A: Both on my site and in How To Write A Mystery, I said that I figured out how much I would get for a first novel, then calculated how fast I would have to write for that to be a living wage. That gave me a schedule, I followed it, and wrote my first book [No One Rides for Free, now out of print].

Then came giving it to the agent, agent getting back to me, agent sending it out, waiting for the replies, then when we got a yes, waiting for the editorial notes, then waiting for the editor to read the rewrite, then copy-editing and the proofreader and waiting for publication. And I found I couldn't write while all that waiting was going on. Which is intensely stupid, a dysfunction, a psychological problem. Once I get to the next book and get the research done, I can still stick to a schedule.

The other thing that happened was that I got great reviews and won an Edgar. Instead of appropriately trying to write a cheap detective novel for money, I started trying to be a good writer, and worse, better than the one I'd already been. Each book had to be better than the last until I got to one that I didn't think I could be better than (American Hero/Wag the Dog). So I went to "different," got to too different, failed commercially, grew humble again and went back to basics. Sort of.

Q: Is it correct that you consciously try not to emulate the big names, so you can write without intimidation?

A: It's important to aim low. Don't try to be Hemingway, Shakespeare, Brecht, Shaw, whomever. You probably won't get a first page that satisfies you. Everything you were taught in school about what made them great - or more precisely - why we read fiction - is almost certainly wrong. Wrong at all times and forever and wrong in relation to the contemporary zeitgeist. It will blind you to what actually makes narrative work and to what makes commercial successes successful. (From time to time Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, et al, manuscripts are submitted by someone for the pleasure of having publishers reject them.)

You should emulate, unconsciously perhaps, the things you enjoy reading. You should understand and consciously emulate the things that you think are crap that you also find compulsively readable (or watchable).

I do steal consciously and liberally in the sense that Brecht, Shakespeare, Shaw, et al, stole. For instance, I consciously modeled the structure of the opening seven chapters of a book on a Grisham novel because I wanted to do a thriller. (What's the thriller "form?" Go look at a successful thriller, take it apart down to the structure, that's the form.) I once took the end of the movie African Queen (structurally) and redid it for a spy novel set in the Alps. I do play with (emulate) styles: My first novel was (in a sense) a Hammett (a contemporary Sam Spade), the second E.L Doctorow (mixing real history with fiction, like Ragtime, though my history was only four years past at the time).

Q: In your essays, you generally sound like a really positive, appreciative, count-your-blessings (ahem) kind of guy. How has that impacted your writing?

A: Probably badly. Poverty and desperation are my best motivators. More misery and engagement with pain would help.

Q: Does your How to Write a Mystery relate in any way to psychological processes?

A: I believe in things that motivate and shape narrative. We read narrative (for fun) because narrative is one of the fundamental ways we think. That is, we organize a trip to the market, a war, a political campaign, a project, etc., as a narrative. I want to have coq au vin for dinner. That's my goal. How do I achieve that? First find a recipe. Then check the ingredients. Determine what I have and what I need. Check the time available. Organize the shopping (list, money, transit), prep, cooking and serving time around that amount of time - a narrative. Then when I tell one of the guests how I prepared the marvelous coq au vin (with the flaming cognac), I will probably tell it as a narrative.

In a narrative, a psychological process is only interesting to the degree that it affects the narrative (provides the drive, enhances abilities, creates limitations). Otherwise it is boring, annoying and superfluous. This is rather narrow-minded of me. There are people who love wallowing in "psychological processes," just as there are folks who love descriptions of clothes and swamps and whatnot.

Q: Salvation Boulevard was a risky book for you, I'd imagine. So many big ideas, not to mention trying to get sympathetically inside the mind of an evangelical. Not the usual genre mystery novel. Was it just time for you, career- and life-wise, to do this? Was it harder or easier than the other books?

A: I thought, at the time, it was the most interesting subject around. I also thought it would be risk-free, commercially speaking.

I came to this business thinking that mysteries were, in a sense, content-neutral. If a book did the narrative and structural job, you could put whatever you wanted in them, and if the content was interesting or exciting, it would be value added. I still think that's true (or might be true) for readers and (more certainly) for film appeal.

But I think it's untrue for publishers. Publishers, in my experience, don't like politics or religion in fiction. Only Nation Books, a small publisher with an agenda, would publish The Librarian and Salvation Boulevard. So I was wrong to think of it as not risky.

Q: Speaking of ideas, in an essay on your site you state that God is a delusion. As another Jewish-raised secular atheist, I wondered what effect atheism has had on your writing and so on?

A: Atheism is only reasonable good sense (like not believing that 1/12th of all people share certain similar characteristics by being born in a similar slice of the calendar). Why people believe is far more interesting. Answering that goes to the heart of all philosophy and opens it right up.

• Larry Beinhart blogs at Huffingtonpost.com.