William Boyle: On Brooklyn as a Mythological Place, Juggling Perspectives, and His New Novel ‘Saint of the Narrows Street’
When I meet another writer for a beer, I usually end up drinking a lot more than planned. We’ll talk for hours, and I’ll lose track of the time and how many times I’ve asked the bartender for another one. We’ll ramble about mutual writers we love, and I’ll inevitably bring up my love of film noir and growing interest in crime fiction. With this, almost without fail, the person I’m with will bring up William Boyle. I finally took the hint and picked up his 2021 novel City of Margins. I was taken aback by the immediacy of the prose and the immersive feeling of the Brooklyn setting.
When the striking cover of his new book Saint of the Narrows Street (Soho Press, 2025) was revealed, I jumped on the opportunity to get an advance copy. The novel revolves around one fateful night when new mother Risa, in a moment of panic, accidentally kills Sav, her drunk and abusive husband. Fearing the consequences of calling the cops, she, along with her sister Giulia and friend Chooch, decides the killing must be covered up. Together they shoulder the weight of the secret as the years pass and more people, including Risa’s son Fab, begin to ask questions.
I tore through the book in a handful of days, but I still find myself revisiting certain moments and thinking about the ending. William was nice enough to talk to me about the novel, among many other topics including Hubert Selby, Jr., hair metal, and the late David Lynch.
Drew Buxton: Saint of the Narrows Street, like your previous novels, is set in your native southern Brooklyn. In a 2013 interview promoting your first novel, Gravesend, you said, after moving to the South, Brooklyn had become a mythological place that constantly evolves in your mind. While reading your new book, I found myself totally wrapped up in your Brooklyn and not concerned with what it’s really like. It reminds me of Hubert Selby Jr., after Last Exit to Brooklyn came out, talking about people from his neighborhood who confronted him about portraying 1950s Brooklyn as more violent than it really was. He’d respond that he wasn’t aiming for reality, that it was an expression of how he felt about the place. Twelve years removed from your debut and that much further removed from your New York childhood, how does Brooklyn exist in your mind now and how did your current vision of it influence the new novel?
William Boyle: Thanks. That’s good to hear. And that’s the way it should be, I think. You’re getting a version of Brooklyn that’s part real, part mythological, and part a product of my imagination. Ultimately, it’s about getting at emotional truth, capturing the ways the place has made me feel throughout my life. My first few books were set in the 2010s. Though I’m back home in southern Brooklyn often, I haven’t lived there full-time since the early aughts, so in my more recent books, including this one, I’ve gone back to the era I grew up there, primarily the eighties and nineties. That’s been key to unlocking something in my approach. Saint of the Narrows Street is about time and memory—it’s set across eighteen years, and it’s a patchwork of the characters’ feelings about and memories of the block and the neighborhood. The real, the mythological, and the fictional mingle on every page. Again, it’s about getting to that emotional truth. Selby’s one of my heroes. There’s a good documentary about him called Hubert Selby Jr: It/ll Be Better Tomorrow, where Michael Silverblatt says of Selby’s work that “he was writing a Brooklyn of the soul, [. . .] that—as real as the book may be—its real landscape was a landscape of spiritual anguish.” Understanding that about Selby’s work has informed my own approach, especially in this book. A Brooklyn of the soul is a phrase I think about often.
I’m in a much different place than I was twelve years ago. At that point, I’d lived in the Deep South, far away from New York for only about four or five years, and what came with leaving felt fresh. There was also the assumption we’d be going back shortly. Now it’s been much longer, over sixteen years, and we haven’t left, my family and I have built our lives in Mississippi and again—though I’m back home in Brooklyn to visit my mom often—I’m getting older and my mom’s getting older and my kids are getting older and everything is changing faster than ever. I’m just facing down the past and the future in ways that come with aging. There’s so much mystery involved in creating art. The Brooklyn I see when I sit down to write is both a movie in my mind and more real than the world that’s in front of me daily.
DB: I love that documentary! I should rewatch it soon. “Landscape of spiritual anguish” is a great way of putting it. The mix of perspectives and the movement through time in your book created an interesting reading experience where I felt nostalgic for the previous time periods when the world seemed more open for the characters.
Time in the book is marked by pop culture. Chooch’s 1986 bedroom is filled with posters of Iron Maiden, Rambo: First Blood Part II, Andre the Giant, etc. In 1998, twelve-year-old Fab listens to Mobb Deep in his friend’s bedroom. The characters often view their lives through the lens of film—Risa hesitates to go out for drinks after thinking about Looking for Mr. Goodbar. I think pop culture artifacts are such a big part of how we remember the past. We can’t go back and watch our past, but the albums, books, and movies are still there for us, just as they were. What was it like to revisit the popular art of the eighties and nineties for this book?
WB: It’s the era that shaped me, so there’s that element. And it’s always so important for me to know what art characters love and engage with. All those things are access points. When I was a kid, before Nirvana came along and switched my brain, I was into hair metal. It was fun to dig back into that world, primarily through the lens of Chooch. L’Amour—the club Chooch and Sav frequent—was a very real place. It was known as “the Rock Capital of Brooklyn,” pronounced by patrons as “La-Morz.” There are no scenes in the novel set there—one wound up on the cutting room floor—but a lot of my early research involved listening to recordings of shows from L’Amour and reading folks writing about their memories of the place, since its heyday was a bit before my time. A lot of that went into Chooch, if only under the surface. I spent time remembering the collection of hair metal tapes I had (before I unceremoniously dumped them in a garbage can on Fourth Avenue in Bay Ridge, a memory which plays in my mind’s eye like that scene in Freaks & Geeks where Sam throws out his childhood toys). I grew up going to my local video store, which I called Wolfman’s (it makes a brief appearance in the book)—I enjoyed thinking about what tapes might’ve been on the shelves at that exact time, what posters were in the window. It was important to think about what Chooch had on his bedroom wall—in his sad little sanctuary. I liked thinking about Risa’s taste, the songs and movies and books that haunted her. Joni Mitchell, Terms of Endearment, The Outsiders. It wound up being important considering Fab’s developing taste too, especially in the final part of the book, as he yearned for a connection with his old man. The way he tried to make that connection through music is moving to me, even as Fab transformed into an unsettling, tragic figure.
