The NYC Mayor Fiction Canon (or why Adams should probably write a crime thriller).

I’m excited to be writing to you from here in Mayor-elect Mamdani’s New York City. After years of bad news and then worse news, and a lifetime of disappointing mayors, it’s a strange and pleasant feeling to wake up in a New York City full of excitement and promise.

We still have a few months left of Mayor Eric Adams’ administration though, and I’m sure he’ll try to wring out a few more first class tickets and pardons before the end of the year. But he’s set to leave office with a bad reputation and under many, many clouds. But one thing we can all agree on is that Adams is a pretty entertaining guy, almost frustratingly so. Our weird mayor finds ways to stay busy—too busy to call the mayor-elect and say congrats, apparently.

My pitch for Adams’ post-mayoralty: write a thriller, or better yet, a series of thrillers.

This is coming from a recent reading project where I tried to find and read as much fiction by New York mayors as I could. The NYC Mayor Fiction Canon is a shallow shelf, and in a week I was able to read Mayor John V. Lindsey’s The Edge and as many of Mayor Ed Koch’s cowritten murder mysteries as the city’s libraries could dig out of storage, which is only a handful with titles like Murder At City Hall and Murder on Broadway. My main takeaway from this self-imposed assignment is that the bar is very low for fiction by our city’s mayors, and given Adams’ skills as an overly specific fabulist who speaks in bizarro aphorisms, I think he’s in a position to write some great procedural fiction.

Adams has already written a couple of books, so he has the publishing connections. Don’t Let It Happen is the mayor’s book-length PSA which by all accounts is full of bizarre advice and stories, and his Healthy At Last is a cookbook where he claims his plant-based diet fixed his vision problems and made his diabetes go away.

More importantly for his storytelling abilities, Adams is a fluent liar. He seems to have made up a cop, invented a story about firing a gun as a kid, and he’s constantly changing his tune on whether or not he eats fish.

The man can weave a tale. Why not use those skills for a fun novel? My advice is to steer away from emulating John V. Lindsay’s writing. The two-term, 103rd mayor was beloved, and the last mayor before Mamdani to win a million votes, but he’s not a great writer. Three years after leaving office in 1973 he wrote The Edge, a political thriller set in an America full of unrest and violence spurred by high unemployment and a bad economy. In response, there’s a new pro-law-and-order party called the Leadership party and the President is trying to pass a Special Powers bill giving the executive sweeping policing and military control. Amidst all this, California Congressman Mike Stuart is juggling a reelection campaign, his mixed feelings about the President’s bill, and his infidelity with a campaign staffer.

Sound exciting? It’s not. The stakes are muted for a thriller, and Congressman Stuart just drifts around and is never in much trouble. He gets beat up once and faces a few rowdy crowds, but threads every needle pretty much perfectly. For the most part, the action of the book stays within the the realm of speeches, political debate, and concern conversation. It’s more West Wing than Air Force One.

The book is also hilariously insistent on letting us know that mayors have the hardest job and are the best politicians. Every time it feels like Lindsay is elbowing the reader in the ribs to make the point. Every other politician is portrayed as sleazy, or lazy, or corrupt—except for Congressman Stuart, who is perfect of course. Both his wife and his mistress think the world of him at the end of the book, for example.

And the plot points feel quaint in 2025. Will Congress pass a bill giving the president more power? What will that mean for the country, the Constitution, and Our Ideals? The Edge’s worries over “what is America in danger of becoming” feels archaic in our current world of hogmen run amuck.

Mayor Ed Koch’s books are much more fun, fitting for a mayor who cameoed in a Muppets movie. One of Koch’s other retirement projects was a book series about a mayor who solves murders. The fun twist? The fictional mayor is also Ed Koch. Writing a version of himself who is both good at mayor and good at crime solving is a charming bit of wish-casting. It’s a retired politician reimagining their legacy, but written with the energy of a kid listing what they want to be when they grow up.

The books aren’t ground breaking, but they’re campy and light. The procedural stories are simple whodunnits with a New York twist—Murder on Broadway has Hizzoner untangling the on-stage shooting at the closing of a long-running musical, for example.

Koch is writing close to reality, and isn’t afraid to pull from his own life. In Murder At City Hall, the murder happens at a wedding officiated by Mayor Koch. The victim is Karl Krieg, a boorish real estate tycoon in a loveless marriage with a woman out of his league, who everyone hates because he’s a cheat and a loudmouth. If you’re thinking this sounds familiar, I think you’re right: the real Ed Koch had a long and bitter beef with Donald Trump and I strongly suspect Koch wrote this character as a bit of literary revenge on the current President. Koch’s cattiness is a gift in 2025—I enjoyed reading his characters’ delight and ambivalence about Krieg’s murder.

You’re never far from a fun city detail in these books, especially about food. Koch’s bagel order shows up in the first ten pages, Hizzoner always knows a great spot for a bite no matter where he is in the city, and Koch’s dad used to be a waiter at a pastrami place and visits from Florida to dote on his son and send sandwiches back because they’re made wrong.

It’s all breezy and light. Even the work of being mayor is presented as time consuming but never heavy. Koch is overstretched and befuddled by paper work, meetings, and incessant press questions, but the crises he faces (the murders aside) are nebulous “budget issues” or scandals like a firefighter being revealed as a stripper called Smokey Blaze.

This blend of cartoon stakes and real world detail is the exact lane for an ex-Mayor Eric Adams thriller: don’t go in for the self-serious realism of Mayor Lindsay and embrace the full Mayor Koch camp. Imagine a series of kid-glove noirs starring a swaggy nightlife mayor named Eric Adams, who is full of bizarre one-liners that he dishes out while prowling the city solving crimes. The vibe of the books should be a little gritty but never fatally so, enough friction to break a sweat but nothing a bad boy mayor can’t handle. By day there are parades, rat control events, and grand juries to attend, but night is when the mayor comes alive, at crypto coin launch events, sweaty outer borough raves sponsored by a new credit card, and downtime at his pad in Fort Lee.

Koch was all in on murder mysteries, but I think Adams should expand the crimes to be solved: an influencer goes missing after a protest; hackers take over the Empire State Building’s lighting system and are sending out coded messages; the entire Queens Museum Panorama of the City gets burgled. It’s all no match for a mayor with street smarts and a Rolodex full of crooked cops, sleazy restaurateurs, and underhanded nightlife fixtures.

Or to put it in more familiar terms: Mr. Adams, as you transition into private life, let the crooks be characters in your books at the table of your post-mayoralty.