My introduction to books as a child was in the crowded and cramped Galway City library. It occupied the second floor of the court house complex built by the British in the nineteenth century. On the portico high above street level the British gave it the ultimate imprimatur by installing a Royal coat of arms carving, featuring the lion and unicorn on either side of the great shield, which looked down on the colonized peasantry of Galway.
Many prisoners were taken from there for the short journey across the Corrib to the City Gaol and then onto the even shorter journey into infinity – hanged at dawn and buried in the goal precincts. The bodies were disinterred in the 1960s when it was demolished to make room for the ostentatious Galway Cathedral. A marginal improvement some would say.
To get to the library on the second floor I had to negotiate a phalanx of prisoners in handcuffs and chains, prison warders, Gardai, lawyers, solicitors, relatives of the victims and accused and a blue grey haze of cigarette smoke that penetrate your cloths as you pushed your way through the crowds and then up the long wooden staircase to the haven of the library. Hence my early and abiding interest in crime fiction was born.
After the big earthquake and tsunami in the Tōhoku region north of Tokyo last year, I felt like I very much wanted to give something back to Japan, a place that’s been my home for the past 11 years – a place that’s equal parts inspiring and puzzling, a fascinating collusion of kitsch and cool, with a history ten times longer than that of my home town, Melbourne.
Last year Elizabeth invited me to write about the 
“Don’t go there. Don’t go there . . .” That’s what a friend of mine told me she found herself saying while reading several of the stories in my new collection, Back Roads & Frontal Lobes. And then she told me that she knew I would, anyhow.
Her skin parts like wet silk under a razor, and even with a gaping hole in her face, I think she’s quite beautiful.
“We are a city of dead women. We feed on our own.”
I’d heard a while back that Chuck Palahniuk cited The Great Gatsby as his inspiration for Fight Club. I didn’t know enough at the time to see the rationale behind it—this was somewhere round 2005—but after I began to take writing seriously (and by necessity, reading) it started to make more sense. I could see the threads that strung the novels together. Man, I wish I could do something like that, I thought as I sunk back into my stack of Garcia Marquez books.
According to the American Library Association, there were 326 challenges reported to the Office of Intellectual Freedom in 2011. Many more go unreported.
