If I had to compare Bill’s work with any other writer time and time again, I think of Charles Willeford. It’s not because Boyle’s work is similar or a copy, not at all, but Willeford understood his world of Miami. He knew the sweat stains in the concrete. Bill knows Brooklyn in the same way. It’s a gift. I can taste the food, feel the guilt, laugh at the jokes, see what they’re wearing. The entire time when reading Saint of Narrows Street, I felt like I was in the room with the characters. The Irish kid with no dialogue sitting inside Bill’s small slice of Brooklyn full of rich, pained, human, and complex characters.

I’ve been a fan of Boyle’s work for some time now. I was introduced to his work a year or two before COVID by a friend. I read Gravesend and added him on social media. I’ve hung out with him in Oxford a few times and threw back beers in City Grocery. We talked movies, music, Larry Brown, whiskey, and basketball. Great person, amazing writer. I’m glad to call him a friend. I’ve read all his other novels, top-notch storytelling. Each novel is its own skeleton in search of a heart often lost in the darkness of crimes, and the haunted visions of a failing church. People that push until sin is the only available outcome, but his new one, the novel with one of the best covers of the year, is hands down his best work to date. Easily one of my favorite reads of 2024. A year in which I read big bastards like Fat City for the first time.

I want to say it was Ace Atkins who said, “This book is an experience,” I couldn’t agree more. I felt alive in his story about what happens when life comes to collect on the sins of the past. There’s such a rich tapestry of character studies throughout the novel. If any of his novels should be brought to the big screen it would be this one. However, due to its size and scope, I think it would serve better as an eight-to-ten-part miniseries on MAX or Netflix. I do believe it’ll make a bunch of best of lists next year, and it’ll certainly be nominated for an award or two. It’s a heavy beast of a crime book. A book not so much invested with the actual crime itself, but what it does to Risa, Guila, Chooch, Fab, and the forever ticking clock each character deals with up until the homerun of an ending.

You don’t want to miss out on this book, which drops February 4th from SOHO Crime. You can preorder it right now through SOHO, a favorite indie bookstore, or online. I’m serious, Saint of the Narrows Street will be one of the most talked about books of 2025. Bank on it.

– Frank Reardon

 

 

FRANK REARDON: How’s it going, Bill? How was the trip to France?

WILLIAM BOYLE: Hey, Frank. Holding steady. France was cool. It’s always a bit surreal when I come back after going over there for book stuff—almost like I’m not sure it really happened. I got to meet James Ellroy at a festival in Pau, which was great.

 

FR: First off, I loved this book. I’ve been a fan of your work for some time, but I have to say Saint of the Narrows Street is my favorite book of yours. Your writing went on a whole other level with thisbook. It’s a movie of a book. Early rave reviews from Megan Abbott, S.A. Cosby, Alison Gaylin, and Willy Vlautin. I agree with every single one of their reviews. I believe it was Ace Atkins who said, “This book is an experience,” I agree one hundred percent. How was it writing this book? The challenges? Getting into the characters?

WB: Thanks, man. I really appreciate that. Writing the book was a tough process. Put a lot of soul and blood into it. I wrote the first draft in the early days of Covid, and I wrote it fast. Started it in March 2020 and probably finished it in a couple of months. But it’s almost not right to call it a draft of this book—it was set on one night, all on the block, in August 1986. Nothing from that version exists in the finished book except for a handful of characters—Risa, Giulia, Chooch, Sav, baby Fab, Lola—and some backstory. I realized after I was done that it wasn’t working, so I chalked it up as a failed novel and put it away and started writing Shoot the Moonlight Out.

But something about those characters and that block kept eating away at me. After Shoot the Moonlight Out, I worked on another book that would go nowhere—I spent over a year on it, and it was a very frustrating experience. The way I structured that failed book—four parts set across twenty years—opened up the idea of returning to this book and structuring it that way. So, at some point in 2022, I came back to it, and it started to take shape. The process after that was still long and challenging—lots of invaluable input from my agents and eventually my editor once the book was sold. Lots of tightening and refining. It’s the longest book I’ve ever written, and the finished version is cut down significantly from the version I originally submitted to my editor. It got stronger with every pass. I’ve lived with these characters for a long time now, so I feel very close to them. They stayed pretty much the same throughout the process, though I came to understand them—and see them more fully—as I went along.

