as ian rankin says, writing fiction were good doesn't always triumph.ised and the reader is sometimes invited to take sides with the assassin against the powers that be. that's never the case with me. i am an advocate of moral fiction. you always know who my good guys are. so you do believe in good guys? i believe in good guys and i think heroes of my books are in fact the good guys. they are the guys in first person or third person subjective viewpoints and you have access to their thoughts, you understand them, you understand the rationales, each and every one of them. the four characters, kay lake, and william h parker and even the evil irish cop, dudley smith. dudley smith, who says, "i control people and if i can't control them i destroy them"? he is on a slow, tortuous path to redemption. wow. he is on a slow, tortuous path to self—sacrifice, salvation and redemption. even as we speak in my brain. in your brain. maybe the conversation we're having or the explanation you give for ultimately the sympathy you have for the cops who even are very bent,

you have been a pioneer, and i have mentioned people like ian rankin who say they owe a huge debt to discussion, maybe based purely on snobbery, in the world of literature, whether crime fiction should be allowed in to the sort of literary circle. does that matter to you? no. i'm not crime writer, nor am i noir writer. i have written a bunch of books set in la in the height of the noir era. and so noir has been applied to me. i am a historical novelist. that's the novel that is resting under your left hand right now. and i am happy to have influenced a generation of crime writers. and i think the designation of crime writers, historical writers, all of this, it's interesting in the moment, and really, in the end, it only pertains towards where your books are shelved. i suppose, i have been reading some criticism of you and one thing that struck me is that a lot of writers have compared you, perhaps surprisingly, with james joyce, for your inventive use of language — stream of consciousness at times. others have compared you to conrad. 0ne critic said the conrad comparison works becau