I shook my head as we passed the Doubloon and its blinking TAKE A CHANCE sign.
Because when I thought back about being a kid going for those long walks on the Boardwalk, it was Vin’s hand, not Mike’s, holding mine. I remember him hoisting me up on his shoulders and telling me that someday the whole town would be mine. Vin showed me the way of the world and taught me that only the strong survive, though in Atlantic City, even that’s not a sure thing. And when the time came, I acted like his son by reaching for a gun to avenge his death. That was what was in my heart, and it couldn’t be any other way. I once thought I was something different or maybe even something better than him, but now I finally understood that what he was was also a part of me. And that in spite of everything, I would always love him.
“My father’s name was Vin,” I said.
A cold wind was whipping around the island. Probably a storm on the way, or at least a light rain. Sand rose off the dunes they’d piled up to keep the Atlantic from overtaking the beach.
“Have it your way.” Farley shrugged.
I took one last look out at the ocean. A full moon was shining on the water and pulling on the tide. The ripples caught the broken pieces of light and threw them back up at the sky.
A Biography of Peter Blauner
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.
A six-year-old Blauner dressed as the Green Hornet. His love of the comic book series marked his first interest in crime fiction.
Blauner with his mother, older brother Steve, and family friends during what he calls “the heyday of the Mad Men era.”
Blauner’s yearbook page from Collegiate School, the all-boys institution he attended on the Upper West Side of New York City.
Blauner’s first real byline as a reporter for New York magazine in 1982, when he was twenty-two. As he remembers, “It was an undercover assignment in which I posed as a street peddler; and an early version of the kind of research I’d do later for my novels. I almost managed to get arrested selling fake Rolexes and knock-off Gucci sunglasses.”
Blauner’s wedding photo with his wife, Peg Tyre, the New York Times bestselling author of the nonfiction book The Trouble with Boys. The couple was married on June 24, 1989.
Blauner and Peg (who was pregnant at the time) with George Jordan and Elaine Rivera at the scene of the Crown Heights riots in 1991, about three months after Slow Motion Riot was published. Jordan and Rivera were two of Peg’s fellow New York Newsday reporters.
Seen here in 1992, Blauner holds his first-born son, Mac, then four months old, at the Semana Negra writer’s festival, which was hosted by the International Association of Crime Writers at a seaside amusement park in Gijón, Spain. They are posing in front of a giant replica of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, translated into Spanish. Blauner’s own books have been translated into twenty languages.