 

FR: Giulia is my favorite character in the book, especially early on. She reminded me of the types of women I was friends with or dated back in Boston. She gave me a feeling of nostalgia that I try to avoid but love to let inside my heart too. She’s full of life, lives in the moment, takes no shit, a big mouth but in the best way. She’s the perfect balance for Risa. Did you know someone like Giulia in your life? What inspired the character? Tell us all about Giulia.

WB: Glad to hear that. I love Giulia, too. I’ve known people like her, but she’s not based on anyone specific. She’s the kind of person who should’ve left the neighborhood—had a bunch of chances and missed out—and now she’s stuck. She was a relatively minor character in the first draft and got a much bigger role as my vision for the book changed. One of my favorite movies is Georgia with Jennifer Jason Leigh and Mare Winningham. I was thinking about the relationship between the sisters in that movie, JJL’s Sadie and Winningham’s Georgia, to a certain extent. There’s a lot of JJL’s Sadie in Giulia, and there’s some of Allison Johnson from Willy Vlautin’s Northline. She’s haunted, trying to live right, but she always has the impulse to break loose.

 

FR: You have a column in Southwest Review about movies you watched on streaming platforms. It’s a great read for people reading this. I discovered a few gems myself. Do movies play any role in writing choices? Do they inspire you? How so?

WB: Thanks, man. Big time, yeah. I go on kicks that influence what I’m working on. Deep diving into a director’s or an actor’s filmography. Certain things about performances. Certain images. I love to read, and I love so many writers, but I grew up loving movies too and I can’t help but seeing things cinematically in my mind. Imagining in shots. Imagining certain people playing certain parts. I was rewatching a lot of classic noirs as I worked on this—Scarlet Street, Criss Cross, Blast of Silence—and they really inspired the book. Italian filmmaker Raffaello Matarazzo’s “runaway melodramas” had an impact on what I was doing. Richard Linklater’s Boyhood was a structural influence. James Gray is one of my favorite filmmakers—all his New York City films are important to me, but Armageddon Time came out while I was working on this and it’s set in the ’80s, when my book starts, so that was huge. And Gray’s one of those filmmakers whose work has shaped my imagination, along with Martin Scorsese, Abel Ferrara, and others. George Stevens’s Giant (based on the great Edna Ferber novel) was very much on my mind, also in terms of how I structured things. So, yeah, on a given day, there are the movies that are part of my “spirit board” (to borrow a phrase from Jordan Harper), along with tons of books and music, but there’s also stuff that comes out of nowhere to surprise me and might change where I’m going or give me a cool detail or a new way of seeing things.

 

FR: The book has a simple plot, but the characters are rich and deep, and you use real human dialogue which I always find refreshing. I’m not the biggest fan of elaborate plots. I sometimes find it gets in the way. I’m invested in character. Early on, did you approach the book as a character study of sisters, abuse, loss, claustrophobia? Did you at times find the characters were taking you somewhere you didn’t fully understand? Did they frustrate you?

WB: I always start with character and place. I put the characters in desperate situations, usually in my part of southern Brooklyn, and see what develops from there. There’s drama just in watching lives unfold. I was thinking about that a lot here. The natural drama of being alive. Throw some secrets and lies and betrayals into the mix and shit gets amped up. I’m drawn to claustrophobic spaces—apartments and houses, especially kitchens—and, yeah, I was thinking about all those things. These characters—with their own private universes of fears and worries—face down everything that confronts them in different ways. Risa’s the one who really believes in God. In a lot of ways, though it’s never explicit, the novel charts the crumbling of that belief. There were times the characters took me places I didn’t expect or understand—that was part of the process. Fab frustrated me. I wanted him to give in and be happy with his life, but he wouldn’t do that.

 

FR: Great cover by the way. Whoever put that one together certainly hit on the classic ’70s paperback vibes. Growing up in Brooklyn in an Italian neighborhood do the people still have the classic names like Giulia and Risa? I remember reading an article you wrote about religious imagery. You and I both grew up in Catholic worlds, but in different cities. Do older names, imagery, religion, food, drink, and themes like guilt, all come from your experience growing up and coming of age in Brooklyn?

