Joseph O'Neill on his Family 's Bloody Irish History

Irish Voice

January 1, 2001

By Dylan Foley

(I interviewed Joseph O'Neill about eight years before his career-making novel "Netherworld"came out. At the end of our 2001 interview, O'Neill told me that his next project was a novel about foreign cricket players in New York. He kept the cricket story and grafted 9-11 on to the novel.)


IN the hallway of the Chelsea Hotel on 23rd Street in Manhattan, a visitor
can feel the ghosts nearby. This battered building is where Brendan Behan
lived during his booze-soaked New York stay. Sid Vicious of The Sex Pistols
killed his girlfriend Nancy here, and it's where the poet Dylan Thomas went
into an irreversible coma.

In a sunny apartment on one of the upper floors, the Irish writer Joe
O'Neill lives with his wife and children. O'Neill has just published his
family memoir "Blood-Dark Track: A Family History" (Granta, 338 pages,
$27.95), which examines his family's ghosts, following the story of his two
grandfathers: Jim O'Neill, a West Cork IRA man, and Joseph Dakak, a Turkish
Christian hotel owner. Both men were imprisoned during World War II - Jim
O'Neill by the Irish Free State and Dakak by the British in Palestine.

Blood-Dark Track is an examination of secrets and hidden truths, many
buried like bodies in a ditch. It also draws parallels between sectarian
violence in Ireland and Turkey.

In an interview at the hotel, O'Neill discussed his book, his family's long
Republican pedigree and the Irish-American problems with the peace process
in Northern Ireland.

"To study my grandfathers is to study what happens to the individual when
they are caught up in history," said the 37-year-old O'Neill.

"The challenge of a book like this is talking to people before they die. It
is amazing how fragile this history is. It disappears with the people."

In O'Neill's family history, there are many murky places. Jim O'Neill,
legend has it, was the gunman responsible for the 1936 IRA assassination of
Admiral Henry Somerville, an Irish Protestant and British naval veteran.
The murder of Somerville led to Eamon De Valera banning the IRA.

Joseph Dakak, on the other hand, was arrested by the British in 1942 when
he went to Jerusalem to buy a shipment of lemons. He was never charged, but
was held in various brutal prisons for three years on suspicion of being a
German spy.

In "Blood-Dark Track," mysteries swirl around. Joe O'Neill's uncle shows him
a rusty revolver that killed Somerville. Was Jim O'Neill the gunman? At
Joseph Dakak's hotel in neutral Turkey, German diplomats drank with British
spies in a Casablanca-like environment. Was Dakak giving information to the
Nazis?

"Blood-Dark Track" is illuminating in its history of Ireland in the first
half of the 20th century. For many Irish Americans, IRA history ends with
the death of Michael Collins in the Civil War, then picks up again in the
Bogside in 1969. This might be because the Clancy Brothers and the Wolfe
Tones didn't sing about the 46-year period in between. O'Neill covers the
sectarian violence in the 1920s where some Protestant civilians were
slaughtered, the IRA activity in West Cork in the 1930s and the murder of
Admiral Somerville.

"Somerville was killed because he was a Protestant," said O'Neill
matter-of-factly. "He was chosen for death because he was a Protestant of a
certain class." At the time of the murder, reports indicated that
Somerville was "to be dealt with" by the West Cork IRA because he was
writing recommendations for Cork youths to join the British navy. "One
mustn't run away from the fact that it was a sectarian killing," said
O'Neill.

During World War II, the Free State kept IRA men at the Curragh,
a-racecourse turned into a military base, in worse conditions than the
German POWs held next door. The IRA men were detained to prevent them from
attacking the British, to maintain Irish neutrality. O'Neill documents the
infighting among the IRA, as well as the harassment and job discrimination
that Jim O'Neill suffered from the Irish government for decades after he
was released in 1945.

Joe O'Neill's own background is quite complex. His parents met in Turkey
when his father was posted there with an American construction firm.
O'Neill was born in Cork, but raised in Holland. His English accent comes
from going to the British International School and Cambridge. He worked as
a barrister in London and has written two novels. He has been in New York
now for three years.

