"I love to read. Most especially, I love low criminal romances. The human condition is most accurately chronicled in pulp, I think. The ugly and ordinary lusts, the contradictory drives, are all ignored by more self-consciously poetic writers striving to peel away the dross to reveal the inner person who of course exists only as the sum of the dross. For example, I have considered the form of assassination in literature very closely. In essence, I believe, the assassin is your counterpart—the murder detective in reverse. You are brought into contact with a crime only when it is already committed, as you are today. By examination of the body; of the person now dead; of their environment and habits; and of all of the physical evidence and the more or less obvious motives, you reveal the face of the killer and bring down justice. Crime, investigation, consequence. The assassin, by contrast, is contracted to the kill. The consequence is already agreed to be payment and death. The assassin then spends time learning the environment and habits of the target, and—already knowing intimately the layout of the organs in the body, the effects of toxins and punctures, crushings and suffocations—strikes, and departs. Contract, preparation, crime. The death stands as a mirror or a fulcrum between killer and investigator, but they are in essence engaged upon the same journey, their mutual roles contingent entirely upon the direction of travel. If time flows one way, the detective removes the knife from the corpse. If the other, it is she who brings the knife to the inert victim and performs the stabbing as an act of bloody resurrection which must subsequently be made good by the assassin in a violent and secret ambush from which the target walks away completely healthy. Tell me honestly, do you agree?"