William Martin Books

In 2005 the New England Booksellers Association gave me their New England Book Award. I was honored to receive it, especially because it came from the people who actually put my books into readers’ hands. But in the interests of not taking myself too seriously, I told friends, “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 in this business, 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 or 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.... eight novels now, some three million copies in print. And I've made a few forays into film, too: a PBS documentary on the life of Washington and horror movie now considered a cult classic.

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, and hiked the deep woods and high ridges of New England... all in the service of my novels.

The Lost Constitution, my latest, features the return of Peter Fallon, the main character from Back Bay and Harvard Yard (2003), and the only character that I’ll admit is even close to being 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 Fallon 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 Carrington. I’ve been married to the same woman for thirty-four 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 national treasure, I have a great time writing about the treasures and the trouble, too.

In all the Peter Fallon stories (and in Cape Cod, too) the contemporary thriller meets the historical novel. A race against time becomes a race through time. And two stories become one… A lot of people are writing these kinds of stories now. I didn’t invent the genre, but I was one of the first practitioners, and I’ve sure had fun with it. So have my readers.

The Lost Constitution was born after a visit to the Massachusetts Historical Society. I went to see one of the sixteen copies of the first draft of the Constitution that still exist. Sixty were printed for the 1787 Constitutional Convention. That’s all. The delegates were supposed to deliberate in secret, and the public was not supposed to know what was going on until the final draft was signed and published. That’s how worried the Framers were about the reaction to their work. The draft at the Massachusetts Historical Society belonged to delegate Elbridge Gerry, who left his notations on it in a tight, careful little script. Here’s one of them: “No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the authority of the United States.” Seems obvious today, but in the eighteenth century? Groundbreaking. Enough to give you chills.

When I touched that draft, I could feel one of the Framers thinking America into existence. Never before had I fully understood what Madison said about the Constitution: “Every word, every punctuation mark, decides a question between liberty and power.” So what do I do with an experience like that? Well, as I say, I’m a storyteller. So naturally, I begin to play the game, “What if…?” What if there was another draft out there? And it was annotated by a group of New England delegates? And they left their thoughts about the shape of the Bill of Rights, including the right to keep and bear arms? What if… that first draft was stolen from Philadelphia in 1787? What happens next? That’s the question that every storyteller loves to answer. The draft disappears. Now it’s worth millions… and what’s more, there’s a political fight brewing over the repeal of the Second Amendment, the right to keep and bear arms.

Along come Peter and Evangeline. Peter is from the working class and sells rare books to the upper crust. Evangeline’s from the upper crust and doesn’t much care. They make a good couple. They argue all the time, but they look out for each other, too. Think Nick and Nora Charles for the twenty-first century. She likes the idea of repealing the Second Amendment. He likes the idea of finding the truth, no matter what it is. But there are a lot of people out there who’d kill to find that draft. Some want it because it’s so valuable. Some want it because in every fight over the Constitution, people want to know what the Framers really meant. In action that swirls from Shays’s Rebellion in 1787 to a climax at Fenway Park on the first night of the World Series, Peter and Evangeline race through history and across New England to find – and save – the lost Constitution.

It’s a big story, and it needs a broad canvas. In my earlier books, I’ve always played the treasure hunt against some legendary New England location because New England is my home turf. It’s where readers first discovered my books. So, how about a novel that dips into the history of all six states? New England: a landscape of contradictions, which reflects the people who live there. The mountains are old and gentle and worn down by time, yet the harshest climate in the world is found atop Mount Washington. The low foothills and second-growth forests close off most of the long vistas, but the ocean and the mountain notches offer views to infinity. Most of the rivers are twisty and narrow, but they are so powerful that they gave birth to America’s industrial revolution. My New Englanders – ambitious, stubborn, conscientious, brave – carve a living from that harsh landscape. They build mills in Massachusetts, march with the legendary 20th Maine in the Civil War, work logging camps in the north woods, visit luxury hotels, serve meals in Newport mansions, open a ski tow in Vermont. And they live the Constitutional crises of their times – Shays’s Rebellion , the Civil War, the struggle for Women Suffrage, the impeachment crises of our time.

Along the way they get to ask some big questions. Who owns America? The right or the left of the ones who scream the loudest? And where is our Republic headed, at a time when the Constitution seems so often under attack? The Lost Constitution will make you wonder about those questions. You might even find a few answers, because, as Peter Fallon would say, you don’t know where you’re going unless you know where you’ve been. And as I say, it’s a big story on a broad canvas.