Anything less than total candor was bullshit. I owed that to my readers, I owed that to myself, and I owed that most specifically to my mother. I've had some thrilling moments in my 18-year literary career to this point, and nothing comes close to giving Geneva Hilliker Ellroy, the farm girl from Tunnel City, Wisconsin, to the world.

When I was a kid, Eisenhower had been President forever, and all of a sudden, everything in the world was all about Jack Kennedy. I was 12, interested in politics; my father was from Massachusetts, had an accent like Kennedy.

Some men get the world, some men get ex-hookers and a trip to Arizona. You're in with the former, but my God I don't envy the blood on your conscience.

As much as I transferred my mother to Elizabeth Shore of The Black Dahlia, as much as her dad mutated into an obsession with crime in general, well, I have thought about other things throughout the years.

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.

Periodically I just notch up. And everyone among my colleagues thinks that Perfidia - in its accessibility, its big throbbing heart - will be the biggest notch up yet. We'll see what happens. It's on my ass.

I am a master of fiction. I am also the greatest crime novelist who ever lived. I am to the crime novel in specific what Tolstoy is to the Russian novel and what Beethoven is to music.