Lev AC Rosen joins us today to talk about his new novel, Depth. Here is the publisher’s description:
In a post-apocalyptic flooded New York City, a private investigator’s routine surveillance case leads to a treasure everyone wants to find—and someone is willing to kill for.
Depth combines hardboiled mystery and dystopian science fiction in a future where the rising ocean levels have left New York twenty-one stories under water and cut off from the rest of the United States. But the city survives, and Simone Pierce is one of its best private investigators. Her latest case, running surveillance on a potentially unfaithful husband, was supposed to be easy. Then her target is murdered, and the search for his killer points Simone towards a secret from the past that can’t possibly be real—but that won’t stop the city’s most powerful men and women from trying to acquire it for themselves, with Simone caught in the middle.
So what is Lev’s favorite bit?
Noir-speak. There’s a specific scene in Depth that I think is probably my favorite, but it’s so spoilery I can’t bring myself to talk about it. But I can talk about why it’s my favorite bit – and how that aspect of the scene reaches out to my favorite part of the book in the general: the dialogue.
I think noir is put together by its dialogue. The world in so many ways is created by the way characters speak to each other; shorthand, slang, the back and forth. In the scene I Dare Not Speak Of, it’s two characters talking over a body. They speak in short-hand, one implying the other is guilty of murder, the other turning it around. It’s almost like a court battle, but instead of long speeches and careful questioning, it’s down to the barest minimum of dialogue. Each sentence has to pack as much information as possible into as few words as possible. Words become bullets. The history of these characters, the situation they’re in, is built by the words they throw at each other.
And since the world of Depth is one in which the ice caps have melted and New York City exists as building tops and bridges, I got to make up some slang, too. I didn’t want to go futuristic at all. I wanted to evoke the past, the 40s, the hardboiled everything – go forward to go back. So I pulled up old slang from my favorite noir movies and books. Some became especially effective in a wet world: “air tight,” referring to something or someone good and trustworthy, for example, seemed even more effective in a world where air tight meant you could keep a thing dry. To drift – to head out, leave, vanish, worked pretty well, too. Some needed to be adapted: dust – which could mean a lot of things, but in the context I wanted meant worthless – didn’t seem to fit anymore. I turned that to salt. Make tracks – to run out of a place – didn’t make sense either, so that became make waves. And since storms are deadly out on the sea, when I wanted to imply the idea of sensing trouble, I made up my own slang: “feel a drop.” There were other terms, too, cobbled together from old movies and nautical slang. I wrote up a whole list – these are just some of my favorites. I didn’t even get to use them all. But the art of constructing slang around the world – using the words people spoke to convey something about the world – was a real pleasure, and something that turned out like I wanted it to. I was afraid of it veering into camp now and then (and certainly, reading all those together, it might look that way), but with spare sentences and select phrases, just a few bullets of dialogue can paint the picture of the world I wanted.
LINKS
Twitter: @LevACRosen
BIO
Lev AC Rosen is the author of the widely praised novel, All Men of Genius (Tor, 2011). His middle grade novel, Woundabout, will be published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers in Summer 2015. He received his BA from Oberlin College and his MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Originally from lower Manhattan, Lev now lives in even lower Manhattan, right at the edge of the water, with his husband and a very small cat. You can find him online at LevACRosen.com.
