Why Delilah for this particular series?

The series back story and setting have a post-apocalypse flavor. In 2000-2001, when various factions feared apocalypse, world war, or simply massive computer failure at the turn of the millennium, what really happened in this world was the "Millennium Revelation." Supernatural legends of the past started appearing close up and personal, but in half-vampire and half-werewolf form. Mainstream society is just beginning to recognize what's going on and the supernatural-human interaction is still evolving. It's now 2013 and Delilah is a paranormal reporter for a Wichita TV station.

Delilah's double, whom she saw autopsied on CSI (Crime Scene Instincts) V, is named "Lilith," which she learns from the show's producer. As Delilah notes: "another shady lady from the Bible." The name Delilah Street is also a bow to Perry Mason's right-hand woman, Della Street. Raymond Burr's Perry is a minor character in the first two books and a bit of a father figure to orphaned Delilah, who was found as an abandoned infant on - you got it - Delilah Street. Except there is no Delilah Street in Wichita, Kansas. You can bet I've Googled every Delilah Street in the country for future books. Sometimes a Lilith Street is nearby . . . .

What made you decide to set these stories in a fictionalized version of Las Vegas where vampires and werewolves roam the streets? Also, tell us the truth: how many times did you visit for research, and did you win or lose?

I cannot tell a lie. I first went to Vegas to do research in 1985. It was Hooterville compared to what it is today. My husband and I aren't gamblers, so we'd probably have never seen Vegas if I hadn't picked it as a contemporary version of Damon Runyon's Broadway of chorus girls, bookies and con men for my Runyonesque Midnight Louie feline PI series.

The underlying back story - the mob struggles of the 1940's for control of what would become Vegas - also included werewolf and vampire "mobs," and the werewolves won. The vampires are now hoping to stage a comeback. Delilah's Vegas reflects our own problems, fads and compulsions. The zombies are illegally imported from Mexico by drug lords. The CSI franchise is worldwide now (CSI Bismarck) and some people "off" themselves to get their fifteen minutes of fame on a CSI autopsy table. (I'd just written that when the real CSI: Las Vegas announced a viewer contest with the grand prize: a role as a corpse in an episode.)

I've visited Vegas many times, enjoying its transformations. As for gambling, I've tried a few nickel slots with only one $15 win in the past 23 years, so I leave that to the experts. I do get to deduct travel costs, though.

You began writing fiction in 1977 but also have a journalism background. You've written 55 novels spanning many genres - mainstream, mystery, thriller, high fantasy, science fiction, and romance/women's fiction. Yet despite the differences in genre, your novels have a unifying thread: strong women. Can you explain the role of strong women characters in your fiction?

I loved reading popular historic Gothic novels in college as a break from Henry James and company. They combined female protagonists, mystery, and history. But the leading ladies were such wimps - what we now call Too Stupid to Live - and in perpetual need of rescue. And few of the novels were well written. I had my genre but I didn't find my theme until a college-sponsored summer trip to Europe, when I heard a bigoted English couple sneer at the staff and guests of an Irish hotel. That's how my heroine became a half-English, half-Irish girl who saves the men in the story, and my first published novel, Amberleigh, became what I call the first--and last--post-feminist Gothic.

What drives all my novels are sexual politics and human politics. When I was first writing novels and was asked why I was writing genre fiction rather than "worthwhile" literary novels, I said this: "What I write is principally entertainment, but the best entertainment always has principles." But I do use humor to lighten the darkness. And I don't get too dark because I believe that just feeds the worst in human nature. My concern with strong women in fiction and equality for women in the real world made me the first author to take a woman from the Sherlock Holmes Canon as a protagonist: Irene Adler in Good Night, Mr. Holmes. It seems obvious now, but it was my reporter's observation that only men wrote Holmes' spin-offs that gave me the idea of being that person. I'm not George Bernard Shaw by any means, but both my women and men characters often face struggles that illuminate the larger social issues.
    
One glance at your website and it's obvious you're an animal person. For those who might not be familiar with your earlier books (and Midnight Louie), can you give readers a bit of your "animal" history and how it's played a part in your fiction writing?

Ray Bradbury has said the secret to his literary success and longevity is that he never lost the enthusiasms he had as a child. Mars. Dinosaurs. Carnivals. I loved cats, probably because my salmon-fisherman father attracted them. He died before I was three and my mother was one of those poor souls who disliked cats. She'd never let me have one. I had a turtle, a parakeet, a duck, a rabbit, even a dog finally, but never a cat. She said I could have "all the cats you want when you're married and have a home of your own." Obviously, she totally warped me.

What's next for the Delilah Street series? How many installments can readers look forward to? Are you working on anything else (related or not)?

I love reading and writing long, nineteenth-century style series and the room they give for character and plot development, but the current bookselling scene works against such sustained series. It's a problem particularly for the mystery genre. I didn't set up Delilah Street as a limited series, and it's noir fantasy, not mystery, so we'll see what happens. Just as people must reinvent themselves throughout their work lives nowadays, authors have to do that many times over.  I'm concentrating on finishing the Louie series with its alphabetized titles ("What will happen to Louie when you reach Z?" readers have queried. He'll probably turn up in a new series.)

Contributing editor, Julie Compton, originally hails from St. Louis, Missouri, the setting for her debut novel and legal thriller TELL NO LIES. An attorney by profession, Julie most recently worked as a trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice in Wilmington, Delaware, but stopped practicing when she moved to Florida with her husband and two daughters. She now writes full time.