Novel set in Overijssel 1961
Talking Location With Michael Cordy: MANHATTAN
29th May 2025
#TalkingLocationWith … Michael Cordy author of Manhattan Down.
I’m British but was born abroad and spent much of my childhood in Africa, India and Cyprus. I grew up watching old New York cop shows on TV like Kojak and Cagney and Lacey and have always been fascinated by that city’s energy and hustle. I didn’t set foot in America until my twenties, however, when my first employer sent me to Manhattan, It was love at first sight. I stayed in the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown and spent all my free time walking around the compact grid of streets and avenues seeking out the places I had seen on TV. Back then, I was blown away by the fact that whether it was day or night I could always find a store or restaurant open. It really was The City That Never Sleeps.
The embryonic idea for my new book Manhattan Down came to me during the early months of the pandemic when I was running in my deserted local park near London. There were no planes in the clear blue sky and the whole world seemed to be on hold or asleep, hibernating until it was safe to resurface. I had just read a fascinating book about insomnia and as I ran, I imagined a buzzing crowded city suddenly going silent because every man, woman and child had fallen asleep. Except me. Although I was near London, there was only one crowded space that came to my mind. Manhattan. The City That Never Sleeps. I wondered what would happen if, at the moment Manhattan fell silent, all the world leaders were assembled in the UN HQ for a climate crisis summit. I ran home with the germ of a story.
Manhattan Down is my seventh novel, and my first for over a decade. The story occurs over the course of 24 hours and most of it unfolds on the island of Manhattan. Because I wrote much of the novel during the pandemic, I couldn’t visit New York at the time so I had to rely on my memory of previous trips, particularly that first formative visit when I walked the length and breadth of the island. One of my most vivid memories from that time, years before the terrorist attack on the twin towers, was dining in the Windows on the World restaurant at the top of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. That recollection informed my decision to set the story on the anniversary eve of 9/11.
In my novel, at precisely 5.25 pm., everyone on Manhattan Island – including all the world leaders – falls unconscious. Everyone, that is, except for Samantha Rossi, a single mother reeling from devastating personal news, and Nick Lockwood, a wounded NYPD detective who wakes from a coma just as the city falls into one. Rossi’s first concern is her thirteen-year-old daughter Zoe and she will walk through the body-strewn streets of an eerily silent Manhattan to find her. As the only cop standing, Lockwood’s main concern is to wake his city. As night draws in, they must work together to save what matters most to them and to unravel the mystery of what has happened.
As both search for answers, they follow in the footsteps of my various trips to Manhattan. Rossi’s first frantic 
dash from the Brooklyn Bridge to look for her daughter in Tribeca follows the exact route I took to meet a friend who lived there.
To bring a place to life on the page and capture its particular atmosphere, smells and sounds you need to visit it. But you also need imagination and secondary research. When I wrote my first novel The Messiah Code (originally published as The Miracle Strain) over two decades ago, researching that story’s location was very different to today. Back then I had to rely on guidebooks and the library to augment my visits to Beacon Hill and the Back Bay neighbourhoods of Boston. With Manhattan Down, whenever I needed to check my notes or my memory, or work out how long a character might take to walk or cycle from City Hall station to 200 West Street, I could instantly look it up on google maps.
Almost every location in Manhattan Down is a place I have visited or stood outside. I found writing the scene set in the 9/11 Memorial Plaza at dusk particularly affecting. The two acre-sized square pools that mark where the twin towers stood will always remind of a more innocent time when I was young and I dined with my American friends at the top of what was once the tallest building in the world.
Michael Cordy
Credit: ‘Manhattan Down’ by Michael Cordy was published by Bantam Press at £20 on 8th May.
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