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Author Rob Walker takes us down a slightly different virtual sitdown. Enjoy!

In the darkness of the storm, I slipped into the sleazy backwater bar on the riverfront where Angela Wilson said we must meet, telling me it was extremely important, that it was a matter of life and death that we speak.  When that didn’t work, she promised that she had something for me.  When I entered, I saw Angela in the booth at the back.  The kid looked as if wounded, hurt perhaps by my harsh tone on the phone.  Downtown Cleveland seemed a retched place on this night, and I wondered what could she possibly want?  When I sat down, I quickly learned she had a gun beneath the table pointed at my hefty gut.  “Talk,” she ordered.  “Tell us about yourself.”  She pressed a button on the tape recorder she’d slapped on the table.  “When did you start writing?”

“What gives?  What’s this about?  You working for the Feds or something?”

“Talk now!”

“I-I started as a junior high student, stealing plots and ideas wherever I could find them.  Is this about that?  Didn’t write my first truly original novel until I hit high school, and even then I ahhh appropriated my favorite author’s ahhh voice and style—Mark Twain for my Daniel and The Wrongway Railway.  Imagine Huck Finn on speed.”

“So it was a passion early on?” she asked, indicating to the bartender to bring my drink.  Angela’d been nursing a red wine.  She knew I liked whiskey sours.”

I nodded to the waiter who seemed to know we were to be left in peace.  Sipped at my drink, and said, “You mean to get this interview no matter what, eh?  All right, I was always, even as a child, fascinated with storytelling—told a lot of whoppers, lies, and fables, sometimes to get out of a fight.  I grew up in innercity Chicago, see.  Always found the strange, the bizarre, and the unusual attractive from Twilight Zone to true ghost stories, monster flicks of the fifties, you name it.  I wrote a lot of monster mash stuff early on, and I have to say that working with monsters is easier than working with serial killers, as the monsters take orchestration far better than do maniacs.”

She laughed and sipped at her wine, and for a second, I thought she’d relaxed her hand on the gun beneath the table, but tapping the barrel, she let me know otherwise.  Then Angela said in that whiskey voice of hers, “Tell us about your latest, Rob, City of the Absent.  On your web site, you emphasize that your protagonist doesn’t have the DNA and technology advantages of CSI. What was it like to research methods of investigation in the late 1800s?”

“Excruciating, but it was an idea that had been percolating in the back of my head for a long time, the early 80’s in fact, an idea suggested by a book that Dean R. Koontz insisted I read—which I did, and it was all about the history of crime detection, and it brought up all manner of images and curiosities as to how authorities dealt with such things as a floater, or a burn victim, how a victim was identified, and the time period fascinated me, the mid to late 1800’s.  Women in medicine at the time figures heavily, the rudiments of psychology, and rudiments of police science along with Inspector Alastair Ransom who Ken Bruen says has the weight of the world on his shoulders.”

“What is one of the most interesting factoids revealed about police investigations during this time?”  Angela shot back.

I took another pull on my drink.  “Gawd, factoid.  Is that a word?”

“Never mind, just answer the question.”

“My research revealed that socially we have not come very far, while technology has outstripped the human element; also kept realizing that all our mistakes in Iraq could have been solved by the tough Chicago Police force.”

Angela laughed loud at this as if disbelieving.  I added, “Police interrogation was virtual torture at the time—and I don’t mean virtual in the computer world sense.  People feared Inspector Alastair Ransom’s interrogation techniques, and that fear kept a lot of people out of jail!  Aside from that, someone could be arrested for an overhanging brow because ‘criminals’ looked like criminals—or so the belief went.”

“You’re kidding!” she exploded.

“And most police work meant knowing everyone in one’s neighborhood, walking a beat, squeezing people and snitches, and the jails in Chicago were considered worse than those in Russia and China at the time!”  My last remarks were drowned out when someone put coins into the jukebox and Johnny Cash began wailing about train whistles and freedom.  I realized the depth of the trap Angela had lain for me.

What was the most challenging - and rewarding - part of writing the series starring Inspector Ransom?”

“Working with my editor who wanted book one in the trilogy begun with City for Ransom, followed by Shadows in the White City, and finally City of the Absent, since I had created a novel of 140,000 words and she insisted I cut it back to what HarperCollins’ contract with me called for—90,000 words.  It took three consecutive rewrites after I’d thought myself finished—rat, tat, tat—three back-to-back rewrites!  I got it down to 100,000 words and it was accepted at that, requiring a different ending than the one I had wanted.  But it sure taught me a lot about cutting on the run!”  I finished off my one free drink just as Cash finished his song.  “Are we done yet?” I asked Angela point blank.

