By Theo Gangi
My debut novel, Bang Bang, has been coined a gritty urban thriller. I’ve always written about urban dynamics, since I’m a city kid and don’t know much else.
I found the thriller genre by accident—a professor of mine at Columbia’s MFA program saw a gun in a chapter of a previous novel and said, ‘So, clearly we’re dealing with noir here.’ I hadn’t read noir at that time—I thought I was writing literature.
Once I dove into thrillers—starting with Hammett and Chandler and working up to Connelly and Child– I realized that these guys were not only having more fun, their work was culturally viable, personally engaging and readers didn’t need a PHD to get it. I always felt my work should appeal to everyone.
The concept for Bang Bang came from idiosyncrasies of street idiom. A ‘bang’ is slang for a con-on-con robbery, and a ‘stickup kid’ is a rogue criminal who preys on other criminals. So I began to wonder, what do you call a stickup kid who’s a grown man? That became the opening sentence of the book. Izzy’s character grew from there—a guy from the streets who’s savvy enough to know he’s a walking contradiction.
I wanted to write a book about this stickup kid because he most embodies the modern urban equivalent of the cowboy: a lone gunman obeying a private moral code within a system of justice beyond the law. Elmore Leonard showed me how the urban crime thriller was really a relocated western. When he couldn’t sell his westerns anymore, he reapplied his conceptions to a modern city and remained relevant for the rest of his career.
Like the classic story of the mysterious cowboy with a past, Izzy has done some bad things. I don’t excuse him, but I offer an opportunity for redemption. I grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where various races and classes are stacked on top of one another in a constantly evolving property market. You learn that identity is never fixed and set, but is perpetually being reinvented.
Bang Bang is more than a street thriller, but a slice of urban clutter where different walks of life constantly connect, challenge and bang into each other.
Bang Bang, an ITW debut novel, will be hitting stores in October, 2007.