reads as a real turning point in the Mulligan series. Looks like Bruce DeSilva really knows how to keep a series fresh.
When the governor wants to legalize sports betting events start that end up getting reporter Liam Mulligan involved with a murder investigation and a missing briefcase full of cash.
What is really more interesting in this novel are the subplots. Like Mulligan dating a black woman and how that works in today's society. Like the fate of the dying newspapers. Or how Mulligan gets a chance at a new beginning, as both PI and reporter, making sure there's bound to be more great novels.
There's some thought provoking scenes in this one. Both about politics and racism. And DeSilva manages to wrap all of that up neatly in a story about a cool, wisecracking detective. This is what hardboiled fiction is all about.

Providence Rag (Liam Mulligan) by Bruce DeSilva

I loved the first two Liam Mulligan novels so was eager to read this one, sure I would enjoy it as much as I did those two. I was wrong. I enjoyed it even more.
Where the first two were relatively enjoyable but standard PI books where the PI role was taken by a reporter this one is a very different kind of novel. This time the POV is not first person anymore and the scale of the story much bigger.
We follow reporter Liam Mulligan helping the cops put a young serial killer in jail and later we see how he works to dig up the dirt on the killer to make sure he stays in jail. Meanwhile there's a younger reporter trying to show the serial killer has been kept in jail because of trumped up charges from wardens. They are in a race with very different goals, but in the end they need to work together in order to save someone dear to the young reporter's heart.
What makes this novel so great? It's the fact that is all seems so real, with the involvement of politics, a shock jock, lawyers... It's almost as if you're reading a true crime novel, just gripping you in a way as you soon forget this is all just fiction. Part of it can be explained by the fact this one was inspired by a true story, but most of it comes from the excellent way DeSilva plays with the several POV's and the crips, reporter-style writing.
This one puts Bruce DeSilva into Michael Connelly territory and personally I think this could be a great DeNiro / Pacino vehicle.

Background Check on: Providence Rag (Liam Mulligan) by Bruce DeSilva

Bruce DeSilva, reviewer and writer's new novel, Providence Rag comes out this month and I find out what's it all about right here...

Q: Tell us what to expect from your new book, PROVIDENCE RAG.
A: Providence Rag is the third novel in my Edgar Award-winning hardboiled crime series featuring Liam Mulligan, an investigative reporter for a dying newspaper in Providence, R.I. The book was inspired by a true story – one I covered as a journalist many years ago. I’ve long been fascinated by the case of Craig Price, The Warwick Slasher, a teenager who stabbed two young women and two female children to death in his suburban Rhode Island neighborhood before he was old enough to drive. Price was just thirteen when his murder spree began and fifteen when he was caught, making him one of the youngest serial killers in U.S. history. But that’s not the interesting part.
When he was arrested in 1989, Rhode Island’s juvenile justice statutes had not been updated for decades. When they were written, no one had ever envisioned a child like him, so the law required that all minors, regardless of their crimes, be released at age 21 and given a fresh start. Nevertheless, he remains behind bars to this day, convicted of committing a series of jailhouse offenses.
I have long suspected that some of these charges were fabricated, but in the very least, Price has been absurdly over-sentenced. For example, he was given an astounding 30 years for contempt for declining to submit to a court-ordered psychiatric examination. Have the authorities abused their power to prevent his release? I think so. Should he ever be let out to kill again? Absolutely not. The ethical dilemma this poses fascinates me. No matter which side of it you come down on, you are condoning something that is reprehensible.
In the novel, the murders are committed and the killer caught in the first seventy-five pages. The rest of the book follows Mulligan, his fellow reporters, his editors, and the entire community, as they struggle to decide which is worse: condoning the abuse of power that is keeping the killer behind bars or exposing it and allowing him to be released to kill again. With powerful forces on both sides of the question, the suspense mounts as it becomes increasingly likely that the psychopath will be set free.

Q: What scenes did you enjoy writing the most?
The narrative is broken by thirteen italicized passages that allow readers peers directly into the mind of the psychotic killer from early childhood to middle age. I loved writing them because the rest of the book is heavy on dialogue, and these scenes gave me the opportunity to write in a more lyrical voice. They are important because when the killer speaks elsewhere in the novel, he mostly lies. They’re pretty creepy, though. I wonder what it says about me that I found it easy to imagine how the monster thinks.