DB: Ah! Hurts to hear about that tape collection getting tossed out. Fab’s story is such a natural consequence of that opening sequence. I felt for him as he clung onto the few shreds he had of his father. His desperation is very real.
The story of Saint of the Narrows Street revolves around an event that takes place in the opening chapter. Despite this, I felt pulled through the book without ever losing momentum. I think this was largely due to the characters being so richly drawn. I was invested in their lives and fates outside of just what would result from Sav’s death. In total, the novel is told from the perspective of six different characters, with a varying amount of chapters devoted to each. How did you decide whose perspectives were needed and how much space to give them?
WB: It’s also part of the mystery. Opportunities present themselves. I guess it’s a lot like writing songs. You catch melodies and voices. Sometimes they lead you down bad roads, but sometimes they work. How much space depends on how scenes play out. I don’t plan a ton—I like to leave room for the unexpected and unknown. The very first draft of this book was set on one hot night in the summer of 1986—the same night as part one in the finished version—all on the block and had something like fifteen or sixteen different POVs. It didn’t work for a variety of reasons, but I was trying to capture something about the world of the block—the tapestry of voices, people desiring escape, people returning home, people in crisis, people in love. When I sat down to rewrite the book after that failed first draft, I scrapped everything except a few of the characters. I knew Risa, Giulia, and Chooch would be POV characters at that point. Once I figured out the time angle, I had a sense that Fab would be a POV character later in the book. Roberto and Father Tim were surprises—I got to a point where I needed to see the world of the story through their eyes. One of the nice things about bouncing between characters is the downhill feeling it provides. There’s an automatic tension built into shifting gears like that.
DB: A professor of mine once said that “movies are empathy machines,” and I think that is certainly also true of fiction when we get a character’s POV. Empathizing with Roberto and Father Tim made me uncomfortable in a satisfying way. It made everything even murkier in true noir fashion. No one is pure, but no one is a monster either.
As someone who primarily read “literary” fiction until recently, a lot of noir and crime fiction feels so steeped in tropes that the story and characters don’t have room to breathe. Your new book contains some identifiable crime fiction traits—corruption, flawed protagonists, the dialogue—while never feeling trite or stale. How conscious are you of genre conventions as you’re writing? Has this changed over the years?
WB: Thanks. Good to hear that about Roberto and Father Tim. I can’t say I think about conventions, genre or otherwise. I think about what I’m moved by and what I respond to most. There is some crime fiction that’s formulaic and underdeveloped, for sure, but the stuff that really inspired me early on—and that continues to really inspire me—doesn’t ever feel like that. Writers like David Goodis, Charles Willeford, Jim Thompson, Chester Himes, and Patricia Highsmith, just to name a few—I learned so much from reading them. Writing fully developed characters, painting a portrait of a place, filling the story with memorable details—that’s what’s most important. Crime fiction can feel like it has a bit of a different engine because it relies on action and movement in a way that “literary” fiction doesn’t always, but most distinctions between genre and non-genre fiction are bullshit. What’s changed for me through the years comes with aging and facing down mortality in new ways and being impacted by loss.
DB: The distinctions definitely feel arbitrary at times, and I suppose plenty of what would be considered “literary” suffers from those same issues you mentioned.
Can you say more about how aging, loss, and dealing with mortality has impacted you and your writing? Scott McClanahan once said, “The thing about writing and art and music is it’s always in the present. Even if you’ve looked at a Francis Bacon painting before and you see it again. It’s still a new painting. It’s still optimistic. It’s still saying death hasn’t caught up with me yet.” On some level, do you seek immortality through your work?
WB: That’s a great quote from Scott (I love his books, by the way). I’ve been thinking a lot about my greatest artistic hero, David Lynch, for obvious reasons. No work in recent years has had as much of an impact on me as Twin Peaks: The Return, which is all about death and time. In an obituary for Lynch, the writer Adam Nayman discussed this remarkable quality Lynch had that made it feel like “his work was always evolving without ever really changing.” In many ways, Saint of the Narrows Street is my version of The Return: it returns to a familiar locale, riffs on types of characters and places I’ve portrayed before, but it’s viewed from this new angle, informed by aging and loss and the facing down of mortality. The interior lives of the characters are portrayed differently across time—a lot more fear and paranoia about the future, a lot of worries and regrets about the past. Characters hung up on missed opportunities, on roads they didn’t take. That’s the kind of thinking that comes with getting older, as people you love die, as certain friends and family members drift out of your life, as you yourself face down new realities. That was very much the headspace I wrote this book in, which sounds dire, but there’s room for hope and wisdom in there, too.
I don’t dream about immortality, but I put some hope in the possibility of connecting with readers down the road. There are writers like Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and Dickens, who everyone knows and will always know, but I think any writer who has put out a book and entered the bloodstream, so to speak, can achieve a small piece of immortality if someone, anyone discovers that book and connects with it. I think of all the books I’ve chanced across—in libraries, at bag sales, in used bookstores—by forgotten or neglected writers, books that are long out of print maybe, and how they’ve hit me. Tom Kromer’s Waiting for Nothing comes to mind—that book wasn’t in my life and then suddenly it was, and things were different. You never know how or if that might happen, which is a beautiful thing.
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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 in February 2025 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, Mississippi.
