After a long career as a state attorney in New York, James Comey became director of the FBI in 2013. He was due to serve 10 years, but was dismissed by President Trump in 2017, having ordered an investigation into possible Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Comey has subsequently published two bestselling accounts of his time in office. His first novel, Central Park West, a crime thriller set in the New York district attorney’s office where Comey once worked, will be published this month.
Have you always been a fan of crime fiction?
I found it too hard when I was dealing with crime or terrorism in my day job to read about those things. The FBI job was really a 24-hour thing and I didn’t want to fill any spare moments reading fiction about my work.
Do investigators and writers share an eye for detail?
I think that good journalists and good lawyers think and communicate in stories. Even as a kid, I was always someone who would try to remember details so I could go home and tell my family the story at our dinner table.
There must have been an element of nostalgia in locating this novel in the New York law courts where you once worked?
I enjoyed travelling back in my mind to those places. I could picture myself in courtroom 318, where a lot of the action in the book takes place. But here’s the thing that made it both slightly strange and wonderful for me: when I was writing this, my oldest daughter was the chief of the violence and organised crime unit in Manhattan, and she was also literally standing in courtroom 318, prosecuting Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s co-conspirator. That made it easy to make Nora, the protagonist in my book, a woman, and to picture her in those places.
The book also draws on your experience of prosecuting New York crime families.
My life changed when I watched the bail hearing for the mafia boss “Fat Tony” Salerno and his co-defendant Vincent “the fish” Cafaro [in 1989]. As I watched the young prosecutors in court, I was struck by how they stood up straight. They didn’t interrupt answers. When they didn’t know something, they said they didn’t know it. It was like being struck by proverbial lightning sitting there in that old federal courtroom. I always hated bullies. I’d been bullied as a kid. And I thought: here’s a way of [taking on] some of the biggest bullies in the world. I went home and called my girlfriend, now my wife, and said: I figured out what I want to do.
You wrote in your memoir, A Higher Loyalty, of your immediate sense that President Trump shared characteristics with some of those mafia mob bosses you had prosecuted. In particular in the demand for loyalty above truth…
Yes, I saw it so early that I resisted that sense to begin with. But something I was seeing was reminding me of scenes from my prosecutorial life. Those impressions can be misleading. But this one was dead on.
The extraordinary thing was how quickly his extreme behaviour was normalised?
I think it was. For the great bulk of people, there was an inability to get their mind around how bad this person is, because he was occupying an office that we endow with all kinds of dignity and importance. I remember cases I was involved with as a prosecutor, where fraud victims came to the fraudster’s sentencing to speak for him, because they simply could not acknowledge they had been defrauded. It was too painful. Supporters of Donald Trump, they see the images of January 6, which shout to them: “You fool! Look what you did!” Some people can face that. But most people turn from that pain and retreat deeper into the lie.
Do you see yourself writing fiction about that period as well?
I do. My wife is my ideas person. Her view is that it’s too close to write about now. I have in mind doing a trilogy [of novels] based in New York. And I’d like to write a trilogy based in Virginia, where I was a prosecutor for many years. And then I’d like to take readers inside the White House and the FBI and the justice department of the CIA. I’ve spent a lot of time in those places.
You have insisted many times that you will never run for political office. Are there other ambitions still in public life, or is that chapter over?
I would never, as you said, run for office. It’s just not something that suits me. And I think I’ve disqualified myself from other [legal] roles, because I intentionally became a political partisan after I got fired, because I thought the existential danger to democracy was so great from Donald Trump. So I’m going to try to write novels until I’m old and foolish, and also try to be, as some of my coffee mugs already claim, the world’s greatest grandfather.
It sounds like your wife is the big reader of fiction in your household. But are there novels that have been guiding lights for you in taking on this new career?
The first sustained reading of fiction I did, in thinking about this, was Le Carré. Partly because I knew he had struggled with the question: how do I write about my work? The criticism of his early books was that he hewed too closely to the truth of his job: desks and files and so on. At some point, his letters reveal, he realised he needed to get the Berlin Wall and some barbed wire in there. I’m no Le Carré, but I’ve tried to do something similar in Central Park West. I don’t think my friends [from the FBI] are going to find significant unrealistic details. But I’ve tried to see if I can keep it real and entertaining at the same time…
• Central Park West by James Comey is published by Head of Zeus (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
