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.

I'm trying to be less bombastic. I love my books. I think I've done things nobody else has done.

We do. Or re-create the ones we have, and project. My whole life is projection.

In the time just before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, when Perfidia opens, we were pre-psychologized. There were no concepts of identity, no politics of victimization. Reparation wasn't in the language. Nobody thought about giving the great grandchildren of black slaves so much as $1.98. And all of a sudden the bombs hit, interventionism versus isolationism became a dead issue, and it was us-versus-them in a heartbeat.

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.

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.

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