Brooklyn Book Festival OnePage
Week of 08-Jun-2012
My one page discusses how the decision to write crime fiction based in New York City changed my books. My first three books, set in Portland, Oregon, featured plots that could only take place in a location that often feels more like a big room than a small city. But New York City is the one place in America where you can be surrounded by people and have complete anonymity. The stories that can be told from that perspective are endless.
I started my first novel thirteen years ago, after I followed a boy from Portland, Oregon to Buffalo. It didn’t take long to realize that I loved Portland too much and the boy too little for me for that move to work. To make the days pass, I started a book set in my former hometown, featuring a character who worked my former job at the Portland prosecutor’s office. Those hours at the keyboard, writing about Samantha Kincaid, were my trips home.
Six years later, both the boy and Buffalo were in my rearview mirror, but Samantha Kincaid was still with me -- and on the pages of three published novels. I had made another move, this time to New York City to teach at Hofstra Law School. I had met another boy, this one on Match.com. I had a weird book idea about a serial killer who tracked his victims on an online dating service. (I’m such a romantic.) The story didn’t work as a Samantha Kincaid novel, because it didn’t work in Portland. You meet a so-called stranger in Portland, and inevitably that person turns out to be your co-worker’s brother or your hairdresser’s neighbor. Portland's one of those places that feels more like a big room than a small city.
The story only worked if the stranger could remain anonymous. Unaccountable. Untraceable. By then, I had been living in Manhattan for four years. I knew the story would work as New York crime fiction. (The book, called Dead Connection, is dedicated to my now-husband, the same boy I found on the computer.) I realize now that my Portland books all took advantage of the small landscape there. One character happens to have worked a few years back with another, and had a one-night stand with that former co-worker's cousin? Yep, totally plausible in Portland.
In New York, however, I can't have characters coincidentally bumping into everyone they know on the street. I can, however, tap into that familiar sense of feeling completely alone on a crowded six-train. Or the confusion of wandering a couple of blocks too far from a Chelsea club, only to find oneself all alone by the West Side Highway. Turns out that despite those plummeting crime stats, New York can still be scary.
Just as plots have their proper places, so do characters. Harry Bosch and Elvis Cole belong in Los Angeles. James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux needs the Louisiana bayou. Karin Slaughter may have made up Heartsdale, Georgia, but Lena Adams and Sara Linton fit right in. The fact that Lee Child's Jack Reacher can still be Reacher anywhere is precisely what makes him unique.
In my most recent book, Long Gone, Alice Humphrey gets what appears to be a dream job managing a tiny new gallery in the Meatpacking District. Her life finally seems on track until she shows up to work one morning to find the gallery completely gone — stripped vacant as if it had never been there. The man who hired her is dead on the bare floor. Suddenly she realizes that everything she thought she knew was a lie. She cannot find the true owner of the business. She cannot prove that the artist she represented ever really existed. That kind of story only works if it's completely believable that Alice lived her day-to-day life around people she had no real connections with. That's a true New York story, and Alice — from a family of privilege and celebrity, but struggling to make her own way — is a uniquely New York woman.
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I started my first novel thirteen years ago, after I followed a boy from Portland, Oregon to Buffalo. It didn’t take long to realize that I loved Portland too much and the boy too little for me for that move to work. To make the days pass, I started a book set in my former hometown, featuring a character who worked my former job at the Portland prosecutor’s office. Those hours at the keyboard, writing about Samantha Kincaid, were my trips home.
Six years later, both the boy and Buffalo were in my rearview mirror, but Samantha Kincaid was still with me -- and on the pages of three published novels. I had made another move, this time to New York City to teach at Hofstra Law School. I had met another boy, this one on Match.com. I had a weird book idea about a serial killer who tracked his victims on an online dating service. (I’m such a romantic.) The story didn’t work as a Samantha Kincaid novel, because it didn’t work in Portland. You meet a so-called stranger in Portland, and inevitably that person turns out to be your co-worker’s brother or your hairdresser’s neighbor. Portland's one of those places that feels more like a big room than a small city.
The story only worked if the stranger could remain anonymous. Unaccountable. Untraceable. By then, I had been living in Manhattan for four years. I knew the story would work as New York crime fiction. (The book, called Dead Connection, is dedicated to my now-husband, the same boy I found on the computer.) I realize now that my Portland books all took advantage of the small landscape there. One character happens to have worked a few years back with another, and had a one-night stand with that former co-worker's cousin? Yep, totally plausible in Portland.
In New York, however, I can't have characters coincidentally bumping into everyone they know on the street. I can, however, tap into that familiar sense of feeling completely alone on a crowded six-train. Or the confusion of wandering a couple of blocks too far from a Chelsea club, only to find oneself all alone by the West Side Highway. Turns out that despite those plummeting crime stats, New York can still be scary.
Just as plots have their proper places, so do characters. Harry Bosch and Elvis Cole belong in Los Angeles. James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux needs the Louisiana bayou. Karin Slaughter may have made up Heartsdale, Georgia, but Lena Adams and Sara Linton fit right in. The fact that Lee Child's Jack Reacher can still be Reacher anywhere is precisely what makes him unique.
In my most recent book, Long Gone, Alice Humphrey gets what appears to be a dream job managing a tiny new gallery in the Meatpacking District. Her life finally seems on track until she shows up to work one morning to find the gallery completely gone — stripped vacant as if it had never been there. The man who hired her is dead on the bare floor. Suddenly she realizes that everything she thought she knew was a lie. She cannot find the true owner of the business. She cannot prove that the artist she represented ever really existed. That kind of story only works if it's completely believable that Alice lived her day-to-day life around people she had no real connections with. That's a true New York story, and Alice — from a family of privilege and celebrity, but struggling to make her own way — is a uniquely New York woman.
