CITY OF GLORY
A Novel of War and Desire in Old Manhattan

Q:  Why did you choose City of Glory as the book’s title?

A:  Actually, I did not.  I originally called the book Kingdom Come and I really liked that title.  So did Sydny Miner, my terrific editor at Simon & Schuster.  It seemed to be descriptive of the future of the city and the young America that are the background subjects of the book.  But when the book was finished and the manuscript started to circulate in house, lots of people said since it was a sequel to City of Dreams, and since that book had so many fans, it was foolish not to give it a title that alerted readers to the connection.  Since Sydny and I had known right along that we wanted a cover that would link the two books, the argument made a lot of sense.  So after some trial and error we came up with City of Glory.  

Q:  How did the idea for City of Glory originate? 

A:  Well, once I’d created the Turners and the Devreys in City of Dreams they wouldn’t leave me alone.  I wrote Shadowbrook almost as a way to widen the scope of what I knew by then was going to be a series of books—a chance to tell more about the world these people found themselves in, with its clash of Native American and European cultures and the way the Old World conflicts played out in the New, but the story of Manhattan and New York City kept drawing me back.  That’s the milieu of these two families, the great city is their backdrop, and their dreams and desires are constantly mixed up with the enormous energy of their city.  No one can ignore New York, least of all the people who live there.  Not now and not then.  So it became absolutely necessary to do what so many fans of the first book wanted me to do, pick up the tale of the two families.  Joyful Patrick Turner sails home to New York from Canton at the end of City of Dreams.  City of Glory tells his story.  At least the part that occurs when he’s a young man in his thirties and captures the woman he loves, as well as helping to save not just his city but his country.

Q:  Did you plot the story in advance?  
 
A:  I don’t write outlines.  If I did I would be bored with the idea of actually writing the book.  Instead I write what I call a matrix—an overview of the history of the period and some general explanations of where the story is going.  I never try to include every plot twist because I don’t know what those plot twists are going to be.  For me, as a writer, it has to happen on the page.  I know the basic outline of where I’m going when I start a book, but the more exciting the characters become, the more new ideas I have.  Make no mistake, I am always in control.  But the story does make its own demands.  For example, there’s a diamond in City of Glory which is critical to the plot.  I didn’t get that idea until I was doing some checking on the Huguenot gold and silver smiths of old New York and how they were congregated on Maiden Lane.  I was wondering if they bought and sold jewels as well as gold and silver, and if they didn’t, who did?  (Mostly I was thinking of a character in the story called Eugenie who’s a penniless widow trying to keep up appearances so she can snag a second husband.  How did she live, since I say she was left with only debts?  She must have sold her jewels.  Where and to whom?)  It was doing that line of research that caused me to run across the tale of the mysterious diamond known as The Great Mogul.  It was the largest diamond ever found at the time, well over two hundred carets originally, and it was first seen in the seventeenth century and had disappeared by sometime in the eighteenth.  So I could do what I wanted with it without breaking my rule never to do violence to history by fictionalizing it.  By then I was a third of the way through the book, but I saw instantly how I could use this marvelous and mysterious diamond and I went back to the beginning and wrote in The Great Mogul.  Working without a fixed outline allows me that liberty.   Since I haven’t already laid out every twist and turn of the plot I don’t find such a change of direction daunting.   In fact I can never turn in a partial manuscript, even to accommodate my overseas publishers who always want to start the translations as soon as they can.  I can’t oblige, because the book they will get when I’m half way through usually turns out to be different from the book I’ll hand over when I’m finished. 

Q:  Critics always comment on how meticulous you are about getting all the details correct.  How do you do your research? 

A:  First, I’m sure I don’t get everything right, as careful as I try to be.  Sometimes I deliberately change something because the story demands it; when that happens I always acknowledge the changes in an author’s foreword or after-word.  In other instances I probably make mistakes because I go only as far as my story requires me to go.  I’m after knowledge for the sake of my characters and my book.  That’s different than seeking knowledge for it’s own sake as an academic does.  That said, I’ve mentioned before that for the historical novelist, New York on New York is as good as it gets.  I spend countless hours in the city’s libraries and collections.  Some examples are the New York Public Library’s magnificent Stokes Collection—a compilation of manuscripts, books, art works, and contemporary sources from the pre- and post-revolutionary era in New York—as well as the NYPL’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, another truly remarkable resource.  I also draw on the expertise of many other writers.  Importantly the very unusual urban archaeologist Hope Cooke, and Professors Mike Wallace and Ted Burrows, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the city, Gotham, was published when I was halfway through the writing of City of Dreams.  All in all, between the research and the writing it takes me about two and a half years to complete one of these books.   
 
