The Writing of Angel Blood

I first wrote Angel Blood when I was twenty-three years old, living in London and Paris in 1978. Back then it had a different title—Blood Music—and although I couldn’t have known it, it would become the novel I would spend almost fifty years becoming the writer it deserved.

I was a young American aspiring novelist in the midst of reinventing himself. My own early life story is far less opulent than Logan Rush’s, but we share overbearing fathers, mothers who were musicians and safe havens, and a longing to put an ocean between ourselves and the lives we were leaving behind.

After leaving Bard College—yes, for father-related reasons, much as Logan leaves Harvard—I boarded a $99 Freddie Laker flight to London. I tracked down my closest friend, who was completing his PhD in Cardiff, Wales. I lived there for several months and moved to London when I met a photographer and photojournalist fourteen years my senior, who became the inspiration for Angela.

Friends who know me well often say Angel Blood is wickedly autobiographical. They’re right. And they’re wrong.

Much of it comes from my life, either by fact or by desire, but the novel has always lived somewhere between memory and imagination.

The pianist Florian Swain is not modeled on my closest friend. Swain is his own creation. What my friend gave me was something far more valuable: an understanding of the profound love that can exist between two men who become brothers by choice rather than blood. We lost one another in the late 1970s over a woman—but not in the way you might imagine—and I have carried that grief ever since.

Looking back now, I think twenty-three-year-old novelists often possess more talent than maturity. At that age, I somehow recognized the writer I would one day become, long before I had earned him. I carried myself as though I already possessed the talent which would not fully arrive until decades later.

Even at twenty-three, I knew I was asking a question few young writers would choose to ask themselves: What is the price of helping your closest friend end his own life? It was a remarkably heavy burden for a twenty-three-year-old novelist—and one I would carry with me for nearly fifty years before finally becoming the writer capable of exploring it fully.

In January 2025, after forty-five years of silence, the novel came back. It arrived like a rock through the window. I had already begun another novel, but I had no choice. Angel Blood announced that its time had come. I put everything else aside. 

As soon as I sat down to write, I knew I could no longer tell the story as the young man who had created it. I had to write it as Logan—an older man looking back across a lifetime at the passionate, reckless young novelist he had once been.

This realization changed everything. I wasn’t resurrecting an old manuscript. I was writing an entirely new novel.

The original manuscript had disappeared decades earlier, a loss that once devastated me. Today, I think losing it was one of the greatest gifts my writing life ever received. Without it, I wasn’t tempted to imitate my twenty-three-year-old self. I was free to write the novel memory had preserved and imagination would move forward instead.

The bones remained. Many of the images and sequences remained. The emotional truth remained. Only a handful of sentences survived unchanged from 1978. Everything else is new.

The greatest surprise was twenty-three-year-old Eve Marie Marat. She did not exist in the original novel. She arrived in Logan’s life one afternoon as an Uber driver in a yellow Prius and quietly took him—and the novel—with her. I realized his story needed another voice to balance it—not someone looking backward, but someone whose life still pointed toward the future. She became Logan’s equal and, in many ways, the emotional heart of the novel.

The new first draft astonished me. Beginning in January 2025, I completed ninety thousand words in forty-six days—one day for every year that had passed since finishing the original unpublished manuscript in 1979. What followed was another year and a half of passionate writing and revision until the novel became what I had sensed it might be all those years ago.

There was also a quiet urgency. At seventy-one, my writing mind feels sharp. My everyday mind, however, has begun to show some deep cognitive cracks which time eventually leaves in all of us. I knew the opportunity to finally write Angel Blood as it asked to be written had come around like a comet that appears only twice in a lifetime. It was now or never.

Angel Blood is the first novel I ever wrote and the seventh I have published. It has taken me almost fifty years to become the writer capable of telling the story I first imagined as a young American, a first-time novelist, living in and wandering the streets of London, Paris, and Cardiff. Some novels are written in a season. Others take a lifetime. For me, Angel Blood did both.

My very best to you…

JTM