I wrote an essay about the inspiration for my forthcoming novel NO HARD FEELINGS on the great crime fiction blog The Rap Sheet. Here’s a little taste:

Ron Hansen’s Atticus is an example of a literary inspiration for the way No Hard Feelings is told. Another comes from a completely different sort of novel: Paul Cain’s hard-boiled gem, Fast One (1933). Fast One is a story of constant action, or as Irwin Faust says in his afterward, “unceasing, unrelieved, unleavened, unnaunced pow, smash, go.” I don’t claim to have fully replicated that pace, nor do I write in the spare, paired-to-the-bone style of Cain, but I held Fast One as a lodestar as I wrote, eschewing interludes, digressions and exposition as much as possible to keep my foot mashed to the throttle. I can’t say I matched the body count of Fast One either, but not for lack of trying. To wit, four bad guys meet their maker in the first 24 pages, three of whom are dispatched by Winnie. (As an aside, it is no exaggeration to say that Winnie is more like Gerry Kells, the tough-guy protagonist of Fast One, than Riordan is.)

Read the whole thing here.