 I always knew I was going to be a writer because my father died when I was six and he was a writer and he was also a preacher. He invented a religion called the Infinite Plan and I used to go and watch him preach and he wrote a book also called the Infinite Plan. This was during the depression so he would travel around and put up a tent in the southwest and he was an Australian himself and he was in love with cowboys and with women and with booze and everything else and it was kind of a mess. I used to watch him talk with an orange hanging from the ceiling and he would say that was the universe and that if you just listen to him he was going to allow you to go to heaven and of course his personal life was a mess. But he had a Mexican gal who was his lover and she was in charge of the church, the money and of course when he died we didn't have any money because she had it all. And my mother was a mother of three kids and so she took us to a place in east Los Angeles where she owned property and she put us in an apartment and then charged the county rent because we didn't have any money, she had it all. And so I grew up in East LA and that's why I spoke Spanish or Spanglish because I had to run fast and talk Spanish and I want to stay in East LA for a minute because it has something to do with why I became a mystery writer. On the first day of school I walked out of the gate of the school where Paul used to teach guys like me and there were five guys there waiting for me and they wanted blood. So I ran to the church which was right down the street and they followed me there and I kept yelling for God to help me and God never showed up and the priest never showed up and they beat the crap out of me. So the next day on my way to school I saw that there was a library between the school and me and so when the bell rang I ran to the library with the same five guys chasing me. And I'd never been in a library in my life, I was only six years old, I didn't know how to read and so I started looking at books for kids and stuff and then I asked the librarian if she'd help me learn the alphabet and she did and during the next three or four months she taught me how to read. And so I started looking around the library and I was very fascinated by the fact that the books seemed to have spirits and I was very interested in how the hell you got out of the ghetto and so I would read stories about Daniel Webster and George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and stuff like that. But the next year when I was in the second grade I started shining shoes downtown LA on Main Street where all the winos go. Why did I choose that? Because that's where I saw the people there. I didn't know anything about money or anything. And on the streetcar going to downtown the dime novel which was then in fashion was all the mysteries that you could buy for a dime and they were scattered around the streetcar so I would pick them up and put them in my shine box that I by the way had made myself. So I would go down shine shoes on Main Street and make a dollar and then one of the winos told me that I was obviously poor I wouldn't be there. So why didn't I go up to Clifton's cafeteria on Seventh and Broadway and I could get a free meal because they took care of poor people. And this was just after the war and the depression was pretty much still on so I went over there and I got a free meal and I saw that they had a wishing wells all over the place. So I came back in the afternoon that afternoon but actually he told me to go up to Persian Square because if I was on that side of town I could charge more money for my shines and I could get 25 cents instead of a dime. So I went up there but I didn't feel comfortable because I didn't belong on that side of town I belonged on the east side. So then I went back to Clifton's because I saw this thing about the wishing well and so I went in there and I grabbed a handful of coins and I put them in my pocket and I walked out of the cafeteria and it looked like I had peed all the way down but I got 20 more cents. And so I would do this every Saturday I would go in there after I'd made my dollar on Main Street with a winos I would go on to Clifton's and I would get food and then I would steal some more money from the wishing well. But the point of the reason I'm telling you that story is I started reading these dime novels of the time and although this is a surprise to most people one of the most interesting writers was Earl Stanley Gardner who was himself a lawyer and he wrote I liked the way he wrote and so I always appreciated him he wrote like 200 books under five or six different names and it was a really interesting guy and there was a lot of other people Raymond Chandler all those other guys but and Dashel Hammett who was supposed to be the best of all of them but I loved Earl Stanley Gardner so but I I lived in the ghetto I had to get out of there and education was a way to do it and so when I got into high school I finally did well and I graduated with honors and I went to Berkeley and I still was going to be a lawyer and a writer I always wanted to do that and I went on and I did that and but I knew I would never write a book until I was 60 so that's when I hitchhiked around the world and did all the other stuff went to law school and then I started representing Latinos and in their daily fight against the system and I did that for a long time oh 50 years a matter of fact so when I was when I was 60 I decided I was going to start writing and I did and the interesting thing about that was that I remember my father preaching to the audiences it was a very charismatic guy very handsome and he wore a tuxedo