Time & Perspective Quote by Walter Wager

Wager’s line has the brisk, almost tactical candor of a working novelist who understands that “world-building” is often just procrastination in nicer packaging. “I use the city” isn’t a love letter to urban life so much as a production choice: the city is pre-loaded with data. Readers arrive already holding the map in their heads - the noise, density, social friction, the mix of anonymity and surveillance. When he says it “saves time,” he’s admitting that realism can be outsourced to shared cultural knowledge, freeing the writer to spend effort where it matters: plot velocity, moral pressure, the mechanisms of suspense.

The subtext is a small rebuke to the fetish of research-as-virtue. Wager’s point isn’t anti-intellectual; it’s anti-waste. A city setting is a kind of narrative shorthand, a cheat code that instantly supplies stakes and texture. Urban space comes with built-in systems - police, politics, media, finance, subways, back alleys - that naturally generate conflict. You don’t have to invent the machine; you just have to decide where it breaks.

Contextually, Wager wrote in an era when mass-market thrillers and crime novels were engineered for momentum. His professionalism shows: he’s thinking like a craftsman with deadlines, not a mystic awaiting inspiration. The line also hints at a democratic instinct. By leaning on a familiar setting, he lowers the barrier to entry, letting the story meet readers where they already live - or where they think they’ve been, through newsprint and movies. The city becomes not just a place, but a shared interface.