"I've always seen myself as Irish," said O'Neill. "I'm an Irish citizen and
have never aspired to the citizenship of another country. I think it would
be a pretty parochial view of Irish nationalism that would exclude someone
like me."

O'Neill said that his accent has caused him problems: "The Irish can be
jealous of their own Irishness, and can be contemptuous of Irish Americans
or Irish like myself with an English accent."

The initial inspiration for Blood-Dark Track came 15 years ago when O'Neill
discovered a document in Turkey that Joseph Dakak had written of his
imprisonment. Dakak himself died in 1964. O'Neill started on the book in
1995, in the last year of his Turkish grandmother's life.

What O'Neill captures beautifully is bloody West Cork. This was an area
that was battered by the Black and Tans during the War of Independence,
where the legendary IRA leader Tom Barry roamed with his men, and Michael
Collins was shot down.

"In the 1950s, when my father grew up, it was a haunted, spooky place,"
said O'Neill, "overshadowed by secrets of a terrible kind--secrets abut
buried bodies and executions, which would have taken place in the 1920s.
When I started the book, I had to penetrate the veil of secrecy."

THE story of Jim O'Neill is both heroic and sad. He remained a member of
the IRA from the 1930s, until he died in 1973.

"He would have regarded his life's main achievement as remaining a
republican during the hardest years," said O'Neill.

"The internment was a demoralizing experience for my grandfather and lots
of other men. He left the camp a very bitter man--bitter over what one
Irishman could do to another."

One of the most compelling characters in O'Neill's book is his 89-year-old
paternal grandmother. Born in 1912, she survived the childhood brutality of
two wars.

"My grandmother belongs to the special category of republican--those that
remember what the British were like in the South of Ireland, the Black and
Tans. Their political assessments were marked by very powerful and bad
experiences."

Eileen O'Neill suffered many hardships with her children during the five
years of her husband's internment. But she was committed: As late as the
1970s, she was using her Cork home as a safe house for IRA men on the run.

In his book, O'Neill also revisits a depressing chapter of the IRA, where
IRA leaders met with the Nazis during World War II to seek help in fighting
the British.

"The idea is that `England's misfortune is Ireland's opportunity.' So you
try to do a deal with the Nazis, suspending your critical facilities on
what they actually do."

O'Neill said that there has been a hopeful reexamination of Irish history.

"It would have been impossible to write like I did about the IRA a few
years ago. The traditionalist nationalist history has undergone a sustained
attack by revisionist historians critical of the founding myths of the
Irish Republic."

O'Neill has said that revisionist historians have gone a bit far in
condemning all political violence. He sees himself as a "post-revisionist"
writer, being more ambivalent about the role of violence in modern Irish
history.

O'Neill also finds himself wary of Irish American "pub republicanism."

"I've been reading certain Irish-American newspapers and listening to radio
shows that express support for the Real IRA, who disagree with the Good
Friday Agreement, and continue their support in the face of the all-Ireland
referendum," he said. "It is deeply patronizing to the Irish people to say
they are incapable of analyzing their own needs and expressing their own
will."

O'Neill noted that his feisty grandmother voted for the Good Friday
Agreement.

"She examined her conscience, and had the benefit of 70 years of republican
experience. Irish Americans have an important role to play in the economy
and politics of Ireland," he said. "Their responsibility is to make sure
that their intervention is not about gratifying one's own psychological
needs, but putting one's self at the service of Ireland."

Peter Trachtenberg on Suffering and Meaning

(This interview originally ran in the Newark Star-Ledger on October 10, 2008)

In "The Book of Calamities: Five Questions About Suffering and Its Meaning" (Little, Brown, $24), writer Peter Trachtenberg interviews survivors of the Rwandan genocide and the Southeast Asia tsunami, as well as parents of a Sept. 11th victim, to explore the raw, searing nature of suffering. He attempts to find meaning in the senseless slaughter of war and natural disasters that wipe whole villages off the map.

