Listen to Bill's appearance on the Bantam Dell podcast. (For more information on the Bantam Dell podcast series or to hear other authors, visit the Bantam Dell podcast site.)

  Podcast:  William Landay on The Strangler  (MP3 - 12MB)

Other Q&A's with Bill are available at Bookreporter.com and at the British site The Book Depository.

Podcast Transcript

This is Bill Landay, author of The Strangler and Mission Flats. I’d like to talk to you today about my new book, which is called The Strangler. There is more information about the book available on the web, at www.WilliamLanday.com.

1. A Misleading Title/The Historical Moment

I suppose I should begin by admitting, right off, that the title of the book — The Strangler — is, if not quite misleading, at least an incomplete description of what the book really is about.

The original working title of the novel — which I kind of liked — was The Year of the Strangler. My editors — both here and in the UK — instantly rejected that title. “Box office poison! … It’ll never sell!” I’m sure they were right about that. The Year of the Strangler does sound a little dry.

But it captures the setting of the novel, which is the crime-world of Boston in the early to mid 1960’s — not just the Strangler case, but also the mob underworld, and the intersection of crime with the legitimate worlds of business and government.

It’s important to remember that Boston in the 1950’s and 60’s was a very different city. This was a historical moment when the Boston that we know today, the modern city of Boston, was really being born.

When you come to Boston today, what you see is a prosperous, flourishing, lovely city. A city with flaws, of course — some very big flaws. But a generally healthy, vibrant place.

It’s hard to imagine that only a short time ago Boston was really dying. It was going the way of a lot of other old-line industrial cities like Newark or Detroit, places that had been abandoned by the industries that once nourished them and gave them a reason to exist.

In Boston those industries were textiles and shoe manufacturing and shipping — in the 20th century all of them left, for various reasons, and Boston went into a very long, very steep decline.

By the 1950s and early 1960s, Boston was a pretty rundown, gritty place: the economy was dying … people were leaving for other, more prosperous cities … nobody even dreamed of building or investing in this place.

And then a very few powerful men set out to reverse all that, by clearing slums and putting up ambitious new buildings. And in the early 1960s — with a Bostonian in the White House, of course — you begin to see this so-called New Boston taking shape.

And it is at just this moment — as Boston is finally beginning to feel a little hope, a little confidence about itself — that the Strangler case comes along.

2. A Boston Book

So this is very much a Boston book.

And I confess, it’s a daunting thing to write crime novels set in this city. There have been so many great crime- and detective-novelists whose stories are set here: George V. Higgins and of course Robert Parker, and Dennis Lehane and lots of others — who I’m sure I’m offending by failing to mention their names.

I’m not sure what it is about this city that generates so many books. Probably it has more to do with having too many writers rather than too many criminals. But, on the other hand …we do seem to have an excess of criminals here, too.

And at the same moment that all of these other things are going on — the Strangler murders, the city being revived and rebuilt — at this same moment in the city’s underworld there is a war going on.

It was called the Irish Gang War. The fact was, it wasn’t strictly Irish, and the result was not the victory of an Irish gang at all. It was the beginning of the emergence of Boston’s first real Italian crime boss. Up until then, Irish gangs had really dominated in what was then — and still is — an overwhelmingly Irish city. But now a new boss began to emerge, a North End bookmaker named Gerry Angiulo.

3. The Daley Brothers

So that’s the historical context of the novel.

But this is all background to the story. It’s just the setting. We don’t go to novels for the setting. We read for story. No one reads Gone With the Wind to get a history of the Civil War; they read it for Scarlett O’Hara. They read it to see: What happened next?

The story in The Strangler is about three brothers from an Irish Catholic family in Dorchester, in Boston.

But anyone who has brothers — or who has even known brothers — will recognize these guys.

One of the things I really wanted to explore in this book was how families interact — how brothers interact among themselves, and with their parents — all the competition and shifting alliances, the tension and the bonds between these three men — men who really are boys in mens’ bodies. Because I don’t know if we ever completely outgrow the roles assigned to us in our families as children. We’ve all had that experience of going home for a holiday and sitting around the table with our family and feeling all those old habits and roles and anxieties come streaming right back.

