Chris Pavone, The Doorman - Author Interview

Thank you to Chris Pavone, Tracy Locke, and FSG Books for the ARC copy! Find the original interview post on The Strand Magazine website.

Synopsis:

Chicky Diaz is everyone’s favorite doorman at the Bohemia, New York City’s world-famous home of celebrities, financiers, and the cultural elite.

Chicky serves at the pleasure of residents like Emily Longworth, who, up in her penthouse, leads a life of her perfect kids in her perfect home, her perfect worries about museum boards, charity work, and so on. Emily’s husband, though . . . perfectly wealthy, but she has quietly loathed Whit Longworth since well before the revelations that he’s a private-equity war profiteer. But their marriage came with an iron-clad prenup, and Emily can’t bring herself to leave all that. Yet.

Meanwhile, in apartment 2A, there’s nothing perfect about Julian Sonnenberg’s middle-aged life. Already struggling with the indignities of turning fifty—a stale marriage, teenage kids who no longer need him, his work as an art gallerist making him feel culturally obsolete—and now his doctor tells him that he needs openheart surgery, immediately. Things are falling apart awfully fast.

In the basement staff room, the life-and-death stakes of daily life are hardly news to the primarily Black and Latino hospitality. So when the NYPD fatally shoots an unarmed Black man and the streets swell with both protestors and counterprotestors, the staff’s concerns are less about the building and more about their survival—and what justice will look like.

Enter Chicky in his epauletted suit, manning the line between the turbulent streets outside the Bohemia and the far more sanguine world within. And not that the Bohemia’s residents care much (except maybe Emily Longworth), but Chicky has his own problems, the kind that mean that for tonight’s shift, for the first time in thirty years, Chicky will be carrying a gun. Because someone, tonight, is going to die.

1. The novel offers a unique perspective by focusing on Chicky Diaz, a doorman in a luxury Manhattan building. What inspired you to center the story around this character and his vantage point? Is this a classic case of an untouchable and a person not really seen by others? Did you draw from any real-life stories or interviews with actual doormen to develop authenticity?

I live in an apartment house that’s bears many similarities to the one in the novel, a place where vastly different lives intersect all the time. To me it’s a very compelling environment to explore the tensions of everyday life in New York, where we are all elbow to elbow, but don’t necessarily see each other’s humanity. I wanted The Doorman to feature a few characters that represent the city at this moment, so I imagined myself living their lives—the doorman, the billionaire trophy wife, the gallerist—and imposed a few overlapping crises on each, and asked myself: what would I do?

2. The tension in the book escalates as protests and counter-protests unfold outside the Bohemia. How did you approach writing these scenes to reflect the current social climate?

The protest-counterprotest element serves a few purposes. On the surface, this is an easily understandable plot device—we all recognize the conflict and peril inherent to a protest against racialized police brutality. On a thematic level, the protest ties together the issues that permeate the rest of the narrative, and the characters’ lives: race, class, money, income inequality, political rage, the confrontational impulses of this moment.

Finally, on the deepest, most nuanced level, the protest illustrates the opportunism that’s at the heart of not just this book’s plot, but at the heart of our real-life American President on one side and the real-life performance of progressivism on the other, both ends of the political spectrum using crises—or manufacturing crises—as distractions to grab power, to grab money, to grab attention, to grab personal gain of one sort or another. In the novel, the protest provides a distraction for a few self-serving opportunities that turn out to be not only life-changing, but life-ending.

3. Themes of deception and dual identities recur in your work. How does The Doorman build on or subvert these ideas?

All my novels pose variations of this question: what if you don’t really know the person you thought you knew the best? The possibility of betrayal within an intimate relationship—a work relationship, a martial relationship, a criminal relationship, an espionage relationship—is a very powerful way to drive forward a story that’s about both plot and character, each dependent on the other for its resonance. That’s one of the layers that’s shared by all the characters in The Doorman, and all their story arcs.

4. New York plays a strong role in this story, like a character itself. How did you approach writing the city through the eyes of someone who observes everything but is often overlooked?

