William Boyle, the novelist whose New York is the heroine

The American writer may have left Gravesend for Mississippi, it is still his native Brooklyn that he writes. His fifth novel “The City of the Margins”, which has just been published by Gallmeister, is no exception and offers us a dark ballad in the New York of the nineties and its magnificent losers.

Gravesend, his first novel, published in the United States in 2013 and in France three years later, was already marking his territory. By choosing the name of his native Brooklyn neighborhood as his title, William Boyle was asserting his choices. He would paint a portrait of his neighbors, his friends, his classmates and a few thugs. Italians, Puerto Ricans, Jews growing up in the same schools and dreaming of leaving these rotten streets where drugs and violence spread like weed.

At that time, five years ago, the publisher François Guérif, then boss of Rivages / Noir, took the risk of offering Boyle and his novel number 1000 in the catalog of his prestigious collection: “It was a new voice of the noir novel and I found it more interesting to focus on it rather than lean, without surprising anyone, on sure values ​​like James Ellroy or Dennis Lehane”, he recalls.

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