Boston
Sep. 8, 2009
Inside “The Strangler”: The New Boston, 1963
One of the frustrations in writing a historical novel like The Strangler is that so much of your research never sees the light of day. When the book is done, all those index cards so lovingly compiled get wrapped up in a rubber band and tossed into a drawer, and the reader is left to [...]
Tags: Inside "The Strangler" · The Strangler
Aug. 31, 2009
Boston’s Wonderful/Terrible City Hall
Ask a Bostonian to name the ugliest building in the city, and nine out of ten will say “City Hall.” (The tenth will say something rude to you. If he does neither of these things, he is no Bostonian.) But architects love the building as much as everyone else hates it, and in this case [...]
Tags: architecture
Aug. 27, 2009
Ten Views of the Combat Zone
Since it looks like this blog is going to be a permanent thing, I’m going to try to gather up some of my other writing here. I don’t do a lot of writing outside my novels, and what I do is mostly for book publicity. But some of it is worth a second look, I [...]
Tags: Combat Zone
Aug. 2, 2009
Kate’s Mystery Books closes (for now)
Kate’s Mystery Books in Cambridge closed on Saturday. Kate Mattes held an event with an army of volunteers who helped pack the place up. I stopped by and chatted briefly with Kate, who told me she plans to spend the next year or so getting her enormous inventory properly cataloged online, as well as digitizing [...]
Tags: bookselling · Cambridge
Jul. 20, 2009
Walter Cronkite and “The Strangler”
In the deluge of clips since Walter Cronkite died a few days ago, the same video seems to come up over and over, like a greatest hits collection: Cronkite announces the JFK and Martin Luther King assassinations, the moon landing, the call to withdraw from Vietnam. I’d like to call your attention to a more [...]
Tags: The Strangler · video
Jul. 17, 2009
The Definitive Boston Crime Novel: “The Friends of Eddie Coyle”
“The Friends of Eddie Coyle” is my favorite crime novel, a lean, gritty story set in a Boston that has long since vanished.
Jul. 16, 2009
Best Boston Movie Ever: “The Friends of Eddie Coyle”
A forgotten classic from 1973 is the best movie about Boston ever.
Tags: featured posts · George V. Higgins · Robert Mitchum · The Friends of Eddie Coyle · video
Jul. 10, 2009
Why the Strangler?
A reader suggests that I use this blog to share a little about how my books develop from initial concept to final draft. I’ll try, but readers should understand that a strange sort of apathy descends as soon as a project is finished. When I am writing, I am obsessed with the book being drafted, [...]
Tags: The Strangler
Jul. 6, 2009
A Random Walk in Boston
I don’t get into the city much anymore. I have young kids and I work at home and I never seem to have the time. But tonight I met a good friend for a drink, and we wound up making three stops in town, all unplanned, chosen at the spur of the moment. All three [...]
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