all the time and so I said to myself when I became a lawyer if I can get my story straight and talk only talk for a half an hour I can get the juries to give these people money but I won't talk for two hours like my father did so you don't have to worry I'm not going to talk for too long I learned my lesson and the interesting thing is that I all the years I was practicing law and I was in before the juries that's what I learned and I got my stories I worked them and I worked them and I always had a little surprise at the end and the juries I don't know if they loved me but they helped my clients which was all about and then I also was a young man aside from reading mysteries I read Somerset Mom and this fit right in with my idea about storytelling because he was one of the great short storytellers of all time and at the end of every short story he had a twist and I just loved that and I still if you read my books I mean when you read my books excuse me you'll find that at the end there's always a twist and that's what I'm happy about so on my I started I wrote my boy wrote a 700 page book when I was 60 and I was then I was married to Isabella Yende he was a very famous writer and she read the book and she said that's a bunch of shit she said no woman in her right mind is going to read that book because you have this over sex dwarf in there and women do not like to go to bed with over sex dwarfs so she said why don't you write mysteries you know a lot about forensics and so and it's true so that so then I started writing mysteries and I wrote the Chinese jars and then I wrote King of the Bottom and then I wrote the ugly dwarf now the ugly dwarf is really a story about my father because and I knew that I knew I couldn't let him go and I there's a dominatrix in there and the dominatrix is was his lover and I fashioned the dwarf after my father because he emotionally he was a dwarf and I fashioned the dominatrix after my father's lover this Mexican woman who was she was a witch and she but she was a curandera you know what that means and so and when I finished the book people would come up to me and they say boy was that she was just so wonderful I've never met a more interesting character I said no you can't like her that I was revenge I was getting revenge and at the end of the I mean she seriously she went to jail for black magic so and I so I learned something about myself from writing that book and it was that she was an important person in my life because she taught me how to get along in the ghetto and she taught me how to be tough and how to be smart and how to stay alive but you know the interesting thing is that I have had Horatio's gone all over the world with me and everywhere I always ask if the everybody wants to anybody wants to see the dwarf anybody here everybody yeah stand up Horatio stand up come on stand up just stand up this is the dwarf this is the dwarf your honor your honor so that the second book I wrote was called king of the bottom and you might be interested to know how or I got the title well the first book Chinese Jars came I got it was an article I read in the New York Times more than 50 years ago about a guy who lived in the sewers of New York and came out at night and he dressed in a tuxedo with a invitation in his pocket that he stole them from the garbage can of a of a engraving place and so that was and he collapsed on the sidewalk and went to the hospital and he died of bleeding ulcers and they couldn't figure out where he lived so he lived in the sewer and he would climb out of the sewer every night so that's how that's how I started that story the king of the bottom second one I started because this guy Hitchens the famous English guy had written a review of Isabella and his first book the house of the spirits in English and it was 25 years since that book had been written and he wanted to he was sent by English publication to review or get an update on how she was doing and stuff and so he came to our house in in San Rafael and the day before I had read an article in the Chronicle saying that the three entrepreneurs wanted to build condominiums in Point Mulate and but in order to do that they had to dig three gigantic 50 foot wells or holes in the ground with a fan at the bottom to turn it at which they had to turn on and then get rid of the poison because the land was so contaminated that it wouldn't work otherwise and then I thought well Jesus that stuff goes in the air and the winds blowing towards my house I get it and I'm all about all the other people so it's absolutely ridiculous so anyway then Christopher Hitchens comes and so then I don't know why I started talking about this but I started talking about what I read and so his wife who he was a drunk but she was a nice gal and so she started telling me that in Los Angeles the toxic dumps were all owned by Armenians and then I thought immediately of the incident that happened in Los Angeles several years ago when the Kurdish I mean the Turkish Consul General walked out of his house and was shot dead by an Armenian teenager so then one thing led to another and I wrote that book and it's about three or four Mexican guys who are accused of killing the Armenian owner of the toxic dump and so that's how that goes but the title of the book is really interesting because it's called King of the Bottom and the idea is that Armenian was the king of the bottom because he came from Armenia and he was working hard and he was down there with everybody else and he was the king and they were the slaves you know but the title of the article was about the blacks and the Mexicans that were having a fight for who was going to control the shoe shine