Colin Harrison '82 The Storyteller By Steve Manning '96 Porter Wren, the star reporter in Colin Harrison's '82 new book Manhattan Nocturne, writes about what his readers want to hear. "I sell falsehood and what passes for truth and every gradation in between," he says. "I sell the newborn and the dead. I sell the wretched, magnificent city of New York back to its people. I sell newspapers." Struggling against constant deadlines and forever glancing over his shoulder at younger reporters seeking to topple him, Porter seeks out the seamy underbelly of the city, writing about the crime, sex, and corruption to keep up with the insatiable tastes of his readers. Yet he is able to escape each night retreating to the safety of his wife and children. At heart Porter Wren is a family man, a quality that is put to the test the night he meets Catherine Crowley. In the femme fatale style, their eyes meet across a crowded room, and the inner conflict between Porter Wren's fidelity and his desires is revealed. The more deeply involved he becomes with Catherine Crowley, the more Porter is sucked into the danger that follows her, until he finds himself unable to escape. "I like to take good men, put them in bad situations, and see what happens," explains Harrison. It's a formula that he has perfected through his three novels, starting with Break and Enter in 1990 and Bodies Electric in 1993. Most of the time, his good men fall hard. "As characters go, purely good characters or purely bad characters are very boring," he says. "It's the complicated ones, the ones that have both qualities, who are fascinating. Even though Porter Wren does some wrong things, you like him. He's sympathetic in the same way that Catherine Crowley is hell on wheels, but you understand her vulnerabilities, you understand who she is. That's storytelling." Harrison has been telling stories and listening to other people's tales his whole life. The son of Earl G. Harrison '54 and older brother to Dana Harrison '85, Colin entered Haverford in the fall of 1978. He would frequently cut his Haverford classes, gravitating to the neighborhoods of Philadelphia, speaking with people, and going places "where a kid from rural Pennsylvania shouldn't go." Between his junior and senior years of college, Harrison drove to Florida with his girlfriend and worked as a reporter for a Jacksonville paper. He spent some time riding around with an ambulance crew, and incorporated one of his experiences into Manhattan Nocturne. The ambulance arrived at a trailer to find a dead baby, and Harrison recalls through the voice of Porter, "I was there when they came in and the woman's face, she saw her daughter and it was like wires yanking her face back across her skull. I looked at the boy, the father, and he was military, he'd been trained not to show emotion and he was biting his bottom lip so hard that there was blood on his teeth. I saw that and - never - never forgot it." That summer Harrison began to write his first manuscript. After graduation, Harrison wrote for this magazine, renting a room in a mansion near Haverford's campus. Although his proposal for a creative English thesis had been turned down his senior year, he continued to work on his growing manuscript. He decorated his new apartment with this work in progress, which he hung, by chapter, on pegs he nailed into the walls. After the maid found out what he had done, Harrison's stay in the mansion was short-lived. In 1984 he was accepted to the prestigious Iowa Writer's Workshop, a creative writing graduate program at the University of Iowa. "It was like living in a hot house," he remembers, "you're with all these terrifically smart people; you've got writers who are working with you, reading each other's manuscripts." His contemperaries at Iowa included his future wife, Kathryn, who wrote the novel Exposure and most recently, The Kiss, among others. While at Iowa, Harrison also finally gave up on his first novel, throwing away five years of work after numerous rejections from publishers convinced him it was time to move on. He started a new work, and when an editor at Crown Publishers read what were the beginnings of Break and Enter, he signed his first book contract. Harrison did not wander too far from his roots for his Break and Enter material. The protagonist, Peter Scattergood, is a Philadelphia-raised Quaker, much like the Westtown School graduate Harrison. Central to the story are the landmarks, buildings, streets, and neighborhoods of the Philadelphia that he roamed during his bouts of collegiate truancy. Scattergood is confronted by City Hall; "The edifice stood before him in all it's marble-scrolled splendor, gray from pollution, with pigeon shit dripped around the cornices and lintels and window ledges, but still it was a god-awful magnificent building..." When Harrison migrated north to New York City, he adopted his new urban home as the backdrop for his books. He has always been drawn to cities and predicts that the rest of his novels will be set in them. "They are the most complicated social structures we have, they are great juxtapositions between all types of people; there are stories everywhere," he says. "Cities sort of excite me and scare me which makes me more attentive to that. They are fun; there is a lot of wickedness in cities." Along with his move to New York came a new job. Harrison joined Harpers Monthly magazine as an assistant editor, and has since moved through the ranks to the position of deputy editor. Holding a full-time job along with being a father and husband mean that he has to search out time for writing. Often working late at night or during lunch breaks, Harrison pieces together his characters and plots. "I get ideas and see things, and start constructing the story. I work on the sections and try to make them fit and make the story move through. I go over and over texts; I probably rewrote the first chapter of Manhattan Nocturne thirty or thirty-five times." He is also always on the lookout for compelling stories that he can incorporate into his writing, blurring the lines between fiction and recollection. Like a good storyteller, he collects stories and contributes his own that he integrates into his own writing. "I don't actually think that I have had a very interesting story as a human being. It's a fairly mundance sequence," he says. "I listen to other people's stories; I make a point of finding out their stories, and they come to me with their stories." Manhattan Nocturne comes alive through several such anecdotes. Porter Wren recalls discovering a frozen body buried in the snow between abandoned railroad cars as a boy, a scenario that sprung from a conversation Harrison had with a Long Island farmer about snow drifting over a train. Harrison has been busy collecting stories for his latest work. He recently signed a two-book deal with Farrar, Straus & Giroux, a contract that requires him to produce a novel in 18 months. Although he would rather not write on such a strict timetable, Harrison is well into the first book, due out in June. "I take a man and a woman who are very unlikely to have anything to do with one another, and I make them have something to do with each other," he says, providing a sneak peek. "The man is a businessman and the woman starts the book in prison. I involve them and get them in trouble." A good man in a bad situation perhaps.