My guest today has a background in hard hitting journalism and he writes hard-boiled crime fiction in the tradition of Dashiel Hammet, and other famed crime writers. I’m pleased to be interviewing him because he represents a great literary tradition in genre. Please help me welcome, crime fiction novelist Jim Nesbitt.

Kaye: Your writing is classified as hard-boiled fiction, but you have your own style. Can you tell me a little about your style of hard-boiled fiction?

Jim: I’ve always thought of hard-boiled crime fiction as a distinctly American art form. Rooted in realism, cynicism, violence, corruption and a dark view of the American dream, it’s also a tremendously flexible genre. It’s best practitioners — from the founding fathers, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, through Ross Macdonald, James Ellroy and the late and vastly underappreciated James Crumley — use it as a vehicle to comment on contemporary American life and…