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I don't believe in evil. It's a word I use, certainly, because words are shortcuts and we all take the short way round from time to time, but that's all it is, a word to describe something we cannot or will not understand or articulate in any other way. If there were such a thing then I would have a much harder time condemning acts that I find selfish, cruel, or otherwise indefensible, because to say that evil exists is to provide an excuse for what I find to be obvious: that humans are animals, and as such often act in ways that other animals can never fully understand.

The first thing I thought when Powell's offered me a soapbox was, Don't come off like a pretentious jackass, be sincere, talk about something you love, like hiking or Vincent Price or Jack Vance or Umberto Eco, and next thing I know I'm using a Milton quote for the title and waxing on about philosophical uncertainties. I'm going somewhere less bombastic, really! Evil as human weakness versus evil with a capital E as a means of segueing into why I've ...

For more than 60 years, Los Angeles's origins, its underbelly, and (yes) its blondes have fueled the imagination of writers and directors from Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder to Roman Polanski and James Ellroy, producing fiction and films like The Big Sleep, Double Indemnity, Chinatown, and L. A. Confidential. Yet amidst these indelible works of fiction something important has been lost — the true history of noir Los Angeles.

The Los Angeles underworld was real. For more than 40 years, from Prohibition through the Watts riots, it was dominated by two men, Chief William H. Parker, who created the Dragnet-era LAPD, and his long-time nemesis, the mobster Mickey Cohen. My new book, L.A. Noir, tells the story of their struggles.

But how does a writer go about recapturing something as apocryphal and elusive as a city's underworld? The answer is ...

In my novel Living Room, I write about the pain of mothering — about mothers who do not know how to be mothers. I finished my edits on the book a week before my first child was born.

I was focused on motherhood, though, even before I became pregnant. It has been what defines me in many ways. After years of therapy it is what you are left with: everything happened in your childhood.

These things make being a fiction writer blur into the soupy mix of what my mother calls "the difference between fantasy and reality." I've used the shield of the page — "as soon as you write it down, it becomes fiction" — since I began to write.

What is most important is not whether I have done the things I write about or not. When I write about "what I know" I am writing about feelings and emotions. The ones I have not felt directly, I imagine. I morph the ones I have felt into others.

Therefore, it should be taken as a ...

My two-volume history,The Texas Rangers: Wearing the Cinco Peso, 1821-1900 and Time of the Rangers: Texas Rangers: From 1900 to the Present, is about men (and now women) who tote guns, not baseball bats.

For those not familiar with the non-baseball-playing Texas Rangers, today they are an arm of the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS), the Lone Star State's police force. But the Rangers are older than the DPS by more than a century; their historical bloodline traces to the time Texas was still part of Mexico.

That Mexico-Texas connection, incidentally, is where the title for the first volume comes from. Back in the 19th century, before Rangers had standardized badges, they sometimes would have a Mexican silver coin altered to form what became known as the star-in-a-wheel badge. Since 1961, all Texas Ranger badges have been fashioned from Mexican coinage and "wearing the Cinco Peso" has become inside-baseball talk for being a Texas Ranger.

Which gets us back to professional baseball and the fact that in terms of name identification, the ...

My first novel, The Island, was inspired by a chance visit to a tiny island leper colony off the coast of Greece on our summer holiday. It was a...

My Catholic friend tilted her teacup like a fortune-teller. "You know," she said, "I think people who don't have God in their lives are like people who have sex but have never had an orgasm and say: 'Oh, but I don't miss it!'"

Spewing is not a traditional tea-party event, yet I managed to baptize the scones with a mighty spritz of superior-grade tippy golden flowery Darjeeling. I shouldn't have been so shocked. After all, we'd been talking about God, and when you go there these days, anything can happen.

God talk is one of the fun side effects of having been flung out of the cozy nest of Victorian adventure writing and onto the rough terrain of the spiritual path. And it was all God's fault! Without warning, He/She/It grabbed me by the ear, marched me into the divine principal's office, and told me to stop goofing off and start paying attention. The wild ride that ensued is celebrated in my new book, Roll Around Heaven. It's an all-true, unbidden spiritual adventure that opens with the sudden appearance of ...

About six months ago, at a fundraising event for the nonprofit I founded, Project H, a six-year-old girl handed me a pickle jar full of pennies. Project H is a nonprofit coalition of product designers working on humanitarian products, and the event was in honor of the Los Angeles chapter's newly launched initiative, Abject Object. The project is an ongoing collaboration between a team of designers and residents of the city's homeless shelters, through which they design, produce, and sell retail accessories made from reclaimed textiles. The proceeds from sales then go directly back to the shelters, as well as to the individual who made the product. It's an amazing educational and design co-op model that continues to grow. I had recognized the little girl as the daughter of one of the Los Angeles chapter members.

The pickle jar was handed to me with the sort of confidence with which an Academy Awards statue is handed to the winner of the Best Actress category. The little girl's assuredness said, "I think this belongs to you. You've earned it; carry it with pride." The jar was ...

At the turn of the last century, illustrations were everywhere. The pages of daily newspapers, satirical magazines, and catalogs were all chock-full of hand-drawn images. Most novels were illustrated, even those intended for adults. Fifty years before, Charles Dickens had included two pictures in each of his monthly installments, and his influence persisted. Certainly, no self-respecting book for teenagers would have appeared without at least a few glossy plates.

But then history went awry. Photography took over catalogs and print advertising, starving the legion of journeymen illustrators whose job it had been to draw the latest hats and shoes and farm implements for Sears and Roebuck. The publishers of novels found themselves suddenly without a cheap and ready supply of artists, and fashion followed economics. Nowadays, people older than 12 rarely get pictures in their novels. Graphic novels and manga abound, thankfully, but not prose mingling with images in the old-school way.

I was contemplating all this while beginning work on Leviathan, a steampunk adventure set in 1914. I wanted the novel to capture the feel of that ...

Libraries have always been vital to me and my family. Our local library, at the end of our street, was our second living room. Books have always been at the forefront of our daily lives. I remember once, after dinner with my parents in New York's Greenwich Village, we discovered their car had been stolen....My father grimaced, saying to my mother, "Dorrie, was my book on the front seat?" For years, my...

Time plays tricks with history, even when the history is personal and the time-scale short and recent. I wrote the first sentences of Collections of Nothing within a week of September 11, 2001, and I had an early version of the complete story finished by June 2002. The book finally came out in July 2008. What came between were years of rewriting and coping with rejections, followed by...