WB: Thanks. Soho had me fill out a form about what I wanted and didn’t want from a cover. I sent them covers I loved, a lot of stuff from the ’60s and ‘70s and further back. The cover designer, Luke Bird, did an incredible job. Just totally nailed the vibe of the book. I couldn’t believe when they came back to me with that on the first try. I have friends who go through hell with their covers, trying to get publishers to understand what they’re after. Covers are so damn important. I feel lucky to have a book out there that people might pick up just because the cover’s so cool.

Yeah, people still have those names. I get a lot of my names from people I went to school with or knew around the neighborhood and from my mom’s high school yearbook and, most of all, from the death notices of a local funeral parlor. And, yeah, all that stuff comes from the Italian Catholic world I grew up in. Brooklyn, the ’80s and ’90s, you know? Everybody’s probably got some picture of it from movies. All the sensory details. Went to Catholic school for twelve years, Mass every Saturday night with my mom and grandparents. There’s so much I can’t shake. The shame and guilt come from all of that, for sure. The fascination with regret and doubt and evil. Writing characters, like Risa, who must suffer. I call myself and the books I write “Catholic-haunted.” Catholicism is well-suited to noir, which is often just the stuff of classic tragedy.

 

FR: Not to give away anything for the readers as the book doesn’t come out until February, but how was it writing the last quarter of the book? I couldn’t stop reading it when I got closer to the end. I might’ve even shouted out a couple of times. Do you as an author want it to go differently for your characters but you know in your heart it has to end up the way it does?

WB: Yeah, that’s a good way of putting it. I don’t really believe in spoilers, but I’ll try to avoid them anyhow. I was thinking a lot about fate and chance and consequences. I did resist ending this where I did—I tried to write an epilogue that pulled some light from the darkness, but it didn’t work. I knew where this was headed for the most part, but I had the thought the characters might take it somewhere else. I was definitely carried along in the current of that last stretch—Fab, in particular, was unpredictable.

 

FR: There’s a handful of people on the social media sites that really pump books, not just new books, but older books too. You are one of those people. I get along best with people who share a love of books, music, and movies. What are your favorite reads that you read in 2024? The book can be older, it doesn’t need to be a new release. Give me four or five you want people to read?

WB: We’ve both talked a lot about Willy Vlautin’s The Horse. My favorite book of the year. Willy’s my favorite writer. I loved Ace Atkins’s Don’t Let the Devil Ride and Eli Cranor’s Broiler and Gabino Iglesias’s House of Bone and Rain. Henry Wise’s Holy City was a killer debut. I read Alison Gaylin’s new one, We Are Watching, which comes out in January 2025—I think the week before my book—and that blew me away. Really surprised me. Claudia Piñeiro’s Time of the Flies is terrific. Richard Price’s Lazarus Man was great, as expected. That’s the new stuff I’ve been reading. Mostly, though, I’m reading older stuff. Donna Masini’s About Yvonne was my favorite discovery this year. I’ve been going back to James T. Farrell a lot lately. The Studs Lonigan trilogy was formative as hell for me, but I’ve been digging into his deep catalogue. I recently read The Silence of History for the first time and loved it. Talk about Catholic-haunted. Brian Moore is a writer I really love—I’ve read maybe five or six of his books at this point—and he always knocks me out. This year, I read Cold Heaven and The Doctor’s Wife for the first time, both brilliant. Sorry, that’s a lot more than you asked for.

 

FR: I couldn’t help but picture Michael Imperioli in my head for Chooch. Did you personally know a guy like Chooch? How did you steer through Chooch’s dilemmas, mindset? He’s a self-defeatist and realist, but he’s loyal. He’s one of the BIG hearts in the book. Tell us all about Chooch?

WB: I love Michael Imperioli. I can see that. I’ve known some guys like Chooch. With him, I think I was also trying to write a version of myself if I’d never left home. I split when I was eighteen. Chased other things. But I often wonder what my life would’ve been like if I never left home, stayed all cooped up and shut off. I put a lot of that into imagining Chooch. It wasn’t hard to get into his mindset. Trapped and full of yearning. He’s not me, or I’m not him, not by a long stretch in most ways, but I could’ve been. I love Chooch. I worry about him. He’s got a good heart, for sure, but he’s damaged.

