The Last Good Day (59 page)
The dead—the one neighborhood that would always take you in, no matter what you’d done.
In the late afternoon, it had a subdued amber shading, as if it were already a fading photograph. If she waited too long, she’d lose the light. A grip on her heart told her to shoot quickly. She took a meter reading, adjusted the lens, raised the Canon, and pressed the little button. The shutter in her head clicked at the same time as the camera’s, closing and then slowly opening up again.
Water cascaded over the rocks on either side of her. But she held her angle, wiped the drops off the lens with her shirttail, and clicked the shutter two more times. Then she turned and carefully picked her way over the rocks back to the shore.
“You get what you need?” Barry was waiting with his good arm outstretched.
“Yes,” she said, putting the lens cap back on and nestling against the undamaged part of him. “As a matter of fact, I did.”
They turned their backs to the boiling river and staggered away together.
Although Peter Blauner (b. 1959) grew up on Manhattan’s East Side and attended the prestigious Collegiate School for Boys, he has always been drawn to the dark side of city life. “Being a kid during the fiscal-crisis seventies, I saw how things could change and you could go from the high to the low very quickly. Which is a very good lesson in humility and an even better one for writing crime fiction.”
Influenced equally by the films of Sidney Lumet and Martin Scorsese, the burgeoning punk rock scene, and the split-lip school of American pulp fiction, Blauner began writing short stories in high school and while still in college got a summer job assisting legendary newspaper columnist and author Pete Hamill. “He gave me a master class on what it means to be an urban writer. He taught me to always get your notes on paper right away, always ask the hardest question you can think of, and always listen carefully to the last thing somebody says to you.”
After graduating from Wesleyan University in Connecticut in 1982, Blauner returned to the city and began working at
New York
magazine, where he apprenticed with Nicholas Pileggi, author of
Wise Guy
and screenwriter of the film
Goodfellas
. Over the next few years, Blauner developed his byline for the magazine, writing about crime, politics, and other forms of antisocial behavior. But, he says, “My real goal was to train myself to become an urban novelist. I wanted to write stories that were suspenseful and compelling, but that also tried to capture what’s funny, surrealistic, and occasionally beautiful about city life.”
He decided on an approach of full-immersion research, which he has continued throughout his writing career. In 1988, he took a leave from the magazine and became a volunteer at the New York Department of Probation, so he could write about the criminal culture of the era from the front lines. The result was his debut novel,
Slow Motion Riot
, which was published in 1991. It went on to win the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best first novel and was named one of the “International Books of the Year” in the
Times Literary Supplement
by Patricia Highsmith, who called it “unforgettable.”
Soon after, Blauner turned his attention to fiction writing fulltime, and his next novel,
Casino Moon
,
was a kind of update of the classic noir pulp genre, set in the Atlantic City boxing world and published in 1994. After his time in Atlantic City researching
Casino Moon
, he returned to New York and spent a year working at a homeless shelter to research
The Intruder
, which was published in 1996 and became a
New York Times
bestseller. For his next novel,
Man of the Hour
, published in 1999, he anticipated the reality of 9/11 by writing about misguided notions of heroism and Middle Eastern terrorism in America. Four years later, he shifted gears and wrote
The Last Good Day
, about a murder in a quiet Hudson River town and the resulting social fissures among the people who live there.
Blauner’s most recent novel,
Slipping Into Darkness
(2006), found him back on the city streets creating a modern urban mystery. It tells the story of Julian Vega, a bright young immigrant’s son, locked up in the early eighties for killing a female doctor on New York’s Upper East Side. Twenty years later, Julian is released from prison and another female doctor is killed under strikingly similar circumstances. Only this time, the evidence doesn’t point to Julian at all—it points to the woman he allegedly murdered two decades before. And the detective who arrested him in the first place, Francis X. Loughlin, is left to wrestle with the possibility that he ruined the life of an innocent man. The book earned the strongest reviews of Blauner’s career, with everyone from Stephen King to the
New York Times
ringing in, and introduced him to a new audience.
More recently, Blauner has branched out into television work, writing scripts for the
Law & Order
franchise, and also into short fiction. His short stories have been anthologized in the
Best American Mystery
collection and on NPR’s
Selected Shorts from Symphony Space
. He continues to live in Brooklyn with his wife, Peg Tyre, author of the bestselling nonfiction book
The Trouble With Boys
, and their two sons, Mac and Mose.
Blauner grew up in the New York City of the 1970s and started writing fiction while a student at the Collegiate School for Boys. “I became a writer right before Mother’s Day when I was fifteen: I saw a little girl at Gimbel’s Department Store trying to pull her dress down, and heard her nanny say, ‘Stop that, you’re as bad as your mother.’”
For his first novel,
Slow Motion Riot
, Blauner immersed himself in research, spending six months as a volunteer at the New York Department of Probation.
For his fourth novel,
Man of the Hour
, Blauner traveled Jerusalem and the West Bank to get a sense of his characters’ background stories. This photograph was taken by a shepherd at the sheep market outside of Bethlehem.
Since 1989, Blauner has been married to bestselling author Peg Tyre (
The Trouble with Boys
,
The Good School
). They have two sons.
In recent years, Blauner has been working in television, as a writer and producer for the
Law & Order
franchise.
I WOULD LIKE TO
give special thanks to Peter Bloom and Michael McElroy for their patience, wit, and good company in helping me research this book.
I would also like to thank William Kress, Tom Reddy, Randy Jefferson, Lisa Kovitz, David Crowley, Sarah Jane Crowley, Elizabeth Keyishian, Sarah Siegle, Jason Cohen, Milton Hoffman, Michael Cherkasky, Nancy Pine, Ray Stevens, Jeff Parthemore, Arney Rosenblatt, Matthew Nimetz, Joe Reed, Jane Hammerslough, Samuel G. Freedman, Constance Hall, Tim Tully, Donna Dietrich, Lori Grinker, Ellen Binder, Joyce Slevin, Bob Slevin, Julie Betts Testuwide, Lori Andiman, Art Levitt, Gene Heller, Joseph Mitchell, Fred Starler, Jordan Fields, Jimmy Wall, Eva Merk, Jesse James Lewis, Bob Merk, Alexander Morales, Richard Ligi, Stephen Brown, Audrey Winer, Richard Sokolow, Lynn Saville, George Johansen, Shannon Langone, and, of course, Richard Pine.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 2003 by Peter Blauner
cover design by Karen Horton
ISBN: 978-1-4532-1519-7
This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media
180 Varick Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
