The Old Days

If you're writing crime novels, it helps to know a little something about crooks and cops, prosecutors and defense attorneys, guns, bullets, red lights and sirens, two-way radio traffic, crime scene investigation and about a hundred other things you pick up on naturally if you've been a cop or spent time as a journalist covering the police beat.

Fortunately, I've done both. I started listening to scanners in high school,  then graduated to freelancing still photos to the newspaper and a TV station in the town where I grew up. I followed that with a television internship, a television reporter's job when I was nineteen, and joined the sheriff's department at 21. The media drew me back a number of years later and I spent the next twenty-some years chasing crime stories.

I haven't constructed an entire plot based on a past experience but that's likely to happen. I often think about how I might concoct a book from  . . . well, you'll read it when I write it.

More often it's a scene (old newspapers piled to chest height in the kitchen of a woman who died in a house fire), a bit of characterization (a vice cop who carries an Uzi under the seat of his car . . .and writes poetry in his spare time), a street-term ("mope" is a favorite) , or the chatter I've heard from street criminals trying to convince you they had nothing to do with the incident you're asking them about ("Aw man, I was in the bat'room! I didn't see/do nuthin.'")

In my second book, Every Secret Crime, I used the traumatic memory of a double-fatal car crash and mixed it with the recollection of another case where police searched under a bridge for the bodies of two children to create a scene where a murder victim and her car are "hooked," or dragged from a river by a heavy-duty tow-truck.

 A chase sequence in my new book, Easy Evil, picks up on some of the thrills that came from cranking on lights and siren and pursuing folks who chose not to pull over for traffic stops. Frankly, that was one of the best parts of wearing a badge, as well as one of the most terrifying. Some drivers react in the darnedest, most unpredictable ways when they see red lights coming up behind them.


Rewriting history isn't all fun and games. Much of what I saw as a cop and reporter was emotionally scarring. Perhaps the worst part was talking to victims, or the families and friends of victims, or the witnesses to a vicious crime or disaster.

Never have I seen so many stunned, terrified and, at the same time, grieving teenagers than in the hours immediately after the shootings at Columbine High School in April of 1999.

One of the most heart wrenching interviews : a nurse who tried to save the life of a young boy trapped in a school bus struck by a commuter train. Her words, "Just tell his mother, he was a brave boy . . ." bring a lump to my throat even as I write them.

Covering the case of a woman who poisoned, and then smothered, her children to get back at her estranged husband was very nearly the catalyst that caused me to leave the news business.

So when fans ask, as they inevitably do, "Where do you get your ideas?" I have a well-prepared answer for them.

I just remember the old days.