“Have it your way.” Farley shrugged.
I took one last look out at the ocean. A full moon was shining on the water and pulling on the tide. The ripples caught the broken pieces of light and threw them back up at the sky.
A Biography of Peter Blauner
Although Peter Blauner (b. 1959) grew up on Manhattan’s East Side and attended the prestigious Collegiate School for Boys, he has always been drawn to the dark side of city life. “Being a kid during the fiscal-crisis seventies, I saw how things could change and you could go from the high to the low very quickly. Which is a very good lesson in humility and an even better one for writing crime fiction.”
Influenced equally by the films of Sidney Lumet and Martin Scorsese, the burgeoning punk rock scene, and the split-lip school of American pulp fiction, Blauner began writing short stories in high school and while still in college got a summer job assisting legendary newspaper columnist and author Pete Hamill. “He gave me a master class on what it means to be an urban writer. He taught me to always get your notes on paper right away, always ask the hardest question you can think of, and always listen carefully to the last thing somebody says to you.”
After graduating from Wesleyan University in Connecticut in 1982, Blauner returned to the city and began working at New York magazine, where he apprenticed with Nicholas Pileggi, author of Wise Guy and screenwriter of the film Goodfellas. Over the next few years, Blauner developed his byline for the magazine, writing about crime, politics, and other forms of antisocial behavior. But, he says, “My real goal was to train myself to become an urban novelist. I wanted to write stories that were suspenseful and compelling, but that also tried to capture what’s funny, surrealistic, and occasionally beautiful about city life.”
He decided on an approach of full-immersion research, which he has continued throughout his writing career. In 1988, he took a leave from the magazine and became a volunteer at the New York Department of Probation, so he could write about the criminal culture of the era from the front lines. The result was his debut novel, Slow Motion Riot, which was published in 1991. It went on to win the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best first novel and was named one of the “International Books of the Year” in the Times Literary Supplement by Patricia Highsmith, who called it “unforgettable.”
Soon after, Blauner turned his attention to fiction writing fulltime, and his next novel, Casino Moon, was a kind of update of the classic noir pulp genre, set in the Atlantic City boxing world and published in 1994. After his time in Atlantic City researching Casino Moon, he returned to New York and spent a year working at a homeless shelter to research The Intruder, which was published in 1996 and became a New York Times bestseller. For his next novel, Man of the Hour, published in 1999, he anticipated the reality of 9/11 by writing about misguided notions of heroism and Middle Eastern terrorism in America. Four years later, he shifted gears and wrote The Last Good Day, about a murder in a quiet Hudson River town and the resulting social fissures among the people who live there.
Blauner’s most recent novel, Slipping Into Darkness (2006), found him back on the city streets creating a modern urban mystery. It tells the story of Julian Vega, a bright young immigrant’s son, locked up in the early eighties for killing a female doctor on New York’s Upper East Side. Twenty years later, Julian is released from prison and another female doctor is killed under strikingly similar circumstances. Only this time, the evidence doesn’t point to Julian at all—it points to the woman he allegedly murdered two decades before. And the detective who arrested him in the first place, Francis X. Loughlin, is left to wrestle with the possibility that he ruined the life of an innocent man. The book earned the strongest reviews of Blauner’s career, with everyone from Stephen King to the New York Times ringing in, and introduced him to a new audience.
More recently, Blauner has branched out into television work, writing scripts for the Law & Order franchise, and also into short fiction. His short stories have been anthologized in the Best American Mystery collection and on NPR’s Selected Shorts from Symphony Space. He continues to live in Brooklyn with his wife, Peg Tyre, author of the bestselling nonfiction book The Trouble With Boys, and their two sons, Mac and Mose.
A six-year-old Blauner dressed as the Green Hornet. His love of the comic book series marked his first interest in crime fiction.
Blauner with his mother, older brother Steve, and family friends during what he calls “the heyday of the Mad Men era.”
Blauner’s yearbook page from Collegiate School, the all-boys institution he attended on the Upper West Side of New York City.
Blauner’s first real byline as a reporter for New York magazine in 1982, when he was twenty-two. As he remembers, “It was an undercover assignment in which I posed as a street peddler; and an early version of the kind of research I’d do later for my novels. I almost managed to get arrested selling fake Rolexes and knock-off Gucci sunglasses.”