In fact I find it a little funny that people come to this novel for the Big Stories about the Boston Strangler and the mob and whatnot — when the small, interior drama of this one family is every bit as dramatic and wrenching to watch. In some ways, the family story is the real story here.

Anyway, the three brothers are Joe Daley, Michael Daley, and the little brother Ricky.

Ricky in some ways is the most interesting. he is a professional thief and a smart-ass, a former high-school athlete and now a jazz aficionado — sort of the guy we’d all like to be. But the Strangler case hits Ricky hardest, and so this guy who has always been so good at everything — is really driven back to rely on his two older brothers.

Michael, the middle brother, sort of a tormented soul. When the story opens, Michael is precisely in the position of Hamlet in scene 1: He is watching a banquet at which his father’s murderer — at least the man he suspects is his father’s murderer — is sitting down in the father’s chair, usurping his place at the table and in the Daley family. And this makes Michael crazy.

And much of what follows, a lot of the action that drives the Daley brothers into various corners of the Boston underworld, much of that is driven by Michael’s desire for revenge and to eliminate this intruder from his family — this snake in the garden. And to solve the mystery of his father’s murder (the Daleys’ father was a cop).

The third brother is the oldest, Joe. He is a cop. A good-natured lug, not too bright. Loves to gamble, loves to chase women.

People sometimes ask: Where do your ideas come from, where do your stories come from? And in this case, it was just the ordinary experience of being a member of a family and of knowing several families — several sets of brothers — who seemed to re-enact these same roles over and over again: the confident, conservative older brother; the middle brother, who feels a little lost, and keeps to himself; the youngest, who is a star in his own way — a little prince — but often a little rebellious or mischievous.

Now I know what you’re thinking: Where do you fall in the birth order? And of course I caution everyone not to read the author’s personal biography into his work. But I am a middle son. I have an older brother and a younger sister. Make of that what you will.

4. On Being a Genre Writer

In putting together this podcast, one of the interesting things I was asked is: Are you a genre writer? Are you a crime writer? A mystery writer?

I suppose I am, in the obvious sense that I write novels about crime. But I’m uncomfortable with the label. I don’t read many crime or mystery novels. More important, I don’t think my novels are just about crime.

There is a difference between a novel about crime and a crime novel. Obviously, a lot of great novelists have written about crime and criminals — novelists whom no one would ever label “crime writers”: Dostoyevsky and Dickens and on and on. Shakespeare, too, for that matter — his plays are full of murder and murderers.

And they all wrote about crime for precisely the same reason that genre novelists do: the criminal life offers so many rich dramatic situations that everybody finds resonant in some way.

The best formulation I’ve heard of this point is: Bad men do what good men dream. (I wish I could claim credit for that line, but it’s not mine.)

Anyway — by now it’s a cliché for a crime writer to protest at being called a crime writer, as if it were some kind of slur.

So, having said all that, in one sense I do think of myself as a genre writer and proudly so. I mean, in the sense that I take seriously the writer’s obligation to entertain the reader. To grab him by the lapels and hold him there, keep him turning those pages until he finishes the damn book.

I think sometimes we confuse a “quiet” story — that is, a story in which not much actually happens — with a literary story. But there is no reason that an exciting story can’t also be a richly told one; and there’s no guarantee that an uneventful novel will be especially “literary,” in the sense that it will be told with elegance or insight … or whatever measure of artistic merit you prefer — whatever “literary” means to you.

For younger readers, especially — and I consider myself one; I’m 43, I was raised in a warm bath of TV and movies and now the internet — I think it’s important to take into account the sensibility of readers who have these choices — to engage the reader’s interest constantly — to make novel-reading as vivid an experience as watching the tube or playing a video game.

Obviously novels have to compete with all these new media. And if they don’t accept that challenge, if they don’t strive to entertain in a way that is every bit as compelling, then the readership will dwindle.

