Who's
Bill Donovan and how did
he get to be that way?
-- Updated Spring
2008
I created the Bill
Donovan Mysteries after spending 15 years as a writer living
on the Upper West Side of New York and hanging out in a lot
of rifle ranges, coffee shops, and saloons patronized by
both off-duty cops and robbers (the latter, to be honest,
were more often low-and-middle level numbers operators ...
though one of them claimed, convincingly, to have two
notches in his 9mm automatic) ... as well as a few mafiosi
who gave them money inbetween beers.
Generally Cracking Up
I didn't set out to write
a mystery when I wrote the first Donovan, Night
Rituals. At that point in my life I still had it in mind
to write a literary novel. (Thus the pithy and allegedly
amusing chapter subheads, a style borrowed from Kurt
Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle; I used to do them every few
pages but now they only announce each chapter.) So I began
to write about a newspaperman who was drinking himself to
death and generally cracking up; soon I made the character a
cop who was cracking up. I had stumbled over a couple, one
of them a quite dangerous man given to looking out the bar
window, threatening to shoot passing black men, while
researching my Edgar winner, The Quark Maneuver. I
decided that Donovan's problems were the result of rage left
over from the murder of his father some years back, a
tragedy for which Donovan blamed himself. (There is also a
mysterious "dark time" in Donovan's past, the famous "three
years in the sixties that he won't talk about." His
assistant and friend, Sgt. Brian Moscowitz, is increasingly
obsessed with unlocking that puzzle and coming to believe
that it may have involved something illegal and perhaps
violent.) When he wasn't destroying himself or aiming
witticisms at all and sundry from his Broadway barstool,
Donovan was trying to make up his mind between two
women -- Rosalie Rodriguez, a Cuban-American barmaid and
drinking buddy with whom he wanted to have a baby and, perhaps did (it's not unusual for me to drop a hint that doesn't materialize for 20 years), and Marcy Barnes, a multiracial undercover
cop who was the daughter of a very wealthy, African-American New
York State Supreme Court Justice and a high-profile Jewish
fashion magazine editor. Despite the chaotic state in which
he found himself in Night Rituals, Donovan managed to
run down a serial killer who was terrorizing Riverside Park.
And, in the end, realize that he had to straighten out his
life.
Mature and
Wise
This took him two more
books to accomplish, but by the end of City of God,
in which he solved some bizarre murders associated with the
Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the world's largest Gothic
cathedral, he was straight and growing up and soon to
transform himself into the mature and wise Donovan we come
to know in Murder at the Museum of Natural History
(the American Museum of Natural History), Murder on
Theatre Row (Times Square), Murder on Fifth
Avenue (the Christmas shopping season on the world's
most famous boulevard), Murder in Central Park (New
York's urban wilderness), Murder on the
Waterfront (the Hudson River docks), and Murder in Coney Island. In October 2008, Donovan & Son, the 25th Anniversay Bill Donovan Mystery, takes him back to the setting in which we met him 1982.