After leaving behind the comforts and the shackles of a prestigious law firm, a restless attorney makes ends meet in mid-2000s Brooklyn by picking up odd jobs from a colorful assortment of clients. When a mysterious woman named Anna Reddick turns up at his apartment with ten thousand dollars in cash and asks him to track down her missing husband Newton, an antiquarian bookseller who she believes has been pilfering rare true crime volumes from her collection, he trusts it will be a quick and easy case. But when the real Anna Reddick—a magnetic but unpredictable literary prodigy—lands on his doorstep with a few bones to pick, he finds himself out of his depth, drawn into a series of deceptions involving Joseph Conrad novels, unscrupulous booksellers, aspiring flâneurs, and seedy real estate developers.
Your novel is a love letter to New York City during the aughts of this century . . . from Williamsburg to the Village to the Upper West Side, the bridges, subways, and architecture that make up the city. NYC is a character in many ways. How did you develop such a clear love and respect for the city, and how did you communicate that on the page?
I’ve spent most of my adult life in New York. Even if I hadn’t, I probably would have felt that way about it from books and movies. We all have an idea of it as a character, right, for better or worse, hero or villain? I moved here while I was in law school. I knew some people with an open bedroom in a duplex near the Brooklyn Museum. The rent broke down to four hundred a month so long as we provided upkeep on a two-story organ built into the apartment. How can you beat a thing like that? It was a couple hundred blocks from campus and I got in the habit of jumping off the subway and wandering the streets when I should have been in class. In my mind, the city was mapped out as a series of bookstores, movie theaters, good food, and erratic subway connections.
As far as getting it onto the page, it wasn’t too hard to conceive, I’ve always loved flâneur novels. Get the characters walking, breathing air, talking to people, wearing out shoes. That melds perfectly with the tradition of private eye fiction, which this turned out to be, an accidental detective novel in the middle of a city full of arcane laws and a million people ignoring them in their own distinctive ways. That’s the town of my dreams—a city of well-read scofflaws.
Your semi-anonymous protagonist is an attorney. You were a lawyer before becoming editor-in-chief at CrimeReads. Why did you give up the law for writing and crime fiction?
Giving up the law always seemed to me the only decent thing to do with it. I practiced at a corporate firm in New York. I was a litigator. For a while it appeared to me a pretty genteel if inherently cruel profession and I always knew that I would quit it as soon as I could, before it worked its way too far under my skin. I did meet a lot of interesting people during that time. Strange clients with midnight crises, judges, prosecutors, opponents. A lot of gruff litigators schooled in the old New York lingo of chits and power brokering. It wasn’t a bad way to spend your formative years, but at some point you had to get the hell out. For me, books were the way out. I didn’t have any intention of writing about lawyers or the bizarre mysteries they sometimes get mixed up in, but when the time came that was the kind of story I wanted to read and to tell.
How has reading and reviewing hundreds of mysteries and thrillers as an editor at CrimeReads. informed you on writing a crime fiction novel?
It’s given me a deep appreciation for mystery fiction as a means of telling vivid, passionate, provocative stories of human striving and misunderstanding, a form passed down through the centuries, built around the dark art of suspense, entertainment and respect for your readers. The crime fiction world today is full of new voices telling timeless stories. I wanted to be a part of it.
An Honest Living is set in the early 2000s, at the tail end of the analog era and before Internet culture fully took over. Why did you want to write about this time period?
There was a mystery to everyday life during that time, some of which was snuffed out by the full onset of the digital era. I used to sit around bars and living rooms forever debating questions that could be answered by a google search. My pockets were lined with calling cards and I spent a good portion of every evening trying to get ahold of people I knew to find out where we were going or what time a movie was playing. Your roommates disappeared. Your bodega shuttered without explanation. The 2 train ran on the 4 line and it was up to you resolve all these little puzzles. That was the kind of mystery I wanted: full of odd, bewildering, lonely moments.
An Honest Living is a tip of the hat to noir mysteries and mentions “worlds colliding” 1950s films like Touch of Evil, Roman Holiday, Rear Window and, especially, from a later era, Chinatown. In what ways do the plot, atmosphere, and characters mirror Chinatown?
I can’t be the only one who thinks of Touch of Evil and Roman Holiday as a nice double feature, right? Or Rear Window as a guide to life? Chinatown was a movie I got obsessed with while my wife was first pregnant. I would fall asleep watching it, and in the morning we’d talk through various vindictive lawsuits the characters might have brought against one another. Lawyers get up to strange activities left to their own devices with a major life event looming on the horizon.
So, Chinatown worked its way into my life. I started seeing it everywhere, which I think is a little how Robert Towne might have felt when he was writing the thing, and certainly how Jake Gittes felt living through it. The fiction seeped into my New York existence and colored the way I saw friends and neighbors, new building developments and old bastards who mispronounced my name. I started writing a novel where Chinatown, the movie, has an outsize influence and Chinatown, the ambiguous unknown metaphor, prevails over ordinary logic.
What was your process for developing the noir feel the novel has? Did any crime fiction books from another era influence you? If so, which ones?
Ross Macdonald and the restrained, bighearted poetry of the Lew Archer novels were my touchstones. I was reading a lot of Margaret Millar at the time, too. Nobody writes a perplexing, insidious phone call like Margaret Millar. (She happened to be married to Ross Macdonald, aka Kenneth Millar, and imagining what that marriage might have been like no doubt influenced the direction of the ruthless literary relationships I was writing about, too.) God, I love classic noir. And from later eras, Donald Westlake, Lawrence Block, Elmore Leonard, with all those schemers and operators talking a mile a minute, mixed up in one another’s lives. Then returning again to Walter Mosley, Megan Abbott, Roberto Bolaño, Santiago Gamboa, Idra Novey, Laura van den Berg, all these writers capturing an uncanny, unmoored feeling at the heart of great noir.
Is there a second crime fiction novel in your future? If so, what can you tell us about it?
I’m at work on a sequel to An Honest Living . It’s another off-kilter murder mystery in the world of arts and letters, similarly obsessed with classic movies and noir atmospherics, but this time the characters go to Miami. It must be my homage to Elmore Leonard and another beloved lost city.