Thanks to Sebastien Bonifay for these kind words about GRAVESEND.
Publié cet année auréolé de l’honneur d’être le numéro 1000 de la prestigieuse collection Rivages/Noir, Gravesend est un premier roman, signé par William Boyle. C’est également un chant funèbre, une ode désenchantée à un quartier de Brooklyn devenu le tombeau des espoirs de ceux qui y sont nés. On peut sortir un homme du quartier, on ne peut pas sortir le quartier d’un homme..
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Thanks to Scott Montgomery for interviewing me over at the MysteryPeople blog. Really excited to be back in Austin a week from today.
I’m looking forward to introducing our readers to William Boyle this upcoming Tuesday, August 2nd, at 7 PM at our New Voices of Noir panel discussion. Boyle joins Bill Loehfelm, Alison Gaylin, and Megan Abbott for the panel discussion. His short stories and Gravesend, his first novel, feature hard-luck people stuck in life. To give you an idea of him, here’s a quick interview we did.
MysteryPeople Scott: Gravesend is an ensemble novel, set in a decaying working class part of New York that is a character itself. Did you start with the idea of the place or the people?
William Boyle: I grew up in the neighborhoods of Gravesend and Bensonhurst. I knew I wanted to write about the place. I’ve mostly lived away from Brooklyn since college, though my family’s still there—I’ve spent time in the Hudson Valley, in Austin, in The Bronx, in…
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Thanks to Douglas Graham Purdy for these kind words.
‘Gravesend’ is a sad, downtrodden ballad to Brooklyn. No tongue-in-cheek subversive commentary about the new trendified and gentrified borough – that self-mocking shit can take a hike. This is hard life in earnest: stories of losers, chumps, and failures. The tales within come from a place where Hubert Selby and David Goodis inhabit – the no-exit school of storytelling – but Boyle makes the tragic template his own. ‘Gravesend’ is a deceptively simple novel that spits in your face, layers in a heartfelt desire of becoming somebody you’re not, whether abandoning your neighborhood in hopes of bigger and better things, or trying to make an old high school crush fall in love with you. But second chances don’t reach that far into the grid of Boyle’s Brooklyn, where certain corners, blocks and storefronts slightly change, but the characters stay the same – lives of stasis and carrying the same hand-me-down…
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The cover for the French edition of Gravesend, out 3/30 from Rivages/Noir.
Man, I’m really excited about this. Gravesend is coming out in France on March 30th from Rivages (translated by Simon Baril, who has also translated Peter Temple and Marilynne Robinson). They’ve chosen it to be #1,000 in their noir collection, which coincides with their 30th anniversary. #1 was Jim Thompson’s Recoil. #100 was James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia. I’m honored beyond words. I’ll be in Paris for the release and Lyon for Quais du polar right after. I’m really not sure what to say. This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me as a writer and one of the things I dreamed about right after Eamon was born when I was plugging away on Gravesend in the mornings before work and in whatever little spare time I had.
One of my favorite movies, STRAIGHT TIME, is on TCM tonight/tomorrow morning at 1:30 a.m. Eastern (h/t Kent). Here’s a piece I wrote about it a few years ago.
William Boyle
Directed by Ulu Grosbard and based on Edward Bunker’s novel No Beast So Fierce, written while Bunker was in prison, Straight Time (1978) is meandering and quietly brilliant in a way that’s representative of the movies we’re concerned with here.
Dustin Hoffman plays paroled criminal Max Dembo. Fresh out of prison, Dembo aims to live honestly, but he’s thrown off course by shitty parole officer Earl Frank (M. Emmet Walsh). At an employment agency, he meets Jenny Mercer (Theresa Russell), who helps him find work and is charmed by his honesty. Dembo catches up with an old pal, Willy Darin (Gary Busey), a decision that stomps out his efforts to live straight. Willy shoots heroin in Dembo’s room and leaves behind a book of matches that Frank finds on an unannounced visit. Frank accuses Dembo of shooting up even though there’s no…
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On December 16, 1960, two commercial airliners crashed over NYC. My stepdad was a student at St. Augustine’s, a school in Brooklyn right near where one of the planes came down. I grew up hearing about the crash and got to be pretty obsessed with it, reading old newspapers and searching out images. Here’s a story I wrote about it, one that I’ve been working on for a few years now.
If you ever read Philip Carlo’s Gaspipe, which is about Lucchese boss Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso, you can flip to the center of the book and see a picture of the attached house where I grew up. My mother and I lived in the ground floor apartment (where the Cassos used to live) for much of my early childhood. When she got remarried, we moved upstairs into the bigger apartment; she was in that upstairs apartment until late last year when she moved next door with my grandmother. My grandfather used to tell me Gaspipe stories, mostly about him selling hot items off a truck. The Carlos were our neighbors and friends. Philip, who also wrote The Night Stalker (about Richard Ramirez) and other true crime books, was living in the city when I was growing up (and, according to his old man, hanging out with his good friends Robert DeNiro and Tony Danza all the time), but he was the first real writer I knew of and knew. I’d talk to his father Frank and ask a hundred questions, pressing him for the straight dope on the writing life. I don’t think I knew at the time how close Frank was to Gaspipe. I never asked him about Gaspipe, I’m pretty sure, even as my interest in mobsters and outlaws grew. But I definitely spent a lot of time as a kid wondering about Gaspipe; I’d sit in our little apartment and try to imagine things that had happened when he lived there.
“These eight stories cut and scar.” Knocked out by Ellis Purdie’s review of Death Don’t Have No Mercy in The Clarion-Ledger. It ran a while ago, but I’m just now seeing it.
William Boyle 