A. In 1971 while I was in college, I worked in a mental institution outside of Cambridge, Massachusetts. I became a voracious reader during this period and just loved what I was reading. I began scribbling back then, and my first novel, The Thomas Berryman Number, was published five years later in 1976.

A. Every once in a while somebody will criticize one of the Cross books and say it was not very realistic. That leads me to think of someone looking at a Picasso or a Chagall and saying, "It's not very realistic." I don't think the painters were going for realism. The books I write are not about realism; they're about nightmares, not literal nightmares, but nightmares I feel about the world.

One of the things that's always bothered me is domineering males, and both Kiss the Girls and Hide & Seek are about domineering males. It's the ultimate kind of nightmare, like that painting "The Scream" by expressionist artist Evard Munch. All of my books come out of nightmares that I have about the world.

Cat & Mouse is an interesting book because when an author writes a series like the Scarpetta series or the Grafton series, one is always faced with this obstacle that one is doing the same book over and over again. So I challenged myself to do something really adventurous. To that end, I tried to make each of the Cross books very different, and with Cat & Mouse I did something completely different which was to introduce a second narrator, a second first-person narrator, in the middle of the book for about 100 pages. It really got me pumped up about what I can pull off in a work of fiction. And, readers are coming back with a very positive response to it, so obviously it worked.

A. Yeah, it's a surprise for readers, it's not the same old, same old. It refreshes them when a writer is trying to stretch and break a little new ground.

A. No, they're just general feelings. I mean, if you live in New York City, it can be frightening just to go out and take a walk. Anything that scares me a little can seed an idea for a story. I can feel it when it's working, and I know that I am in touch with something that is very exciting or romantic or whatever it's supposed to be.

A. I have an evolved series of routines. It's interesting, when I was watching the filming of the movie ["Kiss the Girls"], one of the things that struck me about Morgan Freeman is the confidence that he has as an actor. He's just so confident.

Over the years, at least with respect to thrillers, I've become very confident. I know that somehow I'm going to get it right, that somehow the ending is going to come to me. I guess a little of that is, yes, I have developed some rituals.

One is to do a very exacting 30-40 page outline. It helps me get organized. I will tend to do nine or ten drafts. I do about a draft a month. On each draft, I work on something in particular. For example, I might work on a couple of characters who I don't think are rich enough or I might work on plot twists, and then on a couple of drafts I might just work on the writing itself. Early on, I just work on the story.

A. About a year, it depends, it might be a little less, it might be a little more.

A. I was at the movies, where they show these little factoids on screen before the movie starts, and they had a thing about the Lindbergh kidnapping. It got me thinking about all of the tragedies every day in the world, for example, recently four-hundred people died in a capsized ferry off of Haiti. Yet when one child is missing, people can identify with that kind of tragedy easier, for whatever reason. I was just curious about that phenomenon and once again, it just struck me as one of those awful nightmares and the idea of creating a contemporary kidnapping that would rival Lindbergh to me was a very scary idea. So I had that thought. Then I'd had this notion of a hero, like Cross, who in the first fifty pages was a woman when I initially wrote it [Along Came A Spider]. Then I thought, no, I don't want to do that, and I changed it and then Alex, formerly Alexis, became a man.

A. At some point I'd like to develop another hero figure, but it's hard for me to top Alex in a lot of ways because he's extremely human and very sensitive. He is raising these two kids by himself, he has this terrific relationship with his grandmother. He chooses to live in a tough part of town, even though he doesn't have to. He's raised himself up and has gotten a very good education. He's also larger than life in being this swashbuckling heroic kind of guy, and he's genuinely a good person, too.

The idea of creating a larger than life heroic detective, to me, was interesting. And as I created Alex, I explored the question of can I do it and still put enough humanity in him that even though the character is larger than life, readers will be able to identify with him and his family.

A. I like Washington. It's a very interesting, humorous, and exciting city. When you think about writing a number of books about one character, there are so many things that can realistically happen there. Alex can go anywhere from international intrigue, to something going on with the government like in Jack & Jill, to being dragged around the world from there and back again on to any FBI, CIA or DEA related cases. There are so many possibilities, and they're all credible out of that locale, so that was attractive to me. Plus, I personally really like Washington, it's an interesting, cool city.

A. I sent it to one publisher, and they held it for seven months, which at first I thought was sort of hopeful, but then they turned it down. Then I read in the New York Times about an agent who had taken on some first-time writers. I sent the manuscript over to him, and two days later he called back. My first thought was, he's rejecting the book already, but he said "No, no, no, come on over, I loved it."

So he decided to represent the book which was turned down initially by twenty-six publishers before Little, Brown bought it and published it. Eventually the book went on to win the Edgar Award that year for Best First Mystery, so go figure.

