It’s possible that anyone who walks into Once Upon a Crime, a mystery bookstore in Minneapolis, is ushered right back to a secret vault. But I’d like to believe it was Matt Burgess’s crime-writer clout that made it happen for me.

Burgess—whose second novel, Uncle Janice, is due out this month from Doubleday—knows his way to the hidden room by heart. He leads me down a musty, nondescript hallway, the kind you might find in a dormitory basement. This passage takes us to a trove of classic mysteries, pulps, and rare first editions. It looks like the library of a macabre collector, and Burgess seems to feel both at home and excited to be here.

If the best of today’s crime writers have anything to say about it, Burgess’s books will soon be on these shelves. Carl Hiaasen has compared Burgess to Richard Price and Elmore Leonard. Price himself has described Burgess’s latest book as “one of those books you wish would never end.” Scott Smith has called it “a triumph.”

In addition to racking up crime-novel street cred, Burgess also has one foot solidly in the literary world. Dogfight: A Love Story (Doubleday, 2010), his debut, was a Barnes & Noble Discover pick. Asked about crime vs. literary writing, Burgess is quick to point out the way crime already suffuses the so-called literary world.

“I just finished the new Denis Johnson book,” he says. “On the back of the book, it said something like, ‘All of Johnson’s novels have crimes in them, but we don’t usually think of him as a crime writer.’ But he is one! I was even thinking about Ann Patchett the other day. She’s amazing. Is Bel Canto a crime novel?”

Burgess is a native of Jackson Heights, Queens (where all of his work is set), and he has the accent to prove it. After graduating from Dartmouth, he moved to Minneapolis in 2006 to attend the M.F.A. program at the University of Minnesota, where he studied with Charles Baxter and Julie Schumacher.

Burgess’s accent, combined with his passion for his topic, makes everything he says convincing. He could have persuaded me that Jane Austen was a crime writer by the end of the conversation. Yet, even though he’s always loved the genre, Burgess says he doesn’t think about it much when he’s actually writing. He’s more interested in jobs than mysteries.

Uncle Janice is about an undercover narcotics officer (an “uncle”) trying to make detective by setting up busts on the streets of Queens; the title character is a young woman in a male-dominated profession. The idea for the book occurred to Burgess when he asked an old friend from high school who does this work what he was most afraid of at his job. “Getting screwed over by my bosses,” he said.

“I was expecting him to say getting shot at, or being trapped in a dealer’s apartment!” Burgess says. “Instead he was stressed out by administrative pressures. And I was like: ‘Oh my God, everyone can identify with that!’ Later I thought, ‘Maybe I can write a detective novel that is actually an office novel.’ I was crazy interested in that.”

And indeed, some of the most memorable moments in Uncle Janice take place not on desolate street corners but at the Rumpus (the characters’ nickname for the Queens narcotics division). Here, bored uncles gossip relentlessly, raid the vending machines, and argue about episodes of the telenovelas they watch on their down time.

The dialogue in these sections is often laugh-out-loud funny, rich with the patina of real talk. Research was involved—specifically, a trip to the actual Queens narcotics office. When I ask Burgess how he managed to find a place full of undercovers and confidential informants, he says,“I Googled it!” But he does add, “It didn’t show up. So, I checked the Yellow Pages, and there it was.”

With that knowledge, Burgess hopped on a bus and took a ride out to near the airport. “I walked in the door, and it looks like this boring office building with paper all over the windows so no one can see in. When I went in, I saw the vending machine and handmade signs for, you know, Tommy’s fund-raiser next Thursday. Then I walked up the stairs, and I immediately see a guy coming down, counting a huge roll of cash—who knows what that’s about? Then I just opened the door and said, ‘Hi, I’m writing a book about you guys. Can I talk to someone?’”

He met some undercovers that day, and he was later introduced to others through his friend. On the whole, he found them to be a social bunch, and amazing storytellers. This wasn’t a surprise to Burgess. “Their job is basically to convince strangers to commit a felony on their behalf,” he explains. “It’s also a job that leads to a lot of stress-related drinking and double and triple lives.” In other words: good fodder for fiction.

There’s a detail that didn’t find its way into the book about the undercover Christmas party, for example. As Burgess tell it, “They have to have three different celebrations: one for wives, one for girlfriends, and one for back-up girlfriends.”

Having left the haven of the mystery shop for a burger place nearby, Burgess and I are interrupted, at this point, by a server who comes to take our order. Minneapolis is a burger town, and the two of us spend the next 10 minutes debating who has the best in town (Burgess: the Nook. “All you can taste is meat and fire.” Me: the Blue Door. “It’s all about the Bangkok Burger”). Burgess tells me to order the Heart Attack Burger. He texts his wife to ask permission to order one himself. While he waits for the answer, I ask him about his childhood. And, amazingly, I get not one but two potential origin stories for his interest in crime fiction. Both include his father, who was also a fan of the genre.

“My dad took me to see Goodfellas when I was a kid,” Burgess says. “He told my mom we were going to see Fantasia.”

While waiting in line for tickets at the theater, an older woman standing in front of them turned to tell Burgess’s father that the film was not appropriate for children. His dad told her to “mind your own business.”

What Burgess saw that day in the theater clearly made an impression. So did the fact that his father invented a fake company when Burgess was a boy. The company was called Analytic Systems, and the intent was to declare bankruptcy and collect money from the government.

“He got mail with the company name on it. I would answer the phone and say, ‘Analytic Systems,’ ” Burgess says. “I don’t know if any of it was real. He might have just been messing with me. But it was fun. I was into that!”

This same sense of fun and oddity is what makes Uncle Janice more than just a typical cop novel. Sure there are the tense scenes, requisite in a book about undercover cops, but there is also a playfulness and absurdity that keeps readers on their toes. There’s a cop named Eddie Murphy, for example, who claims to be the movie star of the same name. Nobody tries to disprove him. And Janice, our protagonist, isn’t above using the I Ching to predict whether or not she’ll make her quota of buys that month.

There’s a sense, in all of Burgess’s work, of a writer having a good time on the page—not to suggest that his writing life is easy. He has his doubts, often about which direction to go next. He’s not sure, at the end of the day, if he always wants to be the crime guy.

“I’m not committing to this genre for the rest of my life,” he says toward the end of our time together. “It’s just what I naturally gravitate towards right now. That’s enough.”

For readers who like beautifully written books with a racing pulse, it seems like more than enough. But the thought prompts a rare silence from Burgess. “Uh oh,” he says, “I’m getting ponderous.”

Fortunately, a text message comes in just then. Burgess reads the message and grins. “Yes! I’m getting the Heart Attack Burger!”

Peter Bognanni is the author of The House of Tomorrow (Putnam).