trade in Palm Springs and so I thought it was a great title and so that's what I used then the fourth book after the Ugly Dwarf and Horacio when I got tired of Horacio went on to something else in 1960 when I went through the Middle East I saw the disparity between the Palestinians and the Jews and I was very impacted by that and how it was pretty unfair then but it's gotten measurably worse since then and I noticed how unfair it was and I kept reading about it and reading about it and then a friend of mine who lived in Hungary was there during the war and he survived he was a Jewish guy and he and his brother survived in the basements of all the bombed out buildings in 1944 and his mother and father were both taken to concentration camps and his father died there and his mother survived and so I used his story and I also met a friend from Palestine who lived in Syria and he gave me the other half of the story so I told that so then we only got two more, be patient then the next one had to do with corruption in San Francisco and I liked that one because I was a lawyer for so long and I took all this crap from the judges all the time and I was fed up so I wrote that book and then the last one, the one that I had just finished really was based on a love story that I started in my first book with the Oversex Dwarf I also had a story in there about a French girl who everybody wanted to know whether she was my lover or not and I said no, I just, I don't know, she came to me as an image and I wrote about her and so then I consulted my ex-wife again and she said you can't make that a love story now because you have to have some crimes so I threw in the kidnappings and the murders and all this crap that you're doing and so that's how I, that's basically a rundown of my books and all of them are a part of me and they're also in Spanish back there if anybody's interested and now I open it up to questions and I have no shame so just keep asking me no question, come on, this is the best part of the show I'm writing short stories, yeah well some of them are, for instance I wrote one about I Dream of Zombies it's about the dominatrix goes to jail for black magic and then after she comes and while she's in jail she writes an epistle about how to create zombies and she writes it on sheets of toilet paper and she has a thousand sheets of toilet paper and when she comes out she starts to put this plan into action and I'm sorry you have to read the story, that's it then there's the second one, one of the second short stories is about there's a black guy who's a pimp in the book number five called The Halls of Power and he's a really smart guy and he runs this little house over there in Emoryville and he helps Samuel Hamilton, my detective who's not a detective, he's a reporter catch the murder and so after book number five he calls Samuel up and says listen one of my girls daughter has been kidnapped and I want to save her and of course the daughter that's been kidnapped is actually his daughter with this girl and so Samuel helps him and you have to wait and read the story, that's all I can tell you and the third one is about the wishing well that I sort of describe to you and you have to, if you really want to find out what happened there you have to I'm sorry you guys, I got to make a living Melba, Melba, no she died all the time I don't know that daughter, the daughter's name in this book is Blanche but that's not she's not even, 22nd in camp, Coralton 22nd in camp and I moved it up to Knob Hill because I wanted to give it a little class and I also wanted a view of the bay What happened to your mother? My mother? Your father was having such an exciting life, what was your mother doing? She died, oh no she, you know my mother, it's a very interesting story my mother was a very well educated person she graduated first in her class from Drexel University as a chemist and a pharmacist in 1920 and she was the valedictorian of her class but she was, when my father died she was very depressed and I almost think she was autistic frankly she just never got over it I don't know and I mean who, you know but she was a very cultured person and I would say part of my culture ha ha comes from her So would you tell us about Melbas and the characters were you just a bar owner, you didn't hang out there or were you Well Melba, I would work for the Bacardo firm and I represented Seaman and one of them was a Cuban guy and you should never do this but I loaned him 6,000 bucks so he could buy a bar and in those days 6,000 bucks so he bought this bar and then he started pushing drugs in there and everything and then he tried to sell the bar and go away but I had the documentation that it was mine and so the ABC let me take it over and then I had to have somebody that would run it and so they finally said ok you can transfer the license to you and I had George Agnas, the city attorney helping me which didn't hurt so I needed to have somebody that would do the job and Melba was a sort of a worn out waitress who was a friend of one of my partners so we put us together and I sat down with her and I said ok Melba, you can have the bar but we're partners and all I want is 500 bucks a month and you can do whatever you want with the rest of the money so for 25 years it was the best investment I ever made 500 bucks a month for 25 years and then when she died, we sold it actually when she wanted to retire we sold it and I think we split another 25,000 bucks and then the characters were, what can I tell you they were a mess they were a lot of Irish, worn out Irish a lot of old people trunks there was also a lot of transgenders who would come in there and I used one in the