An Interview With William Landay (2/2) By Steve Rudd

(1/2), (2/2).

What is your favourite stage of the writing process? Finishing. I find writing very hard work, too difficult to be called fun, and I am always glad when I get to stop. I'm a careful writer and I try to invest a lot of myself in my writing, so it is exhausting for me to do it. I do feel, though, that all this angst pays off for the reader, not just because "hard writing makes easy reading," but because the prose is richer for it. There is no reason, after all, that reading a mystery or a thriller or a crime novel (or whatever you call these sort of books) cannot be as rich and rewarding an experience as reading so-called "literary" fiction.

Did you breathe a big sigh of relief and give yourself a prolonged period of time 'off work' upon the completion of 'Mission Flats', or did you find yourself knuckling down to more writing straight away?

I'm a hopeless workaholic, so I always get right to work on the next book. There is a good deal of wheel-spinning and planning before the hard writing comes, though, so in that sense my days are less intense in the early stages of a book.

How is your second novel taking shape, and have you any ideas as to what you are going to call the book? I just handed in the manuscript last week, actually. There is a lag of one year between completing the manuscript and the actual publication, so this book will come out in the spring of 2007. It is called The Strangler, and as the title suggests, it involves the Boston Strangler case. It takes in a lot more than that case, though. It is a snapshot of the crime scene in Boston around the time of The Strangler case, 1963-64. That was a pivotal time in this city and irresistible for a writer.

There is the obvious 9/11 parallel, with the paranoia of the JFK assassination and the Cold War, of course. And there is also the fact that in these years a few people really transformed Boston from a city that was withering on the vine - a city that might well have become another Newark or Detroit -- into the city Boston is today. I think people who enjoyed Mission Flats will really love this one. The sense of place and of moment is even keener. Imagine L.A. Confidential come to Boston, a grittier Boston than the one most people imagine, and you'll have some idea of the tone. It's a great read, if I do say so myself.

Are many of the characters that surface in the 'Mission Flats' plot based on real people? None. Most of the cases that are referenced do take off from real cases, but the people are wholly invented. To Bostonians, the echoes of those real cases are unmistakable -- the drug raid in which a cop is shot dead through a closed door, the prosecutor shot by a gang kid he was prosecuting. But not the people. What are the best and worst things about being a novelist, and did you have any work at all published before 'Mission Flats' took the crime thriller scene by storm?

I'd done some journalism, but Mission Flats was the first fiction I published. As for the best and worst things, the worst is probably the isolation. Writing is necessarily done in solitude, and if you intend to write a lot, then obviously you will be shutting yourself up in a room for a very long time. I have two little boys, so it's difficult to be locked away so much. The best? That's actually very easy. It is the chance to live according to your own standards of excellence - to do work that allows you to exercise your talent at its very limit. That sounds a little over the top, I realize, but I really do feel that way. Very few people get the chance to live the life of a working novelist. I feel enormously privileged and thankful to be among them. I hope it lasts.

Finally, have you any plans to visit the UK on a book tour in promotion of 'Mission Flats', or do you prefer to confine your touring to the US? I wish. I do love the UK, I've been several times as a tourist. Book tours, alas, are very expensive. As an economic proposition, they only make sense for the Big Fish, whose arrival will translate into an immediate and sizable jump in sales. Someday, I hope. In the meantime, I would like to say thank you to the readers in the UK who have made the book a success there. I am very, very grateful for the reception the book has received over there, and I hope people like The Strangler next year as well.

Thanks for talking to me, Steve. It's been a pleasure. For more information, please check out www.williamlanday.com

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