In the summer of 1989 I made a journey through a deeply troubled USA.
A right-wing Republican administration seemed bent on rolling back the advances of the civil rights era; the Supreme Court were partially reversing the Roe vs Wade ruling on abortion; criminals from the Central Park rapist to the serial killers Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacey were all over the news.
Who did I turn to make sense of all this? America's crime writers - that's who. I talked to novelists like James Ellroy and Elmore Leonard, Sara Paretsky and James Lee Burke, and visited the places they write about, like Los Angeles and Detroit, Chicago and New Orleans.
The result was an instant cult classic that remains deeply relevant today: both an incisive and funny travelogue and a revealing guide to the lives and works of America's finest crime writers, caught at their peak.
This updated and expanded edition includes a new foreword by me and an afterword by the novelist David Peace.
In 2005 I went back to the States and wrote new chapters featuring five crime writers I'd missed out on the first time. Those chapters are not included in the reissue, but you can read them here:
Washington DC: George Pelecanos
Hollywood, Florida: Vicki Hendricks
Keeping Austin Weird: Kinky Friedman
Ozark Mountain Daredevil: Daniel Woodrell