I do miss the Chocolate City of my youth.

Many fathers and sons never get to reconcile their differences or come to an understanding that fills the gap between love and expectations.

The Turnaround' isn't even really a crime novel. But you need conflict to make a novel, any kind of novel, and I don't know any other way to do it than crime.

After college, I spent a decade working the kinds of jobs that I write about - bartender, shoe salesman, kitchen man - while voraciously reading novels.

I was 11 when a teacher suggested to my parents that they should send me to drama classes to curb my disruptive ways in the classroom. The next Saturday I was acting, and thereafter it became a ritual of my youth to see a show at the Belvoir on Sundays and, if I was lucky, another at the Opera House on Monday after school.

From the time I was ten, I thought of myself as 'good with words,' thanks to a perceptive and supportive fifth grade teacher.

Lessons didn't really work out for me, so I went to the old school, listening to records and learning what I wanted to learn.

As the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court case has shown us, separate is not always equal.