![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() How do you know which boxes to hit and how do you spring them open? Newspaper articles and Daniel Simone’s nonfiction account “ The Pierre Hotel Affair”-written with Nick (the Cat) Sacco, one of the crooks-provided the logistics of that twenty-eight-million-dollar heist. The New York Times archive led me to the 1972 Hotel Pierre robbery, which suited my purposes. Pop culture provides familiar structural elements for a bank robbery (deactivate the alarm, subdue the patrons and the staff, attack the vault), but I couldn’t think of any hotel ripoffs. The “tick-tock” element is inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s classic “The Killing,” which features a dispassionate, omniscient narrator who counts down the heist and the robbers’ doomed fates. Did you research similar crimes from that era or is this pure invention? You recount the job in minute-by-minute detail. I always hate the moment when our crook-heroes have gone to all the trouble of pulling off the job and then it comes time to unload the goods on a fence, who looks at the $2 million in gems and says, “I’ll give you ten cents on the dollar.” It’s infuriating! I hate the fence, so it seemed obvious that I should make the Reluctant Fence my protagonist. ![]() I was staring off into space and thinking about how much I like heist films and how much fun it would be to write a heist. How did the idea for the heist come to you? Your story “ The Theresa Job” is set in Harlem in 1959, and it revolves around a holdup at a ritzy hotel. ![]()
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