Punk Globe: It is great that you have picked a style of writing that is getting you great reviews. Did it happen right away or did you dabble with other styles of writing?

Tom: Thank you. I’m glad people dig it. The voice came naturally, but I’m not sure I’m going to stick with the style—or at least the subject matter. After the last book, I had a bit of a crisis of faith as a crime writer. I’m not comfortable with the level of violence in my books anymore. Same with the books I read and the movies I watch. On one level, the violence gets tiresome. All the gunplay. The real-life response to some of these fictional events would be so fucking disproportionate these days. They’ll send an army for gunshot. Things escalate quickly into real militaristic operations. So it’s hard to keep it realistic from a writer’s perspective without turning everything into a police procedural. (One of the reasons I try to minimize cops in my books at all.) Also, the consequences. I’ve been through a lot in the past couple of years and the fallout from the unexpected deaths of friends resounds deeply with me. If I’m going to write about killing, I want to capture that kind of pain. I thought I’d write something different about the experience of being on the street. My spin. I’d gotten pretty far into a new book about a homeless man with maybe-real/maybe-not psychic abilities. But it kept digressing into another crime story. So I stepped away till I could crack the code, as they say. 

Punk Globe:  Your thoughts on all the chaos going on and how the current fuck up RepubliKKKans in Congress who cannot get a House Speaker in line. How about the former Miss Brazil Kitari aka George Santos and her new recent indictments?

Tom: Well, I think she may want to keep her cha-cha heels on and keep on dancing ’cause there’ll be more superseding indictments. Santos was stealing his own doner’s credit card numbers. I mean, that’s serious audacity. As for the rest of the GOP, they’re operating more like anarchists at this point. They’re bent on burning down America. Good thing they are rudderless clowns. 

Punk Globe: Have you ever considered doing a political book? A Canadian outlook might be interesting. 

Tom: I had an agent who insisted I could write a great political thriller. Like a gritty spy thing. I’m not sure I could do it. American Static had a great political subplot. But it was local, very San Francisco. But what do they say? All politics are local?

The danger, I think, in writing something more “political,” is that there’s kind of a time stamp on it. These days things evolve—or devolve—so quickly it’s hard to say what the landscape will be tomorrow. When you asked about this interview there was no Israel-Palestine war. Who knows what the world will look like by November 2024. But things down on the street, never change too much. The motivations of the dark human heart, they’re a constant regardless of politics.