In his enthralling book, Trachtenberg's five questions on suffering move from "Why me?" to "What do I owe those who suffer?" He explores the Biblical tortures of Job, the martyrdom of Catholic saints and the Buddhist doctrines on suffering. In this beautifully written, intricately woven work, Trachtenberg follows people like Sally Goodrich, who uses compensation money from her son's death on Sept. 11 to help build schools in Afghanistan. Sally gains some solace, but no closure. "The Book of Calamities" is a subtle mixture of reporting, history and philosophy that addresses some of life's most difficult questions.

Trachtenberg, 55, is the author of "Seven Tattoos: A Memoir in the Flesh." He spoke with freelance writer Dylan Foley by telephone from Wilmington, N.C., where he teaches writing at the University of North Carolina.

Q. When did you decide you were going to write a massive book on suffering?

A. The project started in 2003. I didn't think that the book was going to be as monumental as it turned out to be. I didn't think that I'd go into certain things in such detail, like the background of the (1994) Rwandan genocide. I didn't think that I'd do such a close analysis of martyrdom narrative.

Q. What were your personal motivations behind the book?

A. In 1999, my friend Linda died. I had a very visceral, childish response to her death. I was shocked and outraged by it, even though she had been sick for a long time. An important strand to the book was also my ongoing perplexity to the responses over Sept. 11. It was actually my horror at the outraged narcissism that arose afterward. I understand that people were shocked, particularly those that had been directly affected and devastated by grief, but I didn't understand what was going on around the country. There were Midwestern women on "Oprah" talking about how afraid they were to go to the mall. People were responding as if they were the ones suffering.

Q. You use your autobiography in the book as a recovering heroin addict and alcoholic. Was this difficult material to use?

A. I really hesitated using the material because I'd already written a memoir. I've taught courses on memoir and am very ambivalent about it because it is such a narcissistic art form. I had no credentials to be writing "Book of Calamities," except for whatever proximity I had to suffering. I had to write about myself to a certain extent, and I made an attempt to write candidly.

Q. Did you find meaning in your own suffering?

A. For the purposes of the book, I treated my own suffering as "I courted this." I subscribe to the disease idea of addiction and alcoholism. I may have been born with it or acquired it early in life, but I think that everything that ensued from my drug use and drinking was something that I courted. To a certain extent, I chose to suffer. I would not say that about the people I wrote about. I made a shambles of my personal life and came close to dying a few times, but if you really look at it, I came away unscathed.

Q. A practical question -- how does one go about finding meaning in suffering?

A. The one commonality I found among everyone I spoke with -- and the people I admired -- was that they remained conscious of what was happening to them and around them. (Concentration camp survivor) Victor Frankl was a great example. The way he observed what was going on with such detachment was an instrument of survival. Sally Goodrich, in the midst of what was going on, also observed what was going on inside herself.

This is what I hope for myself: When it is my turn to suffer really acutely, I hope I remain conscious and keep knowing what is going on inside me and outside me, and to keep interpreting it.

William Kennedy on the Joyful Political Corruption of Albany in "Roscoe"

Irish Voice

January 29, 2002


ALBANY legend William Kennedy is back with another novel about politics in the bad old days. DYLAN FOLEY talks to the Pulitzer Prize-winner about his hometown, Irish machines and ghosts.

AFTER a six-year hiatus, the novelist William Kennedy has published his seventh Albany novel to rave reviews. In "Roscoe" (Viking, 291 pages, $24.95), Kennedy offers up Roscoe Conway, the secretary of the corrupt Albany Democratic machine. Kennedy is clearly back on top of the writing game, with Roscoe Conway as the ultimate political fixer.

It is V-J Day in 1945 and Roscoe's party is under attack by the New York governor. The party's backer Elisha Fitzgibbon commits suicide just as a vicious scandal breaks. Roscoe, who says "I am incapable of the truth, so I am incapable of lying," has to save the party and Elisha's widow Veronica, his one true love.

In Kennedy's Albany, the politicians are Irish, the crooked cops are Irish, the whores are Irish, and so are the nuns. Roscoe and Patsy McCall, the party leader, always make sure to install an upstanding and pliable Episcopalian as mayor, to win the Protestant vote. The great Irish
politicians Al Smith and Jimmy Walker float in and out to do bare-knuckle battle with Albany machine, sometimes as allies, sometimes as foes.

