Back Bay

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For Chrissie

INTRODUCTION

They always tell young writers, “Write what you know.”

I never bought that advice, even at the beginning of my career.

I’ve always believed that you write what you want to know, or where you want to go, or who you want to meet when you get there.

So, in the opening chapter of Back Bay, I traveled to Federal-era Boston, to a banquet at Faneuil Hall, and I sat at the table with George Washington, John Adams, John Hancock, and Paul Revere. History records some of the details. I imagined the rest.

I had always been fascinated by the eighteenth-century city, a place of amazing intellectual and political ferment, a place where giants walked the streets. I had also just read Gore Vidal’s Burr, which suggested that those giants were as human as the rest of us, and I wanted to see if I could humanize them, too.

And why not? I was twenty-seven, recently graduated from the USC film school, and trying to get into the storytelling business. So I was learning everything I could from the movies I saw and the books I read. I believed that if I worked hard enough and honed my talents, I’d soon be making a living by telling my stories and humanizing a few giants, too.

Call that confidence or blind faith or the arrogance of naïveté. But any young person who decides that they are going to succeed in any of the arts needs it. They need to say to the world, “Don’t tell me the odds, because I plan to beat them.”

I can quote from memory the first paragraph of the first chapter of Back Bay. That’s how hard I worked on it, because I knew, even then, that I had to capture my readers right away, that the hardest job for any writer is to make a skeptical reader turn the first page. So I brought a character named Horace Taylor Pratt right to stage center and started him fumbling with his snuffbox. I wanted you to fix on him, because even if you didn’t like him (and he’s not especially likeable), I wanted to tell you, before he even opened his mouth, that he would soon be causing a lot of trouble.

And characters who cause trouble, or promise to, can get a story going quickly.

After that first chapter, I knew I was on my way.

But what did I do in the second chapter? All right, I’ll admit it. I wrote what I knew. I took the story into the present and introduced a character named Peter Fallon, who might not be me but certainly made a good stand-in.

When Back Bay came out two years later, a critic said that it was not your typical first novel, which is usually a voyage of self-discovery for a young author. “On the contrary, this is a story of straight adventure spiced with mystery and laced with history.” Nice. Nothing like a little rhyme to fix a good review in a reader’s mind.

But if proving yourself is part of the voyage of self-discovery, Peter Fallon and I were both taking the trip. We both came from a Boston-Irish background. We both had gone to Harvard as undergraduates and done construction work to make a few bucks. We both had gone on to study something other than the law, which disappointed our fathers. I went to film school. Peter studied history. My father encouraged me despite his misgivings. Peter’s father did not. But we both wanted to show our fathers that we could use what we’d learned in graduate school to make our way in the world.

Like Pratt, Peter is a fictional character, so he gets into a lot more trouble than I do. He’s followed and threatened, but he doesn’t let anyone intimidate him. He falls for a girl who rebuffs him, but he keeps coming back. He has to fight hand-to-hand four stories above the ground, but… let’s not give too much more away.

As for me, I got to sit at a desk and dream it all up.

I started writing Back Bay in Los Angeles, in the stacks of the Doheny Library at the University of Southern California. I had written two movie scripts by then, both based on California history.