Bookblog Interview: Linda Fairstein
Linda Fairstein is a former Manhattan Assistant District Attorney in the Sex Crimes Unit and a New York Times best-selling author of seven crime novels featuring prosecutor Alexandra Cooper and NYPD Detective Mike Chapman. Fairstein's books are each centered around a city landmark or neighborhood and include alot of New York history along with the mystery. Her latest, Entombed, centers around a town house in Greenwich Village where Edgar Allan Poe once lived. In a recent interview, Fairstein talks about her new book, her research, food, what's coming up in her next book, and comments about the killer in most notorious case she prosecuted, the "Preppy Murder Case." more

There is so much historical content in your books - it's apparent you know the city and you love it. How much research do you do?
Tons of research. I first had a lot of access to parts of the city through the job (as prosecutor) I just love taking parts of New York that all of us think we know from the externals, and unlayering them, getting behind the scenes. So I really began in earnest in the second book, Likely to Die , because I set in a hospital that looks a lot like Bellevue and it was a where in fact there was a doctor was murdered during the night one night working in her office. So I love the idea of getting inside or behind what we think of as the most benign places in the city, that are populated by thousands of people every day, the hospital, that are bigger than the population of most towns in America. And from there I went to art museums and art galleries in Cold Hit and The Dead House was just a building that fascinated me on Roosevelt Island. With Entombed, both the physical places and then just the volumes of research about his life -- it caused me to re-read all of his works. I knew many of the short stories and most of the poems but I didn't know about the the other ten volumes of literary criticism and essays he'd written. So I got immersed again in Poe which was a great delight and then read biographies of Poe. Some really contemporaneous to his life and time, which were very different perspective from those written now, about 150 years later.

How did you decide to write about Poe for this book?
I read Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle as what were I considered by first real adult books at the age of 11 or 12. And I've always loved Poe not only the short stories but the poetry. And about four years ago I read newspaper stories that NYU was buying the little tenement that he lived in on Third Street to tear it down and build a law school. There was a lot of involvement by Mystery Writers of America and other groups who did not want the house torn down. It was of no architectural significance, it wasn't a landmark building for any other reason, but Poe lived there briefly before moving up to the Bronx. And I became fascinated. In many Poe stories he liked to entomb people, he liked to bury them alive. And he often said in his books that that was the most primal fear we all have, that we are going to be buried alive and that we are going to die a horrible death scratching our way out of something. So for weeks I would have this what if. What if they tear down this house that Poe lived in and find a skeleton? So it started with this very silly "what if" but I couldn't get it out of my head. The lawsuit went on and the writers' groups lost it and in fact the building was demolished. And I bought one of the bricks. The Mystery Writers of America bought a lot of the original 18th-century bricks and they put little brass plaques on them and for $40 they were selling them. So I bought a couple and put them on my writing desk for inspiration and it started me re-reading Poe stories. During which my husband said - my husband is from the Bronx - that he grew up near Poe Park-- I didn't know that. So we went up to the Bronx one day together and there is indeed, a little city park, and in it is a little white clapboard farm house [Poe Cottage] where he lived. And he used to walk every day in the botanical gardens. So I began to spend a lot of time researching there about places Poe had been, and that took me deeper into it. So that was great for Alex and Mike and it was great to be able to work so much of Poe's life into the book and it was great for the reader to learn there was that much of a connection with New York.

What are your favorite Poe Poems and stories?
My two favorite poems are The Raven and Annabel Lee. I love the sweetness of Annabel Lee. My favorite stories are The Cask of Amontillado and The Tell-tale Heart.

I love the way you write about food!
That's one of the things that's fun. I mean [Alex] has to eat somewhere, and why create fictional places when there are all these great places in New York? Alex shares with me the trait or the problem that she doesn't cook and then of course professional lifestyle - I rarely got out of that office before 7:30 or 8:30 at night. And so it is normal to be eating out three or four nights a week to be eating out somewhere and the rest of the eating taking out - deliveries, that great luxury of New York. And so [I write a lot about] Promola, my favorite Italian restaurant in the city, its consistently good food, it's wonderfully comfortable - I walk in - they used to see me walk in with detectives or my husband and they'd always find a corner for me. The humorous side is that now, since I've put them in every book, they have - my husband calls it my shrine to myself - they've got all my book jackets framed on the wall next to my favorite table. So it's fun to go in. When I'm writing I can create the scene and the mood depending on the day and the date or who she's with so that's a lot of fun.