Kennedy, of course, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1983 for "Ironweed," his heartbreakingly beautiful, gritty novel of Depression-era Albany. More recently, actor/director Ed Burns has been trying to make a movie of Kennedy's gangster study "Legs" for over a year now. Word is the Long Island star is still looking to secure financing.

In an interview with the Irish Voice in a New York City hotel, the 75-year-old Kennedy looked dapper in a crisp blue shirt and black slacks. He talked about his new novel, the colorful Albany machine and how to create an appealing, amoral character.

For Kennedy, Roscoe Conway evolved as the book progressed.

"Roscoe came out of the need to have a narrator who knew every level of the Albany Democratic machine," said Kennedy. "His brain, his self-critical quality was very interesting to me. He represents the complexity of the politician--the fact that he'll do anything, that he's completely dishonest. Like Patsy McCall, these are men that will do anything."

IN Kennedy's novels, including Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, The Flaming Corsage and Legs, his native Irish community of North Albany has played a crucial role in shaping his writing.

"It has been the motherlode," said Kennedy. "I got obsessed with Albany when I was writing a newspaper series about it."

Kennedy still lives just outside of his hometown. Growing up in the 1930s and 1940s Albany, Kennedy's relationship to the Democratic Party was a family affair.

"I've counted about 12 members in the party," he said with a chuckle. "My father worked the polls late in his career. My great-uncle was a committeeman in the 9th ward in North Albany. You got your job on the basis of being a party member. If you were a registered Democrat, you were home free."

Compared to the dark "Ironweed," Roscoe starts as a farce, where the corruption is in the air that everyone breathes and the education starts early. When Roscoe is given a rifle as a child, his mother, the long-suffering wife of a political operative, admonishes him to "Remember, never shoot anyone with that gun, unless they are a politician."

As the novel progresses, Roscoe evolves as a romantic character, and as a man who lives by a code of honor, even if he lies and cheats to maintain it. He will protect his party at all costs, and will save the people he loves from a lawsuit with incestuous undertones.

"Roscoe didn't always exist," said Kennedy. "I tried to tell the book from Patsy's point of view, but I couldn't do it. He wasn't smart enough."

The Democratic party has had a 23-year reign over Albany, controlling the cops, the gambling dens and the whorehouses, and filling the patronage jobs. Roscoe is Falstaffian in girth, but Runyonesque in character. Kennedy has written a rich and wry novel of power and greed, and through Roscoe explores the human emotions of love, loyalty and jealousy.

Roscoe is tired and wants out of politics, but he has two great battles left. He has to defend the party from a Republican governor out for blood.

"Governor Tom Dewey is after them," said Kennedy, "trying to break up the machine, to prove that he is the knight in shining armor."

The party is also threatened by a paternity suit from Roscoe's ex-wife Pamela, who threatens to reveal ugly secrets. Roscoe accuses his dead friend Elisha of false rape to derail the case.

"His motivations are to save the party and Veronica, and to not allow his ex-wife, who he loathes, to do this dastardly deed," said Kennedy. "He would make his false assertions in keeping with the patterns of falsehoods that he and the party live with. He is a consummate schemer. He sees where the blackmail lays and is capable of countering it."

Like Ironweed, Kennedy stitches his new novel together with ghosts. In his dreams, Roscoe takes advice from the spirit of Elisha and discusses morality on a streetcar with the murdered gangster Jack Diamond. ("`Virtue was one hell of an idea,' said Jack. `Let me off at the corner.'")

"I've always been taken by the existence of ghosts," admitted Kennedy. "It just becomes part of my imagination. I've got a lot of ghosts in my own life. For me, they are moving around."

For Kennedy, the characters often take on lives of their own and he follows their surprising actions.

"Roscoe took off," he said. "He does all sorts of things I didn't expect. This is when you know you are on the right track, when you can invent your way out of the character's imagination because it's new to you. That doesn't always work, but if it does, you stay with it.

