In today's Lockdown book blog I'm in New York City courtesy of Emily Donoho, whose book In the Canyons of Shadows and Light I strongly recommend.
Extract
Washington Heights bustled
around him: men in suits and women in heels with professionally arranged
dreadlocks hustled to work; mothers stood on the stoops with a baby on their
hips and a toddler in tow; teenage gangsters in clothes three sizes too big
slouched off to school or maybe not; the homeless and the dope fiends, their
eyes haunted and faces hollow, wafted hungrily through the crowds. They melted
together like snowflakes in a blizzard, minding their own business in the way
only New Yorkers knew how in the swirling, fast-paced melee of street life. (p. 243)
Review
A mesmerising, atmospheric novel
set in New York in the years immediately following 9/11, In the Canyons of Shadows
and Light weaves its way back and forth through time as it charts the
psychological meltdown of its main character, Alex Boswell. Mid-forties,
overweight from a diet of ice cream and fast food, Alex shares the
stereotypical characteristics of TV detectives we’ve grown familiar with. Booze
combined with irregular hours and the emotionally searing demands of the job
have driven Alex’s wife and family away. But Emily Donoho has crafted a
character who is different, too. Alex Boswell is an individual. He’s in chronic
pain from a 1987 shooting. He misses his colleague and mentor who ran into the
Twin Towers just before they crumpled. And there’s a case Alex thought was tied
up which comes back to haunt him – a cop killing. This is the background to In
the Canyons of Shadows and Light. It’s intense. It’s got twists and
complications and subplots that hold the reader’s attention right through its
445 pages.
In many ways, this is a standard police procedural. Alex works for Manhattan North Homicide. Over seventeen years, he has earned respect from his team and team leaders alike. The District Attorney trusts him and they have a strong working – and socialising – relationship. Alex is drawn into a big murder investigation – another cop killing – and this is the main meat of the detective story.
What makes this different from standard police procedurals is the focus on Alex as a character. As the plot unravels, so, too, does Alex. First, he’s tormented by the sentence of death by lethal injection for the cop killer. Then he suffers yet another failed love relationship. He mourns his old work partner, who was transferred for a misdemeanour. The new one – Ray Espinosa – is a clean-cut, health-food-eating, God-respecting family man and sometimes it seems there’s a gulf between him and Alex, who is a tightly-leashed alcoholic and serial womaniser. In Ray’s eyes.
Alex’s disintegration makes for fascinating reading. It’s during the course of his long struggle against it that we see his true strengths, and also the strengths of his relationships with those around him. As his police caseload builds and climaxes, so, too, does Alex’s physical and psychological crisis. The book ends with a satisfying crescendo that reaffirms our faith in the justice system and in our human capacity to care.
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| Emily Donoho |
I invited author Emily Donoho to tell me a bit about the background to writing the novel.
CMcK: Hi, Emily. Thanks for joining me on my blog. I loved In the Canyons of Shadows and Light! I’m a slow reader, but it totally engrossed me. Each time I surfaced from reading, I felt a sense of dislocation, because I was so deeply ‘in’ New York through your descriptions. What does the city mean to you?
ED: I live in Scotland now but
I spent a lot of time around New York City as an undergraduate in Massachusetts
and lived there briefly. I loved it. I was drawn to its energy. It has a magic,
wild vibe that I’ve never found anywhere else. But it is also totally
impracticable for me to live there because of other interests, like owning
horses. Unless you have more money than God, keeping a horse and living in NYC
are mutually exclusive. Even owning a car in NYC will give you a nervous
breakdown. But I can write about people who live there, still engaging with the
city in my head – that will have to do.
CMcK: The police procedural aspects – forensics, lividity in dead bodies, legal requirements and so on – all seemed convincing to me. Alex Boswell’s psychological meltdown is also compelling. Do you have a background of work in these areas, or does your understanding come from research?
ED: All of the above. I did a
couple internships in District Attorney’s offices - Boulder, CO and Brooklyn - so I know my way around the criminal justice system and where to look when I
need information. I also did a psychology degree as an undergrad, and my PhD is
in the history of psychiatry in the Scottish Highlands. That’s nine years of
researching mental health stuff, most of it at a high academic level.
CMcK: Fascinating! Now, as you know, my lockdown book blogging project is trained on indie and self-published books. So I’d love to know something about your decision to pursue a more literary focus on the character and his meltdown, rather than focus on a purely genre police procedural novel. Did this make it difficult to place the book with a genre publisher, for example?
ED: I wrote a 130,000 word PhD
thesis, proof I can’t achieve brevity even when I try. It was always going to
be a literary novel because that’s how I see myself as a writer. I also felt
like the world needed a more accurate police novel – one that turned away from
the usual crime genre tropes, where either the detective has a personal
connection to the case they’re investigating, or all the cases are interconnected.
Those tropes are endemic. They’re everywhere. I gave up on the BBC series Luther
after the second episode, where Idris Elba’s detective slept with the serial
killer he was investigating. In the real world, that isn’t what happens, and I was
trying to capture that. On the other hand, standard crime novels that tick all
the genre boxes are easier to publish with traditional publishers, but those
aren’t what I want to write.
CMcK: What drew you to writing?
ED: I have always written. I
wrote stories as a kid, for fun. Then I played about with fan fiction as an
undergrad (should one confess to that?). I started writing original fiction a
couple years after finishing my PhD.
CMcK: Fan fiction seems to be an excellent training ground! So, what’s next for you? Will we see another Alex Boswell story?
ED: Yes – in the near future!
I’ve been working on the sequel to this for some time. It’s an even bigger,
more ambitious novel, sprawled between timelines – five years after the events
in Canyons, and then about fifteen-to-twenty years before it. It’s about
the crack epidemic, miscarriages of justice, why good people do bad things,
Alex’s ongoing mental health issues, his life in general.
CMcK: Excellent! Thanks so much for joining the blog. Where can people buy your books and find out more about you?
ED: The book is available on
Amazon, Waterstones, Barnes and Noble, all the usual suspects. I’m really
terrible at the social media thing, but I have a Facebook page which doesn’t do
a whole lot. I might make a fresh one. https://www.facebook.com/Emily-Donoho-977662978933470
CMcK: Lovely. And here are links to In the Canyons of Shadows and Light in those stores
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