William Martin Books

Sometimes you'll research a city of dreams, and sometimes a dreamscape of clouds...

... and sometimes, my wife, Chris, provides a bit of extra inspiration.

FROM WILLIAM MARTIN:

In 2005 the New England Independent Booksellers Association gave me their New England Book Award. I was honored, especially because the award came from the people who actually put my books into readers’ hands. But in the interests of not taking myself too seriously, I told my kids, “It just proves that if you go up into a room and make stuff up for thirty years, people are bound to notice.”

Well, the truth is that I count myself pretty lucky, because people started noticing in 1980, when my first novel, Back Bay, became a New York Times Bestseller and was heralded by the Cleveland Plain Dealer as “the debut of a new and richly gifted storyteller.” And that word – storyteller – has followed me ever since. “A master storyteller,” said the Seattle Post Intelligencer in 1987, and “a storyteller whose smoothness equals his ambition” said Publisher’s Weekly 1996. I consider it high praise, because if I’m not keeping you up late, wrapped up in my stories and wondering what happens next, I’m not doing my job.

I descend from a long line of Irish storytellers who could make tales from their Depression youth sound like Homeric adventures, who could turn the tough streets of Boston into a landscape of high drama. And as an only child, I had plenty of time on my hands, so I fell into the thrall of storytellers like Charles Dickens, Jules Verne, and C.S. Forester. I also spent hours in the transfixing shadows of movies like The Searchers, Lawrence of Arabia, and Mutiny on the Bounty. Big stories on broad canvases, characters who seemed larger than life but proved to be all too human, epic deeds and powerful emotions… those were the elements that engaged me then. And somewhere in my teen years, I decided I wanted to be part of this storytelling business.I wanted to try to tell those big stories and stretch the canvas wide.

At Harvard, I majored in English before lunch, worked as an historical research assistant in the afternoon, and directed theater at night. I graduated in 1972, did some construction work to raise money, then headed for Hollywood. At the University of Southern California, I studied movie making and realized that the quickest way to get a job – if you didn’t have an uncle in the business – was to write a good screenplay. I wrote a few, but producers kept saying, “The way you write, you ought to write novels.” So I wrote one. I’ve been a novelist ever since....

Along the way, I’ve had a great time and called it research. I’ve sailed on the oldest three-masted schooner still afloat, drunk Guinness in the pubs of Ireland, wandered the Great Beach of Cape Cod, been flown off an aircraft carrier, taken the helm of a nuclear submarine, wandered the grounds of Mount Vernon in the moonlight, gone back to Harvard classes in my forties, hiked the deep woods and high ridges of New England, and explored the streets of Manhattan... all in the service of my novels.

City of Dreams features the return of Peter Fallon, the main character from Back Bay(1980), Harvard Yard (2003), and The Lost Constitution(2007). He's the only character that I’ll admit is even close to my fictional alter ego. We both grew up in the Boston neighborhoods, went to Catholic high schools, and then to Harvard. When I was a graduate student worried about my future, so was Peter in Back Bay. When I was guiding my kids (two sons and a daughter) toward college, so was Peter in Harvard Yard (he has one son). And now the kids have all moved off, so Peter and I can indulge in a little more travel, serve on the boards of a few more Boston institutions, watch a few more ball games, drink a few new wines or better yet, a few old ones, and spend a little more time staying in shape. (Peter rows a scull every other day. I run four miles, hike when I can find a trail that leads to a good mountain view, or play bit of golf when I can find the time.)

Of course, the parallels aren’t perfect. Peter is divorced and back with his old girlfriend, Evangeline. I’ve been married to the same woman for thirty-five years. And fictional characters don’t have to age as fast as the rest of us, so Peter is staying in his forties, but I'm not. And while Peter gets into plenty of trouble when he goes in search of another treasure, I content myself with writing about the treasures and the trouble, too.