Q: Who is your favorite among the characters in the book?
I have a fondness for Fiona McNerney, a close childhood friend of my protagonist and former a Little Sisters of the Poor nun, who is now serving as the state’s embattled governor.
Because of her take-no-prisoners approach to politics, headline writers have dubbed her Attila the Nun.

Q: How long did it take you to write it?
When I’m working on a novel, my goal is to write at least a thousand good words a day. If I accomplish that in a couple of hours, I can give myself the rest of the day off. But if I don’t have a thousand good words after eight hours, I have to keep my butt in the chair until I reach my goal. By doing that, I should be able to turn out an eighty-thousand-word novel in eighty days. Of course, it never quite works out like that. Some days, when life intrudes, I don’t write at all. There are household chores to be done, ballgames and blues concerts to attend, vacations to take, family obligations to be met. Including such interruptions, Providence Rag, my most complex book to date, was completed in six months.

Q: Did writing the book take a lot of research?
Yes and no. When I covered the real-life story for Rhode Island Monthy magazine years ago, I did a lot of research about the state’s juvenile justice laws and the state prison system. I interviewed the police detectives and forensics experts who worked the case. I read a lot of research about the minds of serial murderers and interviewed experts including Robert K. Ressler, the retired FBI agent credited with coining the term “serial killer.” So all I had to do for the book was brush up on the most recent research on the subject. Thanks to Google, that took less than a day.

Q: Will we see Liam return after PROVIDENCE RAG?
Absolutely. I just finished the fourth Mulligan novel, tentatively titled Providence Vipers, which explores the world of legal and illegal sports gambling. It will be published in hardcover and e-book formats by Forge about a year from now. Once I return from a month-long, coast-to-coast book tour in early April, I’ll dive into three new projects. One will be the fifth Mulligan novel. Another will be a stand-alone, or perhaps the beginning of a new series, featuring a young man who is trying to decide which side of the law to live his life on. And the third will be a collaboration with my wife, the poet Patricia Smith, on a novel set in her native Chicago. I’ve made small starts on all three, but I’m not sure which one I’ll finish first.

Q. Is there anything else you'd like to say about the book?
Although the characters and plots of my first two crime novels, Rogue Island and Cliff Walk, sprang entirely from my imagination, this has not prevented some readers that suspecting each was a Roman à clef. No, I tell them, the mayor in my books is not a thinly-veiled depiction of former Providence Mayor Vincent A. Cianci. No, the attorney general is not my take on former Rhode Island Attorney General Arlene Violet. Despite my protests, readers continue to speculate. In fact, two of my old journalism colleagues are convinced that my protagonist is based on them. He’s not. Because of this, I initially resisted the urge to fictionalize the Price case.
In the novel, I invent an early childhood for the killer. I give him a love of reading, allow him to display a clever but chilling sense of humor, and provide him with a prison jargon-laced style of speaking. But I have never met Craig Price. I know nothing of his childhood. I don't know how he talks. I don’t know what drove him to murder. So the character in my novel is most emphatically not Craig Price. None of the other characters in the book represent real people either. Of course, every novelist draws material from life and fashions it into something new.
Still, I can’t help but worry that some readers will view the book as disguised contemporary history. That made Providence Rag a difficult, nerve-wracking book to write.

You can learn more about me on my website: http://brucedesilva.com/

And on my blog: http://brucedesilva.wordpress.com/

Background Check on: Cliff Walk (Liam Mulligan) by Bruce DeSilva

We asked Hardboiled Collective member Bruce DeSilva all about his newest novel, Cliff Walk.

Tell us what the novel is about.

Cliff Walk is the second novel in my hardboiled series featuring Liam Mulligan, an investigative reporter at a dying Providence, R.I. newspaper. The tale begins two years ago when prostitution was legal in the state (true story.) Politicians are making a lot of speeches about the shame of it, but they aren't doing anything about it. Mulligan suspects that's because they are being paid off. As he investigates, a child's severed arm is discovered in a pile of garbage at a local pig farm. Then the body of an internet pornographer turns up at the bottom of

the famous Cliff Walk in nearby Newport. At first the killings seem random, but as Mulligan keeps digging, strange connections begin to emerge. Promised free sex with hookers if he minds his own business--and a savage beating if he doesn't--Mulligan enlists the help of Thanks-Dad, the newspaper publisher's son, and Attila the Nun, the state's colorful attorney general, in his quest for the truth. What he learns will lead him to question his long-held beliefs about sexual morality, shake his tenuous religious faith, and leave him wondering who his real friends are. Cliff Walk is at once a hardboiled mystery and a serious exploration of sex and religion in the age of pornography.

