HOW TO BE A MAN:
Artie and Me.

by
Reggie Nadelson

Reggie Nadelson is a New York City native who now divides her time between her hometown and London. A documentary filmmaker and journalist, she is the author of Red Hot Blues. Bloody London, the third mystery in the Artie Cohen series, will be published in late 1999

 

In BLOODY LONDON, my current thriller, as in the two previous books in the series, RED HOT BLUES and HOT POPPIES, the protagonist is a guy. Artie Cohen, a New York cop (who becomes an ex cop and PI), who was born in Moscow and has become the quintessential New Yorker. He's thrown off his immigrant baggage, he thinks, and turned himself into an American, a New Yorker, a guy who likes women and jazz and New York City. Naturally his past comes up to smack him in the face, and in Bloody London it does it not just in terms of his own Russian past but in terms of the pats of his girlfriend and love of his life, Lily Hanes who has her own demons buried in London.

But what's been really interesting for me about the books, the stories and background notwithstanding, is writing from the point of view of a man.
At first, I thought Lily would be the main character. Somewhere in the first draft of the first book, she met a cop named Artie Cohen and he sort of took over. People ask why I've done this. There are a few reasons. First of all I have trouble thinking of women as "tough guys" I just can't do it. Maybe it's because I'm a bleeding heart liberal myself who thinks guns really are the devil's work (if I believed in devils) Maybe it's because I've never hit anyone in my life and wouldn't know how. There was something else. I wanted to write about other people. I thought if the main character were a woman, she'd be too much like me and I'd end up using her as a mouthpiece for a lot of my own issues and I really didn't want to do that.

Anyhow, Artie took off and became his own guy and it was a challenge. He is, of course, part me. Part of him, especially the jazz loving part, is my boyfriend. Another part is a great Russian pal of mine, someone with a strange Russian-American past. Writing a man also meant that I had to check stuff with male friends. Ask them how they felt about sex and women and life. Sometimes I got things disastrously wrong and had to rewrite. My greatest compliment came from a British friend, a writer who said, "Some crime writers (I'll leave the name to your imagination), can't even write as heterosexuals and you've successfully written as a man."
Also, although my real name is Regina, I write as Reggie so it provided a bit of extra fun.

After I'd written the first book, I thought I ought to meet a real New York cop. I asked around and was given Bill's name. I figured I'd made my own hero, Artie, perhaps too educated, too literary, too different. I went to meet Bill and discovered he's a cop who reads Graham Greene, drinks select Merlots, knows a sweetbread from a sweetpea, and hangs out with writers. I was pretty stunned. I said, "Are there a lot of cops like you in the NYPD?" He said, "Listen, there's fifty-thousand of us in law enforcement in NYC, there's everything, PhDs, classics scholars, the whole ball of wax."

Now that my third Artie Cohen is out, and the next on the way, of course I think of him as real. I feel protective. Sometimes I wonder if Lily is right for him as if I were some kind of fond sister. Or, I ask myself, do I really like Artie too much? Do I wish he were the real guy? In real life? Will I have to keep him going for ever? It gets to be a bit lit a Kurt Vonnegut novel where your characters are running after you tapping on the car window. Let us in, they probably cry.

Anyhow, the only thing I've never been able to quite do is a graphic sex scene from Artie's point of view, but maybe it's better. As the Victorians would have said here, "And so, dear reader, on this we pull the curtain."