Interview with Gabriel Cohen April 2003

1) You’ve done a variety of things before writing your first book, including work as a reporter and a teacher. What led you to want to write a book?

I've always written, whether it was short stories or journalism or music (I was the lead singer/songwriter for a rock 'n' roll band back in the 80s.) I loved to read novels too, but was intimidated by the thought of writing one. The most direct reason why I finally did is rather dopey. I was in love and got suddenly dumped. All of my frustrated energy and desire fed a sudden inspiration to write a novel about--surprisingly enough--a guy who gets dumped. Once I got that (unpublished) story out of my system, I wrote another novel that was less autobiographical. (I call those first two efforts novels-with-training-wheels.) It took me ten years of hard work to finally get published.

2) Why did you choose to write a book in the crime fiction/mystery genre?

First of all, I'm not big on the idea of "genre." I think it implies a set of conventions, and it was important to me to try to avoid taking anything for granted. There are plenty of books and movies and TV shows about homicide detectives, but I wanted to start at the beginning and say Wait a minute--real people do this job. If you stop and think about it, it's a pretty weird occupation. I wondered what sort of person would be attracted to it, and how it would affect them. To me, that was at least as much of a mystery as the Whodunnit. Once I started writing Red Hook, lots of other mysteries opened up. Why did a once-thriving neighborhood turn into a near-ghost town? Why do parents and their kids have such a hard time communicating? Why is the wealth of the world spread so unevenly? How can human beings live day-to-day knowing that they're going to die? Crime novels can provide a way to explore all sorts of fundamental mysteries in life, and that's what attracts me to them. (Of course, you better tell a good story too.)

3) Your first book, Red Hook, has been praised by many readers and critics. Do you feel any pressure for your next book to be as good?

Above all, I'm grateful that there might be anybody out there with expectations for my next novel at all. (It's a sequel, working title Neptune Avenue.) In answer to your question: Yes, I feel lots of pressure. Some of it comes from wanting to please the people who liked Red Hook--and hoping to avoid the proverbial sophomore slump--but most of it's self-imposed. I don't want to put out anything that I'm not proud of. Sometimes the pressure probably made the writing more difficult than it had to be, but I'm glad it pushed me to keep rewriting (and rewriting) this new novel to make it better. I used to think that dissatisfaction was an obstacle in writing, but I've come to see that it's one of the writer's best friends.

4) Is Jack Leightner completely fiction, or did you take aspects of the character from real people?

He's not modeled on any one real person, but he embodies elements of several, including detectives I interviewed in my research, my father, and myself. I tried hard to make him seem like a real detective, and I've been very gratified to hear some cops say that he seemed authentic to them.

There's another big reason why I came up with this character. A lot of fictional detectives are hard-boiled and tough, but also wounded in some way. Jack fits that pattern to some extent, but I didn't want to just accept that and let it go, to let him off the hook for his personal shortcomings. Such characters may be glamorous, but they'd make a lousy parent or spouse. Fighting crime is a lot easier than figuring out how to become a better human being. That's the struggle which interests me the most.

5) Does the city of New York play a major part in the book? Would it have worked if it had been set elsewhere?

I could certainly have set my protagonist's basic story in a lot of different locales--and it might well have worked--but I think that the focus on a specific place that's important to me (and to Jack) made the book richer. I'm not a native New Yorker, but I've lived in Brooklyn for the past 14 years. It's a great place with a fascinating history. When I discovered Red Hook, I really fell in love with the neighborhood, and found that its fall and hoped-for-rise offered a good echo of Jack's own struggles. Some readers have told me that the place in the book feels like a character in its own right.

6) I’d like to hear more about this lead singer in a rock band. What kind of music did you do? What was the name of the band?

The band was called Valley of Kings and we were a trio--we played loud, all-original rock music, which would now be described as "alternative." I was the lead singer/guitarist/songwriter. We put out an album and did a couple of tours. We hit Number 10 on the national college radio charts one month, and--like Jerry Lewis--we seemed to be liked in France. We opened for bands like The Smithereens, Husker Du, and the Del Fuegos, as well as such flashes-in-the-pan as Modern English, The Alarm, and Tommy Tutone. One of the weirdest gigs we had was playing at Studio 54 just before it closed, in a "New Wave Battle of the Bands."

7) What is it about Tai Chi that you enjoy?

I spend a lot of time sitting in front of my computer and so it's great to go out and do something physical. And tai chi exercises a completely different part of my brain. It looks very slow and dreamy, but it's a real martial art. I like the fact that it operates on a lot of different levels simultaneously: it's meditative and healthy, practical but also spiritual. I've learned a series of moves (called the Yang short form), but one of the things that attracts me to it is that you never really master it: you keep refining this basic form and discovering deeper and deeper levels. It's like writing: you never can say you've got it down, but you hope to keep getting better.

