A literary addict

There are wiseguy genes in TC Boyle's DNA. The one-time failed musician turned hipster writer is a prolific author and consummate performer. His one-liners are sufficiently sardonic to drop with startling effect into conversation, even when it's on the phone with an audience of one.

'My standard joke is that I'm writing faster because you generally produce more prior to death than after,' he drawls. But not only is he productive, he also comes up with the goods.

'Why produce scrappy ones?' he deadpans with his New York twang, referring to his reputation as an excellent teller of tales.

His latest, The Inner Circle, immerses the reader in levels of sexual and emotional obsession via the story of John Milk.

This fictional, naive young man works as an assistant to sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, whose findings about human sexuality led to the publication of the first bestsellers about sex.

As with all Boyle's works, he came to it through an unanswered question which emerged while writing his last work. 'My previous novel, Drop City, was set in the 1970s and I examined the notion of free love and the sexism of the hippies. It got me thinking where that came from. '

With Bill Condon's biopic starring Liam Neeson due for release in Britain on March 4, Kinsey and his work, first published in 1948's Sexual Behavior In The Human Male, will be of renewed interest. 'Kinsey fascinates me because he's an obsessive-compulsive, just as I am,' confesses Boyle.

'He was great in that he liberated rather puritanical America, he normalized sexual behaviours such as homosexuality and masturbation. He believed that sex is good and that anything goes between consenting adults. And I believe that, too.'

But Boyle's evocation of the Kinsey era explores psychological submission and dominance as much as sexual liberation. 'I'm not interested in writing a biography,' he says. 'It's more interesting to see what it must have been like under the thumb of such an autocratic man.'

The Inner Circle is Boyle's debut first-person narrative, where 'the reader is always a step ahead and can see where Milk's being foolish'. And he doesn't shy away from presenting the sinister aspects of a man he sees mainly as a force for good.