Q.  How come you didn't quit the writing gig?

I staggered off the grid at age forty-nine after a heart-to-heart with a girlfriend and her husband in Belfast . She and I had been pals since high school, and she thought it was time I realized "life's not an audition." For some cosmic reason I heard her.  A week later her husband was dead on a Belfast street corner, one of those moments where lightning picks the other guy. Each year when the publishing industry said no or go away, I thought about her and him. For better or worse, this is my run.
 
Q.  Well, you've certainly seem to have hit the jackpot in terms of what the critics are saying about Calumet City.  Kirkus calls it a "galloping ride" and Booklist deemed it a "breakneck debut" in a starred review.  How does it feel?

Like LSD. You go from gray-scale, invisible world to Peter Max in thirty minutes. No idea how long it will last or what shape you'll be in when they tell you Dorothy died in the house crash. My mentor Don McQuinn says, write the book, sweat blood, that's all you can do. I also bitch and whine a little on the side, but he doesn't know.

Q.  Your protagonist is a Chicago police office named Patti Black.  I understand there's a real Patti Black on the force.  How did that happen?

Denny Banahan introduced us. Denny is street legend in Chicago.  He told me she was the best cop ever to work for him, and Denny's not a big fan of the female police. I was intrigued by his stories, Patti's right-at-you style, and success rates. At our first meeting I was stunned by her lack of damage, seventeen years of poison and she had none of the marks all ghetto cops have. While we talked, she never stopped working, but she wasn't angry. She was dead cynical, but believed she could still win one now and then for the people in her district. She had then, and does now, these brilliant blue eyes and that movie-star light, but in a tough, Southside girl kind of way. Something I'd never seen before. Her "true" story scares you to death and makes you believe in angels.

Q.  You're a male.  Patti's a woman.  No problem?

First person as a female is much easier if you know the woman well. Patti and the rugby girls I run with (was married to one from Jordan ) have strong masculine personalities, and the more I close these women down emotionally, the easier it becomes to make them real, one of the reasons I use real names and real people in my fiction. A wide open female-female is way beyond what I'd be capable of writing.

Q.  Let's go back to the beginning.  What's Calumet City about?

Facing the devil. It's the first of three novels, all of them trips to hell in one form or another, and the choices one gets to make before arriving.

Q.  What do you want readers to take away from Calumet City?

In the beginning, what it's like to face Patti's world everyday; in the end, a bit of hope that I always pray Pete Dexter will give me, but so far refuses.

Q.  I'm Chicago-born myself.  A Northsider.  Do you have anything to say in Calumet City about the difference between the Northsides and Southsides?

Where on the Northside? I was born downtown, lived on Jarvis and Damen, then moved to Evanston, then back to Halsted and Armitage. Being a Northsider I had to get a green card from Denny--other than Maxwell Street as a kid and the Bears when they moved from Wrigley--south of the river was another country to me. I use the Southside in equal amounts because it's sooo different than the North--south of the river they say, "We have jobs; you have five dollar coffee and maids to open your windows." And I say this is 100 percent true.

Q.  What kind of research did you do for the book?

Rode with Patti; rode with Denny; went all the places you can only go with four guys in vests and handguns--the projects up and down South Michigan and State, clubs on 47th Street, 63rd Street, 79th Street. Met the bangers and the preachers, the cops, drank in their bars, went to the funerals--it felt in some ways like Hunter Thompson's Hells Angels. Major backstage pass on both sides of the argument.
 
Q.  You're living in South Africa now?  What the heck are you doing there?  How do you write about Chicago from 8,502 miles away?

Damn, I thought it was 10,000. Just did an hour interview--me on a cell phone at the Cape of Good Hope, the reporter buried in Chicago winter. I'm based in South Africa, but live on the road where the next book takes place when it spills out of Chicago. Last year I lived in Lebanon and Palestine during both wars (accident), Saigon and Hue for the typhoon, and Jo'burg for the riots. Paradise City (2009) and its Chicago characters have either history or current connections in those places. Each year I come back to run all the locations in the city and re-interview the people, catch a Cubs game if I can (beer mostly), go out to Arlington and see which of the old guys are still around and if they have the winner they've been promising me since I was 14.

Q.  How often do you get back to the States?  Do you miss it?

Thirty days every year. Yeah, we have great things in the USA, stuff works for the most part, hence the frustration level's lower. In Africa nothing works on a regular basis, the murder rate is 40x NYC, the animals will eat you, and there's no A/C. This year we had a small python in the house, rats in the attic--hiding from the python--giant birds diving at the roof to get at the rats, and we (South Africa) won the rugby world cup--45 million Afrikaners painted green.

Q.  So are you satisfied with the writer's life now?  What's next for you?

Satisfied? It's what I wanted, the very best way to use where I'd been and see the places I hadn't. And I suppose, apologize in some small way for what I'd wrought. If you make it to this dance you can voyeur your way into lives and events that took decades to distill, see things from the inside that other people don't have time to imagine. Next is fly to London to do publicity for Calumet City, then Chicago so everyone at my high school reunion will think I'm Jack Kerouac, not the loser they knew.  Then finally finish the third book in this trilogy. Hopefully by then the devil will be dead and I'll have nothing left to worry about.

Contributing editor Keith Raffel wrote DOT DEAD, "without question the most impressive mystery debut of the year" according to Bookreporter.com. Former counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee, he is currently finishing up TWO GRAVES, a political thriller set - where else? - in Washington, D.C.