novel is Saint of the Narrows Street. His books have been nominated for the Hammett Prize, the John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger Award in the UK, and the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in France, and they have been included on best-of lists in the Washington Post, CrimeReads, and more. He currently lives in Oxford, Mississippi.
[My Book, The Movie: Gravesend and The Lonely Witness; The Page 69 Test: Gravesend and The Lonely Witness; The Page 69 Test: City of Margins; My Book, The Movie: City of Margins; Q&A with William Boyle; The Page 69 Test: Shoot the Moonlight Out; My Book, The Movie: Shoot the Moonlight Out; Writers Read: William Boyle (December 2021); The Page 69 Test: Saint of the Narrows Street]
At Electric Lit Boyle tagged nine "books that interact with Catholicism ... as a powerful force that hangs over everything in the worlds of these characters and authors." One title on the list:
Rush by Kim WozencraftRead about the other entries on the list.
I first read the book after seeing Lili Fini Zanuck’s 1991 adaptation starring Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jason Patric. Based on Wozencraft’s own experiences, it’sthe story of Kristen Cates, “a nice Catholic girl who becomes an undercover narcotics officer and a junkie.” At the beginning of the book, as Kristen gets ready to face the Parole Commission, she thinks about leveraging her goody-goody Catholic background for some goodwill. The book is subsumed with an atmosphere derived from Kristen’s Catholic-shaped perceptions of the world. That strain is all but nonexistent in the film adaptation, but you can still feel it somehow. The pressure. The guilt. In an interview with Jill Eisenstadt for BOMB in 1992, discussing her initial naïve belief that drugs themselves are evil, Wozencraft said, “I grew up in a very conservative, traditional household, and I was a good Catholic girl. They teach you never to question authority. I didn’t question authority, and I bought the hype.”
--Marshal Zeringue
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