You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

for you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hi, this is Michael Sulfrablad, and welcome to Bookworm.

Today my guest is Martin Amos, the author most recently of Times Arrow published by Harmony Books, Division of Crown, author two of London Fields and Money.

This book is narrated in reverse by a man who has been a Nazi doctor. And the first thing I wanted to ask,

one of the things I've noticed, I think from the time of John Hawks' novel, The Cannibal,

writers get a certain charge out of writing in the persona of criminals, which subsequently

extends to them.

Have you become, you know, a wolf of the SS subsequent to writing this book?

No, that's yet to happen.

You know what I mean, though.

There's a certain kind of brass that comes...

Yeah, although the criminal has an honorable and charismatic place in society,

which the war criminal doesn't quite have, and particularly the

Nazi war criminal, and particularly the Nazi medical war criminal, who is 100% unappealing,

I would have thought, doesn't even have the squeaky leather jacket.

You know, he is a spectacled figure working in a back room surrounded by

his disgusting furniture and his disgusting ideas. I don't think there's any spare charisma

to redound on the author there. Nevertheless, though, I think after Kurt Vonnegut wrote Mother Knight,

some of that spikiness became a part of his public persona as well.

...