Robert Crais
Robert Crais
Robert Craisis an American author of detective fiction. Crais began his career writing scripts for television shows such as Hill Street Blues, Cagney & Lacey, Quincy, Miami Vice and L.A. Law. His writing is influenced by Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ernest Hemingway, Robert B. Parker and John Steinbeck. Crais has won numerous awards for his crime novels. Lee Child has cited him in interviews as one of his favourite American crime writers. The novels of Robert Crais have been...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth20 June 1953
CountryUnited States of America
People come to L.A. because they're chasing that dream of a better life. That's why I came here, because I thought it would be a place where I would find other people like me; people who wanted to write, people who had a dream of being something else. And that proved to be true.
Sometimes I am so dry that people don't know I'm kidding and think I'm being serious. I enjoy this because their reactions are often funny.
I had a big Akita, Yoshi, who was fabulous. I loved him. We lost him when he was 12, and I've never been able to replace him. Normally, most people lose a pet and get another and keep going on. But it just felt wrong to me; it felt disloyal.
People want you to be ordinary.
People want you to be ordinary. They don't like it when people are different. They don't like it when a man soars over their heads while they stand in the dirt. People hate you when you're special; it reminds them of everything that they aren't
Everyone knows dogs. Most people love dogs. I think most American families probably have a dog, but I don't think people really realize or understand just how wonderful and special dogs are.
I began to encounter real-life stories of dogs protecting their wounded or dying or dead handler... or dogs refusing to leave the bodies of the people they were bonded to, sitting in cemeteries for days or sometimes weeks. You find these stories endlessly.
Quite a few of the dogs that come back from Afghanistan or Iraq or police dogs that are involved in violent confrontations where there's gunfire can in fact exhibit the symptoms and suffer from PTSD.
I don't think about the gender of my readers or about reader expectations. I'm frankly scared to. I figured out a long time ago that if I tried to guess the audience, it would be like me trying to guess which stocks to buy.
There's the Hollywood sign; there's Griffith Observatory; there's the great, amazing Los Angeles Basin. It's 465 square miles of insanity and the best food on the planet.
No other animal bonds to a human being the way a dog does. And I suspect there is no other animal to which human beings can bond the way we can bond to a dog.
I think every writer of detective fiction writing today has been influenced by Mr. Parker. I'm of a generation that followed Robert Parker, and it was impossible to read the genre and not be influenced by him.
I had wanted to be a novelist for so long, but I didn't have a story. That story came from the death of my father, and wrestling with how to help my mother. Writing it allowed me to work through my fears, frustrations and desires. I wanted control over the situation. And I wasn't sure I would have any in real life.
My first job was cleaning dog kennels. It was especially, ah, aromatic during those hot, humid Louisiana summers, but it prepared me for Hollywood.