dwarf the guy was almost the size of the dwarf and he used to come in dressed as a woman and I used him as a character in the dwarf you remember Finocchios? that comes out there so the thing that's really nice about this is that all of this is San Francisco in the 60s and it's all based on my memories once in a while I have to go to a book it's pretty much just based on my memory of what was going on then why did I wait until I was 60? I don't know, I just was very hyperactive and I just knew I was going to be 60 and that's what happened I just couldn't do it before I was too hyper and I was too, you know yeah, huh no it's difficult the question was did everyone hear my question? you didn't? oh okay I had heard that writing short stories is the toughest thing to write that you can do do you feel that it's been more difficult for you than writing your novels? yes, but it's more fun the secret to the short story is that you're sort of like an archer you take the ball and you have one shot and it goes and hits the target or it doesn't and you have to describe every person that you use in the short story you have to describe them and they have to have a purpose they just can't be you know, willy-nilly they have to have a purpose so it's really tough but it's a lot of fun especially after I've written six books and I was kind of tired of doing that and I'm really having a good time I have two questions, willy one at a time? sure first question is and I think I've heard your answer before but it's worthwhile why is your main protagonist a reporter instead of an attorney? very good question since I used to pick these books up from the streetcar and I got very and I saw all this stuff and I got very tired of having the cuff guy knock down the door you know Earl Stanley Gardner said he always got to give him six shots when there's a gunfight because that's when because you get paid by the page and so you take the six shots and then you're you know so here I just got tired of that and so I wanted to have a guy who number one couldn't do stuff by himself but he needed the help of all other people surrounding him and I didn't want him to be a cop for that reason and I also and as Coro said you know, noir they're not cops anyway they shouldn't be and in Mexico for instance you can't nobody will read them if you make them a cop because they don't trust the cops you know so but I needed him for another reason I needed to have him I needed the help for instance Melba this guy was a he started out as a drunk he hit somebody in fact he hit the girl on a bicycle which was Emma and in the last book he injured very badly and then he helped her because he had injured her and so then he ends up solving her son's kidnapping and then the police people that he gets hooked up with like Bernardi and stuff like that they always help him so you get to develop other characters and you just not having this one tough guy who all he has to show for is the fact that he can knock down a door and shoot people six times so that's why I that's why I did it so the second question is have you or will you write a story that is based in a Latin American country a Latin American country that's a good question um yeah I get close I like to do the I like to have get characters from places rather than and I like to have a mixture of people and I like to have the ethnic part I like very much and I know a lot about Latin culture and I'll probably get pretty close to that at least having I have a lot of Latin characters in my books anyway and when you write your stories do you dream of it or how does it kind of come to you how does it evolve well to tell you the truth I was listening to Stephen King the other day and I'm not comparing myself to Stephen King but we all seem to do this the same way something will happen and um I'm going to give you an example of something like that I just I have a friend in Ensenada who I went down there and I um used to have speeches there and I bring my I have to bring my own books because in Mexico there's only 500 bookstores in the whole country and in Buenos Aires there are 500 bookstores in just the city so it's kind of tough and so I would bring the books myself and this guy was he was a garbage man if you want a rural thing but he made like 2 or 3 million dollars a month just picking up the recycling stuff from from the street and I couldn't believe the amount of money that he was making just in Ensenada but he was a very nice guy and I liked him a lot and he spoke my kind of Spanish which is it's the Spanish of the radio it's not the high class stuff that this guy speaks when he wants to so the other day I was talking to him and he was alone over Facebook and he had quit being a garbage man and sold his business and then he came to work in the United States because he's also a US citizen and then he didn't like that so he went back and he started working as for Hyundai and then he said you know I'm really tired of this stuff I love the smell of garbage and I love the people now I mean that really impacted me that's something I can use and I will because it's such an unexpected statement from such an unexpected person he's not doing it for the money and so you have a character there and it'll show up it'll show up and it needs something else and I don't know what the something else is but that's how things happen for instance the book about fractured lives the Jewish guy tells me the story of his youth and then the Palestinian guy tells me I'm there with the Palestinian guy and so I know what's going on so I get the two things it's very powerful so then you have a story and and I can't tell you something happens totally unintended