Linda Fairstein's 'Night Watch' inspired by DSK

Linda Fairstein's 'Night Watch' inspired by DSK

Q: Talk about the title of your new novel.
A: Night Watch is the name of an actual NYPD unit that works from midnight to 8. If a major crime happens in the middle of the night, they handle it.

Q: The novel is inspired by the Strauss-Kahn case. What fascinated you?

A: Had I still been in the office, it would have been my case, and from the outset it fascinated me. I'm still a lawyer, and I found myself second-guessing everything that happened as it went on.

Q: So when did your interest become a novel?
A: The more cathartic way for me to deal with it was to ask what would Alex Cooper be doing if this happened under her watch. I did a lot of legal commentary on TV for the DSK case, so every time I pushed away from using it in a book, I kept coming back to it. It seemed to be fascinating everybody. I factor in what I call the cocktail party element. Everywhere people said to me, "What do you think of DSK?"

Q: What are the differences between your fictional suspect, MGD (Mohammed Gil-Darsin), and DSK?
A: Among the interesting things about the case was the power dynamic. You've got a world leader, DSK, who was white, and the victim, the accuser, was a woman of color. I wanted to shift those dynamics. My perp is a West African leader, so he's the person of color. My accuser is also an immigrant, but she's from Latin America.

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Q: And their wives?
A: DSK has a brilliant, fabulous, well-respected, well-to-do wife with money of her own (Anne Sinclair), and why she stayed with him puzzled a lot of people. My guy's wife doesn't come from that background, but she's a supermodel who's too good to be staying with him when he's treating her badly.

Q: You set these modern novels against the backdrop of well-researched New York City history. How do readers respond?
A: The two things I get are: "I'm in Kansas" or "I'm in Australia" and "I've never been to New York, but I find it through your eyes the way I found London through Agatha Christie." Just as often, I get the New Yorkers who say, "I have lived across from the Dead House (an abandoned 19th-century smallpox asylum on Roosevelt Island and the backdrop for her 2001 novel, The Deadhouse) my entire life. but I never knew what it was."

Q: The novel's backdrop is some of the city's colorful restaurants. Talk about some of them.
A: Tiro a Segno, in the East Village, is a members-only restaurant with a shooting range in the basement. The 21 Club started out as a speakeasy in Greenwich Village before it finally ended up in a Midtown location during Prohibition. It was raided frequently, but the guy at the door controlled a system of levers that tipped the shelves of the bar sending the liquor into the sewers.

Q: Can you discuss your next book?
A: I'm too superstitious but I have a lot of it plotted out in my head. I know what happens. I know the story.