In an interview on Totalitarian Russia

You’ve gone for another classic for your third choice, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.

Oh, this is the antidote to ways of looking at history that insist only on external and objective workings of political and economic and social circumstances. A long time before Freud, Dostoevsky was at work explaining the contradictory, clashing tendencies of the human spirit through his anti-hero, the murderer Raskolnikov. I read this in my second year at college when I was still doing Russian literature and my very enlightened tutor said that I could just stop doing the rest of the 19th-century curriculum and concentrate on Dostoevsky for a year. I have never regretted it. I think Dostoevsky understood psychological and social contradictions in life to a peak of intensity later writers have seldom been able to match.

In an interview on Policing

Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky.

Of course, I’ve read this at least three times and I’ve spoken about it at two New England colleges. I read it the first time in college and was fascinated by the man versus superman aspect to it, that there are superhuman people like Napoleon, like Hitler, who think they are better than everybody else and feel they can do whatever they like. Then there are the rest of us. The second time I read it was at a monthly police officers’ reading club where we’d get together and discuss a book over beer and pizza, and that time it struck me as funny and somewhat naive that a cold-blooded killer’s pangs of conscience lead him to confess.

Can they?

No! Of course, that’s nonsense in real life. I was speaking at Amherst, a fine liberal arts college in New England, and there was a Q and A and a young student raised her hand. We were talking about the murders in New York City. She says: ‘How many murderers turn themselves in because of pangs of conscience?’ I had dealt with hundreds of murderers and as far as I can remember the answer is: None. But I didn’t want to disappoint her so I made something up and said ‘Five per cent’ or something, and then she says: ‘And how many do you have to beat a confession out of?’ I said: ‘None. What would make you think we beat confessions out of people?’ She said: ‘I watch NYPD Blue.’

I told her if I was her father I’d ask for the tuition money back.

So, how do you get people to confess?

Well, you use your creative genius. By tricking them. By lying to them. By doing good cop, bad cop. So, you say: ‘Oh, you know that person you thought you killed? They’re alive and that’s good for you because it’s important that you didn’t kill them.’ It depends on the ability of the investigator, but pretty soon you’ll usually get a confession. Once I was debriefing prisoners on a narcotics case, we were trying to get to Mr Big, and we had to flip this guy we brought in to work for us as an informant. I had a partner, he looked like Jesus Christ, and when he’d finished debriefing someone, not only had they flipped but they were so distraught we’d have to put them on suicide watch.

But that is their conscience then!

Well. It takes a lot of digging to get to. Sometimes, we are reduced to using crass stuff, you know, like: ‘Oh, see your girlfriend out there, she’s pretty gorgeous and once you’re inside she’s going to go with all your friends…’

What’s incredible about Crime and Punishment is that you move away from the murders and then there’s Sofia, the prostitute, and the idea of possible redemption for the murderer. From a cop’s perspective, there’s nothing redeeming about a character like Raskolnikov. But it’s amazing how Dostoevsky gets you to feel sympathy for him. The killing of the two women is completely forgotten. This often happens in life – in police life in particular, that the real victims are forgotten.

Is Porfiry a good cop?

Yes! He’s the basis of Colombo and of Poirot. The idea that you can achieve just as good, if not better, results working with your head, the cerebral detective, if you will. Not the NYPD Blue smack ’em around and rough ’em up. You never see Colombo pull a gun. It’s all brains, no brawn.

In an interview on Crime Novels

Your first choice is the classic Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. What made you pick this one?

I think it was because it is probably one of the first books I read that you could call a crime book. It is not a crime book in the way that we understand crime fiction today. Instead it is like an existential psychological thriller. You watch the protagonist slowly unravel. He’s a student called Raskolnikov who kills his old landlady and covers it up, and it seems like the perfect crime. But what he doesn’t realise is that there is no such thing as a perfect crime because the individual has to deal with it and bear the consequences.

One of the things I really like about it is that no matter how bad the characters are, you always see why they are behaving in that way and the consequences for them and the people around them. That is the power of Dostoyevsky’s novels.

You say that it is not like modern thrillers – how would you say they differ?

Well, if you pick up any modern mass-market book, basically the villains are just cardboard cutouts that have to be locked up or arrested or shot by the good guys. Modern crime is an entertainment genre. It is about resolution, which you don’t get in real life. Although I have a bit of a reaction to this, it can be very good entertainment if it is done properly.