"Nabokov once said that the characters are galley slaves, but I don't believe that is a viable way to work," said Kennedy. "For me, that would mean being locked into one character. Patsy has to change, to fluctuate, for he is as a mercurial character, as Roscoe is."

Physical places become a jumping-off point for Kennedy.

"There is a photograph of an empty street," he said, "that was maybe taken 10 years before I was born, and that was the street I grew up on. I could put the houses and factories there, what was going to come, all the lives that have passed through, and I have a city floating in imagination and memory. Every so often, I ground them. I open up a saloon or a grocery store. I have a sense of place, I have a sense of time with Albany that will be there forever with me."

The roots of his writing style also come from his three decades as a reporter.

"My authentication of time and place came out of journalism," said Kennedy,"to get the facts and don't fudge them. Once I've got them, then I can turn them into something that never was. Make them whatever I feel like making them. History and place have a magical effect on me.

"The writing of Roscoe took maybe five years," said Kennedy, "but the actual gathering of information was over 40 years. Back in the 1950s, when I was a young reporter, I would hang out with the old reporters, reminiscing, crying into their beers. They told wonderful stories about
Albany, a lot of them lies. In a sense, I liked their lies best."

Mark Helprin on His Satirical Novel on Charles and Diana

(This interview originally appeared in the Newark Star-Ledger in August 2005)


In his satirical novel “Freddy and Fredericka” (Penguin Press, $28), Mark Helprin fictionalizes the disastrous marriage of Britain’s Charles and Diana, the Prince and Princess of Wales, through the over-the-top experiences of his title characters. Freddy has infuriated his mother Queen Philippa through his awkwardness and very public gaffs and Fredericka has driven the queen to despair by her ever-plunging necklines and desire to steal the royal spotlight. The couple are banished to America with an impossible quest: They must reconquer the colonies for England.

Freddy and Fredericka are parachuted into the Bayonne Meadows in New Jersey, landing virtually on top of a neo-Nazi biker gang. After a swordfight, Freddy and Fredericka steal a motorcycle and start a madcap journey across the United States. They get jobs stealing art in Washington D.C., washing dishes in Chicago and watching for forest fires in the West. Freddy alternates between being a killer commando and and a buffoon, while he learns that Fredericka may have greater depth than he does. Freddy winds up writing speeches for the presidential campaign of Dewey Knott, a bumbling war hero senator, who is more than vaguely reminiscent of Bob Dole. The couple are finally incarcerated in a California mental hospital.

With nods to Voltaire’s “Candide,” Helprin uses the escapades of Freddy and Fredericka to explore the American heartland, the corruption of a presidential campaign and a man’s realization that he is capable of loving his wife.

Helprin, 58, was born in New York, raised in Jamaica and educated at Harvard, Princeton and Oxford. He served in the British merchant navy and the Israeli army and air force. He is the author of eight novels and story collections, including “The Refiner’s Fire,” “A Winter’s Tale” and “A Soldier of the Great War.” He was a speechwriter for Bob Dole during his 1996 presidential bid and is a contributing editor to the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. Helprin lives in Virginia with his wife and two daughters, and spoke with freelance writer Dylan Foley in New York City.

Q. How did you come up with this fairytale/nightmare of the fictionalized Prince and Princess of Wales?

A. My children were little and they must have known about the Prince Charles and Princess Diana, whether from my wife and I talking about them or television. We took them to a restaurant where you can see people working in the kitchen. There was a couple, a man and a woman, washing dishes. One of my little girls asked, “Is that the Prince and Princess of Wales?” Of course I said no, but it occurred to me that I’d love to be a fly on the wall for that conversation. I’m an expert dishwasher myself. When I was in the Israeli army, we did patrols at night and KP during the day.

My novel is like an alternative ending story for Charles and Diana, a “what if?” It is an imaginary story of what might have happened.

Q. Why did you make Freddy and Fredericka parachute into the industrially polluted Bayonne Meadows on top of a group of drug-addled, neo-Nazi bikers?

A. Very little is by design. They start in New Jersey because it would be too much of a bite out of the beginning of the book to wind up in New York City. Freddy picked the Bayonne Meadows off the map. To him, it sounded like a park-like area. They think it is a trendy neighborhood with boutiques.

