Author

I don't walk the mean streets.

The 1890s was a decade when life began to change in urban America. Modern conveniences that we now take for granted came into use; women's roles became less restrictive; and San Francisco, a port city with influences from all over the world, was a lively place in which to reside.

As I sat in a small room constructing what seemed to me awkward sentences and paragraphs, McCone was out having exciting adventures.

I was never a good journalist, because I would make things up. A lot of people frowned on that, which is why I ended up in fiction.

We have a cottage on the Mendocino coast.

About 10 years ago, in an effort to gain a better grasp on McCone's world, I took up the hobby of building fully electrified scale models: first of the legal cooperative where she started out, and then of her own brown-shingled cottage, a pursuit that the more tactful of my friends label unusual, and that the more blunt refer to as obsessive.

We writers of series fiction tend to idealize ourselves in our characters, giving them attributes we wish we possessed and ever more interesting lives.

I actually feel, when I get to about page 200, that it's going to be a book after all! It never gets easier - when you conquer one problem, another one rises up to take its place.

Women in mystery fiction were largely confined to little old lady snoops - amateur sleuths - who are nurses, teachers, whatever.

Anna Katherine Green wrote about a female inquiry agent, and there were a scattering of female investigators in the 1970s, authored by men, who just didn't ring true. So I thought, 'Well, there's an opening here for something.'

It's very hard to get one publisher to accept an author going over to the other author's company to collaborate.

Through the misguided notion that writing about flying was easy, I had McCone become a pilot. When I learned that research in books wasn't enough, I forced myself to take lessons.