A. The thrill of winning the Edgar was mind-boggling, it was great. It was funny the way it happened because I was working in advertising at the time, and I got this phone call from a woman who said, "Hi, how are you? We've been looking all over for you, we'd lost track of you. You have to come to the Edgar Awards dinner at the Biltmore Hotel." I said, "Gee, I don't know if I can do it on such short notice." And she said, "No, no, no, you have to come, you've won!" So I said, "OK, I'll be there." But the weird thing was since I knew I'd won, I had my agent there, my parents came, and it was great fun because there were a lot of famous detective writers and publishers there. And even knowing that I'd won, as I sat there in the audience, I started thinking, maybe the woman on the phone lied. So I started to get a little nervous.... I can just imagine being at one of those award shows where you don't have any idea whether you won or not, and of course, you really don't want to lose, you'd rather win.

A. The big thing was taking the chance structurally. If you think about it and really analyze the book, it's extremely complicated in terms of the structure. And yet it reads very easily and reads very simply. I'm really happy that I could take something potentially complex and messy and make it so clean. I think it really pumps along, it's fresh. I might like it the best of all of the Cross books, and it definitely is the most romantic.

To write a book that's a big thriller, and scary a lot of times, and yet be able to incorporate the romance where people aren't sort of wanting to skim ahead, is great. I think the romance works real well, and I think readers are extremely involved. Interestingly, we had another ending on Cat & Mouse which was a scarier ending. Advance reader copies were sent out to booksellers who really loved the story, but they were irritated by the ending because it left them hanging, and they didn't want to wait another year. They let us know they weren't happy about being left hanging like that, so we changed the ending. The new ending is great, too.

A. The ending that is in the finished book is the original ending I submitted with the manuscript. It's an upbeat ending. It's kind of cool, and one of the things I like about it is it's not a cookie-cutter ending. Most of the Cross books have had a real scary ending. And I like the idea of occasionally just doing something different, especially if it has some punch to it. Originally, I thought I'd done that, and then when I was talking with Freddi Friedman, my editor, she was pushing more for a scarier ending. I did it, and it was a "wow" but the problem with that particular ending was that readers would have to wait a year, and in this case more than a year, for the next Cross thriller. It really made people nuts.

There was a bookseller who read it who told me, "When I read the ending, I was screaming at you in my room!" I realized we needed to look at this ending again because I didn't want to have tens of thousands of readers out there screaming at me in their bedrooms. I think it's worthwhile to listen to what your readers are saying, and you know what? Sometimes they're right.

A. Good! Please, knock more! I'm a big movie fan, I see everything. The potential is enormous. It's a little disappointing that Hollywood is not a little better at what they do though. The structure they've set up to make movies is not ideal. It's just not a good creative environment, generally speaking. There are too many people involved and way too many people with big egos, and way too many people who actually get to influence the final product. It's just sloppy. The good thing was having the film rights bought, the bad thing is knowing that process can mess up a lot of movies, and you see good books like Striptease and The Juror turn into not so good movies. On one hand I always felt, well, this is nice, we've sold it. On the other hand, I may have to leave the country for a month when the movie comes out because my friends will be ragging me so badly. Fortunately, this movie is really terrific. It turned out real well. Morgan Freeman and Ashley Judd do a very nice job. The film moves along, it's suspenseful, and I think it'll do well, although you never know, but I am happy with it.

A. I met with the screenwriter for a couple of days, and he was very nice to deal with. I was on the set for a week or so. The joke about the set for me — everybody was very nice to me and Morgan Freeman was a gem of a person — but on the movie set, [in the chain of command] the novelist is somewhere below the caterer. They know why the caterer is there, but no one knows why the writer is there.

A. Yes. It's Morgan's Alex Cross — I have my Alex Cross, he has his Alex Cross, and the crossovers are in terms of a real intelligent problem solving character. I think the movie does a little more with the problem-solving side of Alex than the book does. He's [Freeman] not as dashing as the book Alex in some ways, but he's great at it and is a really cool, good Alex. I think one of the interesting things about the Cross character [in film] is to perhaps over time be able to see a couple of actors play him like with Marlowe or James Bond and some of those detectives where the character was portrayed by more than one actor over the series. That's kind of fun where you get a couple of interpretations of the same character. So we'll see. Morgan may play him in the next film, I don't know if they're going to do Jack & Jill next or Cat & Mouse, but which ever way it turns out, it'll be a lot of fun.

A. That's a tough one. I wouldn't mind doing a movie if you could have a very small group of people who were very good and had reasonable freedom. In terms of getting involved with three agents for that actor, four agents for that actor, lawyers, studio people, studio line producers. There are so many people, I don't know if that would be my cup of tea personally.

A. I think Morgan will still play the character in the next film although Samuel Jackson is cool, I could see him playing the role. Will Smith is a few years too young right now to play Alex although a few years from now that would be kind of interesting. But Hollywood is capable of anything -- Robert Redford starring as Alex Cross?!

A. I live full-time now, and I write regularly. I decided, having been on a little bit of a treadmill in the advertising business which I enjoyed a lot of things about it, I could have told myself, "OK well, let's really knock yourself out and try to become the #1 author in America or let's put out two books a year instead of one," or any number of silly thoughts. No, I realized, I really don't want to do that. I'll write everyday and I'll live a life. So I'm married and things happen because I chose to live instead of getting really obsessive.

