THE ODDS THE ODDS—do you think of it as similar to or different from your other books? KG. That's a hard one. Each novel feels different as I'm writing it, but of course there are similarities, one of the main ones being that the core cast of characters remains the same. There's Richard Christie, the Commander in Homicide, and close to him are Artie Dolan, a terrific detective, Colleen Greer, a detective who is new to the Homicide Squad and who has a crush on Christie, and John Potocki, a really good guy, another detective, a salt-of-the earth sort. They feel very real to me. I think I end up thinking of a plot, a crime, and then I sock these guys with it. This one...? KG. This one doesn't start with blood. This one is about poisons—chemotherapy, heroin, alcohol in excess... Christie is seriously ill, in the hospital. Colleen and Potocki are working together and they are "lent to" the Narcotics Squad. They're quite unhappy about it, but right away there's a case that looks like an intentional overdose and so it's much more in their bailiwick... But that overdose and the police involvement is just the engine getting it all going. At the center of my story-idea are four kids, a family of four, that have been abandoned. These kids are amazing even to me, and I wrote them. They have no money and nobody to love them, but they are capable nonetheless and... they are loving. When a guy is wounded in the drug wars, they care for him. They actually do a sort of battlefield temporary surgery. Also at the center of my novel, sharing the stage with the kids, is this wounded fellow. He's been in jail and has definitely been in trouble, but he's physically gorgeous and in terms of his personality, he's an innocent. Think "young Paul Newman." He's a magnet. People are drawn to him. I don't want to give away any more. Enough. There are so many kinds of mystery or crime novels. Which kind are you? KG. I was labeled a thriller writer the first three times around with TAKEN and FALLEN and AFTERIMAGE. My books are also procedurals—that is I follow and research what the police would actually do in these situations. So what I write is a combination of sub-genres. THE ODDS is, like the others, a merger of thriller and procedural. There are some very bad guys in it. And threat. And darkness. I like dark, tough stories. Why? KG. I don't know. I always have. Big trouble. Souls in jeopardy. People who are marked for life by some family dynamic. Where does that come from? Your life? KG. Probably. But it's tricky. You see I had a super-attentive, watchful mother. Three meals on the table every day of her life. Made us clothes. Yet I read the Eileen Simpson memoir, Orphans, and I identified. And I identified with Bergman's Fanny and Alexander. So it seems this is a core story for me, these children unloved—not just the abandoned children of THE ODDS, but when I look back on it, Christie, Colleen, Marina, Joe, Frank Razzi, David Hoffman, and about thirty others in my work. After all, there's the baby in TAKEN, alone out there in the world. I didn't know what my theme was when I started writing. I mean I didn't know consciously, but in the third paragraph of TAKEN I'm describing Commander Christie, the way he sees and understands people. And I say that if he had seen Marina walking down the street, looking good, looking happy, "he would have seen sadness in her and understood she was one of what nearly all of us are in his opinion—motherless children." Beyond that I can't explain it, but my heart responds to those who haven't been mothered and I am fascinated by those who miraculously, in spite of that lack in their own lives, know how to do it—take care of people.   AFTERIMAGE Interview by Sloan MacRae, Marketing and Communications, U. of Pittsburgh How important is Pittsburgh to your novels? KG. Oh, integral! It's the mood and the ethos—a gritty, cheerful working class city, full of ethnic neighborhoods and plenty of bridges. There are supposedly 446 of them, and if that's true, that's more than there are in Venice, Italy. I love putting my cops and criminals on the bridges, the parkway, in the parks. Do your characters make the city the butt of their jokes? KG. No. That happens more often from people who don't know the city. And it happened more often in the past. I can think of famous moments in film—the Preston Sturges Sullivan's Travels, the dark Requiem for a Heavyweight. Those films have outsider jokes about the city in its dirty days. But it's clean now, actually beautiful, and Pittsburghers love their city. After all, it was once again named the #1 livable city in America by Places Rated Almanac for 2007. It had been #1 in 1985 and remained the only city in America to make it to the top twenty every year. Besides, I think of our city as coming into its own lately. It will be featured in the film of Chabon's The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Even the young boy, Shane, in Weeds, trying to save his family from disaster, says he's done research on the internet and he knows where they need to go to make everything right—Pittsburgh. And there's a new Kelsey Grammer comedy series called Back to You set here—the characters are news anchors. And there's the recent Jeff Goldblum doc, but that's about show