Amor Towles Sees Dead People

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The novelist Amor Towles, whose best-selling books include “Rules of Civility,” “A Gentleman in Moscow” and “The Lincoln Highway,” contributed an essay to the Book Review recently in which he discussed the evolving role the cadaver has played in detective fiction and what it says about the genre’s writers and readers.

Towles visits the podcast this week to chat with the host Gilbert Cruz about that essay, as well as his path to becoming a novelist after an early career in finance.

“I remember finishing ‘Rules of Civility’ and feeling like … I don’t know if it’s going to be popular, I don’t know if it’s going to sell, but this is what I wanted to do,” Towles tells Cruz. “It was a great sort of renewal of confidence that I had as a younger person of, yeah, I can do this. And I would have gone on and on and on, I would have written books that nobody read, you know, until I died, I think quite happily. Not as happily as if it were read, but there’s a sort of a, in the arts, there’s an element of you feel like it’s a gift.”

Also on this week’s episode, Sarah Lyall, a writer at large for The Times, interviews the actor Richard E. Grant about his new memoir, “A Pocketful of Happiness,” and about his abiding love for the book “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.