How long did it take you to write the novel?

I began writing the book shortly after my first Mulligan novel, Rogue Island, winner of both the Edgar and the Macavity Awards, was published; and I finished it in six months. The third Mulligan novel, Providence Rag, is also finished and will be published sometime next year.

Did it take a lot of research?

Yes and no. In a sense, the Mulligan novels took forty years to research because they draw on everything I learned about Rhode Island's cops, street thugs, journalists, corrupt politics, and organized crime figures during my 40-year journalism career, about a third of it spent at The Providence Journal, the state's largest paper. I was well prepared to write these books. But when I started Cliff Walk, I did not know much about the inner workings of the state's sex trade. So I spent many dreary evenings hanging out at Cheaters, the Cadillac Lounge and several of the state's other strip clubs where prostitution was openly practiced, discretely questioning bartenders, bouncers, and naked hookers who kept climbing into my lap. Since I'm a married man, that could have had serious consequences. Lucky for me, my wife found my research hilarious.

Where did you come up with the plot; what inspired you?

Unlike Rogue Island, which is entirely made up, Cliff Walk was inspired by real events in our smallest state, a quirky place with a legacy of corruption that goes all the way back to one of the first colonial governors dining with Captain Kidd. In 1978, COYTE, a national organization representing sex workers, sued the state in federal court, alleging that its antiquated prostitution law was so vague that it could be interpreted as prohibiting sex between married couples. The suit was dismissed in 1980 after the state legislature rewrote the law, redefining the crime and reducing it from a felony to a misdemeanor. As it turned out, however, a key section of the new law was left out, supposedly by accident, when the legislature voted on it. Amazingly, however, more than a decade passed before anyone seemed to notice. Finally, in 1993, a lawyer representing several women arrested for prostitution at a local "spa" did something remarkable. He actually read the statute. The only word used to define the crime, he discovered, was "streetwalking." Therefore, he argued, sex for pay was legal in Rhode Island as long as the transaction occurred indoors. When the courts agreed, the state's strip clubs turned into brothels, and a whole bunch of new strip clubs and "massage parlors" opened up. Soon, tour buses full of eager customers began arriving from all over New England. At the height of the state's legal sex trade, 30 brothels were operating openly. Rhode Island didn't get around to fixing the law until a couple of years ago.

Which scenes did you enjoy writing the most?

When I sat down to write the novel, the first thing I typed was this: "Attila the nun thunked her can of Bud on the cracked Formica tabletop, stuck a Marlboro in her mouth, sucked in a lungful, and said 'Fuck this shit.'" That sentence, which ended up as the opening to chapter five, had the hardboiled feel I wanted and gave me the confidence to keep writing. But the short final chapter, which portrays a weary Mulligan's inner turmoil about the soul-wrenching things he witnessed during his investigation, is my favorite part of the book.

Who is your favorite among the characters in the novel?

I'm tempted to say Mulligan because he's a lot like me--except that he's 25 years younger and eight inches taller. He's an investigative reporter; I used to be. He's got a smart mouth; I get a lot of complaints about the same thing. Like me, he's got a shifting sense of justice that allows him to work with bad people to bring worse people down. But I have a special fondness for Attila the Nun, a former Little Sisters of the Poor nun who forsakes her religious calling for the rough-and-tumble arena of Rhode Island politics.

I noticed places in the novel where your own life or interests end up in some scenes, like the appearance of your wife Patricia, and a dog with the same name as yours. You also included an appearance by Andrew Vachss and often mention crime writers you personally like. Could you tell us a bit about why you enjoy including these little nuggets?



I want my characters to be real people, and that means giving them interests beyond the job of investigating crimes. Since Mulligan is so much like me, it makes sense to give him similar tastes. So he's a fan of the blues (The Tommy Castro Band, Jimmy Thackery and the Drivers, Buddy Guy.) He reads crime novels (Vachss, Michal Connelly, Ace Atkins.) He drinks beer (Killians.) He smokes cigars. He loves dogs, although his landlord won't allow him to have one. Unlike me, he's no fan of poetry, but his girlfriend is. So when she tries to read poetry to him or takes him to a poetry reading, I toss in a few lines. I suppose I could have tried to write a bit of poetry myself, but I'm no poet. I could have chosen a passage from another poet and then spent weeks trying to get permission to use it, but why go through all that trouble when I've got my own live-in poet? So I included a bit of writing from my wife, Patricia Smith, who is one of America's finest poets.

