William Landay

Official website of the author

My Other Writing

Jacob Begins

Recently I updated this website to a more modern design. That required a review (still ongoing) of a lot of old blog posts whose format was not compatible with the new code. In the course of rummaging around in all that old material (the blog dates to May 2009), I came across this little article that I published on Esquire magazine’s website in 2007. It was part of a series called “The Last Line.” I had completely forgotten the piece. In it, I discuss the novel that, years later, would become Defending Jacob. Interesting how much I knew early on and also how little. Novel writing is a journey; here I am taking the first steps.

Fathers and Sons. (And Murder.)

Our question: “What is the last sentence you wrote and why?” Master of suspense William Landay answers and still manages to keep us guessing. (Published: Jul 31, 2007)

“I don’t know what I expected to find, blood stains or some such, but there was none of that.”

Why he wrote the last line: This line is from a first draft of a novel I’m working on. The story is told by Andy Lewis, a father approaching middle age, an ordinary suburban guy whose son is accused of that most extraordinary crime, murder. The son does not deny the murder but claims self-defense. In this scene, Andy, who happens to be a prosecutor, has wandered to the scene of the murder, alone, ostensibly to look for evidence.

That he finds none is important to me. It announces that this is not going to be another CSI-style mystery. The story will not turn on the arcana of forensic science. (“Aha! A hair follicle!”) I will tell you almost at the outset what happened, what this kid did, and you will read on anyway, to find out why he did it.

With this book I am moving away from the traditional plot-driven sort of mystery-suspense and toward a more psychological, interior sort of story. My first two novels are dissimilar in a lot of ways, but they are alike in one critical sense: both are intricate, tightly plotted mysteries. They are suspenseful in the way traditional mysteries are, which is to say, it matters “who dun it.” At least, it matters what exactly was done.

In my new book, which has no title yet, the suspense is not so much about who did what — that much is clear in the first few pages — but why he did it and how the crime affects everyone involved.

This story is a mystery, then, in the way all great stories are mysteries. The greatest mystery of all is other people, and understanding other people — empathizing, imagining what it like to be someone else — is the essential power of novels. I’d go so far as to say that recreating the interior, conscious experience of another person is the thing that novels do better than any other dramatic form.

I happen to have two sons, and I love them to no end. But they are individuals, with their own minds and their own wills. I can’t hope to know what it is really like to be them, what they think and feel. Like any fathers and sons, we are mysteries to one another. I think that’s a universal feeling. As fathers or sons, or mothers or daughters, we’ve all asked at some time or other, “What was he thinking?” This story simply imagines that question in an extreme situation: What if someone close to you, someone you loved and thought you knew, did something truly horrifying and unfathomable?

Into the Woods

Cold Spring Park

A blog post I did for Random House over on Tumblr:

Into the Woods

Does it help to see where a novel is set? Would you understand Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County any better if you actually visited his Mississippi? Is it even possible to understand Dickens if you have no idea what Victorian London looked like?

I’m not sure there is a good answer. Sometimes the vision in the your mind’s eye is more vivid than any mere reality. Real life can be so disappointing. Remember when, a few months ago, the mansion said to have inspired Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was to be leveled? To me, the most compelling part of that story was how disappointing the mansion actually was — how unworthy of Jay Gatsby. Even the famous lawn, now turned weedy, was disappointing. Clearly the lawn in the news photos never “started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens — finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run.” Of course, no lawn ever did that — and maybe that’s the point. Great fiction always outruns reality.

Still, people who read my novel Defending Jacob always ask me which details from the book are real. We want to know, we readers, just where the border between reality and fiction lies. In the novel, a teenage boy is murdered in Cold Spring Park, in Newton, Massachusetts. As it happens, both the park and the town are very real. I live in Newton and jog through Cold Spring Park all the time, as does the Barber family of my novel.

So, for the curious out there, here is a photo of the park, which I took just a couple of days ago, on May 10 — very near the date of the murder in the book (April 12), so this is roughly what the park would have looked like on the day of the crime, lush and green and muddy with the spring melt. If you’re curious, more pictures of Cold Spring Park are here.

