Clearly you had a very musical background. Why was it that you did not pursue a musical career?
For the first ten years or so of my life I lived in a big house on the south side of Chicago; several generations were in residence there. The musical "background" was merely that there was some sort of music playing at all times, or so it seemed - radios, phonographs, people who liked to sing. My grandparents had encouraged my mother and her siblings to learn how to play the piano. My father had a really impressive collection of jazz and pop vocalists that was, unhappily, destroyed in a house fire. There was plenty of stuff to be heard on the south side, especially the blues and r&b. And then of course rock'n'roll had become a big thing, so that was all around me too.
I remember that the workers at the company where my father was employed went out on strike when I was ten or twelve. It seemed to last forever; we were horribly broke. Little by little we jettisoned everything except the bare essentials. My piano and voice lessons were the first things to fall by the wayside. I couldn't have been happier then, but I am truly regretful about it now. Maybe in another life I'll get to be a torch singer or a brilliant violinist.

Did the church play any kind of role in your early life?
Not really. I have a dim childhood memory of the Sunday (obviously a great day) that Mahalia Jackson made an appearance at our church. I remember being terrified of her. When I grew up, I came to realize what a powerful, unique voice and presence she was. But I still have trouble looking at her in old clips of the Ed Sullivan Show. Something else I find fascinating - how/why white Americans responded to her in such great numbers in the 1950s and 60's.

Were your family a reading family?
People in my family did read, but they were hardly bookworms. I seem to recall the house being full of all kinds of magazines and those Readers Digest compilations. I became a pretty avid reader, in part, I think, because I was an only child until I was almost 12. Reading was a way not to be lonesome. Even though most people in my family did not go further than high school, they encouraged the kids in the family to do well in school and they seemed really happy to see me reading. Luckily no-one checked very closely, so they never realised what I was reading. I think a little later in life I was using my devotion to books as a weird kind of rebellion. Since a lot of the kids I grew up around had nothing but disdain for books, I could be a kind of nonconformist.

What was the first book to make a strong impression on you?
You know, I don't really remember. There are huge gaps in my memory of life before adolescence. In fact the movies I was seeing as a child, and some of the stuff on television, were the things making a big impression on me - along with whatever music I was hearing. As a teenager I was reading books that stayed with me and influenced behaviour, attitude, ideas, etc.

What kind of things?
Truman Capote stories. Things about beatniks. Novels about college life. Stories that took place in New York or London. In short, a lot of things that had absolutely nothing to do with my reality. I was a huge Kingsley Amis fan, for example. I read just about all of Carson McCullers and Flannery O'Connor, Philip Roth. I recall laughing helplessly at Catch 22. I came upon James Baldwin and Chester Himes kind of by accident, because God knows they were never mentioned in school. I read Dickens and Mark Twain and Jane Austen and Nathaniel Hawthorne, etc., because those were assigned texts. But given the choice I always went for fiction where people were having affairs and drinking martinis or committing suicide.
Also, I had a brief period of being obnoxiously stage struck. So I was reading dozens and dozens of plays and I was obsessed with actors. I used to read about the Living Theater and Joan Littlewood and Stella Adler and people like that. Luckily, I got over it.

Were there any inspirational teacher(s)?
Again, I can't be sure. But I don't think so. I had a couple of really demanding teachers and one has to be kind of grateful for them. I went to segregated, second or third rate public schools with no amenities, and I guess I'm still bitter that I didn't have anyone take a hand in things and help me with scholarships and so on. But I had a brilliant education compared to most black youngsters in public schools today. I find it depressing to realize that black people come out of high school in this society and can look forward to little besides a job at McDonald's. The fact that expectations were actually higher 30 years ago is astounding.

Who are your favourite writers?
Lots of people. Crime writers: I love Chester Himes and Charles Willeford and Jim Thompson. Like a lot of girls trying to be brittle and dissolute, I liked Jean Rhys a lot in my 20's. A few people, like Capote and John McPhee, made me appreciate how thrilling nonfiction could be. I went nuts when one of my professors turned me on to Paul Bowles. For a long time he was just "it" as far as I was concerned. There's also Henry Greene, Proust, Bernard Malamud, Patricia Highsmith, Horace McCoy. Then there are those fabulous, arcane Negro bohemian novelists, e.g. Nettie Jones (Fish Tales) and Charles Wright (The Messenger). And I've always liked Robert Stone's work. Well, you know ... an endless list.

