The fact is, though, what I think we really like is Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and James Gandolfini. We like what the media has created of the mob bosses in movies and TV and books, because it's something the average person never comes into contact with, it's almost as outwardly outlandish as a sexy vampire, and so we can romanticize it, it's non-threatening.

The rise of the anti-hero can be traced to a litany of social reasons. Post World War I, for instance, saw the blooming of some pretty dark stuff - I'm thinking of Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest, for instance, when "The Continental Op" shows up in Poisonville to clean up the town...and proceeds to kill something like thirty people.

Particularly with MFA students, who have so much invested - literally and figuratively - I feel like honest criticism is something they're owed. It's not going to be easier in the real world, surely.

I read an interview with Daniel Woodrell once where he said something like, basically, if people had said what they said to him in a bar instead of workshop, he would have punched them...and I finally understood that when in a class with my wife. Every time someone said something about her work, I wanted to climb across the table and stab them in the neck with my pen. And these were people I liked and respected.

You don't see Los Angeles erecting a museum dedicated to the birth place of the Crips and the Bloods and the Mexican Mafia, with a special guided bus tour highlighting the rise of the crack trade, yet you can hop on a bus in Chicago tomorrow to see the famous locales of murders. I have to imagine there's some wonderful academic book on the sociology of this out there.

It's an unusual way to write a crime novel, to have these lingering, fairly large story points, but it's something I knew I had to do if I wanted to write a sequel...but, you know, people still have to read and enjoy this book, or it's a moot point.

I don't really have any advice for people who love each other and both happen to be writers, other than one of the two people in the couple better be slightly less in the clouds all day, or else you'll both starve to death. Humans really can't survive on just coffee alone, I don't think.