I’ve basically deconstructed crime novels: I’ve taken aspects of crime novels, rewritten them, taken them apart. People used to ask me, “What do you write?”... I just don’t know. But you have come up with a word for what you do. ‘Noir’ kind of fits it.

His setting is a New Zealand you won't see in Lord of the Rings: a city suffering from the same urban malaise as glitzier metropolises on other continents. Our protagonist, Samuel Usher, is a drug addict who supports himself by recovering data from damaged computers. He falls in with a couple of drifters who occupy themselves with recondite mathematics. But the favoured activity for all three involves powders on polished surfaces. When Jules dies in mysterious circumstances, Usher sets off to find out why. Thematically, Taylor's concerns are twofold: the infinite extent of digitised culture; and the limitless flood of narcotics (not to mention the global industry behind it). "Electric" looks at what happens when chaos rises up to warp these apparently unassailable worlds.

His style owes a lot to Raymond Chandler and lesser apostles of noir, but at the same time it's very much his own. His prose is spare but with a strong undercurrent of emotion; "cool" certainly is the word for him, but there's a good deal of heat beneath.

"Taylor is a minimalist whose tortured characters populate a world where silence and night form a disconsolate backdrop for their musings and meanderings across a landscape of bleak, concrete cities... (He has) a profound empathy for the losers in our midst and an acute sense of place and the bizarre in everyday life."

• Pack of Lies (1994), Novel, (Hazard Press (NZ); Mana Verlag (Germany))
• Heaven (1994), Novel, (David Ling (NZ))
• The Man Who Wasn't Feeling Himself (1995), Short Story Collection, (David Ling (NZ))
• Shirker (2000), Novel, (Canongate Books (UK & Commonwealth); Christian Bourgois (France); DTV (Germany); Neri Pozza (Italy); Walker Books (USA)
• Electric (2003), Novel, (Jonathan Cape (UK); Random House (UK & Commonwealth); Christian Bourgois (France))
• Departure Lounge (2006), Novel, (Jonathan Cape, (UK); Random House (UK & Commonwealth); Christian Bourgois (France); Europa Editions (USA); Edizione EO (Italy))
• The Church of John Coltrane (2009), novel, (Christian Bourgois, (France))

• Chad Taylor biography at the New Zealand Book Council
• IMDB listing for Chad Taylor
• Chad Taylor official author site
• Chad Taylor database at the New Zealand Literature File
• Essays and articles written by Chad Taylor
• Guardian article on Chad Taylor
• Washington Post review of "Departure Lounge"
• Primastoria.com interview, January 2009
• Quote Unquote magazine interview, 2005