When asked if he considered himself a feminist, Greg Rucka said, "I heard a great term... femininja. I'm not a feminazi, I'm a femininja."

A white Jewish boy who "always wanted to be more Neopolitan than vanilla", Rucka hardly looks the part of a ninja. But he is sharp, savvy, funny and energetic as hell. He is the author of three Atticus Kodiak novels, Keeper, Finder and the upcoming Smoker. Keeper and Finder are available from Bantam Books. Smoker is slated for release in November 1998.

Rucka says "[T]he loose plot is that Atticus has to protect a man who is a key witness in a personal injury lawsuit against DTS Industries, which is a fictional company.... This guy can really do damage. Look at all the tobacco litigation going on right now. There's this whole deal with these guys who went before Congress, and they lied.... Congress and the Senate are looking over these documents that said, 'We were targeting thirteen to fifteen year olds' -- guys that three or four years ago stood up in front of the Senate and said 'Nicotine is added for flavor" and 'We do not target a youth market'.

"These are the same guys that are now saying 'We want to cap the damages, we want to pay out X billion dollars a year.' The numbers sound enormous, they sound like real restitution. But they're literally getting away with murder."

Rucka has been a smoker himself since "when I was about sixteen. But I did it wrong. I was the... [takes a mouthful of smoke and spits it back out] variety. Then my freshman year at college... I stepped out for a cigarette... [and] The neuron finally fired... it just clobbered me. I had to go sprawl in the bathroom, croaking 'What just happened to me? Oh, that was great! I need to do that again!'

"Smokers, you know, it defines us. It's like cat people or dog, coffee or tea, smoking or non."

But there are some kinds of hypocrite Rucka doesn't want to be, and "Smoker comes out... and I will have quit by then. I am willing to call myself a feminist, but still insist on my right to at least offer to open the door, or pull out the chair, and that's a hypocrisy. But I can't write a book about the evils of the tobacco industry and not recognize at the same time that not only am I a smoker, I'm an addict.

"[I]n tobacco class action and personal injury.... The defense is always that you cannot prove that the cigarettes caused the cancer. Their definition of proof really comes down to, you have to show us that that drag on our brand of cigarette did this and this, which caused this thing to happen, and caused cancer in this way, and so on. Basically what they're saying is you have to show us the filter in that guy's lung. And even then they're going to say 'You know, it's not designed to be taken internally. You smoke it.'"

Not content with plain print, Rucka is working on a comic miniseries, titled Whiteout. "It's coming from Oni Press in Portland Oregon," he said. "They recently came out with a Frank Miller, Simon Bisley and Angus McKie book called Bad Boy.

"Whiteout has certain moral problems, because I'm aware of all the things I'm getting wrong. There's a limit to how realistic one can be if one wants to set a murder mystery in Antarctica. So I'm taking liberties -- but I'm painfully aware every time I take a liberty! [laugh] Eventually I'll rework Whiteout into a novel.

"I'm on a mailing list from the South Pole, people sending out little status reports, and people talk about it. Every now and then they talk about having encountered Antarctica in literature. I know if I write this book -- and maybe this is ego -- I will not be surprised if the book comes out and a year later, and there's be some mail that 'I just read this book. This guy got so many things wrong!'"

Realism is something Rucka takes very seriously. The man does his research, and it shows. He said, "I talk a lot to Jerry Hennelly, of Executive Security and Protection International, in Boston. Jerry's dynamite. I'm not going to give him all the credit, because a lot of it's me, and a lot of it's common sense.

"A lot of it is reading, and I'm shameless when it comes to making phone calls. Newspapers, books, and the Internet is becoming increasingly useful, though I don't use it to its fullest extent.

"I was talking to this DEA agent recently who was talking about how in most law enforcement situations, that you go completely back to training. One, the gun is completely empty. They never go "Bang bang", they empty it. Two, most of the injuries are to the gun, the gun hand, or the gun arm. Even though these people are trained to put the shots in the center of the mass, subconsciously, what's happening is 'Evil thing, make it go away.'

