Who am I and how did I get to be that way?

In pursuit of whales, torts, and words

In 361-some-odd years in New York, my family has managed to move an astonishing 120 miles -- a third of a mile, or 7 city blocks, a year, as fast as some species of tropical vine. In nearly four centuries we have driven relentlessly west, from the eastern tip of sandy Long Island to the hard granite of Manhattan, on and around which we have camped for most of the past two centuries. My feeling is that we hit the Big Apple and said, "let's stay here. This is as good as it gets." Here's a short history of this epic trek. My Yankee ancestor, Obediah Rogers, arrived with his family from Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1640, landing in Southampton as one of the first English settlers of New York and beginning the family's centuries-long quest for whales (great-great-granddad Halsey Rogers was a Sag Harbor whaleship captain), torts, and words. My family left the Hamptons before too many generations had passed, escaping well before the launch of the Hollywood years and leaving behind but a lonely ancient gravestone. The westward drive along the South Shore of Long Island landed us in Brooklyn and New York City over 150 years ago (they were separate cities then) and involved the accumulation of relations who were more recent and, clearly, more colorful arrivals in America. Among my Danielle Steeley forebears were an Irish trolley-car driver who became chauffeur to American aristocracy, a German innkeeper (who ran a waterfront bar, by legend a city block long, that served the workers building the Brooklyn Bridge) and his lawyer son, plus a French educator, one of twin brothers abandoned as children in a seaside resort town. Prominently, there was a family of Spanish immigrants from Barcelona and Pueto Mahon, on the Spanish Balearic Island Menorca, north of Majorca and Ibiza. They ran four "hair dressing saloons" and "bathing establishments" in Brooklyn. Those shops go back far enough for one to have been destroyed in the famous "Great Conflagration" of 1848, its proprietor injured and forced into retirement at the age of 24. Famous in the family of my great-grandmother, Angela (Comellas) Jahn, was "Uncle Juan" Quevedo, a Spanish-born career American Navy man (crewmember on the Perry Expedition to Japan in the 1850s and gunnery officer aboard the USS Brooklyn during the Civil War ... at whom Admiral Farragut may have been yelling when he uttered his famous, if historically embellished command, "Damn the torpedoes--full speed ahead"). My Latino relation finished his career as storekeeper (purchasing officer) at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, in the cove to the far left in the photo below.

Both my parents were born in New York City, my father in Queens, my mother in Manhattan. My father was a reporter and union activist with the New York Newspaper Guild at the legendary Brooklyn Eagle in the years leading up to World War II. He covered the Hindenberg Disaster, the Lindberg Kidnapping, and Hitler's attempt to established the Nazi Party in America, among other things. My mother is the bookish ... one of those rare moms who gives her young son A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners, and Ulysses to read so he can see the career coming way off and know what to expect ... former-librarian daughter of the Irish trolley-car driver (the Third Avenue trolley, when it was still horse-drawn). He wound up driving assorted vehicles for John Ellis Roosevelt, cousin of President Teddy, and finally becoming caretaker of the man's summer estate, Meadowcroft. While my author instincts keep me in New York City, where most of the family has spent most of the past two centuries, Meadowcroft, where I did some growing up as a child, leaves me with a yearning to write an Agatha Christie-style "mansion mystery." Don't be surprised if Donovan turns up in such a place while on vacation one of these years.

Of the various possible ethnic surnames … English, French, Spanish, German, and Irish … that I might have been tagged with, fate knew that eventually I would pen the mystery titled Murder on the Waterfront and named me after the guy with the dockside bar. (The building, at One Old Fulton Street, still stands. You can see it, blurred and misted by history like my NATO family, just to the right of the bridge tower on the Brooklyn side in the above photo, which was taken from the top of the World Trade Center.) The historic building began life as the Steamboat Ferry Inn,circa 1830. Careful readers of Murder In Central Park will recall that name as adorning a beer bottle.

Brooklyn Bridge photo by Gary Feuerstein
(http://www.endex.com/gf/ ).
Used by permission.