Is there anything else you'd like to say about the novel?

The early notices have been gratifying, with both Publishers Weekly and Booklist giving Cliff Walk starred reviews. Publishers Weekly said, "Look for this one to garner more award nominations." Booklist called the plot "exquisite" and added that the novel is "terrific on every level." I just hope people enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Cliff Walk (Liam Mulligan) by Bruce DeSilva

Liam Mulligan, Rhode Island's hardboiled reporter is back in this great new novel by Hardboiled Collective member Bruce DeSilva.
A child's severed arm shows up on a pig farm... An internet pornographer is killed... A politicial battle is fought over legalisation of prostitution...
These ingredients are enough to keep Mulligan very busy. Add to that some vigilante killings on pedophiles, a new love interest and a gangster boss interested in hiring Mulligan and you end up with a very exciting crime novel.
What makes this novel so great is not just the many interesting plotlines however, but the character of Mulligan and the sharp writing. Mulligan is such a great self-depreceating character and the writing such an effective continuation of Chandler and Parker's hardboiled voices this should be textbook writing for anyone attempting to write a hardboiled crime story.
It worried me that the paper Mulligan works for is going through some bad times, endangering his job. Luckily, it seems there's enough people interested in Mulligan's investigation skills to keep him busy even if he ends up sacked. I wouldn't want to miss this guy, his troubles with his ex-wife, his clumsiness, his interest in crime fiction and his attitude. Looking forward to the third in the series!

Guest-Post: Look Who's Reading Mine by Bruced DeSilva

Fans of Bruce DeSilva, author of Rogue Island might have seen the cool 'Look Who's Reading' posts on his blog. I asked Bruce to tell us how they came about...

Publishers spend the most of their limited promotion budgets on sure winners – the latest books by the likes of Lee Child and Laura Lippman. A first-time novelist who wants to tell the world that he’s written a book is largely on his own.

So last fall, as the publication date for my first crime novel, “Rogue Island,” drew near, I was wracking my brain for a way to get some attention.

“I know,” my wife, the poet Patricia Smith, said. “Why don’t we take pictures of famous people reading your book? We can post them on your blog, and on Facebook and Twitter?”

That sounded like a plan. Books are sold largely by word of mouth: One person reads it, likes it, and tells his or her friends. Social networking sites are good for writers because they have greatly expanded the reach of word of mouth.

The problem with these sites, however, is that when you post something, it is seen only by the people you have “friended” on Facebook or who follow you on Twitter. However, you can reach many thousands more if your friends like your post enough to repost it, passing it on to THEIR friends.

The right photos, I thought, just might do the trick.

So Patricia and I started toting a camera and a copy of my book around in case we ran into famous people. Except sometimes, we forgot. It would have been nice if we’d had the book with us when we ran into Chris Rock at the Bronx Zoo.

But over the last year, we accumulated 84 pictures of famous people reading “Rogue Island,” and I’ve been posting several each week on Facebook, Twitter and my blog, brucedesilva.com.

More than half of those who posed for our cameras are famous crime and thriller writers – Dennis Lehane, Walter Mosley, Val McDermid, Ken Follett, Lee Child – taken at crime writing conferences including Mystery Writers of America, Bouchercon and Thrillerfest.

But there was also Andrew Young, former ambassador to the United Nations, whom I ran into on a trip to Washington, D.C.

And Vincent A. “Buddy” Cianci Jr., TV pundit, convicted felon and former mayor of Providence, R.I., where my novel is set.

And famous journalists like Eugene Robinson and Roy Peter Clark, happy to do a favor for a former member of their tribe.

When Patricia journeyed to Hollywood to do a poetry reading at the Getty Museum, she snagged photos of actresses America Ferrera of “Ugly Betty” fame and Amber Tamblyn, who starred in “House,” “Joan of Arcadia,” and “Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2.”

My favorite, though, was Patricia’s picture of Goth music star Marilyn Manson, who posed for two photos – one reading the book and another holding it against his crotch. I used only the first one.

The Manson photo was the biggest hit. When I posted it on my bog, I got six times the normal number of daily hits.


Most people just held the book open and smiled, but a few mugged for the camera. Sara Paretsky, a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master, and Marcia Clark, the lead prosecutor in the O.J. Simpson trial, stared at a page with their mouths open, as if they’d just read something shocking.