"Apparently the number one thought of law enforcement agents, when they have to shoot, is 'I'm going to have so much paperwork!" Not 'I'm going to die' -- it's that adrenaline dump, 'Did I leave the iron on?' You don't think anything about the situation. Jerry has a phrase, 'Who invented liquid soap and why?' Shooting! 'I wonder if pizza rolls really taste like pizza?'"

He also takes his characters very seriously. In fact, if you want to know more about them, you can go to his web site and read more about Atticus, Bridgett, Erika, Scott, Natalie and Dale.

"I like Erika," he said. "Yet another of my female characters that I want to do right by. In Smoker, she's gotten her head pretty much screwed back on. Now her concern is -- having come from one broken family, she's in another broken family.

"Bridgett doesn't really appear in Smoker. She's felt throughout the book, a presence on every action Atticus takes. But Erika's the only person who has direct contact with her, and you never see it, because it's all narrated by Atticus. Erika spends the book shuttling between the two of them.... [B]y book four or book five she'll be starting college. She's going to be somebody who's going to be there for Atticus."

Finder is also highly character driven. "Finder suddenly became this book about what happens when this relationship breaks down, so much that two people hate each other, and they just don't care about what's happening to this life between the two of them. That was like the engine attaching itself to the chassis of the book. [...] I don't know why, maybe because I had a great childhood, it's like 'What would have happened if my parents had been evil?' [laugh]"

"Wyatt just grew by leaps and bounds. It was a question of 'How bitter can we make him?' He bought into the glory of being a soldier, and did all those glorious soldier things, that soldiers don't talk about, like having a lot of sex, and he gets hit with AIDS, at a time when it was a gay man's disease. You're queer, you're not in the Army.

"In the very first draft, I'd wanted to make him a good officer. In the end result in Finder, Moore becomes the good example of what a good soldier is. He believes not only in his job, but in the honor and the duty of it."

Making his characters believable is an even harder task in his new project, Chasing the Dragon. His synopsis has just been approved, but "It's told first person by Bridgett. It's in three parts, and part one and part three are narrated first person from Bridgett, and part two is narrated by Atticus.

"I've got a list in my notebook that's now four pages, that I'm going to be typing up and putting on the office wall when I work on this book. They're points that go from things to remember about the writing, notes like 'end all the chapters strong, the last line should sting', notes on dialogue, got a note here saying 'use your profanity' and then I've got 'Bridgett is not Atticus, this is the big one, keep their voices distinct, no one should mistake the narrators. Always find the emotion in the scene, remember that Bridie is very and always passionate, she will respond to everything, she has an opinion about everything. Tell the truth, don't self-censor, and don't flinch, trust the people around you to call you on your missteps, and trust your gut, but show respect. Bridgett has great respect for those who have earned it, and so should you.'

"I'm not sure what Bridgett's first person voice is like. Until I get her voice, and until I'm sure of her voice, I'm going to be second-guessing myself, and I know I'm going to do it anyway. The things that the book is going to deal with, heroin addiction, that whole criminal world, and then Bridgett enters into it. Puts herself in a very vulnerable position. This is a book that is going to deal with how women are treated and victimized in society, and again, maybe there's great presumption in a male writer even going there.

"I want to be really fair to her. But at the same time, I've got to be fair to the story. If she is going to be searched for wearing a wire by the bad guy drug dealers somewhere in the book, it is honest to say that the bad guy drug dealers are going to take that opportunity to cop a feel. If I don't include that, I'm cheating, but how Bridgett describes that happening is very important, how she feels about that, how she reacts.

"This all does go back to my considering myself a feminist. I love women, and that's a grotesque kind of broad statement, and I suppose it means nothing. But I'm a guy, and I know what that's like. I don't know what it's like to be a woman."

But it's that sort of challenge that drew him to the Investigator form. "[I]t's anybody's voice. Anybody can be that narrator, any member of society, gay, straight, green, yellow, Catholic, Muslin, animist. All of these people are viable narrators. Most literature has been dominated by white males who have been very presumptive. We're in an era now where there's really an emerging, it's getting bigger and bigger, and stronger and stronger, female voice, that's presenting literature.

