The New York Trilogy

"Yes. This is not representative of any of the other detective novels that I’ve talked about. It’s a postmodern collection of novellas by Paul Auster, which focus on the whole idea of mystery and detection, identity and madness. It’s very, very interesting. In the first, a writer gets a phone call from someone trying to call a detective. He takes on the job to follow someone, and as he follows this person through the city, he ends up losing himself completely. The second one is quite similar, in that you have a detective hired to follow someone over years. At some point he realises this person is also observing him—and, again, it dissolves into madness. The third falls along a similar line, but for someone like me, who has read a lot of detective fiction, it’s a lot of fun to read something so different. I write a lot of different types of stuff, everything from crime fiction to horror, but the most obvious would be my series of short stories with my detective Julius Katz and his sidekick Archie, a little tie clip that Julius wears which is actually a sentient being in its own right with a highly advanced neural network. Archie is always trying to adapt his knowledge base and neural network so he can beat Julius to the punch in solving a crime, but he’s always a little bit behind. As in the Nero Wolfe books, my Archie narrates, and a lot of the fun is the relationship between the Archie and Julius. My crime fiction tends to be on the hard-boiled side. Small Crimes is pure noir. I’d say it has that same toughness. If moral ambiguity gets to you, you don’t want to read Small Crimes ."