I read science, because to me, that's extremely exciting. It's like a great detective story, and it's happening right in front of us.
American violence is public life, it's a public way of life, it became a form, a detective story form. So I should think that any number of black writers should go into the detective story form.
There certainly does seem a possibility that the detective story will come to an end, simply because the public will have learnt all the tricks.
A publisher saw one of my historical novels and thought I would write an admirable detective story, so she offered me a two-book contract, and I grabbed it.
Most detective story readers are an educated audience and know there are only a certain number of plots. The interest lies in what the writer does with them.
As I work, I see my writing - each scene, each chapter, each section, each book - in three-act structures and classic myths, and I analyze them through the handy filter of the detective story.
It was really in the Golden Age, between the two world wars, when the pure detective story - of which the locked room mystery is really the ultimate form - became popular.
Mysteries include so many things: the noir novel, espionage novel, private eye novels, thrillers, police procedurals. But the pure detective story is where there's a detective and a criminal who's committed a murder and leaves clues for the detective and the careful reader to find.
What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.