In this third of three installments, Robert B. Parker talks more about his philosophy on writing, the vagaries of the Internet, and the importance of a good cardiologist.

Read Part I of the interview here and Part II here.

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EB: You talked about music with regard to your writing, how it makes sense as music. Does any specific kind of music or films influence your writing at all?

RBP: Probably, but not in any sense that I can tell you. Since the private eye, like the gunfighter, is a fictive creation and at one time or another it occupied predominantly in films. I've probably been influenced more by Western movies than by detective movies. I'm a great fan of Western movies. I'll watch a Randolph Scott Western... I'll watch the crap on the Western channel, if there's nothing else! So probably Western movies most of all.

I have the kind of mind - it's not intentional - where I can't stop anything even if I wanted to, that tucks away cuts and pieces of experience. I know a lot of literary allusions, I know a lot of song allusions, I know a lot of movie allusions. I almost never go to the movies anymore, yet I can still hold my own in the movie trivia games, just because things stick in my head. And that creeps in and perhaps adds a density to the prose, but conscious influences - after [Raymond] Chandler - I don't know any. Unconscious influences, there's bound to be. I have consciousness - I'm alive, still, even though I'm on a book tour!

EB: Do you visit websites often? Are you influenced by the online world?

RBP: No, it doesn't. To my knowledge, I don't have a website. I'm not entirely certain what a website is. I write on a computer and I order books on Amazon, and I think that computers are great. I'm not anti-computer.

I know there are websites devoted to me, but I don't read them any more than I read reviews and everything else.

EB: There's something called the Spensarium. I'm not sure what it is.

RBP: I'm not either, except that I know that it exists. There's something called Bullets & Beer, or Beer & Bullets, which I know exists. I once looked myself up on somebody's website, I think it was in Japan, and I noticed that I was five-feet tall and weighed 250. Maybe they don't get it all right... the weight, okay, but the height was a little bit of an issue.