I had found that I liked some things, and disliked other things. I had always been drawn to outlaws. I liked cleverness and ingenuity. I liked the promise of intriguing revelations. I disliked a hero who was generally smart but did something stupid three-quarters of the way through the book, merely to set up the last part of the action.

G. K. Chesterton once said of Charles Dickens, “Dickens didn’t write what people wanted. Dickens wanted what people wanted.”

As a result, I had come across some very obscure stuff, while being completely ignorant of many major figures.

That’s what a soft-nose bullet does. It goes in and flattens out as it does so. Becomes a blob of lead about the size of a quarter tumbling through whatever tissue it meets. Rips a great big exit hole for itself. And a nice slow soft-nose .22 makes sense with a silencer. No point using a silencer except with a subsonic muzzle velocity. Otherwise th

But not just six years of thoughts—now I have to take the process back another thirty years or so, to the point when my reading habit first took hold.

Second conclusion: If you can see a bandwagon, it’s too late to get on. I think the person who said that to me was talking about investment issues—as if I had anything to invest—but it seemed an excellent motto for entertainment, as well. It’s a crowded field. Why do what everyone else is doing?

And it’s easier to be rootless and alienated in a giant country like America. Alienation in a tiny, crowded island like Britain is of a different order, almost wholly psychological rather than physical or literal. I like reading the internal, claustrophobic British books, but I didn’t want to write them. I wanted big, rangy plots; big landscapes; b

Isolation causes an urge to talk. An urge to talk can become an urge to confess. A brutal arrest followed by an hour’s isolation is pretty good strategy.

But, the third conclusion, and the most confounding conclusion: You can’t design a character too specifically. I knew in my bones that to think too carefully would produce a laundry list of imagined qualities and virtues and would result in a flat, boring, cardboard character.