The Picador Book Room

This week Picador is publishing Bill Loehfelm’s The Devil She Knows, a “gritty and lyrical” crime novel set in the seedy underbelly of Staten Island. To celebrate we’ll be featuring the book here on the Tumblr for the rest of the week. Below, Bill lays out five characters who influenced the creation of his heroine, Maureen Coughlin.

Writers get asked a lot about their influences, a tough subject to address. I feel I often discover what influenced me in retrospect, when I re-read a book or re-watch a movie for the first time in years and I notice something in them that I see in my own work. Maureen Coughlin is a character I developed over many years. Here are five women who I think are embedded in her DNA:

5. Rowan Mayfair – The Witching Hour, by Anne Rice. Intelligent, talented, educated, powerful, sexual, fearless and dangerous Rowan Mayfair was everything I’d come to expect from a hero – except male.

4. Lt. Ellen Ripley – Aliens. She spends most of the movie surrounded by men with money and guns who think they know better, despite the fact that she knows more than them, and she ends up being nearly the last person standing, mostly because of her raw and electric will to survive. An old school “if you want it done right, do it yourself” hero.

3. Marion Ravenwood – Raiders of the Lost Ark. She’s not quite the feminist icon I thought she was when I was younger, she does spend much of the film as a damsel in distress, though a formidable one. Still, how many movie heroines debut by winning a drinking contest, sucker punching an ex-boyfriend and putting a bullet through the head of a Gestapo enforcer? To me, she was always much more beautiful tending bar in her braid than in that ridiculous dress.

2. Carrie Kelley as Robin – The Dark Knight Returns, by Frank Miller. She’s young, small, unskilled, untrained, plain and invisible to nearly everyone around her, including her parents. She both under and over estimates her own bravery, smarts, and toughness. She doesn’t see any reason why she should take shit from anyone, or why you should either. Being female never enters into it. What’s not to love?

1. Sarah Connor – Terminator/Terminator 2. A depiction of a woman as the renegade lone wolf hero that doesn’t just portray her as a woman acting manly; she’s more than a novelty act. Watch the two films back to back. The metamorphosis of Sarah Connor from clueless girl victim to determined soldier is extraordinary. In the second film, I’ve always thought Linda Hamilton does a great job showing that confidence and terror are not mutually exclusive emotions. The asylum escape scene in T2 is classic. There’s a shot during that scene where Sarah Connor trots down the hall, eyes wary, nightstick in one hand, clad in sweats and a T-shirt, hair back in a ponytail. You can just tell her brain is running a thousand miles an hour. I re-watched the film less than a year ago and it left me thinking, “Well, that explains a lot.” 

For more of a peek into Bill Loehfelm’s brain space, head over to his Tumblr.

This week Picador is publishing Bill Loehfelm’s The Devil She Knows, a “gritty and lyrical” crime novel set in the seedy underbelly of Staten Island. To celebrate we’ll be featuring the book here on the Tumblr for the next three days. Below, Bill describes Bay Street, a small strip of Staten Island bars that inspired the world his heroine, Maureen Coughlin, calls home.

A walk down Maureen Coughlin’s Bay Street (my Bay Street, really) is indeed a walk down memory lane. Not much of the Staten Island strip of bars and clubs that I knew remains. The nightlife lives on there, I’m sure, but the names of the guilty have changed, and I’m sure the innocent remain few and far between. I will say that I had a better time out there than Maureen did. 

The Haunted Café, site of one of Maureen’s first Bay Street jobs, was a true hole in the wall whose enormous tuxedo-wearing bouncer inspired the Narrows dapper enforcer, Clarence. I used to see the guy at the gym. He lifted all the weights. The Haunted burned down some years ago, though I hear the site is still haunted. What haunted the café in the first place, I never knew. I’m pretty sure I never asked. It is, after all, a place where I willingly participated in karaoke. Lucky for the other patrons, I counted several musicians among my friends and I was wise enough to stick to singing back up.

The Dock of the Bay was both a favorite hangout of mine and is one of the key inspirations for the dark and nefarious Narrows. It has been any number of other venues these past years – including an all-ages thrash metal club. Not a band has played there, though, that can touch Full House & the Brooklyn Horns, Maureen’s main moneymaker and the first band to really school me on R&B and funk. A friend and I found the place by accident, looking for someplace “classy” while out on a double date at the Choir Loft. In those days, table seating and cocktail waitresses were our idea of classy and the Dock had both. The girls weren’t impressed, but the boys and I became regulars. It was one of those special places that if you’re lucky you find in your twenties. One of those places you’ll always tell stories about. 

Even the Cargo Café, a real place that sponsored our Sunday morning beer league softball team, and site of much conspiring and commiserating in The Devil She Knows, has finally succumbed to the ravages of time and change and capitalism, re-emerging briefly as a similar café under another name and a new paint job before going under once again.

Even the old all-night White Castle is gone, which is probably for the best.

One of the glories of fiction, though, is it lets you keep the past alive, in any you want it to be. 

For more of Bill Loehfelm’s memories of things past (and future), head over to his Tumblr.