Pennyblackmusic, a U.K. music site, has just posted a 3,000-word Q&A with David Rothman. Here’s the start.

Can Bob Dylan fit into a Washington novel? Actually yes, if you go by ‘The Solomon Scandals’ (Twilight Times Books).

Investigative reporter Jon Stone loves to swap ‘Dylan albums and pulpy old spy novels’ with a friend.

Stone’s fictional memoirs—inspired by such realities as a U.S. senator’s hidden investment in a CIA-occupied building—are in fact Dylan-sardonic.

In ‘It’s All Good’, Bob Dylan sings, ‘Big politicians telling lies/Restaurant kitchen, all full of flies… Buildings are crumbling in the neighborhood/But there’s nothing to worry about, ’cause it’s all good.’

Sure enough, in journalist David Rothman’s new D.C. novel, the Vulture’s Point high-rise on the Potomac River may crumble with more than a thousand IRS and CIA workers inside. Jon Stone’s editor is cronies with the builder Jon wants to expose…

Pigeonholing people by Washington subway etiquette, a drunk PR man in the book talks of ‘right-steppers, left-steppers and parkers’ on the Metro escalators. Right-steppers are laidback worker drones–they let others pass. Parkers, their bosses, drive into town without even bothering with the Metro. Left-steppers are the ambitious people in a hurry to change the status quo. Stone is a left-stepper.

[Read the whole interview.]