Everybody in New York is looking for something. Once in a while, somebody finds it.

If your subject is crime, then you know at least that you're going to have a real story. If your subject is the maturing of a college boy, you may never stumble across a story while you're telling that. But if your story is a college boy dead in his dorm room, you know there's a story in there, someplace.

The thing that I prefer, when I'm working on a book, is to do a seven-day week, because it's easy to lose some of the details of what you're doing along the way.

Who's a boy gonna talk to if not his mother?

The British were doing crime stories first, but the British thing is a very different thing. There, the stories are about restoring a break in the fabric of society. The American thing has never been worrying about breaks in the fabric of society, but about people doing their job, whether it's police procedurals or criminals or whatever.

Whenever things sound easy, it turns out there's one part you didn't hear.

Once he became a series character, I made the conscious choice that he would never act like a series character, never wink at the reader, never pull his punches. Better for him, better for me.