Peter Blauner’s Book Notes novel The Intruder, recently republished in a new edition on its 28th anniversary, is an imaginative and evocative literary thriller.
The New York Times wrote of the book:
“Gripping… convincing… richly imagined… A harrowing, compelling read.”
In his own words, here is Peter Blauner’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel The Intruder:
I started writing The Intruder back in the early 1990s, after a frightening encounter with a homeless man who threatened to attack me as I was pushing my infant son in a stroller. I think I had not entirely grown up yet, so a lot of the music in my mind was still about adolescent rebellion. But if any experience can turn you into an adult in a hurry, that one did.
The dude laughed as I pushed past him. I had about two seconds of homicidal rage before I looked down at my son and came to my senses. Then I went home and realized this was the beginning of a crime novel. The family man against the outsider. But what if the outsider believed the family man had stolen the life that was meant for him? And what if the reader could see his point of view?
That kind of tension makes for good storytelling, I think. And it’s the source of a lot of great music as well. These are the songs playing in my characters’ heads.
High on a Rocky Ledge by Moondog
When I was a kid growing up in New York City, there were all kinds of crazy people hanging out. On my way to school every morning, I would pass the Phantom, the Bird Man and the Screaming Lady. They had been displaced by “de-institutionalization,” economic inequality, and a belief in better living through chemistry. I’d even sometimes see a bearded blind man dressed up like a Viking outside the CBS building on 52nd Street. I assumed he was another nut case. I had no idea that he was the great Moondog, a serious composer highly regarded by the likes of Stravinsky, Leonard Bernstein and Charlie Parker. Which just goes to show you shouldn’t trust first impressions.
“High on a Rocky Ledge” is one of Moondog’s most tender, accessible songs. It’s about seeing a vision of love above your head and daring to climb toward it, even at the risk of death. He sings it in a weathered voice of tremulous hope. And even though The Intruder was marketed as a pulse-pounding thriller, this song is closer to the heart of the matter. Especially for characters who come to recognize that the distance between the penthouse and the gutter closes quickly once you start falling.
Intruder by Peter Gabriel
Gabriel seems like a sunny chap who speaks up for the right causes. But here he takes a trip to the dark side and makes himself right at home with the creepy and unsettling. It takes some thought to come up with lines about imagining your victim lying helplessly in bed and hearing you break into the house, while the intruder muses “a sense of isolation inspires, inspires me.” Yikes. We’re a long way from that “that’ll do” song he sang about Babe the pig at the Oscars.
There is also a musical intruder in this song: the “gated” reverb on Phil Collins’s drum sound that became an unwelcome guest on too many recordings afterwards.
Rags to Riches by Tony Bennett
Of course, it’s not all dread all the time. Jake Schiff, who at first appears to be the novel’s hero, is a scruffy kid from New York’s outer boroughs who has made good and achieved a life he never dared to dream about for his family. A Tony Bennett kind of guy, in the sense that Anthony Dominick Benedetto was an authentic product of Queens who worked hard, polished his act, and crossed the bridge to the big time. “Rags to Riches” captures something bright and gleaming in that meteoric ride.
Subway Train by the New York Dolls and Johnny Thunders
Jake’s putative antagonist in the book is John G., is a former subway motorman who goes completely off the rails after losing his family in a tragic accident. The raucous sound of the Dolls matches the commotion in his drug-addled mind. They were punk (just) before there was punk. The original version is bellowed by David Johansen, with his usual streetsy brio. I love Johansen but he sounds like he could hop off at any stop and be all right. A few years later, the band’s lead guitarist, and the song’s co-writer, Johnny Thunders, turned it into a junkie’s lament of a wasted life. He knows he’s missed all the stations where he could have gotten off, but now he’s damned to stay on to the end of the line.
Descent by Olhon
Eventually, John G. winds up living in the train tunnels beneath Manhattan, where he has a confrontation with Jake that changes both their lives. I went down to those tunnels to research the book and found it the darkest place I’d ever been in my life. One of the “mole people” who lived there objected to my presence and nearly cracked my skull with a cast-iron skillet. In his eyes, I was the intruder.
I don’t know much about this soundscape by Olhon, but it certainly evokes the subterranean. According to Bandcamp.com, it was created by electronically, treating field recordings from the Pozzo del Merro outside Rome, said to be the deepest sinkhole in the world. The words “primordial terror” come to mind. But if you listen closely, there’s a rhythm that just might be Mother Nature’s heartbeat.
What A Wonderful World by Louis Armstrong
Ready to get back out in the sun yet? Louis Armstrong is your man.
This, of course, was one of his biggest pop hits and has not a note of the trumpet-playing that made him one of the all-time greats of jazz. It’s the anthem of countless saccharine TV shows, movies and advertisements. When I was writing the novel, I kept hearing it as the bitterly ironic commentary on the scenes of poor, homeless John G., struggling with the ravages of street life, drugs, mental illness and vicious social inequality.