Was there a particular point when you realised you had a facility for writing?
I realized when I was fairly young that I would like to be a writer. Facility, I don't know about that. Writing doesn't come very easy for me; even writing something dreadful seems to take a toll. I pother and obsess and waste far too much time. I guess I'm also kind of a sissy about digging too terribly deep, which makes crime writing attractive. Doing duty as a technical writer and ghost writer was kind of helpful, just learning how to sit down and knock something out. The thing that I believe was truly damaging for me as a writer was working as a copy editor. You need to be picayune and highly critical of what you're editing, but it can be a really bad attitude to take with you when you're trying to write.

What was the first great movie you remember?
Is it too corny to say Citizen Kane?
Certainly not!
My parents were really permissive about bedtime. So I saw many great movies on TV late at night, all alone in the living room. I remember seeing Bette Davis dramas and Preston Sturges comedies and Stanley Kubrick's early stuff under those circumstances, and a lot of noir things like Out of the Past and The Big Sleep. I remember seeing Room at the Top, Paths of Glory, Lucky Jim, I'm Alright, Jack, A Taste of Honey, etc., and the first time I ever saw Albert Finney was on the late movie (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning); ditto Tom Courtenay (in Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner). I saw fantastic foreign language movies too, always dubbed into English - e.g., Four Hundred Blows and Black Orpheus.

I don't know what it's like in England, but these days it is next to impossible to see a really good movie on a regular broadcast channel at night. You have to have cable or take out a video.

What motivated you to start writing?
I used to watch TV dramas and get caught up with the characters to the extent that I'd write stories about them. I always liked the detective dramas and the anything that took place in an exciting city like New York or Hong Kong. I kept a notebook from age 15 to 18 with the plot summaries of every episode of my favourite shows, and I would mark my favourite episodes with a star. I would write down my ideas for stories centring on the main characters or some of the secondary ones. This notebook went the way of my father's Dinah Washington 78s when my parents' home burned down. I also used to try to write stories and plays that I thought would be good vehicles for my favourite actors. During my stage struck era, for instance, I would fantasize that George C Scott would star in one of my things.

Why crime?
I always enjoyed mysteries but never thought that much about writing them until another crime-writer sort of encouraged/ challenged me to do so.

What kind of audience did you have in mind? Crime fans with musical interests or jazz fans who might read?
I'm not sure. If I had to choose one or the other, maybe it would be the latter. I guess I was hoping the books would appeal to an even wider group or groups: readers who like female-centred novels, black readers, etc.

Who do you think are your major influences?
Elmore Leonard and Evelyn Waugh. Just kidding. I was so impressed by that early stuff of Elmore Leonard's. I couldn't wait until the next one came out. What great dialogue and what fantastic villains he and Charles Willeford created. I would love to be able to lay things out with the kind of dispatch you see in someone like Chandler. And I would die happy if I could write something as good as Hammett's Red Harvest, or have a long, distinguished career like Leigh Brackett's. Over and above the high quality of the work, Walter Mosley is to be thanked for sort of opening the door for minority crime writers. Like some of his books, the new series I'm working on is set in the past. It's really interesting and a big challenge to be creating this community of black characters whose assumptions, status, experiences, and so on, are quite different from those of someone like Nanette and her young friends.

Anything British?
I read quite a few U.K. crime writers - John Harvey (who, I'm sure you know, talks about jazz a lot), Ian Rankin, some of the classic people like Graham Greene, Dorothy Sayers - but I don't think they're that big an influence on my stuff. The milieus just seem so different. Same thing with other foreign mystery writers: I like Sjöwall/Wahlöö and Henning Mankell, Simenon, etc.

Is there any specific black or New York writing that you look to?
Yes and no. As for specific black writing, there are three writers whose work I love especially and whose contributions (in two out of the three cases) are underrated. They are what I think of as the three Joneses: Leroi [poet, playwright, activist and author of Black Music], Nettie, and Gayl. When Fish Tales (Nettie Jones) and Corregidora (Gayl Jones) came out in the 70's, I predicted the arc of so-called minority writing/ minority women's writing was going to turn in a wonderful new direction. Alas I was wrong. I am positive the New York School poets (Frank O'Hara, Amiri Baraka, Ted Berrigan, etc.) have left their imprint on me, even if I can't say how it shows up in the writing.

