“Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling the...

• “Born to Run” by Bruce Springsteen. I was in high school from 1974 to 1978. The music was awful—disco and hair bands (Foreigner, Styx, Kansas). I discovered Springsteen and he saved me from all that. He mixed the DNA of an old-school rock and roll band with a...

Power, money and respect. In the world of organised crime these are the end goals that people pursue, but they are not equal and they don’t walk hand in hand. In crime fiction we’ve spent countless words picking apart and examining the guts of that triangle, as...

I wrote my first novel—GRAVE DESIGNS—on a dare from my wife. I was a young lawyer in a big Chicago law firm at the time, and I had no grand plan beyond finishing the manuscript and trying to see whether I could interest a publisher. And thus when my agent announced...

sup•port səˈpôrt/Submit verb 1- bear all or part of the weight of; hold up. 2- give assistance to, especially financially; enable to function or act. I recently had a number of discussions with a number of people in the mystery community, authors, readers and other...