Here’s something cool: Tod interviewed his brother Lee in the Los Angeles Review of Books…something they’ve never done before. It’s pretty illuminating:

It’s interesting to me that both of us write crime fiction but come at the genre from different angles. You have always written more about heroes — not always traditional heroes, exactly, but people who are invested in fighting crime, at any rate — and I’ve typically written about bad guys or antiheroes. I remember a conversation we had, however, after my second book came out and it lost a bunch of nice awards, but no one read it … and you said, “You could try maybe putting a joke in between the suicide attempts, the carving up of little children, and the murdering of women who look a lot like your wife, see how that feels.” You were being funny, of course, but it was also one of those moments of self-realization that I had that maybe you’ve always known: that people read crime fiction to feel satisfied at the end, not to feel like they want to kill themselves. So your approach to crime novels has always been very satisfying — a love interest, a heist, glamorous locales, a mystery that is solved in 285 pages, the world largely set right again by the time the credits roll. Do you think that comes from your TV background, or is it something more personal?

I love reading. I want to be entertained. That doesn’t mean a book has to be funny. But it doesn’t have to be unrelentingly dark and bleak. There are a lot of “literary” writers who think they aren’t good at what they do, or won’t be taken “seriously,” unless they are making the reader feel absolutely miserable. There are some readers who might find that experience engaging, relaxing, and an escape from their day-to-day lives … but it’s a very small number, certainly not one that will sustain a lucrative writing career. People can take heartbreak, pain, and continuing tragedy and despair in a novel as long as you also give them some humanity, some heart, and especially some humor. Open the drapes and let the sunlight in now and then. I’m a big believer that there’s always humor in our lives, even in the saddest, most dire moments. You know that to be true in our own lives.