When I look at Perfidia, I think, "That's a Pulitzer Prize winner. That's a National Book Award winner." It's not going to get it. It's going to be shelved in crime and it's just the way it is. I've done something that no one else has ever done; I've started out as a mystery writer, a police writer, and a crime writer, and I became something entirely different.

I'm grateful for the life I have. I lived bad for many years, and I've got a great life now. I've got the kind of life people only dream about.

I would like to provoke ambiguous responses in my readers.

How did I change my life? I wanted things. I wanted women and I wanted to write books.

The wildest ride in modern crime novel exoticum. A novel so steeped in milieu that it feels as if you've blasted to mars in the grip of a demon who won't let you go. Read this book, savor the language-it's the last-and the most compelling word in thrillers.

You get up in the morning because you might meet a woman. And if you stay at home by yourself, alone, you will not meet a woman.

Raymond Chandler once wrote that Dashiell Hammett gave murder back to the people who really committed it.