Amazon Exclusive: Michael Connelly Interviews Lyndsay Faye
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Michael Connelly: I think the first question is about the
challenge you gave yourself with this book. Re-creating New York
City circa 1845. The question I ask is, Why then? But what I am
really asking is why you took the difficult path. Why not New
York in 1945, or even now? I read this book and from the writer’s
standpoint, kept asking myself, Why did she take this path? Wow!
Lyndsay Faye: Ha! Yes, absolutely—in a certain sense, the
project was very difficult. My hubris in trying to write a novel
set in 1845 New York was about the fact that I specifically
wanted to do day one, cop one of the NYPD. Origin stories are
very compelling. And when you think about how renowned the world
over the NYPD is today, for reasons both positive and negative
but all of them highly dramatic, you find yourself wondering what
such an organization looked like at inception. It’s almost
mythical, the fame they’ve achieved and the advances they’ve
made, and I was deeply curious to know how they started out. I
wanted to take a historical event and turn it into a legend, in
the sense of making something iconic and resonant, and when I
discovered that the NYPD was founded in 1845, my time period
chose itself.
In another sense, I should add that I was once on a library
panel where a very clever author said we don’t write historicals
to choose the difficult path, but rather the lazy one. It’s
almost impossible to commit a decent crime these days, what with
CCTV and the Internet and credit-card tracking and forensics and
ballistics and security cameras and such everywhere. I have a
simple bachelor’s in English lit, not an advanced degree in
criminal science, and to be honest, I find the complexity of
modern-day crime solving much more intimidating when it comes to
plot. I know that TV shows like CSI, etc., make it all look more
magical than it is in fact, but I’m interested in how people
solved crimes before forensics was even a line of study. How did
the first cops go about it? What tools did they employ? I greatly
enjoy reading modern mysteries, but I’m constantly staggered by
the omnivorous technical know-how they require.
MC: What’s most impressive about this work is how the world of
New York is so full and real. Can you walk us through the
research that goes into a project like this? How long were you
putting this part together before you actually sat down to write
the book, or do both things happen at the same time?
LF: Thank you very much indeed—I want all of my historical
fiction to be an immersive experience, so to create that effect,
I bury myself in the world in question for at least six months
before embarking on a first draft. This time around, that meant
poring over diaries, setting up my own tent shanty in the
New-York Historical Society, camping out with a cookstove in the
Bryant Park extension of the New York Public Library’s microfilm
department, etc. Syntax and fashion and food and architecture and
all the other aspects of the culture fascinate me, so I try to
soak it all in like a big fluffy pancake. It’s irritating for me
to be constantly looking up facts or grasping at vernacular as
I’m writing, so I’ve learned to spend half a year at research
first. It saves me time in the long run.
My research includes history books, always, but original sources
are ultimately much more important to me. I read all of the
Herald newspaper from January 1st through December 31st for 1845,
for instance. Countless people wrote travelogues and social
essays and satires in nineteenth-century New York, and those were
invaluable. I wanted to know what the people of the time period
thought about their city, their politics, their lifestyle. What
did they think and say about race? Religion? Where to get the
best oyster pie? How that uppity tart cousin of theirs looked at
the fireman’s ball last night? That journey of discovery is
always a fabulous one.
MC: I think it’s easy in a historical novel to make the time and
place the star—to sort of wow ’em with your research. That
usually leaves the story short on character. You escaped that
pitfall with a host of characters, leading with Timothy Wilde. It
seems that equal preparation went into Wilde as did into your
historical research. Can you say where Wilde comes from?
LF: See, this is something I love talking about, because
historical fiction that shows off the research involved rather
dismays me. The author presents you with a narrator who is, for
example, a tavern girl. She’s plucky and wonderful and when
running for her life from sinister guardsmen, she stops to tell
you that the building she’s racing past was erected in 1814, by
whom, with what variety of stone. I’m exaggerating, but I make it
a principle not to include any information that my characters
wouldn’t find relevant. Or I try my best to avoid it.
