Perhaps at the heart of my difficulties with the structures and rules of the classical crime story is the simple fact that I don’t share the beliefs on which they are based. The world is not rational and intelligible. Order is fragile, a thin crust upon the underlying chaos. Any answers we get will be partial at best and at worst will simply give rise to further, deeper doubts. It is interesting that the classical detective story exerted such a strong influence on the postmodern novel. In the latter, writers found a means of antiliterary expression, a way to react against the weight and expectations of an older, restrictive literary tradition, but the classical story also provided them with something to disprove: the rationalist belief that the mind can solve everything. When just one or two details of the mystery novel are twisted, the opposite becomes the case, and the world that is revealed is both more frightening and more real as a consequence.

Thus, we have Nabokov writing Despair, or the genre experiments of Borges. Thomas Pynchon can produce The Crying of Lot 49, a Californian anti-detective novel that leaves us awaiting a moment of revelation that does not come. There is no explanation at the end, because there cannot be.

Sometimes I envy literary writers that freedom: the freedom not to explain. Ultimately, crime readers expect a solution, however partial, to the mystery with which they have been presented in the course of the book, and writers in the genre have a certain obligation to fulfill that expectation. Literary writers have no such obligation.

Yet there are ways of subverting those expectations, even within the genre, so that some questions can remain unanswered or are, in fact, rendered more interesting by the fact that they are unanswerable. Thus, for me, the supernatural represents my small effort at genre subversion.

After the publication of Dark Hollow, one of Belinda Pereira’s relatives got in touch with me. He had read the book not knowing that one of the characters was based on Belinda, and had only discovered the connection when he saw an interview I gave about the novel and its origins. He wrote to tell me that he did not object to Belinda’s being remembered in that way, and he gave me a little background into what happened to her family following her death. Her parents did not know that their daughter had sometimes worked as a prostitute. By the time her mother managed to return to Sri Lanka, the news of Belinda’s death, and the circumstances surrounding it, had reached there. The family was disgraced. Her mother, he told me, never recovered from Belinda’s death. She contracted cancer and died without ever seeing a measure of justice achieved for her lost child.

The novelist John Gardner once wrote that there are two choices open to the writer who lives in a world in which there are pits filled with the skulls of children. The first is to gaze into one of those pits and write about what one sees. The other, the one that I have made, is to write about how one can endure a world where there are pits filled with the skulls of children; the skulls of children and the bodies of young women who die far from home at the hands of violent men.

And so I created Charlie Parker, and through him I try to understand that world, and present a version of it in which one might live, and in which justice is attainable not only in the next life but in this one too.

Born in Louisiana in 1953, Robert Crais moved to Hollywood in 1976, becoming one of the most successful television writers of the time. In addition to scripts for such hugely successful series as Hill Street Blues, Cagney & Lacey, L.A. Law, and Miami Vice, he wrote numerous pilots and made-for-television movies and miniseries. He was nominated for an Emmy for his work on Hill Street Blues. After an active decade of writing and producing TV programs, he quit to become a full-time novelist.

His first novel, The Monkey’s Raincoat, introduced Elvis Cole, with elements of his own life forming the basis of the story. It was nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award, won the Anthony and Macavity awards, and was named one of the 100 favorite mysteries of the century by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association. Although never planning the novel to be the first of a series, Crais realized that he had produced something special-an interesting and powerful character who served as a surrogate for himself, and through whom he could comment on topics of the day. Joe Pike, Cole’s sidekick, developed as the series progressed, becoming a formidable personality in his own right. Crais became a perennial bestseller with the publication of L.A. Requiem in 1999-one of the most beautifully conceived and written private-detective stories of all time.

In addition to the Elvis Cole series, Crais has written three stand-alone thrillers: Demolition Angel (2000), Hostage (2001), and The Two-Minute Rule (2006). Hostage was filmed in 2005, with Bruce Willis starring as the former Los Angeles SWAT negotiator Jeff Talley.

Crais lives in Los Angeles, California, with his wife, Pat.

Elvis Cole and Joe Pike are twenty years old as I write this in 2007. They came to life in my first published novel, The Monkey’s Raincoat, in 1987. Twenty years is a long time. I had no idea they would be with me for twenty years. I hadn’t planned on creating a series (I thought The Monkey’s Raincoat would be a one-shot) and certainly did not expect these two characters of mine to become so successful both in the United States and abroad (at this writing, Elvis and Joe are published in forty countries around the world). Aspiring writers certainly hope for this kind of good fortune, and dream about it, but only a fool would expect it. Yet here we are twenty years later, me, Elvis, and Joe. And you.

If you’re reading this, you probably groove on my guys and maybe even snap up my new books as soon as they come out. And then you move on to a new book by Mike Connelly or T. Jefferson Parker or Lee Child, or any of the scores of other terrific writers currently plowing the crime fiction fields, and a whole new set of characters are in your head. But get this-

Elvis and Joe never leave me. Elvis Cole and Joe Pike have been in my head every day for these past twenty years, and likely will be every day for the rest of my life. When I’m writing the current book, I’m thinking about the next, one book leading to another as sure as a stream flows downhill. And even when I’m writing a stand-alone in which Elvis and Joe do not appear, they are still behind the trees in my head, knowing their turn will come again soon, and I am always aware of them.