July 15–22, 1999

20 questions

interview by Noel Weyrich

Sons of the City (William Morrow), the first novel by veteran Daily News reporter Scott Flander, is a Philadelphia cop’s tale, written in a cop’s voice, about murder, mob entanglements and police corruption that stretches to the very top of the department. Though Flander claims all the characters and incidents in the book are fictional, he also points out how life sometimes imitates art. A main character in Sons of the City is a female police officer who goes undercover as a top Mafioso’s lover. Farfetched? Hardly, says Flander. A female cop in Miami was recently convicted of lying about her sexual relationship with a mobster she was investigating.

How did the idea for Sons of the City come about?

Several years ago, I was hoping to write a series of stories on the kind of things that cops deal with on a day-to-day basis. I spent a lot of time riding with a squad of cops in West Philadelphia. And I went for six months, almost every single night, most of it on my own time.… The more I got to know them, the more difficult it was to write a newspaper story that would really give the public a sense of what they dealt with. I didn’t know how to do it. And I ended up not writing anything. But I really felt I still had something to say.

That was the germ of the idea?

I had never written any fiction before, but I came up with this main character, Eddie North, the sergeant, and I really wanted to present that worldview.… If you read the book and you have a little better understanding of how cops see things, then I’ve succeeded.

How long did it take to write?

It took about three years. It’s very difficult working for a newspaper and trying to write fiction. The demands of writing fiction are tremendous. The way I saw it, each day I wrote was like diving into a pond or a lake and describing what was around. For me, it can take an hour or two, especially if I’ve been away from it for a while. You can’t get into it in five minutes, unless you’re a very practiced fiction writer.… I had to take a leave of absence to finish the book, just so I could write every day. After the book was sold, the editor asked me to do some re-writing. I got to use some of the advance money to take off for about three months.

I’ve heard the rewrite process called "killing your babies."

Yeah, it was difficult. There was one scene I took out — it’s the weirdest thing to say — after I took it out, I was really depressed for two days.

What was so depressing?

It wasn’t so much that I’d worked hard and didn’t want to see my hard work thrown away. It was more that I was diminishing in some way the lives of the characters I had created, but it was for the good of the book as a whole. It’s weird. It doesn’t make any sense, but these people are in some way real to me. You talk about killing babies, and it’s not far off. It’s almost like a parent saying I’m going to take away the years that my child was 7 and 8 years old.

Who saw the book before you submitted it?

A couple of cops who are friends of mine saw it. And they liked it a lot. One of the cops is a sergeant who became a good friend of mine, although this sergeant in the book is not anything like him. I told him, "This guy’s not you. If you think he’s you, you’re not going to like the book." He said, "I understand that." And then he paused and said, "But I want Jack Nicholson to play me in the movie."

Did he agree that it wasn’t him?

He did, but he gave me a really nice compliment a month or two later. He was telling me about some incident that he was involved in on the street. He was in a difficult situation and he said, "You know I was trying to figure out what Eddie North would do." I don’t know if he realized how much he was complimenting me. I was just knocked out by that.

Scott Flander will read on Thu., July 15, at 7:30 p.m., at Borders, 1727 Walnut St., 215-568-7400.