City of Dreams by William Martin

City of Dreams comes with this premise: Hidden somewhere in New York City is a box of 1780 bonds with a face value of twenty thousand dollars. The Supreme Court is about to decide if these bonds still have value, and if so, compound interest over 230 years will be worth a fortune.

Peter Fallon and his girlfriend, travel reporter Evangeline Carrington, must find the box--fast! And their race against time becomes a race through time as Peter and Evangeline track the stories of New Yorkers whose lives have been changed by the bonds...and all the while they'll unravel the thrilling and inspiring story of the City of Dreams.

How did you come upon the premise of anno-1780 bonds that have grown into a fortune due to compound interest?

The bonds are real.

A collector friend of mine told me the story: not all of the bonds were cashed at maturity in 1786. And though Alexander Hamilton called them "a debt of honor" when he recapitalized the debt of the Untied States in 1790, many bonds fell between the political cracks and were forgotten. Later, institutions and private collectors began accumulating them for their historical value, but every so often, somebody says, "Hey, these should still be valid." And they try to force the government to honor the bonds. But the government always claims sovereign immunity, which means they get to determine who sues them.

If I hear a story like that, I do what a storyteller is supposed to do. I play the game of "What-if?" What if an originalist Supreme Court, like the one we have now, was willing to hear the case, so that there was even the possibility that the Treasury would have to pony up? It's treasure-hunt Armageddon in the City of Dreams, and it gives me my Big Idea.

Big Idea?

Before anything else, you have to have a good story - believable characters taking you through an exciting series of events, all of it leading to a finish that gives you a sense that you've been on a great voyage and actually gotten somewhere. In short, a page-turner.

But the best stories - in any genre - leave you with something to think about. You can use the highfalutin' English-class term and call it "theme," or you can use the term that my friend Steve Berry uses, the "ooh factor." I call it the Big Idea. Sometimes you can reduce it to a single word, like honor (the big idea in Annapolis). Sometimes it's more complex. The Big Idea in City of Dreams is that this nation was born in debt but may drown in it if we don't get control of the deficit, which is now growing more rapidly than at any moment in our history. That box of bonds that Peter Fallon searches for is a perfect symbol of what happens when we kick our debts down the road.
So...add some good guys and bad guys, some Madoff-like businessmen and some Russian mafia, along with all that great New York history...

What about New York? Is the move south an expansion of territory for a series that seems anchored in New England?

The earlier Peter Fallon books have been set in New England, but ever since Back Bay, I've wanted to write a similar novel about New York. It's the ultimate American city. Think of all the giants that have walked those streets. Think of all the scoundrels. Think of all the incredible things that have unfolded on that island. You could spend a career writing about New York and its history. So you need an organizing principle. In this case it's easy: the Big Idea gives it to us: Money.

A character in the novel says, "Boston is history. Washington is power. L.A. is entertainment. But New York is the center of the universe. Why? Because of money." New York is the seat of the money changers, the financial center of the country.  So, it becomes the perfect location for a story of lost bonds

Plus, I get to write about all those figures from history. You'll see Alexander Hamilton writing his Report on Public Credit. J.P Morgan pops up, puffing on his cigar and saving the economy. And there are all sorts of fictional financiers in the recent history who will seem at least vaguely familiar. City of Dreams is a thriller about New York at the end of three centuries, in three financial crises, facing three September disasters.

So you write about 9/11?

I'm a historical novelist, and that is a major historical event. For many years, I didn't want to read anything about it. Didn't want to see movies like United 93, or read books like 102 Minutes, or watch any of the hundreds of films you can find on YouTube.... not that I lost anyone, but we all lost something. So it was simply too painful and made me too angry. And yet, you can't write a novel about the recent history of New York - or of America for that matter - without writing about that moment.  Then I began to research it, get closer, immerse myself in the events and in the people, and a strange thing happened. I was able to see it as I have always seen historical events, as a series of human decisions, some momentous, some seemingly insignificant, that create history. And I come away with a sense of pride for the bravery of everyday Americans and how they acted on that day and what that bravery tells us about ourselves... I tried to build that into the book.

A great series invariably rises on the strength of its main characters and how they interact. Tell us about Peter Fallon and Evangeline Carrington. What's the spark between them? What makes them work in the reader's imagination? In your imagination? It obviously takes a lot to pin a series on two characters. How do you make them so successful that readers keep coming back for more?

Peter grew up in the working class and now he sells rare books to the upper crust. Evangeline's from the upper crust and doesn't much care. They make a good couple. They argue all the time, but they look out for each other, too. And they're a pair of wiseacres. Think Nick and Nora Charles for the twenty-first century. So, even though they're not married - yet - they're a team. In some ways, they are opposites that attract, but they are very similar in other ways, just like the best couples. They are the glue that holds the series together, and I love them, but I don't think they make the stories unique.