And no one, not a single person, turned us down.

Did this sell any books? It’s impossible to say for sure, but it didn’t hurt. “Rogue Island” has sold well for a first crime novel – and nearly a year after its release, it’s still selling.

Now I need to come up with a promotion idea for my second novel, “Cliff Walk,” which will be published by Forge next May. Any suggestions?

Rogue Island (Liam Mulligan) by Bruce DeSilva

This is one writer who honors his influences. Not only does he frequently mention books by Loren Estleman, Robert B. Parker and others in the novel, his style is also a fantastic amalgam of every great hardboiled writer you know. I was especially reminded of a bit leaner, less wordy Estleman.
Liam Mulligan is one of those hardboiled reporters that seem to be back in style. A cool, wisecracking guy with a failed marriage (and what a crazy wife he has)he doesn't back down easily when investigating some fires. As stuff gets more personal and the victims are closer to him he decides to pull a Spenser-like deal with the devil.
The setting of Rhode Island is pretty new, everything else in this novel isn't. What it IS is a combination of everything you love in hardboiled crime wrapped up in one neat package. My favorite of the year so far.

Q & A with Bruce DeSilva

Bruce DeSilva
I'm really happy to be interviewing Bruce DeSilva, author of Rogue Island, because, believe me, you'll be hearing a lot about this guy!

Q: What makes Liam Mulligan different from other (unofficial) PIs?
Real private investigators aren’t much like fictional ones. The real ones spend most of their time delivering summonses in civil cases, locating child-support delinquents, investigating pilfering from warehouses, checking the validity of insurance claims, and doing background checks on job applicants. They rarely investigate violent crimes. Most of the so-called “unofficial” fictional PIs are even more divorced from reality—so much so that they exceed my ability to suspend disbelief. I could never write, and will not read, books in which crimes are solved by hairdressers, dentists, or cats. My character, Liam Mulligan is an investigative reporter—one of the few occupations outside of law enforcement that really does investigate serious wrongdoing. Oddly, there are very few crime novels about investigative reporters. (Gregory McDonald’s just-for-laughs Fletch novels come to mind, along with Bryan Gruley’s two recent books about a reporter in a rural Michigan town.) So Mulligan’s profession alone make him unusual. Better still, he’s a throwback—an old-time street reporter hell-bent on discovering the truth at any cost. He’s a dinosaur in the age of sound bites and biased reporting. And finally, he works not for a TV network or web site but for a newspaper that, like most American newspapers, is dying. This adds an additional layer of tension to the story, the character never sure how long he’ll have a job and always in despair about the demise of newspapers. It also makes the novel a lyrical tribute to the vanishing business Mulligan and I both love.

Q: How did you come up with the character Liam Mulligan?
Mulligan is me—except that he’s 24 years younger, six inches taller, and quicker with a quip. He’s an investigative reporter; I used to be. He doesn’t do well with authority; I do worse. He’s got a smart mouth; I get a lot of complaints about the same thing. He and I both have a strong but shifting sense of justice that leads us to cut corners and work with bad people to bring worse people down.

Q: What's next for you and Mulligan?
The second novel in the series, tentatively titled “Cliff Walk,” is nearly finished. All of the characters from the first book return—except for the ones who got bumped off. Like the first book, this one too is set in Rhode Island. The story involves the two extremes of America’s smallest state—Newport high society and the (until very recently) legal brothel business there. Meanwhile, I’m already planning the third and fourth books in the series.

Q: Can you tell us something about how your debut novel came to be?
It all started back in 1994, when I was working for a Connecticut newspaper. One day, I received a note from a reader praising “a nice little story” I’d written. “It could serve as the outline for a novel,” the note said. “Have you considered this?” I would have tossed the note in the trash except for one thing. It was from Evan Hunter, who wrote literary novels under his own name and the brilliant 87th Precinct police procedurals under the penname Ed McBain. I sealed the note in plastic, taped it to my home computer, and started writing. At the time, I lived 15 minutes from work, so I got up early every morning and wrote for two hours before going in. I was a mere 20,000 words into the novel when my life turned upside down. I took a very demanding new job; my new commute was 90 minute each way; I got divorced and then remarried to a woman with a young child. In this busy new life, I had no time to finish a novel. Years streaked by. Each time I bought a new computer, I taped that note from Hunter to it, hoping I would get back to the book someday. Meanwhile, I was reviewing novels on the side for The Associated Press and The New York Times book review section. That gave me entre to the Manhattan’s literary circle. A couple of years ago, I found myself dining with Otto Penzler, the dean of American’s crime fiction editors, and happened to mention that long-ago note from Hunter.

