Robert Crais - Lullaby Town

Outside, Ellen Lang moved the fish to the side so it wouldn't overcook and Cindy put the garlic bread in the center of the grill. Pike washed off a yellow pepper, cored it in the sink, then sliced it into thin rings. Each ring was uniform, no thicker or thinner than any other ring. When the pepper was cut, he added the rings to the large salad that had already been built and we took it out to the deck.

Ellen Lang says that if you stand on my deck and close your eyes, with a breeze coming up the canyon to blow across your face, it's easy to imagine that you're flying free through the sky, over the city with Tinkerbell and Mark and Wendy, off to Never Land to find the lost boys.

I haven't told her, but I've always thought that, too.

Robert Crais is the author of the best-selling Elvis Cole novels: A native of Louisiana, he grew up in a blue collar family of oil refinery workers and police officers, and was trained as a mechanical engineer before pursuing his dream of becoming a writer. After years of amateur film-making and writing short fiction, he journeyed to Hollywood in 1976, where he quickly found work writing scripts for such major network television series as Hill Street Blues, Cagney amp; Lacey, Quincy, Miami Vice, and L.A. Law, as well as scripting numerous series pilots and movies-of-the-week for all four major networks. He received an Emmy nomination for his work on Hill Street Blues, but is most proud of his 4-hour NBC miniseries, Cross of Fire, which The New York Times declared: "A searing and powerful documentation of the Ku Klux Klan's rise to national prominence in the '20s."

In the mid-eighties, feeling constrained by the rigid working requirements of Hollywood, Crais created Elvis Cole and Joe Pike in order to deal with themes he could not readily explore on television. His major literary influences were Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, and Robert B. Parker, among others.

Currently, Crais lives in the Santa Monica mountains with his family, three cats, and many thousands of books. Of his novel, L. A. REQUIEM, Publishers Weekly wrote, "Crais has stretched himself the way another Southern California writer-Ross Macdonald-always tried to do, to write a mystery novel with a solid literary base," and Booklist added, "This is an extraordinary crime novel that should not be pigeonholed by genre. The best books always land outside preset boundaries. A wonderful experience." High praise indeed.

When not writing, Robert Crais is an active aerobatic pilot, gourmet cook, and backpacker.