I was 14 when I decided I wanted to write detective fiction. At age 10 I read my first Agatha Christie and by 14 I was up to my eyeballs in Arthur Conan Doyle, Dashiell Hammet, Raymond Chandler, and Jim Thompson dime novels.

There was something entrancing about the poetry of noir. Men with shabby suits and wry comebacks, women in slinky dresses drinking afternoon martinis in mansions they had married into and were desperate not to lose.