William Landay

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Into the Woods

Cold Spring Park

A blog post I did for Random House over on Tumblr:

Into the Woods

Does it help to see where a novel is set? Would you understand Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County any better if you actually visited his Mississippi? Is it even possible to understand Dickens if you have no idea what Victorian London looked like?

I’m not sure there is a good answer. Sometimes the vision in the your mind’s eye is more vivid than any mere reality. Real life can be so disappointing. Remember when, a few months ago, the mansion said to have inspired Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was to be leveled? To me, the most compelling part of that story was how disappointing the mansion actually was — how unworthy of Jay Gatsby. Even the famous lawn, now turned weedy, was disappointing. Clearly the lawn in the news photos never “started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens — finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run.” Of course, no lawn ever did that — and maybe that’s the point. Great fiction always outruns reality.

Still, people who read my novel Defending Jacob always ask me which details from the book are real. We want to know, we readers, just where the border between reality and fiction lies. In the novel, a teenage boy is murdered in Cold Spring Park, in Newton, Massachusetts. As it happens, both the park and the town are very real. I live in Newton and jog through Cold Spring Park all the time, as does the Barber family of my novel.

So, for the curious out there, here is a photo of the park, which I took just a couple of days ago, on May 10 — very near the date of the murder in the book (April 12), so this is roughly what the park would have looked like on the day of the crime, lush and green and muddy with the spring melt. If you’re curious, more pictures of Cold Spring Park are here.

The post includes this photo of Cold Spring Park, the setting of the murder in Defending Jacob.

Ex Libris

I’ve just received a new shipment of these bookplates. They are for readers who would like a signed book but can’t make it to a book signing. If you’d like one, just email me with your address and, if you want a personal inscription, what you would like it to say. There is no charge. It’s just a way of saying “thank you” to readers. (Click the image to view full sized.)

A little background on the design. The woodcut illustration is by the artist Rockwell Kent. It was originally commissioned by the Antioch Bookplate Company for a mass-market bookplate in the 1950s. Those Antioch bookplates used to be very common. You could find them at any bookstore. They were tasteful, inexpensive and, for the genteel middle class, a little aspirational. (My mom had them.)

Kent was a prolific bookplate designer. Most of his work was for friends and private clients, though, like the plate on the left. (Source. More examples here and here. There is even a book on Kent’s bookplates.) The series he designed for Antioch made it possible for everyone to have a Rockwell Kent bookplate.

Antioch stopped printing bookplates a few years ago, but Karen Gardner has continued the business under the name Bookplate Ink, where you can still get many of the old Rockwell Kent designs.

Personally, I love Kent’s art. So when it came time to order a bookplate for my readers, I asked Karen if she would modify one of Kent’s designs to make a little more space for a signature and inscription, since the original design left only enough space for the owner’s name. I cribbed the “compliments of” line from a similar bookplate offered by Alain de Botton, and the result is what you see above.

I admit it’s a little loony to spend so much time thinking about bookplates. In the age of ebooks, soon there may be nothing to stick them on. All the more reason to enjoy them now.

The latest on Defending Jacob

It’s been a while since I posted one of these updates about Defending Jacob, so here we go.

The biggest news: Warner Brothers has optioned Defending Jacob for a movie. No actors or directors are attached to the project yet. It will likely be a year or so before we have a screenplay, which will make or break the project since it is the screenplay, not the novel, that will attract actors and directors. Now, what I know about the movie business would fit on the head of a pin, so I won’t predict how this will turn out or even whether the movie will be made at all. But every indication is that the producers are intent on making this happen. Stay tuned.

Last week, Defending Jacob was published in the UK. My English publisher, Orion, has orchestrated a phenomenal publicity effort. Luckily, I will be in London in April to see it (and to drop by the London Book Fair, briefly). The first reviews from England have arrived as well, all quite favorable. In The Times, Marcel Berlins wrote that Defending Jacob is “worthy of being mentioned in the same breath [as Presumed Innocent], which is a high compliment.” It certainly is.

Another exciting aspect of this whole adventure has been foreign sales. Defending Jacob has sold in nineteen foreign countries, an absurd number. Now, the trouble with selling so many foreign-language editions is that sooner or later you run out of places to keep selling. Which is why it was so remarkable when we sold the book in Macedonia last week. Because, well, it’s Macedonia. The advance will barely cover a dinner out with my family, and the print run probably will be around 500 copies. Still, I would bet that more American novels are optioned for film than are translated into Macedonian, so let’s pause to savor this milestone, too.

Finally, yesterday morning was a remarkable one here in Boston, where I scored a publicity twofer. First, my hometown newspaper, the Globe, ran an interview with me — and put my mug at the top of page one. This is the very definition of a slow news day, one would think, but there it was. And second, I appeared on the popular morning drive-time show “Matty in the Morning.” The show’s host, Matt Siegel, is a Boston institution and a genuine, enthusiastic fan of Defending Jacob. (You can listen to the interview here.) So Bostonians on their way to work yesterday could hardly escape me.

What a long, strange trip it’s been.

London Tube campaign

With our UK publishing date fast approaching, Orion will soon have this outrageously cool series of posters displayed alongside the escalators at select London Tube stations. Jacob is coming, Londoners — and he doesn’t look happy. (Defending Jacob will be published in the UK on March 15. Click image to view it larger.)

Week in Review

Today is Sunday. Let’s review the week’s surreal Defending Jacob news.

In Monday’s Times, Janet Maslin reviewed the book, which left her “wondering whether this book’s author, William Landay, a former district attorney with two well-received novels behind him, has developed the chops to catapult himself into the Scott Turow tier of legal-eagle blockbuster writers.”

Wednesday the Times released its latest bestseller list (to appear in the print edition on February 26). Defending Jacob actually climbed one spot, to number 3. Reuters and Publishers Weekly have the book at number 2.

Friday the Daily Mail published the first review in the UK. The opening paragraph (I am not making this up):

Not since Scott Turow has a crime thriller — any thriller, though this too happens to be a literary legal thriller — shaken me by the throat like this. It’s a stunning, shocking, emotionally harrowing ride in which the reader is plunged into a riveting but terrible murder trial and the equally heartbreaking implosion of a loving family. I had to lie down when I finished it (all too soon) to still my beating heart.

Now that’s a positive review!

Honestly, it’s hard to process all this. In the daily grind of writing, it’s a struggle just to churn out a few pages every day. How the work will be received is something I don’t think about. Like any other writer, I am painfully aware of the limits of my talent and the flaws in my work. This business is humbling enough without worrying about what the critics will say. So I am bemused — grateful, of course, but bemused — at the wonderful reception Defending Jacob has gotten these last couple of weeks. Here’s hoping for another week like last week.

Oh, and one other thing: this week saw a breakthrough in the fine art of book promotion, the Defending Jacob cookie. James Patterson, take note.