Surrounded on three sides by thick pine forest, William Kotzwinkle's small solar home looks out over the Atlantic like a face peering from the depths of a rumpled green hood. I'd driven from secondary roads onto dirt to reach it. Kotzwinkle and his wife, author Elizabeth Gundy, came to Maine in 1983 seeking solitude, mountains, and an ocean view. They found all three here.

The few photographs I'd seen of him-- including the leonine countenance which glares so fiercely from the back jacket of The Game of Thirty--did not prepare me for the man's earnest charm. In person he smiles more frequently and there are intimations of the monocled Fan Man immortalized by Annie Leibovitz.

He began the interview by showing me a reproduction of the Egyptian board game which figures so prominently in the novel.

"The one in the Metropolitan Museum, which is where I first saw it, is exquisite," he told me, showing me the symbols, the drawer, the gaming pieces. "The wood is over 2000 years old and the first time I saw it I thought, 'That is the most beautiful thing!' That it had survived all this time is so touching. It touched me and I just filed it away in my head for future reference."

The past influences the present on many levels in The Game of Thirty. While antiquities contribute greatly to the plot and its ambiance, Kotzwinkle cast back to more recent times to create his updated hard boiled detective, Jimmy McShane. Using the conventions of 1930s detective fiction as an armature, he retrofitted them for the '90s.

"(Sam) Spade, especially the Humphery Bogart one, is just the most vicious person imaginable! " he frowned. "That unrelieved viciousness just seemed to me to be inappropriate. For the attitudes of his times he's perfect, but for now..? We are in desperate need of the masculine being feminized in order to find compassion, in order to lay down our aggression, our machismo. That's what this whole thing between Henderson and McShane is about, the altering of machismo that's so necessary for psychic equilibrium of the individual and the culture. . . It seems to me that it's about time our heroes had a 'shadow', this balance in their personality. . . I am paying homage to those (conventions) but if you just stay inside homage you won't be able to really be part of your own time and able to add your own aesthetic."

Kotzwinkle's aesthetic, together with his inspired storytelling, has successfully pulled readers into such alternate realities as The Exile, Fan Man, Trouble In Bugland, and Fata Morgana, as well as garnering the World Fantasy Award for Doctor Rat and the National Magazine Award for Fiction for "Elephant Bangs Train".

"My position is that the book is the 'real world' because there's nothing more real than a very highly refined mental landscape," Kotzwinkle maintains. "The most real thing we have are our mental experiences. They are, in the end, where we suffer and where we rejoice. Certainly my goal is to live more and more in 'mental landscapes' than in the gross landscape. That's not to diminish it but there are these different centers of perception in ourselves and for me, the things I see in my mind are based on models that are very old. Every street lamp that I see is based on all the street lamps of all the cities in the world. When I'm looking at that I'm looking at the archetypal lamp which is brighter mentally than the lamp you see in Bar Harbor. It just does more for your spirit."

Kotzwinkle's research style is concrete enough, however. While creating McShane, for instance, he accompanied private investigator Tim Jameson on several different criminal investigations. He also did an extensive study on sexual slavery. As bizarre as some of the plot twists are in The Game of Thirty, they are factual.

"I was astounded that a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle couldn't believe that such things were going on in America, and that I'd made it up," he told me, speaking of one of the book's sexual slavery incidents. "And moreover, that a woman could possibly be behind something like this! Yet my research . . . about sexual slavery showed that women are frequently behind it, but so are men. Two reporters objected . . . felt that I had somehow done this out of some grotesque design. I was astounded by it! . . . .I wasn't doing it to exploit the reader; I was just trying to make a complete picture of what goes on."

A mystery fan himself, Kotzwinkle shared a few theories on the appeal of the genre. "We like mysteries because life is a mystery and we can't solve it. Reading a mystery gives us the opportunity for a little space to feel we've solved the mystery of our lives. Jung says we like mysteries because it answers the criminal in us. It gives us the opportunity to say 'There's evil. It's in this book, not in me!' like a safety valve and it may be that, too."