"Joseph Kanon" (born 1946) is an American author, best known for thriller and spy novels set in the period immediately after World War II.

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Perhaps history and distance and time enable us to face things that nobody particularly wanted to look at at the time, but it's very important that all of this be known. How did this happen?

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Venice was always one step removed from what was going on. If you were in Turin or in Milan or one of the industrial centers, you would have had a much more active political constituency. Venice essentially lived for itself.

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One of the things that's always interested me, from the first book on, is unintended consequences.

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Having written about a place that was utterly destroyed, it struck me as interesting to look at a place that had come through the war almost literally unscathed, ... I thought, 'And yet and yet and yet ... Does any place [really] come out unscathed?' .

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This must be I guess the most extreme form of unintended consequence, but it seemed to me a great metaphor for things that happen all the time.

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