Headline will publish SCOTT FROST’s featuring Alex Delillo, Head of Homicide at Pasadena PD, and single mother, in paperback in January 2007.

OF ALL the mysteries I’ve come across, none seems to have the lasting power of the question I’m asked most often when talking about my work, either privately or at a reading.

‘SO, HOW DO YOU, AS A MAN, WRITE IN A WOMAN’S VOICE?’The question comes from both men and women, though it is not always phrased the same way. Such is the enduring nature of the gulf that apparently divides us along gender lines.

WOMEN SOMETIMES ASK it in a kind of wonder of discovery – maybe here’s a guy who gets ‘it’. On further discussion I can usually come up with some comment that quickly dispels that notion. Other times the question comes as if I’ve just slipped unnoticed across the front lines and made off with the other side’s war plans.

MEN ASK THE QUESTION SLIGHTLY DIFFERENTLY, as if just posing the question might compromise something in the fragile male psyche. They look at me for a long moment, then look at the book, then look back at me. ‘You did this?’ They then shake their heads, and the talk quickly shifts to more comfortable ground like sport.

SO HOW DO I DO IT? THE EASY RESPONSE to the question, to paraphrase Dustin Hoffman as Tootsie is ‘I was a better man as a woman than I ever was as a man’. Which may, or may not be true depending on which day of the week it is and how well, or badly, the writing has gone.

BUT, LIKE ALL ENDURING MYSTERIES, creativity and sex being two of the best, I really only have one answer, ‘Don’t ask me I’m clueless, Delillo speaks for herself’...

 
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