8) Can you say anything about what your next book, Neptune Avenue, will be about?

It's a sequel to Red Hook which picks up right where the first book leaves off. This one centers on the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Brighton Beach and Coney Island. I deal with the issue of Russian crime, but I've tried to avoid the stereotypes. (My protagonist's own background is Russian-Jewish.) Red Hook was about Jack Leightner's journey inward. Neptune Avenue starts with him being very focused on his own problems, but then he's forced to move increasingly outward and gain a bigger sense of the world.

9) Was this your first Bouchercon? Did you enjoy it?

This past Bouchercon in Austin was my first. Before Red Hook came out, I was told that the mystery community was very supportive and enthusiastic, and I've found--happily--that this is true. It's a lot of fun to go from spending years alone in front of a computer to suddenly having contact with readers and other writers. I had a blast hanging out with such friendly and supportive writers as Katy Munger, S.J. Rozan, Lise McClendon, Reed Coleman, Victor Gischler, Vicki Hendricks, Harlan Coben, and Laura Lippman, and it was great to meet some of the booksellers, reviewers, and magazine people who gave my book a boost

10) When rewriting (and rewriting) what kind of changes do you make? Do your ideas of what the book will be change from the initial writing to the last draft you turn it?

I do a lot of rewriting. In the first drafts I try to lay out the overall plot, and that doesn't usually change a great deal. What changes the most is that I push to get a deeper sense of the characters, to make what they do seem properly motivated. Rewriting also involves clearing out unnecessary scenes, paragraphs, adjectives, and chunks of improperly digested research, because when you weed out the weak stuff then the remaining material feels stronger. On the other hand, I also add stuff to make things clearer. I try to get a deeper sense of what's important in the book, to clarify what I'm really writing about, to push beyond simply setting up a suspenseful plot. I like to have an internal conflict operating at the same time as the external one, and in rewriting I figure out better ways to relate the two, or to dramatize stuff that I might have put too abstractly at first. (To show rather than tell, in other words.)

11) While spending ten years trying to get published did you ever have doubts? What made you stick with it?

Oh yeah--I had huge doubts. In order to be able to afford the time to write I worked freelance in catering, first as a waiter, then as a captain and planner. It was high society catering for some of the richest and most famous people in New York, and though it was interesting to see inside the rarefied worlds they live in, it was depressing to be continually wondering if I'd be serving people hors d'oeuvres for the rest of my life. I used to serve lunch to one of the biggest publishing executives in the world in his private corporate dining room, and I was tempted to hand him one of my manuscripts on a plate. If it had worked it would have made a great story, but I think he would just have been annoyed by it, and I'd have felt humiliated, so I kept my mouth shut and worked on building my career at home, in front of the computer.

Writing was the most challenging, yet satisfying, thing I could do. (I like the counter-intuitive quote that says that writers are people for whom writing is harder than it is for other people.) Ultimately, I suppose I stuck with it out of pure cussed stubbornness.

12) While you are working on this next book, are you already starting to think about what’s down the line? Maybe the book or two after?

I usually start coming up with ideas for the next book while I'm in the middle of writing the current one. This leapfrogging makes it easier when I finish a book--I don't have to go through the stress of wondering how I'll come up with another one. As ideas come up, I jot them down on index cards, and it's a big help to a new project to have a stack of ideas to work with.

13) What’s the best advice you were ever given, and who gave it to you?

I can't think of one single best piece of advice (other than "Don't give up"), but I enjoy reading books of quotes by writers. I like what Annie Dillard said about not hoarding material for other works: "Spend it all," she said. "Give it, give it all, give it now." I like what Bill Bradley said when he was playing basketball and someone asked him how he could stand to play while people were booing him: he said that he didn't listen to the cheers, so why should he listen to the boos? (In other words, you have to find your satisfaction in the work itself, something I have to remind myself when I start obsessing about the publishing process.)

14) Who are some of the people that have influenced you, and helped make you who you are?

