Ed, We Hardly Knew Ye

 

As many of you have heard, the crime fiction community lost a VIP last month when author, editor, and blogger Ed Gorman died following a long battle with cancer. Since today would have marked his 75th birthday, Patti Abbott is collecting links of tributes and remembrances, which you can check out over here. In addition to penning dozens of mystery novels, including the Sam McCain, Jack Dwyer and Dev Conrad series, Ed was a frequent contributor to the Friday's "Forgotten" Books feature hosted by Patti, something I've been a part of for about eight years. I never had the pleasure to meet Ed and am depressed that now I'll never get the chance. 

Ed was involved with many anthologies through the years, often partnering with Martin H. Greenberg and others. I've featured some of those on this blog several times, as well as mentioned some of Ed's interviews with authors such as John D. MacDonald in Mystery Scene and other publications. I've collected a few of those snippets from the In Reference to Murder archives:

One of the Gorman/Greenberg collaborations were two books of interviews with well-known crime fiction authors, Speaking of Murder: Interviews with the Masters of Mystery and Suspense, published in July 1998, and Speaking of Murder II, which came out the following year. The first volume is introduced by Ed, who tells the story of how a Chicago talk show producer once told him that writers made dull guests. Ed allowed as how he agreed, since "compared to cross-dressing prostitutes, mothers who sleep with their daughter's boyfriends, and UFO abductees who have mysteriously started to dress like Elvis, I guess most of us writers do lead pretty uneventful lives." He goes on to add that writers are interesting because they're quiet and introspective.

Ed and Martin were also frequent editor of the annual anthologies of the best crime fiction short fiction. One such volume was 2008's A Prisoner of Memory: And 24 of the Year's Finest Crime and Mystery Stories, which included a roll call of the bestselling mystery authors today, Lawrence Block, Michael Connelly, Anne Perry, Marcia Muller, and many others. 

Ed's interviews with authors in Mystery Scene Magazine were certainly highlights of the publication. Some of his Q&As included an interview with Mary Daheim (IRTM blog link), chatting about the writing life and her new Bed-and-Breakfast mystery; Ed interviewing prolific author and mystery genre advocate, Robert Randisi (blog link); and Ed making an interesting connection by proposing we look at Charlotte Armstrong as a purveyor of suburban noir instead of traditional mysteries (blog link here).

In another blog post, I once noted that Ed had interviewed iconic crime fiction author John D. MacDonald, which you can still read over at The Mystery File. The prolific author actually got his start writing short stories - while he was in the Army in 1945, he sent a short story home to his wife, who promptly typed it up and submitted it to Story magazine. The editors bought it for $25, thus giving MacDonald the idea that he could make a career as a writer. He told Ed that after leaving the Army, "I wrote eight hundred thousand words of short stories in those four months, tried to keep thirty of them in the mail at all times, slept about six hours a night and lost twenty pounds."

Plus, there were many, many more times I mentioned Ed in this blog for various reasons:

• He was one of the authors who donated an autographed book for the Authors Love Teachers OK Tornado Relief Auction following the tragedy at the Plaza Towers Elementary School and Briarwood Elementary School affected by an EF5 tornado in Oklahoma
• Ed and Stephen Gallagher wrote about what it takes to start and finish that first novel in the book Writing Crime Fiction.
• Ed was a friend of actor Kevin McCarthy, best known as the star of the 1956 science fiction movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and worked with Kevin writing a book about the actor's early days with Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift and starting the early version of The Actors' Studio, as well as McCarthy's work on the Body Snatchers movie. Ed later had a nice tribute on his web site after McCarthy's passing.
• Ed was not only an editor of anthologies, he also contributed several stories to such works, himself. I've noted several of those on this blog, including the Murder Past, Murder Present anthology, edited by R. Barri Flowers and Jan Grape, which included stories by members of the American Crime Writers League - the organization that Ed and Robert Randisi co-founded in the late 1980s. (Blog link here.)