So it’s very fair to say that as much effort goes into my
characters as into the world around them. Tim is culled from
multiple sources. To name a few, when I realized that the early
NYPD was inextricably tied up in politics, I determined that I
wanted him to be an outsider with his own set of principles, yet
I still wanted him to be highly competent. I was in the
restaurant business for ten years; my husband and many of my
closest friends are bartenders, and you ought to be aware that
they know more about you than you suppose. Barkeeps are keen
observers, and I realized that a former career in an oyster
cellar would be grand training for the NYPD. Tim’s physical
appearance is more or less based on a dear actor friend of mine I
used to work with when I did musical theater. Many bits of
Timothy are, of course, me. Fountains that don’t work make me
irrationally annoyed; they annoy Tim, too. Finally, my favorite
aspects of Tim are those sort of al moments when a
character you’re imagining takes on a life of his or her own.
MC: It was pure genius to anchor this story in two significant
events—the potato famine and the founding of the New York
Department. There is probably substantial documentation of these
two things. How do you take them and blend them into fiction?
Were you a slave to drama or a slave to the facts/truths of that
time?
LF: The historical confluence of the Great Famine and the
inaugural year of the NYPD was a gift of twenty-four-karat
writerly gold. If I’d found a genie on a beach and asked it for
ideal dramatic material, I couldn’t have done better. That was
100 percent luck, actually—I was researching the first cops, and
then I found that the potato blight had just been discovered the
previous year in Europe, and that thousands upon thousands of
Irish were fleeing their homeland. “Native” New Yorkers were up
in arms about emigrants ruining their democracy in the name of
the Antichrist of Rome, all that unfortunate hyperbolic political
grandstanding that happens when too many people want the same
resources. It was total chaos, and it changed the face New York
City society.
Blending the stories of the copper stars and of the emigrants
was a challenge, but a riveting one for me. As you say, both the
potato famine and the first force are well documented. I
was a slave to the facts in the sense that I wanted to do as much
justice as possible to my ancestors, who were seeking new lives
in what turned out to be a hostile environment. The influx of
Irish refugees continued for quite some time, so I’d copious
material to cull from. It became very real for me. The chapter
titles all feature a quote from the time period, for instance, to
help us bear in mind that poverty and religious bigotry and
corruption were rampant and real. The thin line between success
and despair they walked is as shocking and relevant today as it
was then, so by virtue of being a slave to the facts, I managed
to be a slave to the drama simultaneously.
MC: Your last novel, Dust and Shadow, also blended fiction and
fact—Jack the Ripper—and historical research. Aside from these
two very large, real events that we start with in TGOG, was there
a smaller, true incident that inspired this story?
LF: Yes, indeed. The story of Eliza Rafferty and her infanticide
was entirely true—it took place in 1849 in a house at number 6
Doyer Street. When I read about her distress and incomprehension
after killing her own child, I set myself the gruesome task of
finding out what sort of life could inspire such an act. The
neighbors were rightly shocked by the baby’s death, the
appalled. Today I think we’d term her state a psychotic form of
severe postpartum depression, but apart from lacking modern
medicine to save her and her child, she probably lacked
everything else as well—ample space, adequate food, any sort of
safety net whatsoever. As Tim’s introduction to the atrocities a
man must face in order to do his job, it’s horrifying but
also immediately brings home how high the stakes are going to be.
MC: Here’s one I bet you never saw coming. (Not really.) What is
next for you? Will you stay with a historical project?
LF: Yes, I’m thick in the sequel to Gotham! It takes place six
months later, in the winter of 1846. Timothy and Valentine have
quite a bit of baggage to work through, after all, so I think it
would be rather cruel not to give them a . The usual suspects
will be back in force, and writing it has been a fantastic
experience. I’ve never written a sequel before. Wish me luck! And
thank you ever so much for the truly thought-provoking questions.