“Evan Hunter was a good friend of mine,” Penzler said. “In all the years I knew him, he never had a good thing to say about anything anyone else wrote. He REALLY sent you that note?”

“He really did,” I said. “I still have it.”

“Well then you’ve got to finish that novel,” Otto said, “and when you do, you have to let me read it.”

So I went home and started writing again. I wrote at night after work and all day every Saturday; and six months later, the book was finished.

Q: What are your thoughts on ebooks as a reader AND a writer?
I don’t own a digital book reader, but I plan on getting one when the price drops, as it always does with electronic gizmos. As a reader, like the convenience, although I suspect I’ll always prefer the feel of a physical book in my hands. As a writer, I’m in favor of anything that encourages people to read.

Q: What's your idea about the psychotic sidekick in PI novels like Hawk and Joe Pike?
I don’t regard either of them as psychotic. They, and other characters like them, have clearly defined codes of ethics and personal behavior. Those codes may be unconventional, but the characters adhere to them rigorously. Hawk, for example, believes in living life well and on his own terms, without regard for the rules of society. He believes in being self-sufficient, staying fit, and watching out for his few close friends. Like most such characters, he is fiercely loyal—something a psychotic could never be. I‘d love to be able to count on a friend like Hawk if I were ever in a pinch. That said, what the creators of Hawk and Joe Pike (Robert B. Parker and Robert Crais) are doing is playing around with a theme that has been repeated endlessly in American fiction—the relationship between the hero and one of society’s outcasts. This goes all the way back to Natty Bumppo and his Indian companion Chingachgook in James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking novels. I’m playing around with the theme myself, although my hero’s sidekick is a different sort of outcast. He’s not a drunk or an ex-con or a member of a racial minority group. He’s a privileged young man with a big trust fund—the sort of person those of us who grew up poor or middle class tend to resent or even despise.

Q: In the last century we've seen new waves of PI writers, first influenced by Hammett, then Chandler, Macdonald, Parker, later Lehane. Who do influenced you?
I discovered crime fiction by reading Raymond Chandler in my teens, and he remains a major influence. I reread “The Big Sleep,” “Farewell My Lovely,” and “The Long Goodbye,” every year or two. As for current crime novelists, I’m a great admirer of Daniel Woodrell and Thomas H. Cook, two brilliant writers who succeed at everything except making the best-seller lists. James Lee Burke, Kate Atkinson and Ken Bruen have written paragraphs that take my breath away. I love Ace Atkins’ remarkable historical crime novels and James Ellroy’s staccato, high-on-amphetamines prose. To name a few. But the fact is, I’m influenced by everything I read including the bad stuff that teaches me what NOT to do. That said, the opening passage of John Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row” is my favorite in all of English.

Q: Jay Faerber came up with the following question: First person or third person?
Both have their charms. The one you choose depends on which best serves the story you are telling. My first two novels are written in first person, the main character narrating the story. The next book in the series, which I hope to begin writing later this year, will probably be written in the third person limited, the story told from the points of view of three different characters.

Q: What question should we ask every PI writer we interview and what is
your answer?
How important is sense of place in your novel, and in the books you most enjoy reading?
The most memorable crime stories transport you to interesting places and let you hear, see and smell them. It is difficult to imagine Ken Bruen’s best novels set anywhere but in his native Galway, Ireland, or Daniel Woodrell’s work set anywhere but in the Ozarks. Read James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux novels and you have been to New Iberia, LA, even if you’ve never left your house. As my friend Thomas H. Cook once said, “If you want to understand the importance of place, imagine ‘Heart of Darkness’ without the river.” One of the places I know best is Providence, RI. Unlike big, anonymous cities like New York, where many fine crime novels are set, Providence is so small that it’s claustrophobic. Almost everybody you see on the street knows your name, and it’s almost impossible to keep a secret. Yet it’s big enough to be both cosmopolitan and rife with urban problems. And its history of corruption, which goes all the way back to a colonial governor dining with Captain Kidd, makes it an ideal setting for crime fiction. I made Providence not just the setting but something akin to a major character, in “Rogue Island.”