Notes from the Bench

A woman came in with a doorbell transformer off her own wall and asked me to make the bell ring softer, for a house with no noise allowed in it from the morning to the middle of the afternoon. Nothing was wrong with the box, and a bell has no volume to turn down, so what went home with her was a cut-off switch to fit by the bed.

September brings the rain back, and the whole region turns over with it. It is my working weather, and it is the weather my first novel happens in, because it is the weather I wrote it in.

Violence off the page, the dead treated with decency, the town as important as the crime. The puzzle is no softer for it, and I would not write it any other way.