Q&A: WFAN's Richard Neer Releases Second Novel
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- Longtime WFAN host Richard Neer recently released his second novel, "The Master Builders."
CBSNewYork.com spoke with Neer about the book.
Q: How long have you been writing fiction and how did you get into it?
A: I've been doing this for like five years at least, and I've always wanted to write novels. I wrote the "FM" book about rock radio and all of that. And I think you can sometimes tell more truth in fiction than you can in nonfiction, because nonfiction you've got to think about people's feelings and friendships and there's always the perception that you have that might not agree with what actually happened. So you tend to soft pedal it in nonfiction unless you're doing a really juicy tell-all. Whereas in fiction, you can write true things and what happened and what your feelings are without being too sensitive about it because you can have other characters say what you'd like to say but wouldn't say yourself.
Q: Without spoiling the book, what is the plot?
A: This story is about two builders. One is a very, very honest guy who does everything right and got caught up in the housing bubble. He bought a big piece of land. He was going to turn it into almost like a little town, very progressive town that was looking forward in the 21st century, what a little town should be like. And in the ensuing housing bubble bursting, the land that he bought for two and a half million was worth less than he paid for it and less that he had mortgaged, and they were going to forclose on it and he was going to lose his life savings. So he was reduced to doing odd jobs to try to make ends meet, trying to keep hope alive on this development. But the banks were closing in on him.
The other builder was this guy who was actually a member of the Russian mob from Brooklyn, who emigrated down to Charlotte, North Carolina, 30 years ago after the mob had discovered he was snitching on them. And he had plastic surgery, and he took on a whole new identity. And he started buidling basically subsidized housing for the poor. And in order to make money on it, he started cutting down on the building codes and putting in recycled material from hazardous waste dumps. And he would bascially hire undocumented workers and had no regard for their safety, so he'd let them work with asbestos with no masks on. He would put inadequate wiring in and have them screw Sheetrock into it without any kind of brace, all kinds of construction things. And he made a lot of money.
He was married to a woman who was an aspiring country singer. And since this guy was, shall we say, emasculated by the mob when they found out he was snitching on them, it was basically a marriage for show. And she was still in the prime of her libido, shall we say, so she was kind of spreading it around. Anyway, what happened was she hired the legitimate builder as an odd job to remodel their bathroom. And three or four days after he started, he gets beat up by two big guys for no reason. And his friend, the private detective, Riley King, the protagonist, he says, "We're going to find out who did this. The cops won't do anything. I'll get to the bottom of it." And the suspicion in the beginning of the book is that the crooked builder ordered this beating because he thought the straight builder was fooling around with his wife. And that's where it starts.
Q: You have a character in the book, Rick Stone, a sports talk radio host. How much of your writing is autobiographical?
A: Indirectly all of it, but directly none of it. Rick Stone is not me. He's very different than I am. He looks differently than I do. He's not me at all. But he has experiences that I've had. Riley King, I've never been a detective. I've never carried a gun around, so that's just a total fiction. And the builder guy is partially me and partially my brother. I've built 10 or 12 houses in my time, hands on and hand off, where I've hired people to do it or actually swung a hammer and did a lot of the work myself, a lot of the tile work. So I relate to the builder in the sense that I know all the building stuff and the codes, how things are supposed to be done. So I relate to all of that and none of it, because I've never done any of it for a living or full-time, but I've dabbled in all of it.
Q: This is the second novel in a series. What made you decide to write a series rather than go in the direction of a new book with new characters?
A: Actually, I have two completed novels past this one that use the same characters, Rick Stone and Riley King, and I'm halfway through a third sequel. So I've got basically five books with these same characters. ... I've always liked series. I was a big fan of Robert Parker, who wrote the "Spenser: For Hire" books, and he had the same characters, Spenser and Hawk. They made a TV series out of his books. And the good thing about continuing characters is you can really get deeper into them as you go along, whereas the reader reading that is familiar with them. Hopefully, he likes them. He must like them if he reads more than just one. And he kind of follows their lives as if it's really happening. And I'm trying to keep them in real time so that they age and they evolve in terms of their beliefs and their friendships.
Q: Should a reader start with the first book in the series, "Something of the Night," or can they jump right in with "The Master Builders" and not feel lost?
A: You could jump right in with "The Master Builders" and you wouldn't miss things because what I've been very careful to do -- and I've talked to several authors who have serial things going -- that each book has to be self-contained. It's almost like a serial TV show, where if you tune in three episodes in, you may not know some of the back story of the characters, but the story will be interesting enough and you'll get to know the characters, and I always make sure, like in "The Master Builders," there are references back to "Something of the Night." He relates to things that happened back then and explains what happened back then. So I don't think that if you read "The Master Builders" it will spoil any suspense in "Something of the Night." I didn't put in spoilers in this one, but it does refer back to things that happened in that that'll make sense.
Q: What kind of reader do you think a book like "The Master Builders" appeals to most?
A: People who like mysteries, thrillers, murder mysteries, detective stories. There's a lot of rock 'n' roll references in it. There's a lot of sports talk references in it. So I think sports fans, rock fans. I'm told that most readers are women over 50. I'm not sure if this is a book aimed at women over 50. It's kind of aimed at men over 30. Not to say that people younger or older couldn't read it. But it's almost like James Bond-ish in the way its appeal is designed, except it's not trying to save the world from international bad guys.
"The Master Builders" and "Something of the Night" are available as e-books and trade paperbacks at Amazon.com.