Blauner’s wedding photo with his wife, Peg Tyre, the New York Times bestselling author of the nonfiction book The Trouble with Boys. The couple was married on June 24, 1989.
Blauner and Peg (who was pregnant at the time) with George Jordan and Elaine Rivera at the scene of the Crown Heights riots in 1991, about three months after Slow Motion Riot was published. Jordan and Rivera were two of Peg’s fellow New York Newsday reporters.
Seen here in 1992, Blauner holds his first-born son, Mac, then four months old, at the Semana Negra writer’s festival, which was hosted by the International Association of Crime Writers at a seaside amusement park in Gijón, Spain. They are posing in front of a giant replica of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, translated into Spanish. Blauner’s own books have been translated into twenty languages.
One of the “mole people” whom Blauner encountered in 1994 while researching a book in the tunnels beneath Riverside Park in Manhattan. He describes the tunnels as “one of the darkest places I’ve ever been, save for the occasional flicker of a lighter going to a crack pipe.” Blauner and a friend were taking pictures when the man in this photo displayed his displeasure by throwing a brick at them, though, Blauner remembers, “he missed, perhaps because of his falling trousers.”
Blauner at a reading at Barnes & Noble in 1996 to support his book The Intruder.
In 1997, Blauner traveled to the West Bank to research a character—a disaffected Palestinian who gets drawn into terrorism—for his book Man of the Hour. He’s seen here at the shepherd’s market near Bethlehem. “One of the shepherds took the picture, hence the haphazard technique.”
Blauner’s Red Cross, Department of Probation, and Volunteers of America ID cards. The Red Cross ID was issued to Blauner when he volunteered at Ground Zero in the wake of the September 11th attacks. He wrote of the event indirectly in his book The Last Good Day, saying that writing about the tragedy directly would have been “like staring straight into the sun. It seemed like a more graceful idea to write about the shadows on the ground.” Blauner had previously volunteered at New York’s Department of Probation as research for his novel Slow Motion Riot and at a homeless shelter at the former Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital where he researched The Intruder.
Blauner’s two sons, Mose and Mac.
Blauner in his house in Brooklyn, where he moved with his family in 2003. Previously, they had lived in an apartment just down the hill that, Blauner recalls, was so narrow visitors said they felt like they were visiting Colonial Williamsburg.
Blauner and Peg in Florida circa 2004.
Blauner and family in Egypt, where for several years the author has been conducting research for a new novel (2008).
Acknowledgments
THIS IS A WORK of fiction about Atlantic City. Though some institutions depicted in the book are real, the characters and events are not.
I would like to thank the following people for their help: Bill Tonelli, Suzan Karpati, Robert Flipping, Lou Toscano, Glenn Lillie, Shannon Bybee and the rest of the staff of the Claridge Casino-Hotel, Mary Jean Arr
iola, Tim Voigt, Gay Talese, Vin Czyz, Steven Smoger, Larry Holmes, Thomas Hauser, Ferdie Pacheco, Joe Sayegh, Alia Sayegh, Gail Marrandino, Doug LeVien, Iggy Pop, Robert Lacey, Paul Solotaroff, Pat Pileggi, Dave Lewis, Otto Penzler, Kate Stine, Wayne Kral, Michael Siegel, Dominick Anfuso, Carl Sifakis, Roger Gros, Bobby Fox, Chris Smith, Pat Dodd, Bobby Czyz, Steven Griffin, Casandra M. Jones, James B. Harris, Joanne Gruber, Dan Tyre, Gleason’s Gym, Mark Pfeffer, Fran and Barry Weissler, Fran Kessler, and, of course, Peg.
As always, Arthur Pine and Lori Andiman have been in my corner. And I would like to give special thanks to Richard Pine and Clare Alexander, two champs who were willing to go the distance.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
“You’ve Changed” by Bill Carey and Carl Fischer. Copyright © 1943 by Southern Music Publishing Co., Inc. Copyright Renewed. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission of peermusic New York and London.
copyright © 1994 by Peter Blauner
cover design by Karen Horton
ISBN: 978-1-4532-1525-8
This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media
180 Varick Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
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