Photograph by Andrew French

Over 15 years, S.J. Rozan moved from the practice of architecture to growing success as a crime novelist. She’s published eight books in her award-winning series featuring private investigators Lydia Chin and Bill Smith. Her last, Winter and Night, won the Shamus Award and the crime-novelist’s Oscar, the Edgar, for best novel. With the publication of her latest and much more tragic book, Absent Friends, she has been able at last to do what all novelists want to do: leave her “day job” at Stein White Nelligan Architects, in Manhattan, to write full-time.

Q: Why did you leave the practice of architecture?

I loved what I was doing, but I loved writing fiction more. My office was very supportive of my writing all along, especially Carl Stein. They never demanded that I choose one over the other.

You ran a large, long-running project for the firm. Shepard Hall, at the City University of New York in Harlem [background above].

It’s a huge building covered in what looks like Oxford Cambridge limestone, but which is really terra-cotta that has been failing. The legislature has been funding the gradual replacement of the ornament with GFRC [glass fiber reinforced concrete]. I have been on the job since 1994.

Tell us about your earlier books.

The series features a pair of private investigators. Lydia Chin is a 28-year-old Chinese-American who lives with her mother. Bill is the quintessential white-guy private eye. I alternate their voices book by book. Her installments are Chinese-culture related, and his are much darker—they touch on the darker side of American culture, really.

Have you derived characters or situations from practice?

The entire situation of Concourse came from a client who worked for a nonprofit. He once listed all the scams he knew of or had heard of. I had never thought about how many ways there are to steal from a nonprofit. Characters? I discovered in construction meetings that everyone dresses their character. The way people revealed themselves was really eye-opening. I used that.

Why do few architects appear in your books?

Drama is hard to come by in what architects do. However important, it’s not like law and medicine, where you have to do something now that affects life and death.

Tell us about your new book.

Absent Friends is a crime novel, but it’s not a mystery. I set it in New York right after 9/11. There’s a crime at the heart and an unexplained death in the beginning, and the theme is what the nature of those two things are.

I was struck that you use firefighters as characters to touch on what heroism means.

It is risky, because firefighters are so lionized. If you suggest that they may have feet of clay, people get very very upset. I wanted to write about average less-than-perfect people acting heroic every day—that’s what firefighters do. That’s impressive to me.

How did you use 9/11 in your book?

One of the things I wanted to do was to record what it was like in New York right then. It was not like a city at war, not really like a city after a natural disaster. It was completely new. The sense of dislocation and fear and resolve and kindheartedness all needed to be put on paper. And that’s what I tried to do in content and in the form, which is disjointed and complex. Because that’s how every day was. It was how we felt.