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Parents may not want their kids to hear Marcus Sakey’s advice for becoming a writer: Drop out.

Sakey was enrolled in Columbia College’s fiction program when he met Joe Konrath, former fiction major at Columbia and author of the Lt. Jack Daniels mystery series (Whiskey Sour, Bloody Mary and Rusty Nail). As a result of that conversation, he quit the fiction program and started to work intensely on his first book, a crime thriller titled The Blade Itself.

“I realized that if I wanted to make a living at this, then I need to treat it as a job,” Sakey says. “I quit school, set a deadline and started working at it one page at a time.” The gamble has paid off for Sakey, who wrote his first book in less than a year and signed a two-book contract with St. Martin’s mystery imprint, Minotaur.

“I love Columbia…they help you get into an artistic trance and tap into that part of your brain,” he says. “I learned a lot there. I just couldn’t do both.”

Blade tells the story of two Chicago South Side childhood friends and career criminals, Danny and Evan, whose lives take different turns when a robbery goes bad, sending Evan to prison and Danny down the straight path for the first time in his life. Later, a paroled Evan explodes back into Danny’s life, putting everything Danny has worked for at risk, and pulling him inexorably back into his old life of crime.

Sakey’s extensive research imbues his novel with a tangible sense of place, and any Chicago resident will recognize the locales they frequent. To ensure the details of Evan and Danny’s criminal exploits were accurate, he rode along with Chicago detectives, toured a morgue, learned police procedure and taught himself to pick a dead bolt in 60 seconds. Aside from adding color to the story, the hard lessons morphed into an attitude that’s woven into the fabric of the book.

“I was walking home from the El, and I live on a nice street and I have a nice condo, and my wife was waiting at home, and it occurred to me that, since I had all that, it could all be taken away,” says Sakey, 32, talking about the germ of the idea for Blade. “It was a weird revelation that the more you have, the more vulnerable you are, and that sort of spawned it. By the time I got home I had the idea that would be Evan.”

Danny and Evan are the have and the have-not personified, respectively, and Chicago is the third major character in this story, lending background, mood and a socioeconomic framework to everything that happens. The story encompasses some simple motifs that Chicagoans live with every day: North Side versus South Side, Cubs versus Sox, blue collar versus white collar, criminal versus victim. These tropes are as important to Sakey’s tale as any transgression that is committed within the confines of the story.

Though it’s his debut novel, Sakey has already become an integral part of the Chicago mystery-writing community. He is a founding member of the Outfit (www.theoutfitcollective.com), a group blog of Chicago crime novelists, including Barbara D’Amato, Sara Paretsky and Kevin Guilfoile. But despite his activity with fellow mystery writers—including Killer Year, a group of 15 suspense novelists working together to promote their books—he flinches at the notion of being pegged as purely a thriller writer.

“The genre-versus-literature argument isn’t productive to me,” Sakey says. “Genre is a way for booksellers to know where to put books on the shelves.”

But all the hallmarks of true thriller writing—quick pacing, hard-boiled characters and hard crimes—are here. The title, taken from a Homer quote, “The blade itself incites to violence,” evokes the book’s theme: All someone needs is a knife and anything could happen.

“Safety is an illusion,” he says. “Lock your doors, but if someone wants to get in, they will.”

The Blade Itself (St. Martin’s, $22.95) is in bookstores this month.