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My novels are never directly based on a true crime incident, but I want to get the details right. I want to know how homicide detectives think, what a SWAT team might do to prepare.
I love doing the research for the novels. For me, the writing is hard work.
Research is the historical novelist's map, constraint, and purest energy.
I don't do research for my novels. Obviously, in my other line of work as a reporter and a columnist, I've had the opportunity to get to know both social workers and TV talk-show hosts.
When I was researching my very first novel, "The Basic Eight," I was calling right-wing political and religious organizations and asking them to mail me their material so that I could mock them in my novels.
In researching 'The Luminaries,' I did read quite a lot of 20th-century crime. My favourites out of that were James M. Cain, Dassiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Graham Greene and Patricia Highsmith.
It's good training for a novelist to try to discern the truth about a place after only a few glimpses of it.
