New York City plays a strong supporting role in most of Pete Hamill’s work, from the decades-long pub crawl remembered in “A Drinking Life” to his celebration of the man whose voice filled so many of those saloon hours in “Why Sinatra Matters.” His 10th novel, “North River” (Little, Brown; 341 pages, $25.99), digs deep into the hard details of the city’s life in 1934, five years buried under the Depression and at the beginning of the administration of Fiorello La Guardia.

The North River, the bygone phrase that gives Mr. Hamill’s novel its title, designates the Hudson along its busy stretch of shore from the Battery to the Midtown piers that berthed the trans-Atlantic steamships. Old time waterfront guys still used the term to distinguish the Hudson from the Delaware (or “South River”) when young Mr. Hamill first worked in newspapers in the early 1960s. It’s a credit to the author that nowhere in his novel does he jam an anachronistic explanation of the phrase into someone’s Depression-era mouth.