Behind The Book The Doorman by Chris Pavone

It’s always wonderful having authors return for I am so excited to have New York Times Bestselling Author Chris Pavone return for this Behind The Book Q&A discussing his new novel, The Doorman which has been released today on May 20^th wherever books are sold!

Q: Chris, welcome back to Book Notions! Would you please give a brief description of The Doorman? Where did the idea for the novel come from?

A: The Doorman is a thriller about race, class, and privilege that revolves around a doorman at a fancy apartment house who gets caught up in a web of adultery, robbery, and murder.

I grew up in New York City, and my whole life I’ve been reading New York novels— Invisible Man and John Dos Passos, Bright Lights Big City and Jazz, Jonathan Lethem and Richard Price, Pineapple Street. In books like these, the city isn’t merely a setting, it’s a confluence of themes: race and class and money, art and commerce, ambition and crime, sex, and the subject that New York City people love to talk about above all others: real estate.

That’s the sort of book I’ve wanted to write since before I was even a writer. But it wasn’t until a few years ago, when I moved into a building with doormen, that I realized what mine should be: a contemporary Bonfire of the Vanities, mixed with some White Lotus and Remains of the Day, and a hint of Only Murders in the Building.

Q: The Doorman is different from Two Nights In Lisbon & The Expats! Was it easy transitioning from writing international thrillers to then keeping your recent book The Doorman in one setting of New York? 

A: It wasn’t much of a transition! Although my previous novels have largely been set abroad, the point of those foreign locales was mainly to impart a strong specificity of place, a sense for readers that they’re visiting somewhere interesting. In this book, that place is Uptown New York City, which for many readers is just as foreign as Lisbon or Paris.

And all my novels have offered a very particular type of reading experience: as a reader, you initially don’t really know what’s going on, and after you think you’ve figured it out, the paradigm shifts entirely, and you realize you’re not in the story you thought you were in. That’s true in The Doorman too.

Finally: my books are all driven forward by major betrayals within intimate relationships—work relationships, espionage relationships, marital relationships—and that’s true for The Doorman too.

So, from my experience as an author, the chief difference is that I didn’t need to travel to write this book. I started conceiving of it at the height of covid, when I wasn’t going anywhere.

Q: Which scenes & characters did you enjoy writing the most and least? I think out of the entire book I enjoyed the ending, & I enjoy the descriptions of New York. What lessons & emotions do you hope readers learn and feel after they turn the final page of The Doorman?

A: I’m so glad to hear that! I love New York City, every crowded subway car is a miracle of diversity, all of us thrown together: different religions, ethnicities, ages, economics, professions, sexualities, politics. In fiction, this creates opportunities to explore the ways in which our humanities overlap, and diverge, and that’s what I hope everyone takes away from the novel. In fact, that’s what I hope everyone takes away from every novel, because that’s what novels are for.

I really enjoyed writing all the characters in this book. Most of the minor ones exist to illustrate some issue or another in today’s fractured political world, and its tremendous fun to invent people who annoy the crap out of me. But what I loved most was writing the three main characters: I love their relationships, I love their problems, I love their failings, I love the momentous choices they make at the end of their intimately intertwined stories.

Q: If you were ever to write a sequel to The Doorman, what would Chicky, Emily & Julian be doing right now? 

A: I can’t answer without spoiling plot twists! I think it’s clear from the very first page that someone is going to die in this story, but the big reveals are who dies, and how, and when, and perhaps most interesting, why. I wouldn’t want to ruin that journey by skipping past the end.