What happened to that new movement you mentioned?
The vanguard houses, like Grove Press used to be, just somehow got bought up, co-opted or folded. The average novel by an American black person that sees the light of day features a protagonist who is under-educated, born in poverty, has children but no spouse, and lives in an atmosphere of violence and hopelessness. He/she likes a certain kind of music and approaches sex and child rearing in a certain way and expresses himself/ herself in the same way. NOT that there aren't fantastic books whose characters are downtrodden - to wit Push[Ramona Lofton, writing as Sapphire], which was one of the great novels of the 1990's.

In the 1980's I really blew off writing. Great timing! But I was reading the New Yorker one day and I read a really engrossing story by Andrea Lee. I became so disheartened when I compared my stuff to what she had achieved. More important, I became so convinced that mainstream publishing was only going to tolerate one black woman who was writing from that middle, if not upper class viewpoint, that I put down the pen, so to speak. I didn't write for a good five to six years. Meanwhile the New Yorker was publishing one terrific story after another by Andrea Lee, who was presenting this really complicated young black character who is worldly and sexual and funny and educated and all the rest. And the movies were going crazy with violent drugs in the ghetto shit and all the fancy New York agents were lining up to represent gangbangers doing life sentences. I knew at least four other black writers during that time who deserved to have representation, but their work wasn't considered exciting enough, or they'd be told their stuff "wasn't realistic." It was infuriating. In the end, by the time I began to get published by mainstream presses, I was writing mysteries, which just aren't looked at or judged by the same rules as so-called serious, or literary, fiction.

Tell us about your non-crime writing.
I guess I thought of myself as a poet when I first came to NY and started taking writing workshops and getting published in small press venues. I was not a terrific poet. A lot of the "experimental" prose things I did look godawful to me at this distance. Intense, self regarding, confessional things that were not very necessary. There are only a couple of things I can reread without cringing now. I had a good time during those years, though. I've published a few short stories in the last couple of years that show, I hope, a bit more polish.

How do you approach plotting?
It's a bitch. Really hard. I often get carried away with character stuff and don't sharpen the plot enough. I am trying to address this, though. My husband helps me enormously with plotting.

How difficult was Rhode Island Red, your first book, to write?
Not so difficult. I finished it faster than any of the other books. I was feverish about the whole thing, not just allowing myself to think maybe someday it would get published, but almost counting on that. Never before in my life had I allowed myself to just assume that someone was going to pay me for writing. I was also broke and unemployed at the time, a nice spur.

Nanette is a marvelously distinctive character with a very distinctive voice. How did she develop in your mind?
I did see a woman saxophonist on the street one night. But she was white, not black, and she was blind and not very good musically. In any case, that is how Nanette was born. The character seemed to fall into place pretty easily. Naturally she and I are usually in agreement about music, but we're quite different in other ways. I enjoy the way she tells people to stuff it. Wish I could do it more often.

Any models? Saxophonist Sonny Rollins, for example, had a period playing on the Williamsburg Bridge...
No. Rollins voluntarily exiled himself in order to practice and learn more, whereas Nanette sort of depends on street gigs for income. Sonny Rollins is obviously a brilliant musician. Nanette is a pretty good one, but too interested in other things in life - too distractable - to focus solely on a career in music. I think she also underplays her own abilities. She's probably more capable than she knows.

Nanette has a Masters degree in French. Does she share that with her creator?
I have only schoolgirl French. That, and what I could pick up while I was trying to live by my wits in Paris.

Were you conscious of any of your crime writing predecessors?
I read a couple of Barbara Neely's mysteries: she has a heroine (Blanche) who is a domestic - a really inspired choice. But I don't see that Blanche is anything like Nanette, outside of the usual traits a detective figure almost always has: a conscience, a sense of fairness, loyalty etc. I'm not saying I created Nanette for sociopolitical reasons, but I did think it a good idea to have a character/ characters whose problems, interest, relationships and so on, were not all connected to being oppressed.