Weegee and Me

I followed my father into newspaper work at the age of 11. My father was then editing a weekly newspaper in Sayville, NY This is the aforementioned resort town, a picture book hamlet of sand, gift shops, and Rotarians on the South Shore of Long Island halfway back to the hallowed Hamptons digs. Once known for Blue Point Oysters and the summer estates of the very rich, Sayville now is famous worldwide as the place to catch the ferry to the gay parts of Fire Island. My father started me as a printer's devil in the back shop and two years' later bought me a camera and turned me into his emergency photographer. I covered fires, arrests, and car wrecks—heady stuff for someone that age, being given a press badge and a pass through police lines—and worshipped Weegee, the legendary New York City police photographer who inspired the character played by Joe Pesci in his 1992 movie "The Public Eye." After a while I traded my Speed Graphic for a typewriter and drifted into writing and editing, becoming news editor of another weekly at the age of twenty. I got my first apartment in Manhattan in 1966, on the Upper West Side, while a part-time graduate student at Columbia University and a full-time supplicant to the gods of freelance writing. And it was during the antiwar "disturbances" at Columbia in 1968, when reporters were sitting up all night playing cards with my fellow sleep-deprived Columbia officers waiting for the thousands of tactical police officers swarming the campus to attack, that I heard about and shortly thereafter got my first newspaper job in Manhattan, as folk and rock music reviewer at The New York Times, replacing Bob Shelton, the Times’s legendary reviewer who discovered Bob Dylan and had just retired to write a biography of him. Writing as Mike Jahn, the byline I had been using since my Weegee days, I worked that beat for six years. I covered the Woodstock Festival and hung out with many of the countercultural and pop music icons of that age--and wrote quite a few of their obituaries. Occasionally I took one of their photos; the one over there of John Lennon, recording in America for the first time in 1972, is an example. Eventually I tired of watching people I liked die, and after two-year stint as a TV critic and celebrity interviewer--Leonard Nimoy gave my son a Tribble that now is displayed prominently on his mantle--I built on the notoriety that a daily Times byline gave me to live my real dream, writing fiction for a living. At first, I signed up with MCA Universal to produce novelizations of its TV and motion picture properties. Those included The Rockford Files, The Six Million Dollar Man, Switch, The Invisible Man with David McCallum, and Black Sheep Squadron. (I still do this sort of work from time to time, a fact that is inescapable if you look me up on Amazon.com, most recently with Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story and The Frighteners, a Michael J. Fox movie that I like to describe as "Ghostbusters meets The Seventh Seal.")

Then Came Donovan

That training gave me the courage to write my own original fiction, and my first original mystery, The Quark Maneuver (Ballantine 1977) won the Edgar Award for best paperback original mystery. A handful of paperback originals later in genres that included science fiction (Armada) and historical (Kingsley's Empire) as well as a dalliance with experimental fiction, and following a byline switch to Michael Jahn, I made the jump to hardcover fiction, starting the Bill Donovan Mysteries in the early 1980s with Night Rituals. By 2002, I have published about 50 books.

While most of my years in Manhattan were lived on the Upper West Side ... and Donovan began his illustrious career with the West Side Major Crimes Unit before moving up to command of the citywide Special Investigations unit ... I also lived on the East Side near the United Nations, and in the Brooklyn communities of Flatbush and Sheepshead Bay. I now live in Manhattan and thereabouts.

When I am not writing I indulge myself in rereading those writers who influenced me. Among the mystery writers, that would include Georges Simenon, Leslie Charteris, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy Sayers. Among the other writers who moved me are Joyce, O Henry, the Depression Poet Kenneth Fearing (read his "St. Agnes Eve," a fine noir poem), Jack Kerouac ... sometimes I feel I have been rewriting that last paragraph of On the Road for thirty years ... and especially Meyer ("Mike") Berger, creator of the "About New York" column in "The New York Times" and inheritor of O Henry's talent for describing the little guy just getting by on the streets of New York ... get his Meyer Berger’s New York (Random House, 1953) if you can find it. As for Georges Simenon ... I have been known to refer to Donovan, arrogantly, maybe, but, I hope, not entirely inaccurately, as New York’s Maigret. Donovan does have Maigret's intuitiveness and psychological insight. And to refer to Marcy, Donovan's multiracial wife and, now, the mother of his child, as New York's Emma Peel. Well, her black leather catsuit days are behind her now; she's a mommy. As Donovan showed, we all grow up—sometimes against the most amazing odds. Marcy still steps in now and again to help her husband with cases.

As will his son.

That's New York

It is New York that you get in reading my books. Beyond my family and writing, the city is my one true love. It is this city that fills the imagination and warms the spirit and even if you write about the view from the World Trade Center, a young man who is raiding the Tuesday night trash pickup seeking to furnish his flat with the castoff furniture that wealthy families still shove out onto the curb, an Afghan immigrant selling hot dogs so he can afford his studio apartment on Northern Boulevard, or an old man trying to get a warm winter sleep atop a steam vent along the West Side Highway when the wind is blowing in raw and knife-edged from Jersey and the rest of America across the Hudson, there is a majesty in New York City that you don't find elsewhere. That's what I write about.

That's New York.

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