What does?

The structure. The modern thriller meets the historical novel. We see a lot of very cool treasure hunters in modern thriller fiction, but in Peter's adventures, the history comes to life. So instead of, say, just hearing exposition about the 1776 fire that destroys New York in City of Dreams, you live it with the characters who are experiencing it, and you see how their small decisions, made in the midst of the roaring conflagration, affect the forward momentum not only of their own plot, but of the modern plot as well. Readers have always loved that sense of frisson, of past and present being alive to each other in chapters that alternate with the story of Peter and Evangeline.

But Peter and Evangeline are the glue. Did this series sort of organically grow of its own warmth? Or did you set out long ago to write a series and take it in the directions it has gone?

I never planned to write a series. Peter and Evangeline met in Back Bay. He was a graduate student in history and she was just finding her way, running a plant shop, living on her trust fund. That treasure hunt gave them both a purpose. People loved the  way the history was interwoven into the tale of Peter and Evangeline. And Back Bay was a New York Times bestseller (around a million copies now and still in print). So, after writing five other novels, I decided to revisit Peter and Evangeline in mid-life. I had a story I thought would be a great vehicle for them, the story of a lost Shakespeare manuscript and the history of Harvard. Harvard Yard clicked with a lot of readers, so I went back to them again. And The Lost Constitution was a Times bestseller, so I decided to stay with something that was working and take them to the City of Dreams.

How does one write a series? Are there rules, secrets, clues, to the technical aspects of writing a series? Did the idea of a series ever faze or daunt you? Did you grow into it as you got better at it?

Last question first. Writing a series is like all writing. You may get better at it, but it never really gets easier. And the easier it is to read, the harder it probably was to write. As Nathaniel Hawthorne is supposed to have said, "Easy reading is damned hard writing."

The main rule of writing a series: don't be boring. Aside from that, remember William Goldman in Butch Cassidy. "Rules? No rules in a knife fight." At some metaphorical level, you are involved in a knife fight with every novel, series or stand-alone. You're fighting for readers and for personal satisfaction. So once you've learned the basics of narrative structure and prose style, you must learn to respect your instincts and break a few rules.

As for being daunted... the Peter-and-Evangeline part is usually about half of the story. The history takes up the rest. I can't be daunted by them because I have so many other narrative arcs that I'm following at the same time.
I just try to make Peter and Evangeline old friends - familiar occupations, general attitudes and personality traits - so that the reader settles in with them right away. But in each book, I add something new, some bit of tension, so they evolve from book to book. In Back Bay, they meet. In Harvard, they re-connect after twenty years. In Constitution, they are split up and must re-connect. In City of Dreams, Peter's old girlfriend shows up and it's... uh-oh.

Readers return for the familiarity, but they stay for new complications. The love relationship is the real glue. Hitchcock made the greatest thrillers, but they were always about love relationships. Remember Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint?

It's interesting that you would mention a famous movie couple -Nick and Nora Charles of The Thin Man series from the 1940s, or Hitchcock - given your background in screenplays and film. How much does film influence your novel writing?

First off, let's credit Dashiell Hammett as much as Hollywood for Nick and Nora. But yes, I grew up loving movies, so after Harvard, I went to the USC Film School to learn how to make them. I studied the craft of screenwriting, but no one wanted the scripts I wrote. So when some Hollywood producer, looking for a good way to get me out of her office, told me I might make a better novelist, I said, "OK, I'll write a novel." This is what I call the arrogance of naivete. But Back Bay changed he direction of my career. And when I wrote it, I applied the lessons I learned about the importance of the big set-piece scene, of how to build to it and sustain it, how to write dialogue that conveys a lot with a little, and most importantly, how to keep pushing the story forward from one climactic or revelatory moment to the next. And I still apply those lessons.

I want to also ask about your background in fiction, in general, and the novel in particular. You grew up in Boston, and graduated from Harvard (English, 1972). You have mentioned 'the tough streets of Boston.'

I descend from a long line of Irish storytellers. They could make tales from their Depression youth sound like Homeric adventures, and they turned the tough streets of Boston into a landscape of high drama. As a kid, I used to love listening to them. But I had a pretty easy childhood. The tough street of Boston weren't that tough to me.
And as an only child, I had plenty of time on my hands, so I learned very early about the wonderful resources of the Boston Public Library, and I fell into the thrall of storytellers like Charles Dickens, Jules Verne, and C.S. Forester. I also spent hours in the transfixing shadows of movies like The Searchers, Lawrence of Arabia, and Mutiny on the Bounty. Big stories on broad canvases, characters who seemed larger than life but proved to be all too human, epic deeds and powerful emotions...

At Harvard, I knew that I wanted a piece of this storytelling business. So, to raise money before heading to Hollywood, I did a few years of construction work - tending bricklayers, building staging up the side of fifteen story buildings, pouring concrete - and I got a whole new education.

