Q: Which is harder to write, bleak or funny?

Funny, absolutely. My first stories were very noir -- PI’s pulling their hats low in the rain, all that. Lately my writing has become less serious, perhaps even amusing. Maybe it’s just because, now that the children are a little older, we’re no longer constantly sleep deprived. But it seems to me a higher achievement to make one’s readers smile, rather than wince.

Q: What about violence?

Oh, there’s plenty of that, and I try to avoid the usual cliches; if a guy gets punched up in chapter one, he should still have aches and bruises in chapter six. But speaking as a reader, I’ve completely had it with storylines focused on brutal violence against attractive young women. That’s not clever, original or remotely interesting anymore. As for children -- well, no value judgements, but ever since we had kids of our own, I don’t enjoy reading about abused or threatened children.

Q: Animals?

Only bulletproof, million-copy bestselling authors are allowed to kill the cat.

Q: You often write about financial crime.

Which I find absolutely fascinating. Doesn’t everyone? I mean, Bernie Madoff stole tens of billions of dollars, just by moving numbers around on a spreadsheet. You’d have to hijack Fort Knox to get anywhere close to that in tangible assets. And don’t get me started about Wall Street. The funny thing is, the swindles are rarely complicated -- greed encourages a certain obliviousness on the part of the fleeced. You can write a great book about pool hall grifters, but to me, boardroom malfeasance is every bit as compelling.

Q: But if you look at the bestseller lists --

Well, maybe my next book will be a dog vampire detective thriller. Written from the dog’s point of view.

Q: You’re really trying to alienate potential readers, aren’t you?

No, I’d be ranting about politics if that was the case. Nothing ruins a good story like the author lugging in a trunkful of ideology. John LeCarre is an example of someone who gets away with it, to some extent, but he’s an astonishingly good writer.

Q: Let’s talk about technology.

You know, I remember the old days, when young hotshots boasted how they’d memorized all the keyboard shortcuts for WordStar, and changed out the heads of their dot-matrix printer for pica. They, in turn, mocked the old guys who’d never moved on from typewriters. Today, I write on the same PC as pretty much everyone else who’s not on a Mac. I should mention this incredibly useful utility Microsoft used to support called Binder, which lets you --

Q: No, I mean reading technology.

Oh, that. More than ten years ago, while I was at Fidelity, I came across this little tech company called E-Ink . . . it’s happening, paper is on its way out, but the transition will be long and slow. I don’t care much how people read, only that they do, one way or another. In pessimistic moments it’s easy to start talking about the death of literacy, killed by electronic distraction and ever-decreasing attention spans. But then I see my daughter and her elementary-school classmates, some of whom read 20 or 30 books every week. I haven’t read that much myself since, well, since I was in elementary school.

Q: What do you read today?

A dozen magazines, two newspapers, twenty-five blogs --

Q: I meant books.

Right. Mostly crime and thrillers and, increasingly, speculative fiction. I have this vast useless store of SF arcana in my brain, from the late 1970’s, when I read little else. Lately I’ve been drawn back. I’ve also written a few SF short stories recently, and perhaps they’ll see print.

Q: One last, unrelated question. Do you really think you have the worst possible name for an author?

Well, it is unpronounceable, unspellable and impossible to remember, and beginning with ‘W,’ it means my books sit at the very bottom of the very last rack at the bookstore. On the other hand, at least I’m not a Patterson. I wonder if Richard and James swap the revenue from mistaken purchases? Anyway, pronounce me “V-check” and you can’t go wrong.