biz. What do you think people outside of Pittsburgh—say in New York or Kansas City—know about Pittsburgh? KG. It's always interesting to see which items about Pittsburgh the New York Times picks up. Or the national news networks. Definitely the Steelers, the Pirates, and the Penguins. For sure, we are a sports town. Ben Rothlisberger, Heinz Ward, and Fast Willie Parker are known by sports lovers everywhere, not to mention in the recent past Bill Cowher and Jerome Bettis making the sports news regularly. We're known lately for Luke Ravenstahl, our baby-faced mayor, only 27 years old. I believe Dave Letterman asked him one night if he'd finished his homework and was allowed to stay up this late. There's the medical community, a very prestigious one that produced Jonas Salk and the famous polio vaccine as well as Tom Starzl, the transplant pioneer. (I just met him at a dinner event. Very impressive man.) There's Heinz (Teresa and the famous ketchup and the whole big company with its many products). US Steel, Westinghouse . . . Help me here. US Airways, PPG industries, Alcoa, Bayer, 84 Lumber . . . . KG. Right. How does the city figure in AFTERIMAGE? KG. Well, as in TAKEN and FALLEN, it provides the police force, the sports teams, the highways and bridges that the characters travel, the restaurants and fast food joints they eat at. The parks. I guess I'm drawn to parks. In AFTERIMAGE, there is a murder in a house in Regent Square (near Frick Park) and two days later another murder victim is found in West Park. In FALLEN Schenley Park and Frick Park are both important. I'd better confess here. Most of the places are real. A few are made up. I know some people want everything to be absolutely real, but I'm a rebel about that. If I need a business or a street that doesn't exist, I create it. Oh, and now that I think of it, the city provides news anchors. I have a friend who moved away, stayed away for nearly twenty years, and returned to find the same news anchors working. "Where else?" she asked. I just read somewhere that we have the most trees per capita of any city in the US. Maybe it's the parks. KG. I didn't know that. Fantastic. Do you intend to write a series? Recurring characters? KG. I didn't start out doing that, but my characters are still interesting to me. Detective Richard Christie is a charismatic fellow. I've had readers (of both sexes) tell me they had crushes on him. Some of the other characters do, too. For AFTERIMAGE, I've added a new detective to the Homicide Squad, a woman, Colleen Greer. She has a crush on Christie. She's grown up, she knows better, but there it is. She wants to be around him. Detective Artie Dolan is still a major character. And it's great fun to bring back other detectives and other civilians for cameos. So this is the third in a series and the fourth is in the works with these same people. The series seems to be in control of me instead of vice versa. Who is the main character? KG. In AFTERIMAGE, Colleen Greer is. But I seem to be doing a thing in all three novels so far in which a woman or two women act as the typical protagonists, but Christie is crucially important to all of them. He shares the stage with them if he doesn't absolutely upstage them. You've been described in the past as a writer who gives as much time to the criminals as you do to the police and the heroes. Nick Pileggi said something like that. Why is that? KG. I don't know. It just . . . happened. I started writing what the criminals were doing, thinking, and even how they were like the protagonists. And I got very interested in these bad guys. They're working, too. They're trying to solve things, too. Trying to make something right for themselves. I don't mean to sentimentalize them here. They're often very bad. How bad? KG. Very. There were some deeply pathological baby traffickers in TAKEN. There was a charming, disturbed seducer in FALLEN. And there's a desperate predator in AFTERIMAGE. I don't want to say any more. I'm already giving too much away. Like so many other people I find evil interesting. But I want to understand it, too. One common theory has it that evil is always banal, empty. My evil characters aren't empty. They're "at work." Now that sounds very Pittsburgh! Does your work in theatre help you at all in writing crime novels? KG. At first I thought, What is this? Why am I doing these two different things? Then I started to notice how many theatre references there are in most crime novels. And I attended a few conferences, only to find that most of the crime writers had theatre backgrounds. My current theory is this: what fuels plays/theatre is lying, pretending, and indirection (high stakes and the characters unable to say what they mean). Not to mention the tricky interweaving of suspense and dramatic irony. These are also the basic ingredients of mysteries and thrillers—people speaking lines that have subtext, people covering the truth and then uncovering it. So I conclude that these two different things I am doing are very much related. Is AFTERIMAGE theatrical? KG. I think so. I hope so. There are funny scenes and tense scenes. And puzzles. I hope so. Good luck with it. KG. Thank you. Do you really go to all those restaurants you write about? KG. Mmmm. Yes. I feel it's my duty.