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"The Yankees hit the consonants, but Southerners hit the vowels," was how A.B. Blass described the difference in speech between the North and South.

Our interview with A.B. Blass went for six hours. It started with dinner at the Radley Café and a trip to the town square. In the South, a story takes as long as it takes. That is the way it was with Blass, too, a childhood friend of Harper Lee's.

Even as adults, Blass and Harper Lee swapped stories whenever she came home from New York. She liked to work at her father's office in the mornings, and when she'd see Blass leave his hardware store, she'd call out, "A.B.!" and he'd say, "Nelle Lee!" And the two of them would have coffee and catch up on gossip.

As a high school boy, the clock tower of the courthouse proved irresistible to Blass. He explained that a man who "liked a drink" happened to be in charge of winding the clock. Blass said, "The man gave me the key to go up there if I'd wind it up for him. Well, this one time I got this idea to add an extra gong after clock struck midnight. I hit the bell with a heavy piece of metal. The next day at church everybody was saying, "Did you hear the clock struck 13 times last night?" Blass did it again the following week, and the old clock man said to him, "A.B., I need the key back. Clock is broke, striking 13 times, upsetting folks."

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Some of the most inspiring roles in the story of the Dodgers of old were played by fans. In Brooklyn, and later Los Angeles, they came to cheer even when their boys lost because, I think, they could see a bit of themselves on the field. When the bumbling bums of the 1930s missed fly balls, or set their pants on fire with cigars (this really happened) they still gave their all and the faithful appreciated it. In the 1950s and 1960s when they became dominant on the field, they were still men you could relate to. They were great athletes, yes, but in the pre-steroid era when few players were made genuinely wealthy by their contracts, they seemed more like us.

Today, after a decade or more that saw players bulk-up like cartoon superheroes, it's hard to imagine them being anything like us. Add the enormous wealth so many enjoy thanks to free agency, and the distance between the fellow on the field and us in the stands grows even greater. Of course no one can begrudge a player who seeks the highest pay for the comparatively short period of time he'll enjoy in the game, and many of their problems are not unique. The downside of celebrity can be seen in every field where people come under media scrutiny, from Wall Street, to Washington, to Hollywood.

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Imagine a city. Close your eyes, stretch out your arms, spread your fingertips. What can you smell? Hear? What does the air taste like? Every city is different, every city has its very own DNA. Cambridge (England) where I live now, is the click-click-whirr of bicycle wheels and the grind of aircraft engine testing, the smell of clean stone and institutional cooking. Its air strikes chill in winter, as winds come to rest over it from the distant ice of the Urals: in the summer the dust is full of drying leaves and grass. In the early 1990s, I lived in Dublin, with the hum of traffic travelling wide straight streets and the heady yeast smell of the Guinness brewery and the backdrop of the wind, so constant that once, when it dropped, the sudden silence woke me.

The first thing I knew about Merafi, the city where Living With Ghosts is set, was the feel of its air. It was a brush along my fingertips, a touch on skin and bone, a softness, faintly gritty, faintly sweet. It blew past me, cottony and misted, carrying upon it the faint brown, brackish scent of river water, the dull cold of damp, a hint over all of honeysuckle. As it wound around me, as I listened to it and touched it, it opened out, gave glimpses of what lay beyond and within it. Here it carried the tolling of bells, there a rumble of wooden wheels; here the voices of a market-place, there the clatter of boot-soles on cobbles. It was an old city, then, and a busy one. It was crowded and busy and pre-occupied. As I wandered out into its streets, it ignored me, intent on its own business.

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All right, it's true. I'm starting The Dark Horse (release date, May 28) tour in France this year with a trip to Paris and then to the literary soiree in Saint-Malo, a walled city in Brittany on the edge of the English Channel. The French edition of The Cold Dish, published by Oliver Gallmeister of Editions Gallmeister, will have its debut, and I figure this trip to Europe might be a little better than my last one.

One of the most embarrassing moments in my life actually took place in France-- Chamonix, to be exact. I was climbing a handful of mountains in Switzerland, Italy, and France on a bottle of wine and four baloney sandwiches a day. I was sitting in a sunny little café with my future wife (although we were not engaged at the time) and a climbing buddy, when I spotted a startlingly beautiful young woman walking down the sidewalk. I gave her a glance. Keep in mind I was young and single at this time. I swilled a gulp of wine and gave her another glance. She approached the table, stopped, and placed a perfectly formed elbow on the railing separating us, looked me in the eye from very close proximity, and spoke in a sultry voice, "Bonjour."

I'm not really sure what happened at that point, because my Scotch-Irish brain blew a number of breakers. Judy tells me I turned a bright shade of crimson and sputtered a few words of a language neither French nor English. The young woman, surmising that I was an idiot, stood and walked on.