I set out to write a New York novel, which for me is more than merely a setting, it’s a set of inter-related themes, with a plot that’s impelled forward by those themes: a contemporary version of Bonfire of the Vanities. Like Bonfire, I wanted to tell a story about class, with characters who represent different points along the city’s vastly disparate continuum of economic strata. And one of the things I wanted to explore that we are, all of us, overlooked by people who are not like us. We all have problems, but all of our problems might be invisible to the most of the people who surround us.

5. Much of your fiction hinges on trust and betrayal. Who did you trust most in this story—and who surprised you as you wrote it?

I don’t think I’ve ever been surprised by any character I’ve written, but I do hope readers are surprised by all of them. And after the initial surprise wears off, I hope all these characters’ actions, and all their decisions, make perfect sense: of course that’s what they’d do. Of course.

Similarly, I trust all these characters, and I hope readers do too. All of them have secrets and problems that are gradually revealed and ultimately resolved over the course of the narrative. It’s a central part of my mission as a suspense novelist to generate questions, then withhold answers, but in a way that doesn’t read as dishonest, or overtly manipulative, or coy. I want it to feel natural, because it’s something we all do, naturally: keep secrets.

6. Many of your characters are involved in international intrigue. Did writing a more “domestic” or stationary main character pose new challenges or freedoms?

Most of my books fit into the non-existent (and oxymoronic) subcategory that I think of as international domestic: they share many elements with domestic suspense, but the settings are largely international, with plots that intersect with espionage, or finance, or crime, or all of those.

The Doorman is very specific to New York City, in the same way that I’ve written books that are very specific to Luxembourg, to Paris, to Lisbon. And for almost all readers, a fancy Manhattan apartment house is just as foreign a setting as Paris, if not more so. After all, anyone can buy a ticket to the Louvre, or book a hotel room in downtown Lisbon, and share experiences of those other books’ protagonists. The Doorman provides a peek inside a more rarefied experience.

As a completely practical matter, I first conceived of this book at the height of covid, when I couldn’t travel to do the sort of research I’ve done for my books with international settings. So I set the story at home.

7. The pacing in your thrillers is often praised. How did you maintain tension in a story that unfolds in a relatively contained environment?

Perhaps there are readers who love the fastest possible pace, but I’m not one of them. For me nonstop breakneck action isn’t compelling, because it’s not credible, and if I don’t believe in the plausibility of the story, then I don’t feel an attachment to the characters, then it doesn’t matter how much life-or-death peril is on the page, I’m not invested in the outcome. Investment comes from caring, and caring comes from character.

What I’m trying to do with plot is create very high peaks of dramatic tension and life-threating action. But if these peaks aren’t surrounded by valleys, you can’t see them. So one of the things I prioritize is trying to create valleys—character development, scene setting, political context, social observation—that are interesting and maybe beautiful in their own right, but with glimpses of the mountain of menace looming back there. I want you to know that something bad is going to happen, but you don’t know what, or when, or to whom. You need to wait for it as your investment in the characters builds, and along with it tension.

8. Was there a particular moment or news story that sparked the idea for The Doorman?

There’s a tremendous volume of real-life news that informs this novel: George Floyd and Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police, Donald Trump and Erik Prince, MAGA trolls and the forgeries sold by the Knoedler Gallery, the culture wars that are raging in schools and the performative progressivism that infects the arts, the war in Ukraine and the one in Gaza . . . Every character and every plot line is ripped from headlines of one sort or another.

9. What’s the last thing you overheard in public that you wish could become a subplot?

Before I started writing this book, before we moved to a more sedate neighborhood uptown, before covid, we lived in a raucous part of downtown New York, surrounded by restaurants and bars, music clubs and comedy clubs, avant garde theaters and the West 4th Street basketball courts, these streets of Greenwich Village filled day and night with all sorts of people, locals and students and tourists plus no shortage of troublemakers. My family was walking down the street one evening behind a couple of sketchy characters, and we heard one of them say to the other: “Yo, I got all my warrants cleared.”

I use that as a passing line in The Doorman, in the same way I heard it in real life: without any further explanation. Not just one or two warrants. All of them.

10. Can you share one thing about The Doorman that readers might miss on a first read—but is important to you as the author?

The opening sentence tells you the essence of the entire story.

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Book release date: July 15th 2025

Buy the book here.

Goodreads page here.

ISBN: 9780374604790