As for who you're influences are, that's one of the things people always like to ask who are your favorite writers? Invariably it turns out to be who you've been reading in the last couple of weeks, and two hours or two days later you go, 'Oh my God! I forgot to mention so-and-so.'

New Orleans life is such a night life. The thing that comes up very often is that our day essentially doesn't start until midnight or 2 in the morning.

Writing that's not working for a living.

I've had a five- or six-year down-spell as a writer, and now that most of the other contracts are cleared or down to the last book, I have a chance to do what I want to do - specifically, something set in New Orleans.

That's a good question, but it's like having a 'Z' in Scrabble and no way to use it.

But we really didn't take each other's material and say 'This is a bad sentence.' Sometimes we would say 'This could use an element.' But I didn't take my stuff, give it to Bob and let him edit it; and I didn't edit his. Our writing styles are so different, that we really didn't want them melded.

We're kidding on that. One of the things I insisted upon when we went into this project was that we are full partners, going fifty-fifty, both on the money and on the say of what's going on with the books.

The only time I see 8 or 9 o'clock in the morning is if I'm still up for it, and that happens on at least a semi-regular basis.

The basic story for the opener is that word came through the bar that someone got knifed and killed up on the Moon Walk. It turns out to be one of the quarter regulars that everybody knows, including Maestro and Bone.