How a Cold Murder Case Spawned a Veteran Journalist’s Debut Novel

Steve Wick’s debut novel, a gripping tale of murder, espionage and Nazis on Long Island, grew out of a trial he covered in 1980 as a young reporter at Newsday.

“I was in a criminal courtroom in Riverhead one day and these two detectives brought in this very old man,” Wick recalls. “They told the judge he was being arraigned on a murder charge and that it was the oldest cold case in New York State.”

He remembers thinking, “Wow, am I lucky to be here today.”

Wick was assigned to cover the trial. “It was a fascinating case. There was hardly any evidence against him, and I thought, there’s no way they’re going to convict this guy. It’s just too old of a case.” Near the end of the trial, the defendant’s ex-wife was brought into the courtroom and the defendant, Wick recalls, “turned white as a sheet.”

The ex-wife’s testimony about what she witnessed in the early morning hours of October 4, 1954, convicted Rudolph John Hoff of murder in December 1980. The following month, he was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

“I asked the sheriff if I could talk to him in jail, and I had a brief interview,” Wick said. Hoff insisted he was innocent and that he was framed.

“He started launching into ‘Hauptmann this and Hauptmann that’ and I had no idea what he was talking about,” Wick said. “And I realized as I talked to him that his German immigrant mother in the Bronx was the last friend of Anna Hauptmann, the widow of Richard Hauptmann, who was executed by the State of New Jersey for the kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh child,” Wick said.

“It was so bizarre. And at the same time, I thought, ‘Man I got to be able to do something with this.’ But the years went by. I was busy at Newsday for 30-some years,” Wick said.

Wick had a distinguished career at the Long Island daily, winning dozens of reporting and writing awards and sharing in two Pulitzer Prizes for local reporting for Newsday’s coverage of the Baby Jane Doe case in 1984 and the crash of TWA Flight 800 in 1996.

As his career at Newsday wound down, Wick — who had already published three nonfiction books — began mulling over possibly writing a detective novel, a murder mystery. “And of course, I had saved all those Hoff clips,” he said. “I started thinking about inventing a detective, because I needed a detective to be able to carry the story through.” That’s how the protagonist of Wick’s new novel was born. “I invented Paul Beirne out of whole cloth,” he said.

Wick was about halfway through the first draft of the novel when he left Newsday to become executive editor at Times/Review, publisher of three weekly newspapers, including the Riverhead News-Review.

It took eight years to finish, Wick said.

Wick said the jump from nonfiction, particularly journalism, was difficult, because in journalism — as with nonfiction, in general — “you explain things.”

“In fiction, you don’t explain anything,” Wick said. “You let the reader figure things out as the story unfolds.” The writer does that by showing the reader things and letting him draw his own conclusions.

“I kept going back over it, saying, Wick, you’re not writing for a newspaper. You’re trying to make up a story. You need to develop the detective. You need to develop this. It has to unfold in front of you. You can’t front-load. You front-load in journalism. You know, your third paragraph sums things up. Forget that. And I kept going, and finally I thought I had a decent grip on it,” he said.

Wick recalls a conversation he had at that point with the literary agent who had sold his last book, “The Long Night,” a 2012 biography of the legendary American journalist William L. Shirer, author of “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.” He told the agent he was working on a novel.

“And he said, ‘Oh God, please no.’” Wick recalls.

“Reporters can’t write fiction,” the agent told him. “Please don’t waste your time. Don’t waste my time. It’s too big a leap. In all my years doing this, I’m telling you the truth, people in journalism cannot switch to fiction. It’s too damn difficult. The divide is too wide,’” the agent said. But Wick knew he had a good story. “I’m not going to just throw this thing out,” Wick told the agent.

His insistence led to the agent introducing him to a fiction editor in East Hampton. Wick said the editor read his 130,000-word first draft and cut 40,000 words out of it. She sent back “multiple pages with just big Xs across them,” Wick said. “She said, ‘Steve, you have a really great story here. Just tell that story … focus on your core story.’” He went to work and ended up cutting another 10,000 words.

The result is “The Ruins,” published last week by Pegasus Books and distributed by Simon & Schuster.

Set in 1954, “The Ruins” is told from the perspective of Paul Bierne, the new chief of police of Lindenhurst Village. Bierne is struggling with demons in his past — his time as a prisoner of war in Japan during World War II, the disappearance of his mother when he was a boy, and growing up with an alcoholic father who was emotionally abusive.

Bierne finds himself working to solve two murders — the first in the quiet South Shore village in decades — that both took place on one night. As the story unfolds, Bierne is drawn into a cold case murder, committed two decades before.

From Lindenhurst and the waters of the Great South Bay, to the eugenics office at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, to an Oregon Road farm in Cutchogue and the waterways of the North Fork, the plot of “The Ruins” takes the reader on a thriller of a mid-century journey that criss-crosses Long Island and ultimately solves a two-decade-old mystery in one of the most notorious crime cases of the 20th century.

Wick’s debut novel has been called “a shattering journey from Lindenhurst to Lindbergh” (Kirkus Reviews) and a book that “brims with fascinating insight about the Nazis’ presence in the U.S. and the shifting cultural climate of the 1950s.” (Publishers Weekly)

Wick, 73, takes the praise in stride. He’s already thinking hard about his next novel, which may feature the police chief Bierne as its main character.

“The Ruins” is on sale at bookstores everywhere. It is also available as an audiobook. On Friday, March 28, at 6 p.m. Canio’s Books hosts Steve Wick at Christ Episcopal Church in Sag Harbor where he will talk about the book.

Denise Civiletti is a veteran local reporter, editor and attorney. Her work has been recognized with numerous journalism awards, including investigative reporting and writer of the year awards from the N.Y. Press Association. She was also honored in 2020 with a N.Y. State Senate Woman of Distinction Award for her trailblazing work in local online news. She is a founder, owner and co-publisher of Riverhead Local.