Jon:  For the un-initiated how would you describe your latest books with Nina Zero?

Robert:  SHOOTING ELVIS follows a good girl working in a baby-photo studio in a small California town who is asked by her bad boyfriend to deliver a package to Los Angeles International airport; when the package explodes the good girl goes on the run, makes herself over into her alter-ego, Nina Zero, and discovers she isn't so good after all, that she has a wild, dark side. She follows it, to much mayhem.

KILLING PAPARAZZI begins the day Nina Zero is released from prison. She tricks her parole officer into letting her drive to Las Vegas to marry an English paparazzo in need of a green card. They fall into a wild, screwed-up kind of love. She learns she’s tough and talented enough to become a paparazzi in her own right. They split up. He’s murdered. She’s one of the suspects. She’s driven by revenge and a need to stay out of prison to uncover how and why he was murdered. She discovers not only the killers, but a deep and abiding rage she has harbored since adolescence, and the second book begins her coming to terms with that.

Reviewers generally do a better job of summing up my books, but that’s the gist of it.

Jon:  Is Nina Zero going to be an ongoing series, or just the two books?

Robert:  A series, though I’m hoping that her books will develop into something more than a series of adventures. I’d like to chart her life, with each book dedicated to Nina’s discovery of something in her psyche that will allow her to grow as a person and character. Right now, she’s discovering why she makes certain mistakes over and over again, why she’s in pain, and what she wants to make of her life.

Jon:  She is a very interesting character. She starts out like a real typical person, with common problems. Yet she really rises to the challenges thrown at her. How did you come up with the idea for Nina?

Robert:  She’s a composite of the many women I’ve listened to in my life. I started listening to women at an early age. If you listen to women enough, you’ll begin to appreciate and understand how they think and feel – even if you’re a man.

Jon:  It seems to me that this series would make for a very fun movie. Any buzz?

Robert:  Almost everyone who reads SHOOTING ELVIS remarks what a great film it would make, and I’m confident that it will one day be filmed, when a good script is developed, and the right actress signs on to play Nina Zero. But I have no control over the process, so I think about it as little as possible. Hollywood thrives on buzz, and most of it is no more substantial than a moth beating it wings against a window. In the meantime, they give me money every year for the right to try to make a film from the book. I don’t have to do any work to receive this money. I wish more people would pay me for not doing anything. It’s a great gig.

Jon:  Your descriptions of LA are right on. For example, the description of Gorky‚s in Shooting Elvis brought back memories of sitting in there and drinking beers and watching people. Did you spend a lot of time in LA?

Almost 20 years.

Jon:  With the onslaught of new mystery authors, do you think it‚s gotten harder to get published? Are the publishers using this to their advantage?

Robert:  It’s easier than ever for a crime novelist to get published, because we have so many more options now than writers did twenty years ago, when publication was ruled by a dozen large publishing houses. The number of major publishers has contracted, but small presses have emerged in the void, such as Poisoned Pen, Soho Crime, Ugly Town and Akashic Books. If you still can’t get published, you can publish your book through Print On Demand or POD, and have something that looks and thumbs like a real book, even if you might have difficulty selling copies beyond your circle of friends and family. The increase in publishing opportunities has encouraged more people to write, because publishing your book suddenly doesn’t seem like such a daunting obstacle. The market is flooded with manuscripts, some of them good and most awful and every single one of them clamoring for attention. This probably hurts the low-to-mid-list author the most, because they are now facing competition from an entirely new tier of writers publishing via POD. There are more writers, and more books, but not substantially more sales. It is easier than ever to get published, but more difficult than ever to make a living writing fiction.

Jon:  What made you want to start writing?

Robert:  I began to write with serious intent coming out of a divorce followed by a car wreck; two disasters, one psychological and the other physical, which led me to seriously question both the direction and longevity of my life then. The divorce was like most divorces, when people who love each other grow apart: inevitable and heartrending. The car accident occurred outside a kitchy provincial disco in France. I'd just been divorced, as had the French woman driving the car. We argued. In a fit of drunken pique she turned the wheel into a car parked by the side of the road. She was wearing a seat belt. I wasn't. Since my early teens, I’d promised myself that I’d write a novel before I died, and the prospect of my demise suddenly seemed more imminent than not.

Jon:  Prague is an awful long way from LA…

Robert:  It used to be a long way, but with the emergence of the internet and cheap air fares, it doesn’t seem far away at all. Three or four American films are always playing in town, in English. I get the L.A. Times, Hollywood Reporter, Variety and L.A. Weekly online. Every day, when I enter my office to write, I'm in the Los Angeles of my imagination, and stay there, intermittently, for the next 10 hours. I don't think I've escaped L.A. at all. The way I look at it, I live in Europe and commute to Los Angeles every day. Sure, the commute is a little greater in distance than those who live in Van Nuys or Pasadena, but isn't a long commute part of the Southern California lifestyle?

Jon:  what made you want to move to Prague in the first place?

Robert:  I do not think well or deeply in Los Angeles; instead, I careen from one thought to the next, propelled by the sheer amount of stimuli. Los Angeles assaults the senses with a barrage of commercial and cultural white noise. Prague is lively but relatively quiet. I can close the doors there and concentrate on what I've observed and felt in Los Angeles.

Jon:  They say that when lying, it‚s easier to tell lies based on truth. If that‚s true I would imagine that when writing it‚s easier if you can draw on real life experiences. How often do bits of reality make their way into your books?

Robert:  The Nina Zero books are written in her voice. Obviously, I’m not a young woman from a small town in Southern California. I can’t draw on my real life experiences as a woman because I’m not a woman. But fiction is best made in the space between the writer and his protagonist; if the space is too far, the writer doesn’t know his own creation, and if there is no space at all, it becomes memoir, fictional or not. Even though Nina and I are not the same sex, we share many similarities, and these similarities are my conduits into her psychology.