There are countless authors who have been sharing their encounters with Ed, either in person or online, and how willing he was to help others as they stumbled through their literary journeys. We've not only lost an outstanding author and editor and a passionate book advocate, we've also lost a fine human being. Requiescat in pace, Ed.

Author R&R with Douglas Perry

 

Douglas Perry is a journalist and the award-winning author of the true-crime books The Girls of Murder City: Fame, Lust, and the Beautiful Killers Who Inspired Chicago and also Eliot Ness: The Rise and Fall of an American Hero. His work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, The Oregonian, Tennis, and many other publications. His first crime novel is Mammoth, released today via Amberjack Publishing.


Mammoth is set in the small, isolated town of Mammoth View, California, which is hit with the news of an attack on a summer morning. It’s not clear what happened, but it’s bad. And it’s not over. As residents panic and leave town, the police chief and his deputy set off into the woods to investigate. The campsite attack is the perfect coincidence for Billy Lane. Looking for the biggest score of his career, he’s targeted the local bank. The robbery does not go well – and the aftermath unfolds catastrophically. Over the next twenty-four hours, chaos descends on Mammoth View. What really happened at that campsite outside of town?

Douglas Perry stops by In Reference to Murder today to talk about about the inspiration and background for his new novel:

 

I am an historian by training and trade. My three previous books are all histories. So when I launched into writing Mammoth – my first novel – I knew I wanted to stay in the past. Making the setting a little unfamiliar adds an inherent sense of dislocation; it makes the characters and plot pop more.

My last two nonfiction books – The Girls of Murder City and a biography of Eliot Ness – take place primarily in the 1920s and ’30s. I know that era very well. But I didn’t want to go that far back for Mammoth. I ultimately decided on the year 1977. Because of the march of technology, it can seem very far away. There was no Internet. No smart phones. For most people, there wasn’t even cable TV. This is a valuable background for my story, which revolves around a mysterious incident outside a small ski-resort town in California. Something terrible and dangerous has happened, and our protagonists must figure out what it is – and survive. All without Google or 24-hour TV news.

1977 is also a good year to set the novel because you don’t have to be too old to remember it. I did a lot of research into the time period – there have been quite a few good histories of the era, such as David Frum’s How We Got Here – but I also have memories of that year. One of the main characters in Mammoth is a 16-year-old girl who dreams of being an Olympic runner. She could have been my babysitter in 1977.

The 1970s don’t get the credit they deserve as a turning point. Popular culture – That ’70s Show, Boogie Nights, the Studio 54 movie, etc. – reinforces the idea that it was the self-absorbed Me Decade, the vapid, fashion-challenged Disco Age. But that’s just the surface sheen. The politics were radical, bizarre, and outrage-driven. The idealism of the 1960s had curdled into something darker. The economy was tanking; crime was exploding. Mammoth is set in 1977 in California. So in the next year, San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk will be murdered. The Jonestown Massacre will happen. (Remember, Jim Jones built his following in California.) The Zodiac Killer is still on the loose in the Golden State. The Hillside Strangler, also in California, is about to start his murder spree. The Prop 13 tax revolt is brewing.

Three years earlier, in 1974, Patty Hearst was kidnapped from her apartment in Berkeley. During much of the decade, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, co-founders of the Weather Underground terrorist group, are hiding out in Marin County. (As it turns out, the house where they secretly spent a few years was three miles from the one where I grew up. They probably shopped at the same grocery as my mom.)

So there was a lot going on, in California and in the culture in general. It’s a fertile backdrop for a crime novel. And that’s what Mammoth is: a straightforward, old-school crime story. The 1970s were a great time for that, too. The decade produced a lot of first-rate crime novels. It’s my hope that Mammoth harkens back to the best of them, with the added benefit of historical perspective.

 

You can read more about the author and the book via Douglas Perry's website (with purchase links), and you can also follow him on Goodreads.