"Regardless of the relative merit of the works, which have to be approached individually -- whether or not you like Sue Grafton, whether or not you like Sara Paretsky, it's vital to acknowledge what's happening, these voices are finally coming out and finally being heard. In the same way that Walter Mosley is so important to the genre, and the same way that Gary Phillips is so important, we're now getting a strong African-American male voices that are addressing the social injustices they're seeing, and at the same time, it's presenting this genre-style mystery."

Rucka has some personal reasons for taking his feminine characterizations so seriously. "My senior year at Vassar, one of the best classes I took at school was a seminar taught by James Weedin, a very inspired and brilliant professor. We were all upperclassmen. We would meet in a room in one of the towers of the library... tracking a long line of literature.

"It was one of the few classes where I was religious about the reading. It was a seminar, which meant that it was really discussion.... On the way out of class, we were headed down the stairs and the professor was leaving, and I was one of the last people because I wanted to talk to him, and this young woman, whose name I do not know... turned to me and said 'Can I talk to you?'

"[S]he basically dropped a ton of bricks on me. She said 'You really are horrible in this class. Whenever a woman tries to speak, you interrupt her, you shout her down, you ignore what's being said. I'm personally insulted.'

"I was so taken aback by this. [..] I took what she was saying at face value. I granted her, immediately, 'My God, I must have been doing this. You wouldn't say this to me unless you felt it was of merit.' That hurt me profoundly, and very deeply. Even at that point, I'd worked very hard. My chauvinism is the chauvinism of a guy who likes to open doors and pull out seats. I have never consciously thought that what somebody was saying didn't have merit because of their gender or their colour or their religion.

"The end result of this was that I was so afraid to go back to the class, because I felt that I couldn't interact in the discussion. I think I went back to two more classes, and this was only halfway through the semester. The joy of being able to discuss this stuff had been taken from me.

"Professor Weedin had a very strict attendance policy. Two absences, and then you lost a full grade for every other absence. By the end of the semester I had accumulated to negative F. I was supposed to graduate, and I needed that course to graduate. He wasn't going to pass me, on basis of attendance. So I told him.

"He was gay, and very unselfconscious about it. He had reached a point and a place, and it was clear in some of what he had said, his struggle with being a gay man in society. I came to him and explained -- and I was wrecked, because I really wanted to graduate. He said a couple of things.

"The first thing he said was 'Well, you shouldn't have run away.' Number two was 'You should have told me sooner, I didn't see that behavior.' But the third thing he said was something that I really remember.

"He said, 'Unfortunately, because of damage that has been done, for example, by this male paradigm world, now that we're at a point where we're allowing these other voices, and it really is allowing, because they still haven't been granted the right to speak out... the second you acknowledge that sexual harassment is a problem, there are people who are going to start calling harassment, even when it isn't. But you cannot then say "Well, we never should have acknowledged sexual harassment was a problem."'

"It matters a great deal to me that women like what I write. I tend to think of myself as writing far more to a female readership than a male one. Though at this point, almost all of the letters I've gotten have been from guys."

Rucka is married, and "my wife tells a story about how, when we were getting married, she was in her wedding gown, and needing a cigarette. [laugh] My wife has two addictions. I have two addictions too. My two addictions right now are coffee and nicotine. My wife's are Coca-Cola and nicotine. There's a shot of her in her beautiful wedding gown with the veil back, with a Camel light and a can of Coke. We had to send it to the Coca-Cola bottling company. It was one of those culturally defining moments."

In his spare time, such as he has any, he enjoys roleplaying games. "I do a lot of World of Darkness, so I love the World of Darkness parodying they're doing [in Knights of the Dinner Table]. Where they play the Vampire stuff and they've got the widow's peaks and the fangs and the cloaks. It's really scary when you read it and you see yourself.

"I'm a selfish gamer. I think it's fallout of being character driven. When you're character driven, you want time. You want to say 'Okay, I'm going to go home, and I'm going to turn on the stereo,' and the GM moans 'Why are you telling me this?'

"I'll say 'I'm sorry,' but I'm not really sorry, I'm being true to my character, and nyah, nuts to you.

"The whole thing of adversarial GMs, which is why I love the Weird Pete and Sara bit [in KotD], is you have these GMs that want to make you jump through these hoops, and Sara digs in and says 'Mmmmmmake me. Go for it. Let's see your best shot.'"