Who are some of your favorite crime and mystery writers?

The big three for me were Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald, and Joseph Wambaugh. Wambaugh is still writing, of course, and his next book, which I've had the privilege to already read, continues his inspiration for me. Other contemporary writers who do it for me are George D. Pelecanos, Dennis Lehane, James Lee Burke, Peter Robinson, and Vicki Hendricks, to name just a few.

Do you ever miss journalism?

The only thing I miss is the camaraderie of the news room. I don't miss the actual reporting and writing and deadlines because all of that is still a part of my life. The deadlines are obviously far different but I still act very much like a journalist when I research my books — notebook in the pocket, etc. So I get my journalism fix that way.  

How has working as a journalist affected your writing style, positively and negatively? For example, I write more concisely after writing for newspapers with space restrictions.

I think that journalism helped me hone my writing style and taught me that less can be more. I have always tried to boil it down to what is essential. This creates a velocity in writing and reading. I don't think I would practice this in fiction if I hadn't practiced it in journalism.

In your Amazon essay you wrote: "Obvious or not, I can trace a connection to a novel with every one of the stories in Crime Beat."  The main criticism I've heard of this book - and one I share - is that you didn't write comments about each article, or at least each chapter.  Was it a conscious choice not to "trace" the connections?  Do you have any regrets about not doing that?

I don't really have any regrets about it. My feeling was that if I wrote about the echo from news story to novel that it might come off as being pompous. There is an element of vanity to the whole project, and I didn't want to accentuate that with notes that could be read as "look how good I am at taking this stuff and spinning it into fiction." So we presented the stories and my thinking so that a reader familiar with my work as a novelist could identify the echoes.