Freddy and Frederick have been expelled from paradise. The first step for Dante or Virgil is hell. If you are standing on the Pulaski Skyway, it looks like the circles of hell. It is unbelievable.

Q. Your story of Freddy and Fredericka gets more and more absurd, then it turns serious. Why?

A. There was a professor of mine at Harvard named Frohock. One thing he taught me, which I call Frohock’s Law, is that all comedies end in one of two ways. They either become completely absurd or they become serious. Freddy and Fredericka are on a quest. They go through astounding coincidences. They pass all the tests, gain a sense of maturity and return to paradise with a transformation of soul.

This book was written for pure enjoyment. I wanted to write a comedy. This is the movie I would like to see. Essentially, I made it in my head.

Q. At times, there is an element of a Candide-like morality tale in your book. Was this intentional?

A. There is some of a morality tale in the book. It is more like Tocqueville and a commentary on America. At the heart of it, though, is the story of a man who learns to love his wife.

Q. What do you think of Prince Freddy after spending two years in his head while writing this book?

A. I see him as someone who is genuinely a good person, who is able to overcome his handicaps. His handicaps are that he has become pigeonholed and trapped in a kind of prison. He grew up without knowing how to live in the world and then he learned to to exist in the world. Anybody can learn how to do that.

Q. Frederick gets involved in a doomed presidential campaign for Senator Dewey Knott. Do you see any parallels with your own experience with the Dole campaign?

A. You write about what you know. Dewey Knott is not Bob Dole, though they both refer to themselves in the third person.

Q. As a political commentator for the past 25 years, how do you view the recent presidential campaigns?

A. They are unbelievably absurd. It’s beyond sense and sensibility. Everybody above a certain level in the campaign is only thinking about one thing, and that is whether he’s going to get an administration appointment. If you read the minds of these people, as I can at this point, they are choosing their embassies and their undersecretaryships. They care more about the position in the campaign than doing what it takes to have the candidate win.

Q. Would you call yourself a conservative?

A. I’m an eclectic conservative. I don’t follow any particular line. As each issue comes, I decide it on its merits. I’m for a strong military, but I am for a high minimum wage, like any former dishwasher might be. You can’t raise a family on $300 a week. I’m for a progressive income tax, rather than a flat tax. think there should be just a few brackets, with 25 percent as the top level.

Q. What do you think of the quality of the political and civil discourse in the U.S. today?

A. It’s not a civil discourse. I think it’s because of the educational system, which has blunted people’s sensibilities, and because everything plays to the media, which is now punch and kick rather than talk. You can’t be civil unless you are complex. if you have one position and I have a diametrically opposed position, we have to talk. Now we have politicians who communicate with the people through the electronic press, when they only have a few seconds to do it.

We’ll never have a civil discourse and an intelligent political society unless people are properly educated and trained to think for themselves instead of relying on doctrines.

Thomas Kelly on His Novel "Empire Rising"

(This interview originally appeared in the Newark Star-Ledger in March 2005)

On March 17, 1930, construction started on the Empire State Building, which was to become the tallest building in the world. In Thomas Kelly’s novel, “Empire Rising” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25), the 102-story building is a looming presence in this gripping novel of New York City, where the city is in the grips of both the Depression and Prohibition, and the Italian and Irish gangsters are in a brutal battle for supremacy.

At the center of Kelly’s subtlety layered novel is Michael Briody, a veteran of the bloody Irish civil war. Though the war is officially over, it is still being fought on the streets of New York. Briody gets a dangerous job on the Empire State Building as an ironworker, and falls for the artist Grace Masterson, the mistress of Tammany Hall fixer Johnny Farrell. Tammany Hall is the corrupt Irish political machine that runs New York, controlling the mayor, cops, judges and politicians. Briody is also pulled under the sway of the Irish mob boss Tough Tommy Tuohy, as the gang wars are about to begin.

Kelly, 43, was raised in New Milford, New Jersey, educated at Fordham University in the Bronx and Harvard University. He worked a construction worker and as a Teamster, and is the author of “Payback” and “The Rackets,” two novels that delve into the muck, corruption and cement of the New York construction world. Kelly lives in Manhattan, where he spoke with freelance writer Dylan Foley.

