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Raymond Chandler or Ross MacDonald, for instance, you come away with a real feeling for a certain
part of California. If you’ve read a Tony Hillerman mystery, you have some idea of what life on the
Navajo reservation is like.
In the introduction to Killings, you describe how you explained your presence at a relatively
minor trial to the people there: “The best I could manage was ‘It sounded interesting.’ ”
Yes, sometimes I’m attracted to a story out of pure curiosity. For example, I once wrote a story
about a high school girl from Tennessee who brought the family car home past curfew on a school
night, and then, without even coming inside, got right into another car with some friends and left again
[“U.S. Journal: Knoxville, Tennessee—It’s Just Too Late,” The New Yorker, March 12, 1979]. Her
father was a strict man—a junior high school principal. When he saw this, he jumped into his own car
and chased the car she was in. Her car crashed, and she was killed. I found that I couldn’t get that
story out of my mind. What must he feel like? Who was this girl? Who were her friends? I wanted to
know a lot more about it.
I sometimes think of your pieces as intricate puzzles.
Well, they aren’t the kind of puzzles that are solved. They are puzzles in the sense that I’m putting
things together. What TV news shows like 60 Minutes realized early on is that ambiguity is their
enemy. They need to put on a case. Either the guy is innocent, or he is guilty. Or he’s innocent, but
everybody thinks he’s guilty—or vice versa. I look for the opposite. I find ambiguity interesting.
How do you come up with story ideas?
When I was writing a “U.S. Journal” story every three weeks, from 1967 to 1982—this was, of
course, long before Lexis/Nexis or the Internet—I would go to the out-of-town newsstand in Times
Square and buy piles of newspapers. Ninety percent of them were totally useless to me, of course,
because they ran the same AP stories. Also, I started writing “U.S. Journal” around the time a weekly
alternative press began to evolve, so I subscribed to a number of papers like the Seattle Weekly and
the Chicago Reader and Maine Times.
Did you discriminate, or just buy any out-of-town newspapers?
Sometimes I concentrated on some section of the country I thought I’d been neglecting. Also, I liked
certain papers, like The Des Moines Register, which ran state maps next to stories about Iowa. That
helped me because I could read through the paper quickly, stopping only at stories with maps next to
them.
Will you write stories suggested by others, or only those you come up with yourself?
I don’t care where story ideas come from. One story about a scout-master in Oregon who molested
some of the boys he befriended and was killed by one of them came from the daughter of someone
who lived in that town. She lived hundreds of miles away, but she happened to be a New Yorker
reader. I would never have heard about it otherwise.