I needed to address that I've had some profound moral shifts in my own life.

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.

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

There are a lot of Ellroy lifts, man. This guy went to school. But then there's a willful thing that comes over me - God gives it to me - where I go, "That's real nice, let's just go home, pat yourself on the back, good dog, good dog, and wake up in the morning and go to work."

I don't have children. I serve the world and I serve God by living as deep within my work as I can, reveling in the language of other times and putting it forth for the world.

I have insane curiosity as to what happened in all these events. I will never know. I'm not a researcher. I don't possess that kind of mind. I have a researcher who compiles the fact sheets and chronologies that allow me to write these big books of mine.

If I wanted to make money I would have written another novel.