A. One of the things I'll do when I submit a manuscript is ask the editor to send me her notes and criticisms before we have a face to face meeting about the book. This allows me time to read them over, get really angry at the editor for being so insensitive and missing everything. Slowly over the next 24 hours, I'll start to think "Well, that was a good point, and that was a good point," and along the way you get to be more objective about it. But some of the things I'll look at and say, "That's true. That may not be the solution, but the criticism is valid. And I find it really useful to get the criticism and then decide over time which part of it is valid, and which parts can be incorporated to make a better book.

A. I have a couple of researchers who I can ask, "OK, I am going to do a scene in a crack parlor and just give me a bunch of bulleted information about what they feel like, what's on the floor, what's on the walls," and then I'll use that information. I generally have maybe 30-40 different things that I want information on, and I have a researcher who's pretty good about giving me what I need. I don't want reams of stuff.

A. Yes, for the time being. A lot of readers like the shorter chapters. Obviously it would be a disaster if every writer wrote that way. People are really busy and they come home at night and are faced with a forty page chapter and think, "I can't do that right now." Whereas with the Cross thrillers, they'll think, "Oh, 3 pages, I can do that," and then they go on to one more chapter then another and so on. I think the shorter chapters are conducive to that sort of reading experience. When I sat down to write the first Cross book, I consciously set out to make it the fastest-paced thing I could ever put on paper. I wanted to differentiate the series from what was already out there, and the short chapters are something I decided to do consciously. They really are addictive.

A. Ernest Hemingway always said his influence was Cezzane. I really can't point to any one person in particular. There was a book at Thompson on creativity that I avoided, but was then forced to read for a symposium I was preparing on the same topic. And I was on a plane reading it and realized, "Ooh, this is a really cool book." And it really did get out a lot of principles about why some people are the way they are and what are some of the things that make people more or less creative.

The point that really struck me, because it was true about the limitations of my own creativity, is that there is very little completely creative, out-of nowhere stuff that appears. It's more likely someone puts together Chinese poetry and out of that, along with four or five other influences, this cumulative process creates something new and different. Previous to reading about that, I hadn't been that interested in a lot of side things. Then I started to think, being creative is what I love to do, and yet I'm not taking in enough stimuli, so I really started broadening my span of things that I am interested in.

For instance, this past summer, I forced myself to pay attention to things I've missed. For example, I've never really been that interested in classical music so I spent a lot of time with classical music. The previous summer, I spent a lot of time with jazz which I hadn't been as into although I had some interest in it. I tried some science fiction and discovered that, no, I'm not going to do that. But I did give it a shot. I also spent a lot of time last summer with modern philosophy and that shows up a lot in Cat & Mouse. I like to go into untried areas and spread my wings a little bit.

A. Everyday I read the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the New York Post. In that strange combination there's a lot of stimulus there. And then I read a lot of fiction, I don't read as much non-fiction. I wish that more non-fiction was told from a storytellers point of view. A lot of people read non-fiction because they want to pretend they're smart because they have all of these facts. But most people don't want to read a story that way. I dislike reading nineteen pages about a person's grandmother unless that part of the book is really germane to how that person turned out. This pushes me away from a lot of non-fiction. Occasionally I'll read something like Barbarians at the Gate or Angela's Ashes which were both so well-written.

A. When I was very small, my family lived out in the country and there were no other little kids around. So, I used to roam around in the woods and just to amuse myself I would tell stories.

Once that gets developed it stays with you. I went to graduate school at Vanderbilt, and driving back and forth to school, I would write Broadway shows in my head and sing 14 songs on the way. So it's the same thing. I have folders of 3,000 ideas for stories, obviously I will not be able to turn too many of those into novels. But every time I am about to start a new book, I do go back over all of those ideas again. And occasionally a piece of one will work well in the book. There's a twist in Along Came A Spider when another group gets involved in the kidnapping which could have been a stand-alone novel, but I decided to incorporate it into Spider as part of that story.

A. Every once in a while someone asks me, "Can you give me any ideas on writing or how I may write a better book?" One of the suggestions I make is to take the best story you have, that you know works for you when you tell it, and write it down. Chances are it has a really good beginning, a really good ending, and you've weeded out all of the extraneous stuff. The detail that you have is really relevant to the story and makes it work better. For the kind of writing that I do, that's how I do it. I don't want the extraneous stuff, I just want to mainline to the heart of story.

A. The real story with these books is what moves them. They're very fast reads. When someone reads one, a very high proportion of readers goes on to the next. The books are somewhat addictive. I think it's a lot of different compelling reasons as to why a lot of readers really like Alex, I think he grows on people; they like the family, the grandmother, the kids and the thing I'll get in letters from readers is "Do not hurt any one in Alex's family; do not kill their cat." I get a lot of letters and most of them are very positive, which is great. People will pick up that I'm not very good on my gun facts but other than that, that's the only negative thing.

A. I would like it all to have happened when I was 33, I would like to be 35 right now instead of 50, and I would've like to have married Sue when I was 35 with my success that I have today.