My parents were always very supportive of my desire to pursue some kind of career in the arts. I've been inspired by many of the people I've worked with who have struggled to make it as writers or actors or dancers or musicians while enduring some relatively meaningless day (or night) job. A number of books have had a major impact, including John Updike's Rabbit series, Oscar Hijuelos's The Mambo Kings, Lawrence Block's Eight Million Ways to Die and his whole Scudder series, Raymond Carver's stories (especially "A Small Good Thing" and "Cathedral"), almost anything by Bernard Malamud, stuff by Don DeLillo, Anne Tyler, Toni Morrison, Frederick Busch, Martin Cruz Smith's Renko trilogy, John LeCarre's Smiley books... The nonfiction book that has probably influenced me most is The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, which says that many institutions of human civilization, from the military to religion, art to politics, are things we have developed in order to defend ourselves from the knowledge and fear of death. I'm interested in exploring how this idea plays out in the context of the crime/mystery novel. I went into a mystery bookstore recently and asked the owner how many books featured a death or a dead body and he answered, Almost all of them. So mysteries are largely--implicitly or explicitly--about mortality. Some of them are just about raising the reader's anxiety about death and then relieving it through a neat conclusion, while others explore the matter in a more deep and challenging way.

15) Was it fun to see your first reviews or tough?

I was very lucky in that almost every review was positive. The only one that wasn't was from some cranky librarian out in Ohio who seemed personally offended that I had omitted a couple of minor procedural details.

16) What are some of your favorite movies?

Off the top of my head: A Christmas Carol (the one with Alistair Sim), Raging Bull, My Life As A Dog, L'Atalante, Tender Mercies, The African Queen, Five Easy Pieces, Children of Paradise, Wings of Desire, It's a Wonderful Life (which is actual darker and more politically radical than most people remember it), The Last Detail, The Scent of Green Papaya, Say Anything, Life Is Sweet...I could go on and on. More recently, I liked You Can Count on Me, Punch Drunk Love, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Waking the Dead, and one I just saw last night: Laurel Canyon.

17) Is there anything you wouldn’t write about? Any topic you would stay away from?

First of all, I'm aggravated by people who argue that fiction writers should only write what they know in a narrow sense of the word (e.g. men shouldn't write female protagonists, white writers shouldn't write black protagonists, etc., etc.). A large part of the value of fiction is that it enables writers and readers to empathize with the experiences of other people. Some the world's biggest problems are a result of a willed blocking of empathy. If you refuse to try to put yourself in another person's head, then you can demonize them, and ultimately--as the astoundingly violent history of the 20th century shows--you can feel free to victimize them. Nationalism and "patriotism" (narrowly defined, as we Americans seem to be doing these days) tend to work against this empathy with others. The question is not whether writers have a right to write from another race/religion/gender's perspective, but whether they do a good job of it or not. I think writers should have the freedom to write about pretty much anything--and then take their critical hard knocks, if called for.

To answer your question another way, I'll mention that a few years back I had a fluke freelance job doing research for Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese. One of the subjects I had to look up was serial killers. Not only did I never have a desire to write about them, but I had never even wanted to read about them--frankly, it just creeped me out. What I learned was that they're not the slavering incarnations of pure evil that are so often presented in popular "entertainment". In fact, almost all known serial killers either suffered from severe physical brain damage or extreme abuse as children. I learned about the very specific psychological mechanisms through which this abuse is internalized and then expressed later when they grow up. (Understanding this would not be much comfort for their victims, but it might lead to stronger efforts to prevent child abuse.) This experience felt like a valuable lesson for a writer--make an effort to understand all varieties of human behavior, from worst to best. The Roman playwright Terence did a great job of answering your question many centuries ago: "I am a human; nothing human is alien to me."

18) What’s one of the things about being an author that never occurred to you before you got published?

When I was in a band, the musicians I knew all believed that getting signed to a major label record deal was the top of the mountain: if you got there, then you had it made. Years later, I know a number of musicians who had that dream come true--and discovered that their troubles were just beginning. Similarly, I think it's easy to focus narrowly on the mountain of first publication. Once you reach it, of course, you see that there are lots of mountains behind it--and you realize that mapping out a lifelong career as a writer will be a continual challenge.

19) What are you doing this weekend?

On Saturday morning I may go to Central Park, where a bunch of New York tai chi practitioners will meet to celebrate World Tai Chi day. At exactly ten a.m. in a big muddy field, twenty different tai chi schools all start practicing whatever forms they've learned and you get to see how other students do things differently. (It becomes obvious that some have learned on a deep internal level, while others are just waving their arms around.) Other than that, I'll be trying to deal with the post-partum depression of finishing another book, and the shock of poking my head out of my writing workspace, which I sometimes call my "hidey-hole."

20) What’s the one thing always in your refrigerator?

I've seen in your other interviews that this question is a good setup for a witty answer--and I'm tempted to say that it's where I keep the body of the reviewer from Ohio--but the truth is just extra-sharp cheddar cheese, which I eat with pretzels while writing. I'm a big believer in the power of snacks to keep the writing energy going. If I'm not eating something, I'm chewing gum or toothpicks. There's something in the bovine satisfaction of it that occupies some physically-oriented part of the brain and frees up the creative cells to do their thing. That's my theory, anyhow...