Q&A with MISSION FLATS author William Landay

Note: This is a Q&A I did in the fall of 2003, when MISSION FLATS was first published. I have not updated it because it reflects my thinking at the time the book was written. Like anyone else, my opinions change over time, and I might answer these questions differently today. Certainly I would have written the book differently. (There is an old story about John O’Hara taking his published books off the shelf and editing them. I know the feeling. It is strange to find your words frozen with all their imperfections, uncorrectable.) In any case, here I am at the time my first novel came out.

Q. What was your goal in writing MISSION FLATS?

A. “The primary goal was to write a crime novel that was both entertaining and smart. That is, to bring together the entertaining qualities of a thriller — action, suspense, humor, a twisty plot, life-or-death stakes — with the intelligence of a so-called ‘literary’ novel — fully realized flesh-and-blood characters, a backdrop of serious issues, and a prose style more elegant than the usual rat-a-tat-tat of hardboiled descriptive sentences (‘He put his hat on the table. There was a note. He picked it up. It was from …’). Is it possible to strike that balance, to write a thriller as smart as it is fun? Graham Greene didn’t think so. He famously divided his work into ‘entertainments’ and serious novels. But it’s been done. Among crime novelists, Scott Turow certainly pulled it off in PRESUMED INNOCENT.”

Q. How did your experience as an assistant D.A. inform MISSION FLATS?

A. “Obviously it gave me a stockpile of stories to draw on. I remember sitting in a courtroom one hot summer morning during my first few weeks on the job. A homeless man was brought in who, according to local cop lore, ‘had no face.’ This poor guy had tried to kill himself by firing a bullet into the roof of his mouth, but he’d flinched, leaving his face mutilated. He was a character too big, too dramatic for real life, and he ultimately found his way into MISSION FLATS as the jawless hermit Maurice Oulette. So there are direct connections like that. But there are subtler things too. I think my years as a prosecutor gave me a fluency in the language of cops and courts, which I hope readers hear in MISSION FLATS. Also, I saw firsthand how difficult it can be to do the right thing in our system, or even to know what the right thing is. Writing MISSION FLATS was a way for me to think about some of those moral issues. The choices that the young cop, Ben Truman, faces in the book are precisely the type that cops and lawyers face every day. In the end, they all boil down to one question: What should you do when what is right and what is conventional are not the same thing?”

Q. Parts of MISSION FLATS have a realistic, documentary tone. How much of the book is fact and how much is fiction?

A. “I think it’s important to keep in mind that realist fiction is, after all, still fiction. It is realism, not reality. So the short answer is: MISSION FLATS is fiction. It says so right on the cover. The relevant question is not ‘Is it true?’ but ‘Is it convincing?’ That’s what any realist author owes his readers — verisimilitude, not facts. So let’s leave it this way: Yes, I was a prosecuting attorney for a few years, and yes, there are a lot of factually accurate details in MISSION FLATS. But where the line between fact and fiction is, I’ll never tell. And you wouldn’t want to know, really. Suffice it to say, it all could have happened, and in that sense — the only sense that matters — it’s all true.”

Q. Why is MISSION FLATS set in fictional places rather than real ones?

A. “Because it’s easier. That’s the honest answer. It allowed me to imagine the story freely, unconstrained by reality. If a writer chooses to set his story in a real place, he is obligated to describe the place accurately, I think. He cannot, say, have a character mail a letter at the corner of State Street and Congress Street if there is not a mail box there. So the writer who wants to have his character mail that letter has to stop and wonder, ‘Is there a mailbox at the corner of State and Congress?’ Maybe the writer will even go there to have a look, just to be sure … and by that time he will have forgotten what he was writing about in the first place. The great advantage of dreaming up your own settings is that you can put a mailbox, or anything else, wherever you damn well please. That allows you to focus on the important thing, the story (what is in that letter? why did he write it?). Of course it is possible for a writer to bend the facts a little, to shrug and say, ‘It doesn’t matter if there’s actually a mailbox at the corner of State and Congress. I can put one there and call it fiction.’ To me, that’s cheating. More important, it carries the risk that some sharp-eyed readers will spot the error and be distracted by it. Those readers will lose confidence in the writer — and lose interest in the book.”

Q. Who are some of the authors that you admire and that have influenced your writing?

A. “This is always the first question a writer is asked, and I hate it! I am so fickle in my reading, my bookshelf is always such a hodgepodge. Also, the books I read tend to be very different from the ones I write. I do not read a lot of suspense, mystery, or crime novels. Remember, too, that a working writer has to be careful about what he reads because inevitably, unconsciously or not so unconsciously, he winds up mimicking the style of any book he admires. So I tend to read the same few writers over and over again. Updike, Roth, Ian McEwan, and lots of good younger writers. Spies like Le Carré and Graham Greene, and Maugham. F. Scott Fitzgerald for his romanticism, Hemingway for fiber. For fun I like Stephen King. That’s a hopelessly random list, and a hopelessly incomplete one. I suppose the best answer is, when you see me, ask what’s on my night table.”