Goodreads asked Roger Angle:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Roger Angle Well, that is complicated. I always loved NYC. The hustle and bustle, the wild driving energy of all those millions of people, and so many out on the street. The sense that everyone was there, at least back in the '60s and '70s because everyone else was there. It had a thriving, throbbing intensity.

I had the feeling that you could live in NYC for a thousand years and go out ever day and every night and never do the same thing twice. I also had the feeling that you could be anything you wanted to be. Nobody cared. Nobody was looking. In Wichita, KS, where I was born and grew up, I always had the feeling people were watching and measuring you against social norms. I didn't always adopt them as my own.

Someone once said that all the important decisions in America are either made in New York or D.C. I thought that was true. When I lived in Lower Manhattan, in Little Italy at Mulberry and Broome, we had an electronic musician working downstairs and I could hear him composing during the day. Upstairs were artists doing huge paintings. Next door was an art restorer who worked for museums. So much creative energy. An exciting place.

Also, I grew up around cops. They always seemed stone-faced and controlled, confident, sure of themselves, and willing to deal with danger and ugliness and to go up against people the rest of us run from. One of my cop sources told me, "You know, when you're a cop, you can't afford to lose a fight." I thought, whoa, that means you are all-in, all the time. That total commitment appealed to me. I tried to become a reserve police officer one time, and they wouldn't take me, because I'm nearsighted.

So, I couldn't be a cop, but I could write about them. I wanted to combine those two things: cops and NYC.

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