Q:  Do you use the Internet? 

A:  Yes, I certainly do.  Without the net writing these books would probably take twice as long.  Some of the greatest collections of some of the most magnificent libraries are now digitalized and available online.  You can, for example, find the diary that John Hancock kept while he was president of the Second Continental Congress, the one that produced the Declaration of Independence.  That’s all online in both facsimile and plain text at the Library of Congress site.  And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.  Besides the resources themselves, there are the people you meet.  Even though everyone’s afraid of nuts and stalkers and hackers, once you get past that you can build real collegial relationships online.  I have and they have been a true joy.   

Q:  What has surprised you most as you researched New York?

A:  Well, there are two levels.  There’s the chuckle I get when I learn that Jacob Astor’s mansion at Broadway and Barclay St. was considered to be in the furthest northern reaches of the city and many people expected it to remain so.  Or discovering that the grid, the streets and avenues laid out so precisely, was already a fully fledged idea by 1809.  Or even that until 1812 flogging was an official and legal punishment meted out by the city, the way we use fines today, and there was an official whipper.  (Vinegar Clifford and his bull whip, one of the characters in this book, is based on a very real man with a  very real job.)  Then there are the really serious revelations.  The things that truly make your jaw drop.  Such as learning that the entire economy of New York depended on slavery.  Until I researched these books I didn’t know that America’s first slave uprising occurred in New York in 1712, or that Wall Street was the location of the biggest organized slave market in the north.  By the time of City of Glory, which mostly takes place during ten days in 1814, there are fewer slaves in the city because the uprisings made the white populace afraid and they switched to using indentured servants from Europe—men and women who sold themselves into bonded labor for a period, usually ten years, to pay for their passage to America—but slavery was still entirely legal.  That’s what gave rise to the gangs of  what were called blackbirders, bounty hunters who would pick up any black person on the street, drag him or her off to the magistrates, and get a reward for catching a runaway slave.  It didn’t matter if the person they’d caught was really a runaway or not.  Any black person was fair game, and God alone knows how many were deprived of what liberty they had in this way.  New York was a hotbed of blackbirding.  It’s shocking, but it’s absolutely true.  In fact, fear of the blackbirders is a driving motive for a young woman called Delight Higgins, one of the major characters in the story.

Q:  If northern slavery was the big surprise of City of Dreams and Shadowbrook, what do you think will be the biggest surprise for readers of City of Glory?

A:  Probably the same thing that surprised me.  That the Union came so close to being split apart in 1814.  Scholars call it the Crisis of 1814; the country was so polarized and so divided and distraught about the war President Madison and his congressional allies had declared in 1812, that New England was seriously considering separating from the other states and becoming an independent country.  If that had happened—and maybe New York had joined in as I have it in this book—there was no way it could have been stopped.  Unlike what happened fifty years later under Lincoln, Madison’s central government was so young and tentative it wouldn’t have been strong enough to hold the nation together, much less wage war to do so.  We would have had at least two countries right away, and I suspect many more as the continent was explored and taken over.  Maybe eventually these small nations would have united again, or maybe we’d have developed into something that looked like the Balkans today, or all the independent republics around the Black Sea.  I don’t know, but learning how close we came to going that route was a shock.  I don’t ever remember being taught about that in American History in school, and I bet many readers will be as astounded as I was.   Particular when they consider that it’s all true and the only thing I made up was the involvement of my characters and their motives.  But…  No, I better stop there.  You’ll have to read City of Glory to know the rest.  Both the story and the real history they forgot to teach you in high school.

Q:  You’re launching a new website we’re told.  What can you tell us about it?

A:  It’s called BeverlySwerling.com and it features all three books and also a lot about me and how I work.  I even post some of the matrixes I discussed above.  It’s very different from what I did before at cityofdreams.com.  That was a site that concentrated on one particular book and had very little about me or how I work.  But readers have told me it’s those personal details that interest them.   And of course, the Internet has moved on.  It’s such a new medium and has become such an important way for authors to communicate with readers and let them know a book is out there.  Any writer is foolish not to take major advantage of that.  In my case, too, I have a wonderful webmaster, Mel Croucher, with whom I’ve been working for seven years.  Having that kind of world class professional to rely on makes it possible to dream large.  That’s what we’ve done on BeverlySwerling.com.

Q:  What do you hope readers will get from this book?