From the sublime to the ridiculous, this collection of expanded interviews culled from the pages of Crime Time magazine covers most bases. Someone like the grizzled Edward Bunker, for example, would command our attention with or without his marvellous back catalogue. A career crim before he started writing, he saw and learned more on the streets and in gaol than self-proclaimed queen of the scene Patricia Cornwall will ever understand, no matter how many autopsy rooms or FBI body farms she haunts. "(Thieves) are not emotionally or psychologically equipped to work," concludes Bunker. "(They) are the extrapolation of laissez-faire capitalism."

It's a pity, but Cornwall's name - and that of half-arsed West End Jackie Collins crime-clone Martina Cole - will shift more copies of this collection than either Bunker or the brilliant Walter Mosley, even though the men here are, almost uniformly, the more interesting. All power to Duncan for finding the space for Gwen Butler and Elizabeth George, even if the results are too conversational, their thoughts frustratingly predicated on an in-depth knowledge of the work. That said, the variation in interview styles is attractive, even if they occasionally lack sufficient editorial backbone not just to record but to challenge.

Of course, you end up having to make space for Cornwall, an author who, like John Grisham, shifts dead-head plotting, witless prose and insufferable arrogance with fundamentalist zeal. She is, after all, the number one selling genre novelist in the world (something she actually tells us, lest we forget). Truly America's P.D. James.

Self-styled Demon Dog James Ellroy gives a good account of himself, based around the recent and rather fine semi-autobiography, My Dark Places. We learn, for example, that Bobby Kennedy "was a great man, perhaps the chief crime fighter of the Twentieth Century in America", while Tarantino is "a fatuous child". Those who fail to read him "don't have the discipline or the intelligence," he tells Duncan. "The bottom line is this: if you don't like my books you can kiss my ass." Surprisingly he comes out as anti-gun. Cornwall, inevitably, is rabidly pro.

Some entries are distinctly underwhelming - stand-up the much overrated Michael Dibdin - while others are clearly on a promo-jag. Andrew Klavan talks almost as much 'common-sense' as Cornwall, while it's down to the likes of James Sallis and Lawrence Block to quietly steal the show. Paul Buck, on the other hand, chats merrily on Roeg and Cammell, Cronenberg, Marianne Faithful, Genesis P. Orridge and the appalling torch singer Melinda Miel, and almost disguises the fact that the vast majority of his outpourings languish suspiciously unpublished.

As Crime Time goes from strength to strength, so the inevitable second volume will hopefully find space for the likes of Ruth Rendell, Elmore Leonard, Daniel Woodrell, Carl Hiaasen, Robert Campbell, Jonathan Kellerman, Barry Gifford and Kenneth Abel. For now, at least, this is a solid, worthy, occasionally fascinating first showing.