A couple of years back, I wrote JUST A GIRL WITH A GUN, a melancholy noir novel which was a bit of a last hurrah for Cornelia, a hitwoman who had previously appeared in several of my short stories and as a secondary character in some novels, an anti-heroine some readers had taken a liking to.
As I weaved new plots to put her in context, albeit never to justify her cold-blooded propensities, it gave me the opportunity to build the world through which she moved in more detail: streets engineered by Chandler, bleak atmospheres straight out of Cornell Woolrich, lost souls in harmony with the early films of Alan Rudolph, sad romantics haunting the pages like in most of my writings, adding some overall conspiracy elements and a gallery of minor roles that passed through the story like ghosts. When the publishers asked my advice for the cover, I said I wanted something that evoked Edward Hopper, and they obliged with a clever variation, as reproduction rights for an actual Hopper painting were unaffordable.
The following year, I wrote THE EXOPOTOMIA MANUSCRIPT, a novella with many of those same obsessions but with a strong fantasy element and I felt my fiction writing days might be over as I had little new to say. But the world of JUST A GIRL was still there in my head, haunting away at me, nagging me to return to its shores and tread its despairing pavements again. I couldn’t bring my beloved Cornelia back again as that well had gone and dried up, but there was her sometime associate Hopley, there was New York and the mysterious Bureau pulling the strings in the background and a feeling the story might still be incomplete.
So I resorted to my familiar technique of going on a lengthy cruise to warm places when the weather in London is unwelcoming and typed away at my required 2,500 words a day and lo and behold, following much improvisation, almost sleepless nights struggling with the developing plot, the occasional wander through Caribbean and Mexican ports to catch a breath of fresh air, MANHATTAN DEATH BALLAD slowly came to life.
It begins in Spain on a nude beach and introduces a new hitwoman working for the Bureau as the story is triggered when her path crosses with that of a forlorn widower spiralling into personal darkness. Hopley makes a momentary return visit. There are taxi dancers in shady Manhattan ballrooms, in an open nod to Horace McCoy’s THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON’T THEY?, much violence and sadness, characters in a losing fight against the winds of fate. An early review says that it reads like ‘a tragic song’ and who I am to disagree?
It’s also another homage to film noir, and there is not a mobile phone on show, a deliberate choice so that the setting should feel relatively timeless in a shadowy New York which I know all too well, from the Port Authority to Times Square, Bryant Park, the Village, Gramercy Park, a Manhattan which exists no longer and might prove at times contradictory, the Manhattan of my dreams, a confused mix of what it was when I began visiting it and what it has since become: at times sordid, at times beautiful, a dream of Manhattan deeply embedded inside my psyche. Throats are cut, characters end up on subway tracks, stabbed, shot, but they also live with a febrile intensity and are made of flesh and blood, and not fictional cardboard, I hope. It’s also a love story; go figure! But that will come as no surprise to those who have read my books and stories before.
Again, we’ve gone back to Edward Hopper for the cover, with Martin Baines dreaming up a variation on ‘Chop Suey’ and the two covers match beautifully, a visual and written diptych. Yes, the two novels can be read as separate entities but there are crossovers, a mood in common, a similar love letter to the noir genre. If you’ve read JUST A GIRL WITH A GUN, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed and if you begin now with MANHATTAN DEATH BALLAD, I hope you’ll be intrigued enough to go back in time and find out what was lurking on the other side of the coin!
I am great admirer of Paul Auster’s NEW YORK TRILOGY (which the mad book collector I happen to be owns in what is now extremely rare first small press editions, acquired in a now long gone bookstore on 5th Avenue on the occasion of my first ever visit to New York…), so I commend my New York duology to you, with the firm assurance it will not extend into a third volume, as I haven’t a bloody clue as to what I might write next or ever!
Manhattan Death Ballad and Just a Girl with a Gun are published by Telos