and then it sticks in your head and then you go from there as long as you have a head yeah can you tell us something about when you were an attorney and the system when you were working in San Francisco and how that impacted did you work? well I actually the impact came from Los Angeles because I grew up with Mexican people I was very close to them and I I mean I was doing the war my father died and even though it was a tough neighborhood they gave me a place to be and they're a very warm culture I don't know how many of you know about them and so I missed them when I went to college and when I was in high school I was elected to student by president there was only 8% of the population there was Mexican but I couldn't even speak English I spoke English with a Mexican accent so I won this thing so it was a big deal I was very close to them and when I went to college there weren't any two guys that were on the football team so when I went to law school same thing when I started practicing law one of my first jobs was to be a city attorney because I spoke Spanglish I would get called to the front desk and I would handle the Mexican-American or even the Mexican people having problems and I realized how much I missed it so when I started practicing myself I just because I spoke the language I was attracted to the people and I you never just start out and say okay what's the problem you always say how's the family blah blah blah you have a wonderful time you have a wonderful chat and then you get into the stuff about what their problem is so it's a way who you feel comfortable with and I just always felt comfortable with them it's not them it's sort of where I come from so I represented people who didn't speak English I defended them in the courts mostly in civil because I didn't like I didn't want to be responsible for sending anybody to jail so I didn't do the criminal part of it but I remember I'm reading these detective novel forensic novel so and I a lot of the stuff that you see in my books like damage from the chemicals and stuff like that those are people I saw in my work and I also scaffold people with terrible injuries and you send people back to Mexico with money which was a big deal especially in the early days it got a little tougher toward the end but I if it's in the books read the books read the books so you said you made San Francisco a character always and can you tell us how you translated the characteristics of San Francisco into a person well it's not that they're a person it's just that they are a character and you describe the city you describe Chinatown let me give you the most perfect example I can tell you about San Francisco is one that I don't know how many people have thought about this but if you go to New York and you want to have the smells of the Chinese the Dominicans the Filipinos you have to go a long way in different directions all you got to do is walk down Kearney street where the Italians Filipinos and the Chinese and I don't know who else all meet and you can have all those smells right there so you're just walking at home in the rest of the world just by walking down the street and it's such a wonderful feeling and you can say wow and you start imagining I mean for instance in my first book Mr. Song is a Chinese albino he's the herb guy well I actually saw Mr. Song on the street I wanted to have an herb shop to be special and one day I'm driving down the street on Kearney street and I see an albino Chinese guy in a suit and I thought jeez it's a gift talk about the second part of what you need to you know and so that's what happens that's San Francisco so you can't China challenge is a very appealing thing but there are other parts Chinese funerals take place they take place out of the Italian mortuary and you know why that is because Italians moved out and the mortuary is not stupid they want to make money so they get the Chinese to come in there and they have their funerals and they do the thing and the band, the Chinese band that plays on the funerals there's no Chinaman left because they didn't want to join the union so it's all Italian so you figure it out but this is San Francisco I mean that's just a crazy city and it's perfect for this or it was one of the things I really enjoyed is your descriptions of San Francisco I can follow where you're going and so when you were writing did you go back and walk the streets from memory? It's all from memory I remember I worked here for 28 years and the smells and what you see what I saw then when I was in college we used to come to the matador every Sunday and watch the bull fights and of course that's all gone and before that it was down below that was the bad section but then Mayor Christopher kicked all the bums out and then they moved up to Broadway and then the gay culture was just getting started and you could go up Grand Street there were gay bars and stuff but they weren't legal but they were there so all that stuff was just going on Hi Diana, how are you? That's my trainer She beats a crap out of me once a week Her name is Brutella So Are you going to go back to the series? You've been writing short stories Well right now I'm writing short stories and I I never know I just go over I'm so happy to be able to do this especially at my age so it's really exciting I've had a full career as a lawyer I'm having a wonderful time as a writer and now I'm writing short stories and it's an adventure and I Somerset Mom was such a great storyteller and I I'm not thinking I'm Somerset Mom but I'm thinking hey I'm doing one of my great idols did and having fun doing it that's it this is probably this let's wrap it up buy my books they're back there