maybe you could if you were john updike orjohn irving, but not david baldacci, so i never even got paidi sold a story. they would give me a bunch of free copies of the magazine and said that would be enough in payment. so i became a lawyer and i did very well. i practised for ten years from washington, writing the whole time. high school, college, law school, ten years of practising law. i wrote short stories, novellas, screenplays and then finally novels. and ‘absolute power‘ just really was the turning point for me. and then you were able to commit to it full—time. fast—forward now dozens of novels later to your latest novel, ‘the fix‘, and this tells the story of a man who shoots a woman outside the fbi headquarters and then turns the gun on himself. so it‘s a whydunnit, rather than a whodunnit. what inspired the story? well, this is the third instalment of my amos decker series. he‘s your detective. he is. we first saw him in ‘memory man‘. and he has a perfect memory, hyperthymesia, because of a brain trauma that he suffered. and he is the most unlikeliest of heroes. he is not your