No other animal bonds to a human being the way a dog does. And I suspect there is no other animal to which human beings can bond the way we can bond to a dog.
There's the Hollywood sign; there's Griffith Observatory; there's the great, amazing Los Angeles Basin. It's 465 square miles of insanity and the best food on the planet.
What they smell isn't the emotion of fear. What dogs can smell is the changes in a person's skin that suggest fear to the dog, anxiety, the way your skin sweats, the amount of uric acid that suddenly pours out of your pores.
I don't think about the gender of my readers or about reader expectations. I'm frankly scared to. I figured out a long time ago that if I tried to guess the audience, it would be like me trying to guess which stocks to buy.
I was digging for stuff in a used bookstore, and I came upon 'Little Sister.' I fell in love with Chandler that night. I fell right down the rabbit hole of crime fiction.
First and foremost I am a commercial writer, and I hope to entertain people. But having said that, I'm in love with the relationship between humans and dogs, and the more I learned about what our military working dogs are doing, I wanted to at least share with people what an important role these animals have in all our lives.
I love, love writing about Los Angeles. I love exploring every part of it. And I find, rather than a burden, it's actually one of the most enjoyable parts of the writing process for me. I love everything about L.A. Okay, not the traffic. But I love the way it looks. I love the geography. I love the diversity.
I tried to reject everything I knew as a TV writer when I decided to be a novelist, and the books didn't work. Finally I realized I should go back to all the techniques I'd learned.
I'll bet you $10 right now that there are an awful lot of literary writers who started a long time ago and now they find themselves in this place where secretly they feel trapped. And you know what they really read for fun? They read crime fiction.
People come to L.A. because they're chasing that dream of a better life. That's why I came here, because I thought it would be a place where I would find other people like me; people who wanted to write, people who had a dream of being something else. And that proved to be true.
Quite a few of the dogs that come back from Afghanistan or Iraq or police dogs that are involved in violent confrontations where there's gunfire can in fact exhibit the symptoms and suffer from PTSD.
Writing a book is a long and difficult process for me. I'm a slow writer, so I spend the year with Elvis Cole and Joe Pike in my head. I was thinking about this the other day. I wrote the first book in 1987. Literally every day since that time, Elvis and Joe have been in my head. They're always there. I started these guys because I like them.
Everyone knows dogs. Most people love dogs. I think most American families probably have a dog, but I don't think people really realize or understand just how wonderful and special dogs are.
I have this horrible weakness. I fall in love with my characters. 'Suspect' started as a one-shot, but I just love Maggie so much, and I love Maggie and Scott and what they have going.