And a very different one? How did the two experiences - Harvard and the building trades - benefit you in how you characterize ordinary people like construction workers and the like?

The Red Line subway could take you from Harvard Square to South Boston in about eighteen minutes, and it was like traveling from one side of the earth to the other. I mean... you won't meet a lot of construction workers who can tell you what Gammer Gurton's Needle is, but you'll meet some very smart guys, some street-educated and some self-educated. You won't meet a lot of Harvard professors who can tag a crane up five stories to drop a load of concrete into a form, but they know how to handle themselves in the treacherous corridors of academic politics. So... different skill sets, but human skill sets. Study both and learn from both. Everything that you've experienced in life becomes material once you start writing. Whether you're in a Harvard tutorial or working ten stories above the street, if you're a writer, at some unconscious level, you should be observing, absorbing, and saving whatever is going on. Just don't give the professor the wrong answer... or fall off the staging.

You achieved your first major success when your first novel, Back Bay (1980) became a New York Times bestseller. The Cleveland Plain Dealer heralded it as "the debut of a new and richly gifted storyteller." The Seattle Post Intelligencer called you "a master storyteller" when your historical thriller, The Rising of the Moon came out in 1987. When Annapolis - your Michener-style epic about the U.S. Navy - arrived in 1996, Publishers Weekly called you "a storyteller whose smoothness equals his ambition."

I'll take that as my epitaph.

By then you had already created a widely acclaimed PBS documentary entitled George Washington: The Man Who Wouldn't Be King, an episode of The American Experience, and in 1996, you published a biographical novel, Citizen Washington, which historian Doris Kearns Goodwin praised as "a wonderfully entertaining and thoroughly terrific book." So you've written in several media, and across several genres, with considerable success. Do you foresee more Peter Fallon novels or will you continue to widen your scope?

Both.

Peter and Evangeline are with me for life (although the good part about fictional characters is that they can age much more slowly). Their stories give me a formula that readers love, and a formula can be quite liberating for a writer. It provides a discipline that you must respect and a recurring set of storytelling challenges. Oh, and my publisher likes them, too. That counts for a lot, especially with City of Dreams coming out. So I'm starting another Peter and Evangeline book now. It's called The Lincoln Letter. You could subtitle it Mr. Fallon Goes to Washington, with the added bonus of a Civil War novel as the history.

But I have other genres to explore. I have an outline for a novel set in first-century Britain and Rome, told in the first person. I will write that in the next few years. And I've always wanted to write some narrative history, but I hate footnoting, so... we'll see.

One more question. Aside from writing (and copious research, one assumes) what do you do with your time? What are your recreations? Do you go on research vacations? You've been at the helm of a nuclear submarine, and flown from an aircraft carrier deck. Tell us a little more about the man behind the   novels. And thank you ever so much for taking time to answer these questions!

Flaubert said, "I must be orderly and boring in my daily life so that I can be extraordinary in my work." Salman Rushdie said, "A writer should live in a monastery by day, a whorehouse by night." I am more of a Flaubert kind of guy, at least in my habits. I usually work a six-day week, 8AM to 6PM. At midday, I work out. Then I look forward to a pleasant dinner with my wife, a nice wine, a good book or a movie.

Recreations? I gave up basketball after I broke too many bones. I keep a boat on Cape Cod Bay and like to fish, though I worked so hard last year on City of Dreams that I got to the boat three times all summer. I used to play a lot of golf, but I found that I was happier pushing a story along instead of a golf ball. And I get a lot of satisfaction giving a bit back, serving on the boards of several Boston institutions: the Associates of the Boston Public Library, the Paul Revere Memorial Association, and the USS Constitution Museum. I've done some teaching, too. I've loved my time at the Maui/Hawaii Writers Retreat.

As for research vacations, I dragged my kids all over when they were younger,  from London to Gettysburg to the old logging towns of the White Mountains, all in the interests of research. But now, they're spread all over - D.C., L.A., San Francisco. So I just came back from researching The Lincoln Letter in D.C. And I'm already thinking of a Fallon novel set in California. And when I write that first-century book, there will be a lot of places I will just have to see. Could make a helluva family trip.

I consider myself fortunate. I get to do something that provides enormous satisfaction, entertains and sometimes educates, and - no matter how hard I may work at it - beats real work all to hell. Thanks.

John T. Cullen writes fiction and nonfiction. He is the author of A WALK IN ANCIENT ROME, Revised Second Edition (Sep 2009; nonfiction/ancient history); LETHAL JOURNEY (Sep 2009, dark thriller based on a true 1892 crime/ghost story); UMNITSA (WW2 espionage thriller); THE GENERALS OF OCTOBER (suspense: what if we had a Second Constitutional Convention?); and nearly two dozen other books. Visit http://www.johntcullen.com/.