You Hit That on the Head

With Rusty Nail, the third entry in his well-received series featuring Chicago police lieutenant Jacqueline “Jack” Daniels, due out early next month from Hyperion, J.A. Konrath talks all too briefly with PublishersMarketplace about the writing game (“The secret to getting published is simple: Write a plagiarized memoir about DaVinci.”), his forthcoming anthology of hit-man tales, and his book-writing routine (“I get up in the late afternoon, disentangle myself from whatever celebrity super model I picked up the previous night, do a bunch of drugs, and then go cash whatever big check arrived in the mail that day. Being a mid-list author is a white hot roller coaster ride of glamorous sin, depraved debauchery, and unhealthy self-obsession. Plus, binge drinking.”). Did I mention that Konrath specializes in humorous storytelling?