The post includes this photo of Cold Spring Park, the setting of the murder in Defending Jacob.

Boston’s Wonderful/Terrible City Hall

Boston 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 the architects are right: City Hall is a treasure. It is one of the very few truly significant and daring buildings this conservative city has from the entire twentieth century.

What City Hall needs is not tearing down, as the mayor has suggested, but fixing up. It is badly maintained, badly lit, badly furnished. Worst of all, it is surrounded by a barren, windswept, forbidding plaza that is an unqualified disaster.

But reimagine City Hall Plaza as a green space thick with trees and walking paths, a mini Central Park or Arboretum. Or reimagine it as a bustling open market. Reimagine the plaza, basically, as anything other than what it is, so long as it is warm and alive, with City Hall rising up out of it like a stone outcropping of the hillside it’s built on. Not cold and “brutalist” but geometric and permeable and funky — and unabashedly modern. Add shops and cafes to bring people inside, especially in winter. Open the roof as a public space overlooking Faneuil Hall. Imagine City Hall crawling with people like an ant hill or a coral reef or a playground structure! It would be worth any dozen of the forgettable glass boxes or tubes we’ve put up here in the last century.

ArchitectureBoston magazine — itself a little-known treasure of the city — devoted an issue to reimagining City Hall in 2007. Editor Elizabeth Padjen invited me to chip in with a non-architect’s impressions of the building. You can read my piece here (PDF) and the whole issue here [update: link no longer available]. I highly recommend the magazine. The architects’ visions for a renewed City Hall [update: link no linger available] may change your mind about this despised but important building whose failure leaves a hole at the very navel of our city.

(I am in the process of gathering up some of the scattered pieces I’ve written over the years and linking to them here on this blog. That way the good people at the Library of America won’t have to hunt around for my collected works when the time comes. I’ll link to them all using the tag Other Writing.)

Photo credit: “Upsidedown Ziggurat” (licensed under Creative Commons).

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 hope.

“Ten Views of the Combat Zone (Boston, 1976)” is a short short story I wrote in 2007 for Esquire magazine’s “napkin fiction project,” which challenged writers to compose a story so short it could fit, hand-written, on a cocktail napkin. The napkins themselves were as interesting as some of the stories (mine is above).

I’ve been fascinated by the Combat Zone, Boston’s notorious old red-light district, for a long time now. I hope to write a novel about is someday soon. I pitched the idea once to my editor, Kate Miciak, as a follow-up to The Strangler. It seemed natural enough to follow a story of Boston’s 1960s crime scene with one set in the epicenter of the city’s 1970s crimeworld, the Combat Zone. Kate didn’t buy it. But we novelists are stubborn as mules when we think we’re onto something good. I’ll try again.

The complete text of the story is after the jump.

[Read more…] about Ten Views of the Combat Zone

The Definitive Boston Crime Novel: “The Friends of Eddie Coyle”

Yesterday I wrote about the film version of The Friends of Eddie Coyle, which I think is the best movie ever made about Boston. Today, over at the Rap Sheet, my review/appreciation of the George V. Higgins novel is up, part of the Rap Sheet’s “Book You Have to Read” series highlighting forgotten classics. Here is a clip:

Elmore Leonard, in his introduction to the Holt paperback edition, recalls reading The Friends of Eddie Coyle when it first came out. “I finished the book in one sitting and felt as if I’d been set free. So this was how you do it. … To me it was a revelation.” Leonard has called it “the best crime novel ever written.”

Eddie Coyle was a revelation to me, as well. I was a young assistant D.A. when I first read it, another Boston College Law grad with literary aspirations. I worked in Cambridge then, across the river from Higgins’ old office. I had never read the book. I was only eight when it came out, and later I was never much of a crime-novel fan anyway. But when I hit the first page, I had the same reaction Leonard did: so this is how you do it.

Read the rest here. Of course calling any book or movie the best of its type is a good way to start an argument, but I did it yesterday so why stop now? The Friends of Eddie Coyle is the best crime novel I’ve ever read.