Interview

Richard Rayner discusses the symbolism of the skyscraper in Cloud Sketcher and what the skyscraper represents to the American psyche before and after Sept 11th.

This novel is a departure from your previous novel, Murder Book, although some elements of detective fiction are still present. Does it signal a permanent change of direction in your work?
Murder Book was Los Angeles cops and robbers, in other words a straightforward genre novel, although it arose out of real and true experiences I'd had with the LAPD while reporting for the New York Times magazine, so it didn't quite feel like that as I was writing it. It felt like fictional reportage on the city in which I live. Only later did I realize, hey, I've written a police procedural. But I've always loved what good genre writers give you: story, pace, movement, life, a sense of things happening on the page. Likewise, I find a lot of so-called literary novels dull fare indeed. The Cloud Sketcher is very different in that it's historical and has a big sweep-encompassing the Finnish Civil War, architecture and idealism, New York in the 1920s, the Jazz Age etc. The element of detective fiction is murder, a turning point in the story, although I don't think that violence belongs to, or should be left to, the crime genre alone. I suppose what I tried to do with The Cloud Sketcher, and will be hoping ...