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Last Sunday, the great George Pelecanos mentioned that he was reading The Lonely Witness in his New York Times By the Book feature. Pelecanos has been one of my biggest writing heroes for a while now, and it’s such a big honor to see The Lonely Witness mentioned here, especially alongside all the other incredible books he’s talking about. When I was in my early twenties, I found a copy of The Big Blowdown at a library sale in Poughkeepsie. I read it and was knocked clean out. I tracked down every other Pelecanos book–at that point, it was the Nick Stefanos series, Shoedog, the rest of the D.C. Quartet, and Right as Rain. I bought every new book after that as it came out. I loved his writing for The Wire. I read every interview with him I could find and sought out the authors he recommended. The first I ever heard of Megan Abbott was because George Pelecanos recommended her books. Same goes for Vicki Hendricks, Willy Vlautin, Don Carpenter, and Newton Thornburg. He’s also great on music and movies. I can’t even start to list the stuff I listened to because he put it on a playlist or watched because he mentioned it.
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Here’s a thoughtful-as-hell review of Gravesend by Thomas Pluck over at Criminal Element. This one means a lot. Other than older books by John Fante, Salvatore La Puma, and Pietro di Donato, I never found much about the Italian-American experience that hit me the right way, and it was important to write the book I wanted to see and to get all that right. To be mentioned in the same space as Price’s The Wanderers and Season 2 of The Wire knocks me out.
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When I was 13, David Lynch’s Wild at Heart came out. I saw it and loved it and got it on VHS as soon as I could. I also tracked down the book by Barry Gifford, and it blew me away. I didn’t really know at that point that books could be like that. I’ve got lots of favorite writers, but Gifford’s been a consistent for over twenty-five years—his bio on Jack Kerouac, his film noir essays, his novels and poems and plays, his work with David Lynch, and (maybe above all) his Black Lizard line of books, which introduced me to Willeford and Goodis and furthered my love of Thompson. Anyhow, the first blurb for my new novel, A Friend is a Gift You Give Yourself, is in, and I’m goddamn floored:
“One thing to appreciate about William Boyle’s process is that, not unlike the late, great Charles Willeford, he takes his time, he doesn’t rush the reader. This is a significant trait, more important than it sounds, the method of a confident writer. He builds his characters patiently, allowing them to adjust to one another, not merely throw lines to titillate the reader. In A Friend is a Gift You Give Yourself, Wolfie Wolfstein is as comfortably intact a creature as any crime writer of recent vintage has put together. I gleefully anticipate the coming of a movie or better yet a TV series in her name.” —Barry Gifford, author of Sailor & Lula: The Complete Novels and The Cuban Club
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I now have an entry at the Mississippi Writers & Musicians page.
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William Boyle 