 

FR: You have a full life: family, work, book travels overseas, etc. When and how do you spend your writing time when you are deep into a project? Where do you write? Do you have superstitions around you like a little shrine? Is it a set schedule or do you write when you can?

WB: When I’m really working on something, I wake up at five and try to get right to it. No distractions. If I can get three or four good hours in the morning in, I can usually accomplish what I want to for the day. I’ll work throughout the day beyond that if my day job teaching doesn’t get in the way—sometimes something about the book will keep itching at me, or I’ll be revising—but the morning’s the best time for me. I mostly write at our dining room table when I’m home—I don’t have an office or anything. I like to go out to coffeeshops, too. No real superstitions beyond needing music in my headphones. With this book, I was listening to a lot of Loren Connors, particularly Hell’s Kitchen Park. Nick Cave’s and Warren Ellis’s score for Blonde was also in steady rotation, as was Harold Budd’s score for I Know This Much Is True. Lou Reed’s Hudson River Wind Meditations has been a big one for me in the last year.

 

FR: Tell us about the book release. When exactly does it drop? Are you planning reading events online and in person? How is it working with Soho Crime? And are you working on anything new, or in the early stages of something new?

WB: The book will be out on February 4, 2025. I’ll be doing an event here in Oxford, Mississippi at Square Books that day—I’ll be in conversation with Ace Atkins. The next night, February 5, I’ll be at Novel in Memphis, talking to my pal David Swider, who owns the record store, The End of All Music, where I worked for many years. On February 17, I’ll be at Greenlight in Brooklyn, and then, on February 18, I’ll be at Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan with Megan Abbott. On February 19, I’ll be at Rough Draft in Kingston, New York. Still trying to put a few things together after that, but that’s the schedule right now. I’m sure there will be at least a couple of virtual things too, and I’m hoping like hell to make it out west.

Soho has been great. They’ve been one of my favorite publishers for a long time, and I’ve been hoping to wind up there. I love my editor and the whole team.

I am working on a new book. You can never tell how things are going to go, but I think I’m in the homestretch of finishing a draft. We’ll see. I’m superstitious when it comes to talking about stuff I’m working on—I hate to do it.

FR: Bonus Question: P.T. Anderson calls you up and tells you to stop at Blockbuster and pick up three movies of your choice. Also, to stop and get some treats from the best bakery in Brooklyn. What bakery are you going to? What kind of treats are you bringing? And what three movies do you pick?

WB: First off, I’ve gotta say, I was never a Blockbuster kid. I went to a mom-and-pop shop in my neighborhood. It was named International Video, but I called it Wolfman’s because the guy looked like Lon Chaney Jr. in The Wolf Man. They did open a Blockbuster a few blocks away from me in the ’90s, but I never went there. And, oh man, that’s a tough call. Am I trying to grab movies I think he’s never seen or just favorites? I feel like it’d be damn hard to get something Paul Thomas Anderson has never seen or heard of. I guess I’ll go with a couple of favorites and one recent first-time watch. Louis Malle’s Atlantic City would be my number one. I think about that movie constantly, and it inspires everything I write. No doubt PTA’s a big fan of Saturday Night Fever, but I feel like I’d have to take the opportunity to show it to him in the part of Brooklyn where it was shot and then I could pitch my idea for Saturday Night Fever 3: The Future Fucks You, about a washed-up Tony Manero. And, finally, I’ve been on a big J. Lee Thompson kick lately, and I just watched North West Frontier for the first time. Kind of like Stagecoach on a train in India. Thompson is one of those workhorse directors with a long, wild career that I really admire. I feel like that’d been an unexpected pick.

The bakery I’m going to is Villabate Alba, which is where my character Risa in Saint of the Narrows Street used to work before the action of the book unfolds. Best joint around. I’d go with classic pastries—cannoli, sfogliatelle, and sfinge—and probably grab a pound of rainbow cookies.

William Boyle is the author of eight books set in and around the southern Brooklyn neighborhood of Gravesend, where he was born and raised. His most recent novel is Saint of the Narrows Street, available from Soho Crime. His books have been nominated for the Hammett Prize, the John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger Award in the UK, and the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in France, and they have been included on best-of lists in Washington Post, CrimeReads, and more. He currently lives in Oxford, M