This interview tells the inside story of writing of Flash.

Wes Adams, my editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, was intrigued by what I had told him about what went on while I was writing the novel

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WA: Michael, is it true that a bank robbery you witnessed first sparked your interest in writing Flash ?

MC Yes!  I was walking along Washington Street when I saw a car exactly like the weathered Taurus in Flash traveling very fast and very erratically, with two guys in it exactly like the characters I would eventually call Bruce and Milton. And the car was streaming day-glow green smoke, full of green smoke, with bits of paper spinning around the inferior of the car as the driver struggled to keep his hands on the wheel and avoid crashing the car.

WA There's a mix of humor and menace in your description of that real-life scene that is also at work in your novel. The bumbling Borchard brothers are both scary and funny. Do you agree?

MC I try to to discover my characters and to see through their eyes--and feel what they feel. So I don't see myself describing characters--I know them. This becomes very disturbing for me in the case of both Brice and Milton, because Bruce is white hot violent simplicity, while Milton is so devious he can convince himself of the logical need to commit even murder.

I see guys like this in San Francisco and the East Bay all the time--energetic, comical at a distance, but potentially deadly.

WA It's interesting that you've set this story filled with violence and such troublesome characters as the Borchards in your hometown of Albany, California. Why did you do that?

MC This novel brings to life real events--true menace, authentic crimes, actual wildfires, and the real results of an actual war. It is not an exaggeration to say that I did not make this novel up. I reworked the details, but in an essential sense this all happened right here beside San Francisco Bay.

Dramatic events altered our lives in recent years, and this turn of events pulled me from my fascination with history in novels like The King's Arrow and Peril on the Sea and compelled me to create a new contemporary novel.

What happened was that, through terrorism and economic failure, our own era became an intriguing period of history--riddled with tension, and peopled with individuals with powerful grievances. I knew that I had to respond to the high and low crimes I was seeing all around me--and Flash was the result.

WA In so far as the story grew out of your daily life and the zeitgeist, did any signs or omens occurred to you while you wrote this novel ?

Strange and unsettling events shadowed the creation of this book. There was a murder on Albany Hill--and the voice took place right about where Bruce and Milton have their violent disagreement over the lives of Terence and his mother. The murder reminds unsolved. Not only that--there was a fire on the crest of the hill, and only speedy response on the part of firefighters staved off a sure disaster. And I kept seeing the word Flash scrawled on walls, and scratched into sidewalks. I would not be surprised to see Bruce and Milton on my walk this afternoon--quietly bickering over who should carry the gun. I felt that the border between fiction and fact became blurred as I wrote this book.

WA This is your first novel with a contemporary setting in over a decade--what drew you back to this genre after so many years writing historical fiction?

MC  I have always kept writing about contemporary themes, and recent violence in California has made me all the more aware of the world around me.. My web site currently features a story called Earthquake Murder Plane Crash Flood that is all about living in Southern California. And the poetry I write is largely about the places and creatures I encounter.  I don't see the historical past as being really absent and gone. A novel like Peril on the Sea is really about us--how we and the needful heroes and heroines of the high seas are really more alike than we think. I know that Captain Fletcher would understand Bruce and Milton very well, and that he and Carraway together would be able to enact their own brand of renegade justice.