There's always a point where Alex has to handle a false accusation from some teenager. How true to life are those scenes?
Dead-on accurate. These scenes come almost directly from cases. I mean, I never wrote the dialogue down, but I can recreate it in my head in a flash. In my non-fiction book and in many of my speeches it's something I refer to often. False reporting, or a real incident but lying about some aspect of it, is a very serious problem in sexual assault cases. It's a minority, its fewer than ten percent of the reports that come in, but it happens. That's what makes it so ugly for real victims because somebody encounters one person who lied and tends not to want to believe the next one. And so I enjoy putting these scenes in, for their realism and for the fact that this actually occurs. Here's Alex working on somebody's death or somebody's serial rape and in the middle of it, there's a person who's sucking the energy out of the police department and Alex and her colleagues with a false report. It shows how dangerous they are. And so I do try and put one in every book. One of the things that I dislike about crime fiction in books, in television and movies, is that the characters get the "real case" the skeleton in the basement, and all else stands still for them, there's no other new cases, that's what they work on day and night 'til they solve it. And that's just not real life, not in any police department not for Alex or any other prosecutor. The reality is you have the big case but you still have your datebook full of appointments from the week before, that you haven't seen yet, witnesses in an on-going case you haven't talked to, and by the way your beeper is still going off, the phone continues to ring, cases continue to happen and I mean nobody [has just one major case]. And so I just like showing that all this is going on. And Michael Connolly said when he wrote to me - because he spends a lot of time researching with police - he was so gracious to say that he really likes that in my books. And I like that too because it's real and its so rare that you see it in fiction.

What is happening in the future with Alex and Mike romantically?
I get more mail from fans and readers about that question than about anything else. [laughing]. And I'm very concerned about it because readers sense that she is beginning to understand - she hasn't said it out loud yet - that her feelings for [detective] Mike Chapman go deeper than this pal-around friendship they have. And I think she's keenly aware or probably going to express it soon that she's very worried about what becomes of their professional relationship, which they've had for ten years. Which certainly she can't work with him anymore, because the first time she would put him on the witness stand there would be the defense attorney who says, where'd you spend the night last night or are you doing this because alex cooper asked you to do it and were you in bed with here or are you doing this just so you could win the case. So it raises just enormous problems in the professional context. Since she doesn't age real time, since in each of these seven books there are just three months between books for her unlike the rest of us, I'm hoping readers will be patient while she tries to figure this out.

Are you working on your next book?
I'm well on the way [with the next book]. The next one takes Alex and Mike into the theater world in New York. Broadway - I'm doing the same thing - unlayering stories about broadway theaters, the Metropolitan Opera House, where, in fact, there was a murder in 1980 while there were 4,000 people sitting in the audience. It fascinates me that somebody, with a completely full audience and 400 employees backstage, disappears between acts and never comes back, and the orchestra played on and nobody even missed her. It takes me into the Metropolitan Opera House, the City Center and then a lot of theaters like the Belasco, which are supposed to have ghosts. The research just fascinating history of who lived in them and what terrible things have happened.

Robert Chambers, the killer in the most notorious case you prosecuted, was released last year and re-arrested days later on drug charges. Any thoughts?
Many times before he was released many people asked me if I thought he would kill again. His killing again wasn't [going to be] the problem. He's been addicted to drugs since he was 13. We proved that during the trial with records - He was kicked out of school at 13 for stealing a teacher's wallet and sent to his first attempt at rehab. And in jail, in 15 years of state prison when he had chances to be in detox programs, and there are good ones in prison, he chose not to, and was charged more than 15 times in fifteen years with drug infractions, of people smuggling drugs into him, that caused him to do most of his jail time in solitary. So if that wasn't a wake-up call to him - if killing a friend wasn't a wake-up call to him, nothing is. I don't meant this answer to sound like I have a crystal ball, but all of us who knew him, the detectives, the Levins [the victim's parents], the people who worked on the case, we all knew he'd be back [in prison] and the problem would be drugs. It's not brilliant of me, and it's not a crystal ball, it's just a sad fact about him.