My 1987 novel Zodiac is a 1930s hard boiled crime novel dressed up as a 1980s eco-thriller. The idea came to me at a low point in my career, when I was looking for a new project. A friend had recommended the novels of James Crumley. Until then I had considered the hard boiled genre to be a thing of the past, but Crumley’s work opened my eyes to the fact that it was still possible to write excellent novels in this vein, and that not all hard boiled detectives had to be working in California in the 1930’s (totally obvious to people who know anything about contemporary crime fiction, but news to me at the time). I started thinking about other directions in which the hard boiled genre could be taken. Since I was especially interested in the crime of illegal toxic waste dumping, I decided to write a hard boiled novel in which the “detective” was a scientist who investigated those sorts of crimes. This led me to invent the character of Sangamon Taylor, who is a classic hard boiled antihero with all of the flaws that are traditional in such characters: a cynical attitude, a foul mouth, a penchant for substance abuse, unstable relationships with women, etc. Like most antiheroes, however, he does have redeeming qualities. My friend and ex-college roommate Marco Kaltofen assisted me in dreaming up the basic technical scenario (a genetically engineered bacterium that converts the salt in seawater into hazardous waste) and provided many other kinds of technical and scientific inputs. The characters and situations are imaginary, and, in keeping with the genre, heavily skewed towards the pulpy and lurid.