Oct 27, 2012 3 min read

NEW YORK – Like a prize-winning reporter, fame follows Tom Wolfe, even when he swaps the white suit for a blue blazer, even when he visits some strip club in Miami as research – yes, research – for his new novel. “I was the only man with a necktie,” he says with a chuckle, back in his trademark white during a recent interview at his Manhattan apartment. “They seat you in these little couches, and it was like a furniture show room – all these pieces of furniture would stretch long for maybe 40 feet. So I’m sitting there and this guy, must have been a bouncer, came over and said, ‘Hey, you’re Tom Wolfe aren’t you?”‘ Millions know the meaning of “Tom Wolfe”: “The Bonfire of the Vanities” and “The Right Stuff,” the “Me” decade and “radical chic,” the punched-up prose and the blaze of white. At age 81, his hair is thinned and his posture stooped, but the face remains impish and his manner wide-eyed and boyish at all the amazing things that happen – the kinds of stories, he likes to say, that you can’t make up. His latest scoops appear in “Back to Blood,” his first novel in eight years. It’s another big city tale in the tradition of “Bonfire,” his gleeful panorama of 1980s New York. “Back to Blood” features Wolfe’s usual cocktail of sex, class and color, from a Cuban-American policeman to a WASP newspaper editor to a Russian oligarch. You don’t have to ask what Wolfe’s been up to the past few years. For the most part, it’s in the book. Not just a strip club, but City Hall and Little Havana, the Miami Art Museum and Fisher Island. A favorite memory was when police let him ride on a “Safe Boat” around Biscayne Bay. “These things go across the water at 45 miles an hour, which is fast when you’re on the water, and these boats are unsinkable. Nobody has ever been able to turn one over. The bottom of the boat was like an enormous mattress. It was built for safety, and that gave me the idea for the whole first chapter of the book,” he says. “Unfortunately, when I went, the police had begun to crack down. It was no longer an orgy on the water. They used to line up boats, as many as 10-12 boats lashed together, so you had one enormous uneven deck. And they’d have really wild parties, ending with boys and girls down on the deck having at it, and pornographic movies on the big sails of the schooners.”