Race, in fact, is not an overt theme in your books. That was a conscious decision then?
I'm about as race weary as the next Negro. The truth is, of course, you can't write about black people in the States without taking in the subject of race one way or another. But I have characters who don't talk about it 24 hours a day. Something else that was a conscious decision was to feature a character who is quite aware of what kind of world we live in but hasn't been plowed under by racism. I don't have any patience with the novels that promote the lie that black people constantly talk about race or see themselves and live their lives according to how white people are going to react.

With Nanette did you set out consciously to create some sort of role model?
I love Nan, but she may not be much of a role model. She is a hedonist and tends to leap before looking and is always getting carried away with one thing or another. Plus she's had an awful lot of men.

Did you always plan a series or did you see this book as a one-off?
I definitely hoped Rhode Island Red would be the first book in a series.

Did you get rejections?
For Rhode Island Red? Plenty. A lot of editors had really good things to say but in the end decided against taking the book on. Finally it was accepted in England, and then, in a kind of screwy turnabout, my U.S. publisher picked it up.

Did you encounter (like Walter Mosley) any anti-black (or anti-woman) prejudice in the process?
I have to wonder how much. Not a single rejection letter read that way, but let's just say the fact that the novel was written by a black author about a black character had to have been an element in some of the rejections. Just as it certainly is an element in the marketing of the book and the future of the series. Mosley's success aside, some editors might have thought white readers, who make up the bulk of mystery fans, wouldn't be interested in Nanette. Some, looking to feed into the niche marketing thing might have found the character "not black enough," i.e. they thought Nanette's background and unconventional way of life placed her outside of the ambit of the average black reader. That this is offensive goes without saying, yet it's something that many black writers have to contend with with U.S. publishers. On the other hand, one white reviewer found it ridiculous that someone like Nanette would know the meaning of the word "hiatus." Another admitted she had never before read any book in which a black person was the main character. (I was stupefied.) As to the woman thing, I don't have the statistics but it seems to me that there are more female sleuths around today than male.

How did you take to the editorial process?
I honestly don't think I am a prima donna about the writing process. I have no problem with editors who tell you what they think, what they want, where you've messed up, etc., as long as they do so with clarity.

Do you think you hit your audience first time out?
I don't really think so. I mean, diehard mystery readers who keep up with things and people who might have recognized my name from the small press world picked up on it immediately. And the reviews were really good. But it's taken a long time for Rhode Island Red to get noticed in some quarters, despite the good reviews and word of mouth.

Coq au Vin is your (later) valentine to France. What went wrong on that first visit?
You mean my first visit? I guess nothing could live up to my expectations. Don't get me wrong. Paris itself didn't disappoint. I had never been anyplace that beautiful, and with one or two unhappy exceptions, I've never felt so safe anywhere in my life. Anyway, I had this fantasy about writing a novel in my little garret and being adopted by some wonderful group of artists and landing some kind of dream job and living happily ever after as a French person. None of that ever happened. It was a really lonely time and I wrote next to nothing. When I came back to the States I felt pretty defeated. But Iwas stupid. I kind of forgot that you take your shit with you. I realized also that it was impossible to leave my Americanness, which in many ways I loathed, in America. The black expatriate scene eluded me for the most part, if it still exists at all. So it wasn't until much later, when I returned to France as a bourgeois tourist, that I started having a wonderful time there.

Coq au Vin seems to me a much more ambitious book than Rhode Island Red. Were you consciously raising the ante?
Yeah, I think so. Trying to be taken a bit more seriously, I suppose.

The missing Aunt Vivian pervades the book. Where did she come from?
From a couple of sources: 1) the wish I had when I was growing up for a sharp, permissive, sympathetic adult to turn to. I guess I never lost that Auntie Mame fantasy. 2) I actually had an aunt named Vivian who was really attractive and funny and complicated, and I know she didn't get to have the kind of life she wanted. She died young and I regret that I didn't get to have a relationship with her as an adult. Naming that character after her was a kind of tribute.

Are you happy with the way the book turned out?
I think the An American in Paris aspect came out okay but the plotting wasn't everything I wanted it to be. I am pretty pleased with the love affair between Nanette and Andre. Most women who've read all three books say this is their favourite; that has to be because of the Nan - Andre romance.

Are most of your readers female?
I would think so. I certainly didn't set out to make it so.I have been really pleased that the guys who have told me they read the books are all either musicians or great music fans. I guess it's partly that most male readers gravitate to books written by men. There may be a male backlash going on: I mean, men resenting the fact that there are so many female driven mysteries.