Q. How did you decide to write about the construction of the Empire State Building?

A. It is one of the things you write about if you write about construction and New York City. How do you not write about the Empire State Building? My great-uncle Michael Briody, an Irish immigrant, worked on the building. I don’t know much about him, so I wanted to tell his story. The time had everything for me, with 1930 being an amazing historical moment. You had Prohibition, which maybe for the first time created real wealth and power for the underclass. Then there is the Jazz Age. The Boom had ended, but nobody was sure how bad it was yet. A lot had happened then that determined how Americans would live for the next several generations. I put a few characters in the middle of that, and then I went from there.


Q. You write at length about the new Irish immigrants of New York, running guns to Ireland and settling scores from the Irish civil war. Why?

A. My family was part of the whole migration that happened after the Irish civil war in the mid-1920s. I believe that it was the second biggest Irish migration, but it is never talked about. Part of me wanted to get into the characters that were shaped by the migration. The real Michael Briody was killed in the Bronx. I don’t know what happened, but there were whispers that it was related to the civil war. I wanted to explain it to myself, what happened to him.

Q. All three of your novels focus on construction, gangsters and corruption. In the new book, you focus on Tammany Hall and the graft that permeates all levels of New York society. How did you handle it?

A. (The Tammany fixer) Johnny Farrell is made up, but he is very realistic. On the whole, the Tammany political machine was a very positive thing, but they got carried away. Of course they stole, but I call it moral relativism. You look at the Irish, who took power in the city in 1880, and they are finally getting their share. The reformers are these third or fourth generation pseudoaristocratic elites, who made their money butchering the Indians or trading in slaves. They say, “These Tammany guys are thieves and animals.” The Irish turn around and say, “Screw you. This is our time to get something.” At the end, Tammany was stealing so much that nothing worked. In 1930, corruption was just way of life in New York. Judges paid for their appointments, workers paid for their jobs. You had to give a little to get a little.

(Empire State Building by Lewis Hine)

Q. What kind of research did you do for this novel?

A. One of the things that helped me a lot was sitting in the library for hours at a time and reading the tabloids of the day. They make the New York Post seem like a Hallmark card. The papers were all sex, all violence, all the time. They gave me a feeling of the street and some of the language of the time. I got to talk to some people who were adults at the time, during the construction of the Empire State Building, including a man who had been a 17-year-old “rivet punk,” who was in his nineties.

Q. You juggle the Empire State, the Irish civil war and the gang wars, as well as bohemian culture. How did you keep a balance?

A. Everything is interconnected, more so in New York than anywhere else in the world. You’d have the 21 Club, where you’d have a gangster like Tough Tommy Tuohy, as well as the Astors going there. When I started, I wanted to get into construction, Tammany Hall and the Irish civil war. I thought it was too much, but then I realized it wasn’t, because it was often the same talent pool that all these people were recruited from. The Tammany guys, the gangsters and the cops were sometimes even literally related to each other.

Q. You write at length about the work and lives of blue-collar men, from ironworkers to bricklayers. Why?

A. It is as much because no one else is doing it as anything else. You get tired of seeing these documentaries and reading these books, where you hear about these architects and engineers who built the great buildings and bridges, or the people who finance them, but not one of them risked a hair on their head. It is amazing to me that the actual workers are ignored, totally taken for granted and underappreciated. Then the media portrays these workers as buffoons. Look around the city--these buildings, the energy plants would not exist without these workers. They never get any recognition.

Q. Time and demolition has wiped out much of New York from the 1930s. Do you miss this lost New York?

A. A lot has been torn down, but a lot is still here. If you walk around New York City, and raise your eyes one story, above the Starbucks and the McDonald’s, it is all the same, the same tenements. I read this great thing from E.L. Doctorow. He was working on his novel “Waterworks,” and was in Greenwich Village. A fog settled in and all the skyscrapers had been blocked out. All that was left was the 19th century. It gave him the kind of visual material he needed to start. It was kind of the same for me.