The Los Angeles that I write about is real enough; though I’m often accused of writing satire I very rarely invent locations, and most of the places written about in my books hew closely to my descriptions. The mock-Tudor funeral home called Little Chapel of the Dawn from KILLING PAPARAZZI really exists, and it features the paintings of big eyed dogs mentioned in the book. The Formosa Café really does display a collection of liquor decanters in the shape of Elvis figurines. My research into various Los Angeles locations always yields stuff far more bizarre than my poor imagination could invent. Don’t forget, Los Angeles is the city that gave the world restaurants in the shape of a hat, hamburger and hot dog.

Jon:  Who are some of the authors that you like to read? Are there any authors you think should be required reading?

Robert:  I’m a slut when it comes to reading; I’ll bed down with just about any book. But I won’t fall in love with just any one, and many I won’t even like. I try to read as much crime fiction as I can, and anyone with more than a passing interest in this style of fiction should read the classics: Arthur Conan Doyle, Hammet, Chandler, Cain, Jim Thompson, Ross MacDonald, John D. MacDonald, Simenon, and may the ghosts of all the other greats please forgive me for stopping this list short.

I read history when I’m writing fiction too intensely to follow someone else’s narrative. When well written, history provides a narrative drive and characterization similar to fiction. Right now I’m reading Barbara Tuchman and Will and Ariel Durant.

Jon:  What kind of jobs did you have before you started writing novels?

Robert:  I began mixing and carrying cement on construction sites at the age of 16, and have worked full time or close to it ever since. My full resume would stretch over a couple of pages. The jobs that had the most impact on me were hospital orderly and video cameraman. The need to support myself from an early age helped me to develop a blue collar approach to writing. I’m not privileged enough to wait for inspiration. I punch the clock.

Jon:  What kind of things do you with your free time?

Robert:  Cook, read, and travel around Europe with my wife. She’s a wonderful traveling partner, because not only is she charming and intrepid, she’s muli-lingual, making up for my dull social skills and inability to speak any language well except English.

Jon:  Your web site is outstanding. Do you think the web helps authors connect with readers? And maybe bring more readers to the books?

Robert:  The web site was fun to conceptualize. A Yugoslav living in Hungary built it for me, and he did a fabulous job refining the few basic concepts I gave him. I’m not convinced the site will bring more readers to my books, because an author needs to market the site to bring it to the attention of readers, and it’s much simpler just to market the books, rather than market the web site that’s based on the books. It’s a good resource for reviewers and journalists though. Good stories, good word of mouth and good reviews bring readers to books much more effectively than web sites.

Jon:  People I‚ve talked to love Angel Cantini. Have you thought about writing more with her and Paul Marston?

Robert:  I learned how to write with the Marston and Cantini books, and readers whose tastes run to the traditional might prefer those to my new ones, which are a little more outrageous. But no, I don’t plan to write another one. Angel Cantini was the tough guy sidekick in those books, my Joe Pike or Hawk. Only my tough guy was a girl, a professional boxer and knockout in more ways than one. She was also far more interesting than the protagonist, which led me to the idea of writing out of a woman’s first person voice, and to Nina Zero.

Jon:  I saw on your web site that you have quite a few different language editions of your books. How many different countries are your books available in?

Robert:  My books have been translated into 10 languages, but I don’t know how many countries, because each edition sells across borders. I’m published in the U.S., England and Australia, for example, though that counts as only one language, and you can find my books in Canada and New Zealand, too. The equation gets complicated. So I’ll just say 10 languages.

Jon:  What are your thoughts on Paparazzi? Do they really serve a journalistic function, or are they more like parasites?

Robert:  From the stars’ perspective, most paparazzi are scum, and because we as the adoring audience identify with the stars, we tend to think them as scum, too. No doubt many of them are. But the more powerful celebrities wield tremendous power over the established media, from who will photograph them to who will write what about them. This results in an orchestrated, hagiographic image of celebrities, and paparazzi can provide a counterpoint to that. The two viewpoints – how the celebrity wants the public to see him and how the paparazzi’s camera photographs him – balance out.

Jon:  Nina finds that she does indeed have a bit of a dark side. Do you think this is true of most people?

Robert:  Yes. But not everyone yields to it.

Jon:  Do you ever get to the US to do signings or conventions?

Robert:  I enjoy signings because I like meeting and talking to readers. Conventions seem too much like a cattle call to me; a hundred authors chasing the business of five hundred fans. I’ll attend a convention one day, if only as an excuse to drink and gab with kindred souls who read and write crime fiction. But it’s a long way to travel for a drink.

Jon:  If you were able to go back in time and talk to a teenage Robert, what advice would you give him?

Robert:  I’d keep my mouth shut. My life could have turned out considerably worse, and I’m not wise enough to know the repercussions should teenage Robert believe and act upon what I might tell him. 20) What book can we look forward to next from you?

I’m working on the third Nina Zero story, provisionally titled BURNING GARBO. Nina rescues a toothless Rottweiler from a brush fire in Malibu, and the dog turns out not only to be the clue to who set the fire and why, but the key to her learning about loyalty and trust. My great-grandfather always used to say that if you have problems getting along with people, you should get a dog. Nina finds that to be good advice.

Jon:  And because the world need to know, what's the one thing always in your fridge? (and what kind of refrigerator is it?)

Robert:  Ice. My refrigerator is Russian, and like most things made in Russia, it's loud, ugly, energy inefficient and completely lacking in any modern amenities; but if you threw it out a sixth floor window, ran over it with a truck, strafed it with a full clip from an AK-47, and then plugged it into the nearest socket, the damn thing would still run.