BIOGRAPHY Nobody gets through the doorway of American success with more than two-dimensions on them. You're supposed to be one thing and one thing only. So you're "a horror writer," or "a comedian," or "a sexpot" or "a right-wing pundit." Or some exaggerated comic book version of one particular aspect of a personality. I'm supposed to be "a thriller writer." At least that's what it says when you try to find my books in the stores and libraries. The problem is I don't think of myself that way. To me, "a thriller writer" conjures up an image of some smooth silver-haired old pro in a turtleneck grinding out book after book about a noble granite-chinned series character with a 75-foot yacht and a penchant for tanned blondes and dry martinis. Whatever. That's not me. I drive an old Volvo. I only write one book every two or three years. I don't even think I own a turtleneck and most of my characters don't get out in the sun long enough to get a tan. What I'm trying to write are social novels. Yes, they have a suspense element as well. But the crux of them, the real animating impulse, goes back to growing up in New York City and seeing things on the street that I couldn't wait to tell my friends about. I remember Ed Sullivan giving me a wary half-smile on Madison Avenue one sunny afternoon, both wanting and not wanting to be recognized. I remember "The Bird Man" of 77th Street standing in front of the halfway house near my school, squawking at my teachers on their lunch break. I remember a little girl pulling up the front of her dress outside Gimbel's one day just before her Irish nanny nudged her and said "Stop it. You're as bad as your mother." Anyway, I started writing little street scenes when I was in school and found perhaps I had a small knack for it. With the encouragement of a teacher named Charles Stone, I started working on my writing the way other kids worked on hitting a fastball or learning to play the violin. I did it every day, for a few hours, after the rest of my homework was done. In the meantime, I was absorbing influences as fast as I could. Not just books either—though I devoured Philip Roth, Raymond Chandler, and Salinger—but film and music as well. As a grown-up looking kid in the seventies, I could get into R-rated movies on my own, so I discovered Scorsese, Altman, and all the great European directors. And with the money I earned as a Good Humor man, I could sometimes get into CBGBs without getting carded. I packed all those influences with me when I went off to Wesleyan University in Connecticut (nice people, not too many bodegas), where a story I wrote managed to win the Paul Horgan prize for best short fiction by a student. That was enough to keep me going through the next few years as it dawned me that I probably couldn't sustain a long-term career as a novelist just writing about myself. I began turning toward journalism, because I knew it would give me access to other people's lives while earning a living wage. Besides, some of my favorite authors (Graham Greene, Hemingway, John O'Hara) had once been newspaper men. I was lucky enough to get a job as an assistant to Pete Hamill, who not only taught me something about the craft of writing but also how to treat people with a degree of respect and common decency. Then I moved on to internships, reporting for the Newark Star-Ledger in New Jersey and the Norwich Bulletin in Connecticut. After I graduated, I landed at New York magazine in the 1980s, where I eventually started reporting on crime, politics, and other forms of socially abhorrent behavior. I wrote about the crack kingpin "Fat Cat" Nichols, the Russian mafia, the downtown skinhead scene, and the early rappers Run-DMC. But in truth, I was always hunting for a subject for my first novel. One day, I found it at the offices of the New York Department of Probation. I realize that the job split every man and woman who did it right down the middle, making them compassionate social workers half the time and hard-ass cops the other half. Maybe I could build an interesting character along that fault line. And what made it even better were the client lists. Each PO was responsible for a virtual social microcosm—everybody from crack dealers and psycho killers to Wall Street inside traders and middle-class kleptomaniacs was on probation. I realized there was a potential Big Canvas New York City novel ready to burst out of almost every cubicle in that office. But I knew I had to commit myself to get the story down right. So I saved up some money, asked for a leave from the magazine, and took my best shot at writing a novel—which turned out to be my first book, Slow Motion Riot. Interestingly, the book was published in Europe first, where critics seemed to get the social commentary behind the story. In America, though, it was initially sniffed at by some of the so-called respectable people. It was the hard-core mystery readers and booksellers who saved me by taking me a little more seriously. In 1992, the Mystery Writers of America gave Slow Motion Riot an Edgar for best first novel. Perhaps it