Her answer came with a the sound of her cocking the gun beneath the table.  “Not quite.  Listen, Rob, you’ve written horror, suspense, paranormal mysteries, YA’s, and now historical suspense under four pen “My next novel is Dead On.”

“Dead on what?”

“No, Dead On is the title, and Tess Gerritsen said of it, “Whip-smart dialogue , vivid characters, and ever-building tension makes Dead On a terrifically compelling novel.”  Ken Bruen praised it as “Amazing, stunning, and the whole of it all!”

“Blurbs, big deal.  What’s it about?”

“It’s a modern day noir.”

“I thought noir meant like 1940 setting, black and white film.”

“It’s a colorful, up to date version.  It’s coming out next spring with Five Star under my name, and it is vastly different from anything I have done before.  It’s risky as the hero is suicidal and it opens with him about to do away with himself; however, his suicide keeps having to be put off due to circumstances beyond his control such as a pedophile, a dirty blonde, and a revenge plot that gives him a reason to live—for now!”

“That’s what strikes me about you, Rob Walker!  You keep jumping all over the place, so readers want to know why!  Why not just do medical examiner thrillers as in the Instinct titles, or police procedural and psychological thrillers as in your Edge series?”

“Why?  Why jump about so much?  I have to be excited about an idea, a place, a plot, and a set of characters that fit that place and plot, and these facts dictate what kind of story it is and in what genre it best fits along with other considerations such as who it is for—age group, mystery readers, horror aficionados, etc.  But I also confess that I love doing the challenging thing, and I don’t want to repeat the same story over and over, or the same formula.  I love a challenge, and I am something of a chameleon writer; there are not many categories I have not tried my hand at, and a good writer should stretch.  In my Echelon Press novel PSI Blue, a paranormal suspense novel, people are astounded that my mother and daughter main characters are so realistic.  That’s the ultimate challenge, write to your opposite gender, race, time period.  Genre hoppers like me just love a challenge.”

I watched this mysterious, curious, bright-eyed young woman finish her wine and shake her head at me.  She seemed for the moment at a loss for words.  I jumped in with, “Look, sister (I know she is a writer, too!) it’s late in here, and dark outside, and it’s a lonely town you got here, and I’ve got twenty pages to do before I sleep, so if we’re done here, you can put that damn rod away and try to act like a lady.”

“Hey, you’re the one who told me once that you’re inspired by risk and danger!” she countered.  “Certainly true of your characters in the Instinct and Edge Series!  Just how many books have you sold to agents, editors, and publishers since your first sale in 1979?”

“I stopped counting around 44, counting e-book sales.”  I stand to leave, turn and make for the door, praying I won’t get it in the back when the dame shouts, “People want to know what inspires you, what you’re reading now, and what’s next for you!”  A dark shadow sliced her face in two.  Her eyes bore into me.  The place smelled of danger.  She had guts, I had to give her that.

I turned and firmly grabbed her by the wrist, wrenching the gun from her, tossing it onto the table.  It slams into her recorder, knocking it onto the booth seat.  “People wanna know, eh?  All right, if you insist, send them to find a free download, sneak early peek at Dead On where I live online: http://www.robertwalkerbooks.com, my new site with giveaways and lots more revealing dope on yours truly, kiddo.  Or they can go to my dungeon second site at http://www.robertWwalkerbooks.com or find me at www.myspace.com\robertwwalkerbooks.com  or find me blogging at www.Acmeauthorslink.blogspot.com and find my e-books at www.FictionWise.com  and at Amazon.com\shorts or Authorsden, or Wikipedia, or Google me, sweetheart.”

“What if I buy you a second whiskey sour?” Angela pressed her luck.

“You know what, Angela?  That sounds good.  “One for the road.”  I heard a street cleaner going by outside; struck me as funny, odd really that a street cleaner would be going about on a rain-soaked night.  When it abruptly stopped outside the bar, I grabbed Angela, and she grabbed her rod and the recorder, and we rushed out the back door as two men with coveralls kicked open the front door and sprayed the entire place with automatic gunfire.  They never saw us go over that fence out back, soaking wet and cold and dirty, panting like a pair of animals, fear pounding a hard rhythm in our two hearts.