Park Slope novelist Rob Reuland used to be a prosecutor in the DA’s office in Brooklyn. That is, before his crime novel, Hollowpoint, was published in 2001.

In February 2001, Reuland was interviewed by New York Magazine about his first novel and was   quoted as saying, "Brooklyn is the best place to be a
homicide prosecutor. We’ve got more dead bodies per square inch than
anyplace else."

I remember the incident well because I used to rent studio space in Reuland’s brownstone, which I shared with another fiction writer and a quilter. My office was an adorable and rustic mud room that led to the garden. Unheated, it was a little cold in the winter. But hey, it was my rustic writing room in the woods of Park Slope. The others were in a larger room. Rob and his wife had a big, fancy office in a big room closer to the street.

After about a year, they decided to reclaim the back of their ground floor and we all moved out. But I knew Rueland had a crime novel in the works and I kept my eye out for it. Then I saw the interview in New York Magazine. I thought it was a good quote. There was definitely some poetic license there  — I wasn’t sure if it was statistically correct. But I was surprised a few weeks later when the whole thing blew up.

Then again. Maybe I wasn’t so surprised.

The quote got him into trouble with his boss, Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes. According to an article in last week’s Village Voice, then State Senator Marty Markowitz wasn’t too pleased either.

Inveterate Brooklyn booster Marty Markowitz (then a state senator
and now borough president) demanded Reuland’s head. With Hynes out of
town, Reuland’s boss, Amy Feinstein (now Hynes’s top assistant)
summoned him, and Reuland told her he didn’t mean to piss anybody off.
He offered to write a letter to New York. Feinstein and another
boss in Hynes’s office edited Reuland’s meek missive, in which he
admitted "my hyperbolic remark" and said, "This was not intended to be,
nor is it, literally true. In fact Brooklyn’s murder rate has declined
more than 66 percent during the past decade." But Hynes wasn’t
mollified, taking Reuland’s comment as a personal attack on the crime
reduction that Hynes believed his office was instrumental in achieving.

Well, here it is six years later and Charles Hynes is promoting his new book, "Triple Homicide." In early June, he had a reading at the Park Slope Barnes and Noble. Here’s the Village Voice again:

[Hynes} started expounding about this and that," says Reuland, "and
I just couldn’t stomach it." No surprise there. Six years ago, Hynes
tossed Reuland out of his job as a prosecutor in the high-profile
Homicide Bureau for doing exactly what the district attorney is now
doing: hawking a book.

Reuland walked out. I wish I coulda been a fly on the wall. But the Village Voice was there and tells the tale.