There are remarkable twists and turns in The Woman in the Fifth. When the initial idea came to you, did you foresee these plot upheavals from the onset? What was the process that led you to the discovery of this narrative?

I never plot out a novel in advance. I start with the general premise—the narrator and his or her central dilemma—and the rest arrives during the actual writing. In the case of The Woman in the Fifth I was coming out of a difficult juncture in my life when I knew my marriage was failing, and I was beset with the onset of midlife melancholy. One of the manifestations of this was six months of profound insomnia that saw me walking the streets of Paris frequently half-the night whenever I spent my week per month in that city. Eventually I was able to put this melancholia and insomnia behind me. And a long-overdue divorce in 2009 rendered me a much happier man. But The Woman in the Fifth came out of this strange, bleak juncture in my life. As such it's a novel that reads like a perpetual nuit blanche—an endless sleepless night, full of dread and misgiving.

The Woman in the Fifth is a novel of many forms. It applies the psychological narrative of Henry James mixed with the hard-boiled crime fiction style of Raymond Chandler. It also blends themes of the American expatriate experience with the 19th century ghost story. Could you give some examples of other novels that may have inspired this amalgamation of themes?

There's a brilliant novel by Geroges Simenon called Three Bedrooms in Manhattan. It concerns a French actor whose marriage has just combusted and who finds himself wandering the shadowy, down at heel, neon-silhouetted world of 1950s New York. Simenon captures so superbly this nocturnal world of mid-century Manhattan; a time when the city really did wear a perpetual five o'clock shadow. Simenon's portrait of my hometown (Manhattan) as a sinister construct—and of a man grappling with serious emotional demons—began to bounce around in my imagination. And the result was this novel, which is so wildly and radically different from Simenon's, even though it was initially inspired by it.

Harry Ricks finds only coldness and strife in his first days in Paris. As a man who has spent considerable time in Paris, did you encounter any of the coldness Harry experiences upon your Parisian own arrival in Paris?

I decided to write a novel against the clichÉ of the American in Paris. I've read far too many of those sorts of novels, in which the character arrives in the City of Light and inhabits a picture postcard of chic apartments, chic restaurants, chic women, and (god help us) trying to write a novel in his local uber-chic cafÉ. The Woman in the Fifth subverts all these clichÉs and brings the reader to a very different, but profoundly real Paris that is, very much, on the other side of the tracks.

The descriptions of the Tenth Arrondissement are so full of life that one can feel the grit underneath one's nails while reading the passages. What personal experiences had led you to write so truly about this "other" side of Paris?

The novel was a huge hit in France—selling over 600,000 copies and receiving largely terrific reviews. But you would not believe the number of Parisians who came up to me after its publication and asked me how I had discovered this alternative Paris. My reply was a simple one: "On foot." I happen to be quite the flaneur—a wanderer of cities (something I developed during my Manhattan adolescence), and the Paris depicted in the novel, especially the tenth arrondissement where Harry lands, is a very real Paris: grubby, tough, anti-picture-postcard. I decided to use Paris as a nightmare landscape, and one in which Harry rarely emerges into the city during the morning. As such the novel is set in a largely nocturnal and haunted city.

Harry and Margit have an interesting dialogue regarding modern attraction to the act of shopping and consumerism in general. As Margit says, "It's what people do with their time now. It's the great cultural activity of this epoch—and it speaks volumes about the complete emptiness of modern life." Could you elaborate on this particular philosophy?

Shopping has, alas, become so much of the way we define ourselves in the modern world. We are all enslaved to the idea that buying stuff will make us happier. In the novel, Harry's impecunious state—and Margit's lack of resources as a translator—means they are both outside of the "luxe" aspect of Paris which exists throughout so many corners of the city. Harry is very much living a grubby day-today existence until he begins to enter Margit's world, which is not all that it seems.

Infidelity is a continual theme in your works. As Harry laments after his affair with Yanna, "Do we ever learn from our mistakes? Not when it comes to sex. That's the one arena of bad behavior in which we are recidivists, over and over again." (p.206) Harry cheats on his wife Susan, Susan cheats on Harry. Is infidelity inevitable? Is betrayal somehow sewn into the human experience?

Well, put it this way: infidelity is an essential component of the human emotional palette. As long as the notion of a committed relationship exists there will always be infidelities because human sexuality is such an interesting minefield of desires, needs, fears and contradictions. As such, with the promise of fidelity must come the possibility of straying, of betrayal, of seeking comfort elsewhere. Infidelity is so much the third-rail vis-À-vis love and marriage—and as all novelists deal with human mess, so infidelity is such a compelling subject with which to grapple.

Another interesting conversation between Harry and Margit concerns the essential nature of American morality versus the French methodology of "compartmentalization.'"Accept that—as Dumas said—the chains of marriage are heavy and, as such, they often need to be carried by several people." (p.000) Margit also criticizes American morality, which she claims as hypocritical finery." Could you discuss the essential differences between French and American culture in regards to human relationships and marriage?

Put simply: in America we rarely compartmentalize. We also believe there is a price is to be paid for bad behavior, especially as you also have to live with yourself thereafter. In France there is far greater compartmentalization—the idea that, within an individual life, there are hidden recesses which need not intermingle with each other. Granted, that's a sweeping generalization. But one thing is very clear to me after a decade of living part-time in France: sexual guilt is not the same issue in France that it is in my own country, and I play with this moral gulf throughout my novel.

The parlay between Inspector Jean-Marie Coutard and Harry Ricks is a cat and mouse game of information desired and withheld. There is a parallel between these character's verbal jousts and Raskolnikov's and Inspector Porfiry's interactions from the Russian classic Crime and Punishment. Did the Dostoyevsky classic influence these themes of a man wrestling with his own guilt under suspicion?

Of course anyone who writes a novel about guilt, self-incrimination, and fear of authority must bend the knee in the direction of Crime and Punishment. It remains the benchmark work when it comes to delineating the way that the possibility of violent malfeasance is within us all—and how so much of life is lived under the existential fear of being exposed for what you really are.

In the short story "Le Horla" by Guy de Maupassant, a man is physically dominated by a creature bent on ruling over his decisions in the physical world. This is similar to Harry's predicament, as his decisions are dominated by Margit's schedule of meetings that he cannot break, or face the deaths of those he cares about most. Do you have an attraction to these 19th century ghostly tales of men trapped by supernatural creatures? What do you believe the metaphor for these "ghosts" really are?

My interest in ghosts center around a very basic belief: more than anything, we are all haunted by ourselves.