would have been smart to have settled down and started writing a suspense series at that point. But it's hard for me to justify spending two to three years writing a novel unless there's a real challenge and chance to grow. So I decided to get out of New York for a while and write about another place and a very different kind of character. From 1991 to 1993, I must have ridden the gamblers' bus to Atlantic City three or four dozen times, researching my next book, Casino Moon. It was meant to be sort of a quick down-and-dirty pulp novel about a young man trying to get away from his mobbed-up family. So naturally, it ended up taking four years and dozens of painstaking rewrites to get it in shape. It was published in 1994 and again perhaps better received in Europe than in America. By the time it came out, though, I was focusing on New York again. I got interested in writing about a homeless man, but not for polemical reasons. I just thought it would be interesting to write about society from the point of view of someone who was outside of it. Then I realized it would give the book real balance and tension if I also wrote from the point-of-view of somebody who was deeply invested in society. So I started dividing my time, hanging out some days with a friend of mine who was a successful lawyer and other days with a friend who happened to be homeless guy. Then I created fictional versions of these people and set them on a collision course and the result was The Intruder, which sold about four times as much as the previous two titles combined. Because of the way that book and its follow-up Man of the Hour were marketed, some people may have gotten the impression that I'm trying to write relentless straight-ahead page-turners. In which case, they may have been disappointed at times. Sure, there's suspense in the stories, but what I'm mainly interested in is trying to build a sense of character and place through detail. There are jokes, digressions, tiny changes in perception. To me, the moment when a book comes alive is not when I discover who killed Roger Ackroyd. It's when I find out the homicide detective is a part-time funeral director who once embalmed his old partner or when I see the suburban pot dealer standing on the front lawn in his Lakers jersey, making neat little piles with his Craftsman leaf blower, which I did in my one and only suburban novel, The Last Good Day, which was published in 2003. Of course, if you want to skip all that crap and just get to the murders, you should probably look elsewhere for satisfaction. On the other hand, if you don't mind a little scar tissue in your fiction, a little moral complication and ambiguity, maybe even a few less-than-perfectly-happy endings, well, then I just might be your man. All that said, though, my new novel Slipping Into Darkness, is probably as close as I'm ever going to get to writing a straightforward mystery suspense novel—which is probably not all that close. Yes, it has two murders, connected in an ineffable, seemingly inexplicable way, and there is a resolution of sorts at the end. But nobody is going to confuse this with Encyclopedia Brown. It's a character piece. It's about a detective and the young man he put away for twenty years, and the effect it has on both of their lives when facts begin to emerge indicating the wrong man was convicted. And in its own way, it's also a social novel. The detective has a degenerative eye disease, which is literally causing his world to narrow down while on the other hand, the ex-con is trying to deal with the world opening before him faster than he can handle it. For my research, I spent roughly half my time with some of the finest homicide detectives in New York City and the other half with men who'd spent twenty years or more in state prisons. I found there were sharp-eyed, acute social observers on both sides of the great divide. When I asked one ex-con what was the greatest change he'd noticed in two decades away from the outside world, he looked at me and simply said: "White people can dance now." It's moments like that remind me how lucky I am to be able to do this for a living and how fortunate I've been in living in this city. New York has rewarded me with the daily inspiration for most of my life, as well as doling out the occasional bruising lesson. It's frustrated me, enthralled me, and more than once reinvented right at that point where I thought I couldn't take it anymore. After all these years, I still find myself on streets I've never before, seeing things done in public that I never thought possible. And of course, it's the place where I met my wife, the lovely and startling Peg Tyre (a very fine novelist and reporter in her own right) and raised our two children. I'm sure I'll continue to write about other places and it's even possible I might someday live elsewhere, but the city is so deeply imprinted on me that if they ever cut me open they'll probably find the route of my veins resembles a map of the IRT subway system. But, of course, I hope they won't cut me open. Author photo credit: Don Kim