But now I hear it differently. Armstrong was born in poverty in turn-of-the-century New Orleans and raised in a neighborhood known as “the Battlefield.” He hustled and scrapped, briefly pimped, narrowly escaped death more than once, played riverboats and church concerts, and eventually helped to reinvent the American musical vocabulary with his Hot Five and Hot Seven groups. Some people begrudged him and called him a ”sellout” (and much worse), but he never really let it bother him. In 1943, his wife Lucille bought a house for them in Corona, Queens for $8,000, where he lived the rest of his life. Shortly before he recorded “Wonderful World,” he said this about the neighborhood: “We’re right out here with the rest of the colored folk and the Puerto Ricans and Italians and the Hebrew cats . . . What the hell do I care about living in a ‘fashionable’ neighborhood?”
Armstrong didn’t write “Wonderful World,” but you can hear the hard-earned experience in his voice and the sense of true gratitude for finding a home in a brutal world.
Territorial Pissings by Nirvana
On the other hand…
This is a story about a battle between haves and have-nots. The rage music of that time was not just rap, but grunge. Kurt Cobain was its most vehement, inconsolable vocalist. “Territorial Pissings” is one of his most furious and confrontational songs, even though it’s not entirely clear what he’s confronting. Baby boomers? Other men? Social norms?
Given what ultimately happened to Cobain, I think it’s likely that he was directing most of that anger at himself.
I Made It Through the Rain by Barry Manilow
About halfway through the novel, another character offers to solve Jake’s problems with John, and the resulting complications turn the story inside-out. This is the third intruder in the book and he deserves a song of his own. Like bad men I’ve known in real life, the soundtrack of his life is Easy Listening: songs of swelling strings and epic self-pity. Because if you believe other people have mistreated you all your life, certainly you’re justified in mistreating them. The music of Barry Manilow really speaks to him. In fact, my man prefers Manilow to Sinatra because Barry truly understands what “it’s like to be rained on.” Or maybe that’s just me remembering times I’ve been in a bar or a restaurant and Manilow sings just before something awful happens.
Fear Is a Man’s Best Friend by John Cale
Then something awful does happen. The lock’s been picked. The intruder is in your house. Your family is under attack. You have no weapon at hand. All you have for protection is your own fear. But fear is a man’s best friend.
At least that’s what John Cale says. Cale is, of course, one of the enfant terribles of avant pop (along with his frenemy Lou Reed). Much of his music is beautiful. Some of it is deliberately discordant and primitive. And, occasionally, he gathers those elements into one work of gentlemanly beastliness. It’s hard to think of a song that sounds like the violent climax of a crime novel. But here Cale somehow manages sound like both victim and the perpetrator at the same time.
‘Til I Die by the Beach Boys
Dante’s Divine Comedy begins like this: “In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself, in a dark wood, where the direct way was lost.” I was thinking about that a lot when I wrote The Intruder. But I was also thinking about Brian Wilson and this song.
‘’Til I Die’ is not one of the Beach Boys’ songs of eternal golden summer. It was never a hit. It was a B-side of a single. But anyone who has ever found themselves lost on the journey of life can understand its concise images. “How deep is the valley? How long will the wind blow?” Brian Wilson wrote the song from the edge of a spiritual abyss, after contemplating driving his car into the Pacific: “Looking out toward the ocean, my mind, as it did almost every hour of every day, worked to explain the inconsistencies that dominated my life; the pain, torment, and confusion and the beautiful music I was able to make. Was there an answer? Did I have no control? Had I ever?”
It’s the same despair that John G. encounters on his journey through the dark wood. Somehow Jake, who begins the book as a seemingly successful family man, finds himself in the same place. But “Til I Die” is not a hopeless song. How could it be if Brian sets the words to one of his most achingly poignant melodies? And just when it seems too unbearably sad, he brings it all home on a note of serene acceptance. “These things I’ll be until I die.” And at the end of The Intruder, the characters who survive are trying to stagger toward a similar state of grace.
Peter Blauner is the author of nine novels, including Picture in the Sand (Macmillan/Minotaur, hardcover—January 3, 2023; paperback–March 19, 2024), Slow Motion Riot (winner of the 1992 Edgar Award for best first novel from Mystery Writers of America), and The Intruder, a New York Times bestseller and a bestseller overseas (hardcover reissue, March 26, 2024; Dead Sky Publishing). He first broke into print as a journalist, writing cover stories for New York magazine about crime and politics. He has written for numerous TV shows, his novels have been published in twenty-five languages and his short fiction has been anthologized in Best American Mystery Stories and NPR’s Selected Shorts from Symphony Space. He lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife, the bestselling author Peg Tyre. You can visit him online at peterblauner.com.