My ancestors fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War; I was raised in Natchez, Miss.; I performed in the Confederate Pageant for a decade; I dug ditches and loaded trucks with black men who taught me more than any book ever could; and I graduated from Ole Miss. Anyone who survived that is a de facto expert on the South.
Greg Iles
Southern Gothic is alive and well. It's not just a genre, it is a way of life.
I pull out on the highway, and a truck hit my driver's door going 70 miles an hour. Took off my right leg from the knee down; broke 20 something bones.
A tourist will just walk up to a Natchezian on the street and ask, 'Where does Greg Iles live?' And they'll say, 'Oh, right over there; just go knock on the door.' I've had people just walk into my office, walk into my house like it's a museum just open to the public.
Experiences are like hoarded gold. Whenever I dole out a piece of my private suffering, that is when I get letters from all over the world.
In Mississippi, black and white live cheek by jowl, day in and day out.
The South is the home of 'an eye for an eye.' 'Turning the other cheek'? The South can't see that.
A lot of people have always asked, is Penn Cage me? And I say no. There's an early character in an earlier novel, 'Mortal Fear,' that's closer to me.
It was quite a blow to have my perfect image of my father shattered, but that's something we all face before we come to full adulthood.
And I do have one surefire plot I have not and probably never will write because of my fear someone will carry it out.
My father served as an Army doctor in West Germany in the late '50s and early '60s. As a result, he and my mother - both native southerners - were acutely aware of what had happened during the Holocaust.
I have not written a perfect sentence, in the literary sense. It's a lot easier to throw a perfect pass than to write a perfect sentence, if that sentence is meant to perform more than a mechanical function.
'See Spot run!' is a perfect sentence in some ways. But I doubt the critics would say it was.
Penn Cage I think of as annoyingly righteous sometimes. He's almost too good.
Writing novels is sitting in a room by yourself for a year.
I like taking a character at the most intense moments of their lives and exploring all that in full and then moving on.
Like my best friend, I asked for drums for Christmas, and got them. But when he moved on to guitar, I realized two things: (1) guitar is a much more expressive instrument, (2) way more girls pay attention to guitar players than to drummers.
I deal with the human psychology and evil. They are my twin issues.
My father has always been the heart of my Penn Cage novels.
I didn't set out to write. It was just something I always could do. Teachers would say, 'you really have this gift,' but I just didn't care.
I was lucky enough to be raised by a man of great integrity and rectitude. That said, he was also human and had his secret sins, as we all do.
Some things we must pass over in silence.
My mother, a teacher, encouraged me to use my creativity as an actual way to make a living, and my father, a Mississippi physician, did two things. First, he taught me that all human beings should be treated equally because no one is better than anyone else, and he never pressured me to become a doctor.
I've learned as much about writing from songwriters as I have from other writers.
I'll read anything that's good. I have no artificial barriers based on genre.
I happen to think Martin Cruz Smith is very good.
It's too easy to unconsciously echo another novelist's voice while reading fiction, a habit of mimicry I probably picked up as a musician.
The thing about a small town is that there are people who just remember me as a musician, as a high school football player.
Music is instant gratification in its purest form.
All my books are an inquiry into the nature of evil. Why do good people do bad things? Are any human beings completely evil? Do we all have good within us? That's what I'm interested in.
I am just like everyone else.
The South is just a dark place, man.
America is a transplanted place. Families split and people travel 1,000 miles for a job, but the South is not yet like that. People live for three or four generations in the same town, even the same house.
Great song lyrics are as valid a part of American literature as any novel.
A large percentage of my father's patients were African-American.