In Drumsticks,the new novel, you develop Leman Sweet a little more here. Any thoughts about taking it further?
I used him in Bird Bath, a short story I did for a Mysterious Press anthology. He's a good balance for Nanette in terms of temperament, sociological background, and so on. I can't ever see a romance between the two of them, though they are becoming friendlier. In the fourth book, Rooster's Riff, I introduce his new girlfriend, who is not the kind of woman you'd expect him to go for.

Mayor Guiliani, I note, is not a favourite of Nanette's, nor I guess amongst the black community of New York. How do you and they feel about him now?
He would make a great character in a play. Amazing combination of grandeur and pettiness. He is now known and respected all over the world. Another guy would have known that that was his cue to exit graciously. But his personality won't let him stop while he's ahead. I think during his tenure he made the accommodations he had to make, given the makeup of the city these days, but he fundamentally doesn't like people of colour.

Place has been key to your books. Can you avoid the events of Sept 11?
God, is it difficult to write about New York and not take that into account. I am finishing the fourth Nanette book and some days I just can't even bear to look at it. It feels obscene trying to be clever and sexy when 3,000 corpses are within walking distance.

At the end you've set Nanette up with a few problems. Any chance that Nanette might go back to Paris?
Probably not.

How are critics reacting now?
The critics in the States didn't like Drumsticks as much as the others, but I'm getting reports that it was much better received in England and France. I am truly happy the books get published in Europe as well as here. I'm not thinking about the extra money; I'm talking about the different way the publishers and readers engage with writers. In Europe people aren't always looking for the blockbuster or the relentless action read. As long as they enjoy someone's writing, they're much more willing to let the writer take his/her time and take his/her characters to different places. Maybe I'm deceiving myself, but I actually think European readers are interested in the class issues that come up in Drumsticks.

Have you had any interest in Nanette from films TV or radio?
Several "nibbles." It's all come to nothing, though. I would love to be picked up by the film or TV people. It would provide a nice financial cushion.

Just suppose, who would you want for Nanette? Grace Jones?
Too bad, but the time for Grace Jones to play Nanette has passed. I've seen a number of actresses - really different types - who'd do a great job as Nanette: a beautiful young woman named Saana Lathan; two of the three actresses from the movie of Toni Morrison's Beloved (Kimberly Elise and Tandie Newton); maybe even the model Veronica Webb; besides them, I see potential Nanettes walking in New York all the time.

Do you have any ambitions to write for the screen?
I'd like to learn how.

Any particular place you buy your books?
Not anymore. There are a couple of nice mystery specialists, but no place I have any particular loyalty to. There were so many spectacular bookshops in New York at one time. One by one they went out of business. It is tragic what has happened.

What are you reading at the moment?
I'm taking my time with Christopher Isherwood's diaries. I'm reading a couple of bios and critical studies of Miles Davis, who figures in the next Nanette plot. I just got a much touted mystery - Jon A. Jackson's The Blind Pig.

None of your novels can be described as noir, yet you cite a number of noir films as personal favourites. Can we expect a noir novel from you sometime?
Serpent's Tail is to publish a non-detective novel of mine, Walking Bones, in 2002. It is very short and more or less written as one breath, and it's pretty dark and downbeat. As a matter of fact, I think a few martinis are consumed in it.

Apart from that, what's next?
As I mentioned, I have started the writing on a new series with new protagonists. It is set in the 1960's and the story opens just after Martin Luther King's assassination. The main characters are an orphaned black teenager (the narrator) and her guardians - a sophisticated older couple who take on responsibility for her. While society is changing - not just changing but exploding - and the Vietnam war goes on, the girl and her ersatz parents become involved in the criminal doings in a down and out community on Chicago's south side. Nick and Nora meet Native Son? Chester Himes meets J.D. Salinger?

A nice feature of your books has been the song title chapter headings that you use. Any chance that you might run out of them?
Funny you ask that. I had hundreds and hundreds of them I intended to use someday, but a recent computer disaster wiped them all out. At any rate, the next Nanette book does NOT feature the song title chapter headings.

Which, of your own books, came closest to realising your ambitions?
To Be Announced.

Charlotte Carter, thank you very much.

Bob Cornwell