Happy New Year, everybody! 2007 was a blast, and I have no doubt 2008 will be even better.
At Hard Case Crime, we're kicking off the year as we usually do, by publishing a book by Lawrence Block. This one's called A DIET OF TREACLE, and though Block wrote it in 1961 it has never been published under his real name (or under this title, or at all for more than 40 years). It's the story of a good girl from an uptown neighborhood who gets bored and takes the long subway ride down to Greenwich Village, where she falls under the spell of the drug-using, free-love-practicing counterculture, specifically a troubled young war veteran, his sociopathic roommate, and their beatnik friends. What happens to those characters will keep you glued to the pages...
...but even more than the men and women in the book, the real star of the book is New York City. Block lived in the Village during the sixties, and in this book he paints a fascinating portrait of New York at that time. It's more that just a backdrop for the story -- it's a time capsule, a bit of New York's colorful history preserved forever. (So much so that this weekend the New York Post quoted a scene from the book in their popular "Page Six" gossip column, to illustrate a point about Washington Square Park.)
Thinking about this, it occurred to me that one of the things I love most in my favorite crime novels is the portrait they paint of a particular time and place -- and in particular (since I'm a lifelong New Yorker) the portrait so many of them paint of New York City.
Block, of course, sets most of his books in New York -- the Matt Scudder books explore city's darker corners while the Bernie Rhodenbarr "Burglar" books take readers on a comic tour of city highspots. But Block's hardly the only author to do this. If you want an insider's perspective of commuting around the New York area, read Donald Westlake's books -- his characters always seem to be driving around the city and he lavishes care upon details such as which way traffic on individual streets goes and what driving directions will get you from Point A to Point B the fastest. Cornell Woolrich of "Rear Window" fame paints a highly stylized, romantic but grim picture of the city in many of his books and stories, and it comes off as a haunted, perilous nightscape of shadows and broken dreams. Ed McBain's 87th Precinct novels are nominally set in a city called "Isola," but it's obviously just New York renamed. Pete Hamill's crime novels, like his mainstream novels, are love letters to the city he's most associated with. Paul Auster first achieved fame with his "New York Trilogy," a post modern series of crime novels in which lots questions are posed but might few are answered. Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer walks the streets of New York, as does Matt Cordell in Ed McBain's THE GUTTER AND THE GRAVE, and the characters in Ken Bruen and Jason Starr's BUST and SLIDE. And of course my own detective, John Blake, is a New Yorker through and through, though the city doesn't treat him especially well in LITTLE GIRL LOST and SONGS OF INNOCENCE.
What is it about New York that makes it the city of choice for so much crime fiction? (Once upon a time it might have been because of the amount of crime in the city -- but these days it's pretty safe...and even in the past, it's not like there was a shortage of other dangerous cities in America.)
And which portraits of New York in crime fiction are your favorites?
Have you ever read a crime novel set in New York and then tried to hunt down the locations in the city where the book took place? (I have. I'll tell you about that in a future message.)
And is there any part of the city you wish you'd seen depicted in a crime novel but just haven't? (I grew up visiting the Hungarian neighborhood in the east 80s, but I'd never seen any crime novel mention it. That's why in my last book I made the gangsters Hungarians...)
So: The floor is now open. The topic: New York as a setting for, and as depicted in, crime fiction, past and present.
I'm curious to see what you think.
--Charles
