A. I’m always amused by this question because it seems premised on the notion that Cleveland played a traumatic role in my life. Look, I grew up there, enjoyed a relatively happy childhood there, I know the area, and I know how to describe it. Many actual streets and buildings appear in my books. For example, The Ashley-Burnett School for girls is based on a high-end private girls’ school in one of the up-scale suburbs. In Switch, the killer comes from Cleveland, and in Wallflower, so does Bev Archer. In Blind Side the totally evil Grace Arnos lives in Cleveland, and in The Dream Of The Broken Horses the city I call Calista is a stand-in for Cleveland. But I don’t use Cleveland as the birthplace of crazed characters because I think it’s a hateful place. Quite the contrary, there is much to admire there: a magnificent symphony orchestra, a magnificent art museum, and The Cleveland Clinic, perhaps the most important medical center in the country. But because it played a role in my early life, I enjoy using it as a reference point, a way of trademarking my books with something from my past.

 

Q. Still from what you’ve said, it sounds as if there may be personal elements in Wallflower?

 

A. There are, but, hopefully, they’re well encoded. I think to one degree or another all novelists write out of their obsessions. I recognize certain themes in my books: the recurrence of Cleveland as a place where criminal madness is forged; deeply troubled and, in some cases, deranged shrinks; lots of references to art; and, most particularly, the role of family, especially parents, in distorting the psychology of their offspring. I certainly draw upon these and other interests to construct my stories, but it’s very important to me that the stories stand on their own and not come across as the outpourings of an author trying to resolve his neurosis through his novels. There’s a place for that kind of fiction, but when I write crime novels I want to entertain and compel belief. So I try hard not to let personal elements intrude. However, this being said, I believe I came fairly close to that kind of self-indulgence in Wallflower. 

 

Q. Why the opening in Venice?

 

A. I wanted to do two things: have Janek fall in love, and also pull him out of New York for a while and set him loose in a new environment. So what does he do when he spots an attractive woman while vacationing in Venice? He shadows her as if she were the subject of an investigation. Venice is not only a romantic city, it’s also a great place to shadow someone. I guess the message is that you can take the detective out of NYC but wherever he goes he still thinks and acts like a detective.

 

Q. What did you think of the TV movie, The Forget Me Not Murders that was based on Wallflower?

 

A. I thought it was okay. Tyne Daly was good and so was Richard Crenna, but the first two Janek movies, both four hour miniseries, were the best of the seven. For one thing the extended length allowed room for character development. Also those first two were actually shot in New York, while the other five were filmed in Toronto-simulating-New- York. But I don’t want to sound like a complainer. I’m grateful that seven movies were made, and that each one was shown twice on CBS. That’s thirty-six hours of major network prime time devoted to a character I created. Few fictional characters get that much exposure.

 

Q. Of the three Janek novels, how do you rank Wallflower?

 

A. That’s like asking which of your kids you love the most. If forced to answer, I’d have to say that I personally feel that Switch and Mirror Maze hold up the best of the three. And yet I think there are scenes and concepts in Wallflower that are as good as any I’ve ever written. And going back to the first question about working with a series character, I’m proud of the fact that the books are so different, that they all contain unexpected elements, and that in each of them Janek is probed ever more deeply so that, hopefully, after reading the three books, the reader obtains a full portrait of a brilliant, complex and often quite conflicted detective character.