Thomas Heise

 Thomas Heise: The short answer is that I’ve loved reading crime fiction since I was a kid and I’ve loved (and felt saddened by and occasionally hated) New York City as an adult. When I was growing up, I devoured crime novels and noir films. Though I certainly wouldn’t have articulated it to myself this way at the time, I found appealing the way these novels and films would intensely aestheticize the world and purport to intellectually decode it, theorize it, and eventually solve it—or if not solve it, at least bring to light its subterfuge, its murky opacity, and its deeply cynical corruptions. As much as I wanted to write about crime fiction, I also wanted to write a book about New York City. I’ve lived most of my adult life in New York and have watched the city change so profoundly since I moved here in 1999 for graduate school that I felt the need to formalize my understanding of that change through research and writing. I needed to understand the New York that greeted me at the end of the revanchist Giuliani administration and that I watched turn into the playground of the global elite under three terms of a developer-friendly billionaire mayor who still maintained the racist “broken-windows” policing of his predecessor. The Gentrification Plot is a scholarly book, but it’s a personal one for me. The immediate “academic” problem I wanted to address in the book is a puzzling question about genre, a question that somewhat simplified is: What do contemporary crime writers write about when there isn’t much crime to write about anymore, when the city is no longer associated with the luridly sensationalistic violence and urban decline that defined New York in the 1970s and 1980s for many Americans?