So maybe popular writing or genre writing is owed a little more respect — because this is the area that competes head-to-head with these relatively new electronic forms. This is the kind of book that proudly calls itself “entertainment.”

Of course what I try to create is intelligent entertainment — the so-called “literary thriller” — if such a thing exists. Probably I just want to have it both ways. But hey, that’s my right. I’m the writer.

5. On the writing process

My writing process is very orderly, very organized. I spend a lot of time researching and planning and outlining before I ever sit down to write. It’s important to me to know where I’m going, because when I’m writing a scene I want to stay completely inside that scene, inside that moment. I don’t want other thoughts to intrude. You know: Which clue should the hero find? Does this contradict something I said before? Will I need such-and-such a detail a hundred pages down the road?

When I’m writing, I want to concentrate on each sentence. I take pride in writing good prose, in being a good sentence writer — and I find you can’t really do that if half of your brain is given over to thinking about the plot, the big picture.

Your characters, after all, don’t think that way. They don’t know what will happen in the next scene, and the next and the next. They have to live in the present, like everyone else.

I’ve heard a lot of writers say, “Oh, I just sit down and wing it. I figure it out as I go along.”

I can’t imagine doing that!

I hate reading a book where I get the sense that I’m not in sure hands, that the writer is just feeling his way along, that he doesn’t know exactly where he is going.

Obviously a sense of unpredictability and spontaneity is important. Real life is unpredictable and spontaneous, after all; so you can’t be too scripted. The story must never feel scripted.

But at the same time I like a sense of narrative compression — a sense that not one word is wasted or unnecessary. I want my readers to know right from page one that the voice behind this story, the hand on the steering wheel, is a sure one. So they can be confident enough in the storytelling to stop thinking and enjoy the ride, to let the story carry them along.

6. “The story writes itself”

Another thing I hear some writers say is “The story writes itself! The characters surprise me, I have no control over them!” As if the writer is just taking notes on a story taking place on a movie screen in front of his desk!

I have rarely felt that. To me, writing is hard work — every damn sentence of it. I am constantly aware of the fabricated, artificial nature of my characters.

How could a writer not be? He made them up!

To me, that sense of the characters springing to life in some organic way — of characters standing up and beginning to move of their own will — that is for the reader.

In fact, the whole game is to create that sense in the reader: that these are real people, ones that you should know and care for and learn from — and miss when they’re gone, when the book is over.

But as the writer, I’m never fooled by my own work.

The chef always knows the recipe — it’s hard for a chef to enjoy a meal he has cooked in the same way anyone else would.

7. On Credentials and Authenticity

I’d like to say a word about credentials and authenticity.

Before I started writing, I was an assistant D.A. for many years. In the publicity for my books, of course the publisher likes to mention that — as if that credential somehow ensures that the book will be especially authentic.

But it has always seemed to me that there is an overemphasis on credentials.

What matters is the work itself. Either it’s credible or it’s not, and the fact that it was written by a cop or a criminal or a prosecutor or what-have-you is no guarantee of anything.

I once heard John le Carré — who, by the way, was a spy for a shorter period than I was a prosecutor — say that he would rather be credible than authentic.

And I think that’s the key.

When I first started writing, I set out to make my books as authentic as possible — as true to life, as accurate. And of course the problem was that real life is messy and slow and often dull — it desperately needs the author’s hand to shape it into some dramatic form. And I very quickly realized that there was a reason why authors bent the truth — even authors who knew what the truth actually was. You’re telling a story, not writing a newspaper account of an event.

I don’t mean to say that some professional involvement in crime or in law enforcement is not useful. Obviously it is.

But it’s no guarantee of anything. In fact I suspect that, the more you hear an author bragging that he was a cop or a prosecutor or whatever … well, look out. The work should speak for itself.

After all, Mario Puzo wrote the definitive gangster novel and he was never in the Mob. But his book was so convincing, the real mobsters started acting like the fictional ones Puzo made up. Suddenly real gangsters started imitating the ones Puzo had made up — they started talking about “going to the mattresses” and “an offer he can’t refuse” and all the rest. That’s the only credential Puzo ever needed.