RBP: Well, "block out" makes it out to be more formal than it is. This is all I do. I don't have any other job, so I get up in the morning and feed Pearl the Wonder Dog. I have coffee and read the Globe, do a little business, make a few phone calls. Somewhere in the 9:00 range I start writing... Pearl the Wonder Dog arises early.

EB: So Pearl the Wonder Dog does indeed exist?

RBP: Oh yeah. Pearl III. This is the third Pearl. And it's the one on the back of the book.

So nine, ten I'm writing and I persist into the 3:00 range, or until whenever I get ten pages done. When I'm finished with my ten pages, I stop, I usually have a nap, I go to the gym, I workout, I come home, and that's my day. I do that five days a week.

EB: Do you block out your stories ahead of time?

RBP: No.

EB: For Spenser novels particularly, how do you take him to a new place and take him through a new story?

RBP: I just start out and see where it goes. In Cold Service, I thought - just because it felt so - that it was time for Hawk to have a larger part again. So I thought, 'Well, what if Hawk got hurt?' So I started with the premise that Hawk was being somebody's bodyguard and got shot. And that's all I knew. So, that's the first chapter. And the first chapter leads to the second, and the second leads to the third, and it evolves.

The current Spenser that I'm working on now, which is called Dream Girl, and will be out a year from now, I think. I'm five books ahead, so I get confused. I'm on Page 215 of that, and I don't know who "did it."

Joan keeps saying, "You know yet?"

"No! I don't yet, stop asking!"

EB: I like the model where if the author doesn't know, the readers won't know either.

RBP: And the process - this is not by design, I just happen to know this - allows me to go through the same things Spenser goes through. So between us, we find out what happens. Or Jesse Stone, or Sunny Randall, or anybody else. But the writer-as-detective is automatic if you don't have an outline. Which I don't.

EB: So for Cold Service, you're involving the Ukrainian mafia, obviously Hawk is more involved. Do you have an idea of adapting Spenser and the classic detective story to the spy or gangster story to keep Spenser fresh or do you say, "Let's just have a new adventure and see where it goes."