Author R&R with Terrence McCauley

 

Terrence McCauley had success writing short stories featured in Thuglit, Spintetingler Magazine, Shotgun Honey, Big Pulp and other publications before turning his hand to two crime novels set in 1930s New York City, Prohibition and Slow Burn. In 2016, Down and Out Books also published Terrence's World War I novella - The Devil Dogs of Belleau Wood, with proceeds going directly to benefit the Semper Fi Fund. His latest work is the techno-thriller, A Murder of Crows, the just-published second installment in his James Hicks spy series, Sympathy for the Devil.

A Murder of Crows opens with every intelligence agency in the world on the hunt for the elusive terrorist known only as The Moroccan. But when James Hicks and his clandestine group known as the University thwart a bio-terror attack against New York City and capture The Moroccan, they find themselves in the crosshairs of their own intelligence community. The CIA, NSA, DIA and the Mossad are still hunting for for The Moroccan and will stop at nothing to get him. The team find themselves in a strange new world where allies become enemies, enemies become allies and the fate of the University - perhaps even the Western world - may hang in the balance. 

McCauley stops by In Reference to Murder to take some Author R&R (Reference and Research) on how he went about preparing to write this novel and his other books:

 

Research has always been very important to my work, no matter what genre I may be writing in at the time.

When I wrote my western, I made sure I weeded out many of the inaccuracies created in the collective entertainment consciousness by movies and television. Cowboys didn’t say shucks and darn. They didn’t just drink sarsaparilla and Miss Kitty probably just didn’t run a harmless hotel. Townsfolk weren’t cowardly and almost no one ever had a showdown on Main Street at high noon. Just as people hadn’t travelled all that way and endured all that hardship to let some bully push them around, they certainly weren’t going to stand in the middle of the street and let someone shoot at them in broad daylight.

I did even more research for the first two novels in the University series (PROHIBITION and SLOW BURN). I wanted to capture the flavor of the 1930s without falling prey to the pitfalls of caricature we have come to believe as fact. Anyone who thinks Daymon Runyon’s work accurately chronicled the era is sadly mistaken. If he told the truth about the people he knew and what he saw, his friends would have made sure he took a long walk off a very tall building. For accuracy, one must turn to the photographs of Weegee and the writings of Herbert Asbury (Gangs of New York) and others to attain a better sense of the underworld at the time. Al Capone wasn’t a cigar chomping, Tommy gun-firing mad man. He also wasn’t the charming common man portrayed in archival film footage, either.

If research has taught me anything – whether I’m examining the past or the present – it’s that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. The trick is to get close enough to it for the reader to believe it and be entertained by it. As Wesley Gibson, my mentor and friend once told me, ‘You’re not writing a textbook. People don’t care how it’s done. They care about why it’s in your story. Justify it and move on.”

I took the same approach when I researched SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL and A MURDER OF CROWS. Just as I sought to avoid the stereotypes of the black hat-wearing villain in my western or the cigar-chomping mad-dog killer of the 1920s, I wanted to avoid the stereotypes that the techno-thriller genre has acquired in the last couple of decades. You know what I mean, even though you might not realize it as they’ve become so commonplace, they’re impossible to notice. I didn’t want to write about the nerdy, socially awkward computer whiz with spiked hair, piercings and tattoos who resents authority, but follows it anyway. I also didn’t want to write about the hacker with the heart of gold or the criminal who reluctantly decides to fight crime or promote national security. And I sure as hell didn’t want to write about the foaming Islamic terrorist or the ex-special forces super-agent who reluctantly gets pulled back in to the fray of serving his or her country.

I wanted to write something different, but also something the reader could recognize. If I wrote an existential spy novel, no one, it meant I had to do my homework. A lot of it.

I started by deciding what kind of story I wanted to tell. Did I want to go the Le Carre route, meaning a book heavy on background and plot but not much action? Did I want a Bourne-like novel, with hyper-action and plot that got filled in along the way? Or did I want a Tom Clancy novel, wherein technology and lingo rule the day while plot and character development take second place?

Never opting for the easy road, I chose a little bit of all three. The collective Snowden and Assange messes helped me with the technological aspects of the story. I replaced the inked-up, rebellious hacker with a standing system called OMNI that gave the members of the mysterious University access to some of the most classified information in the world. Agents could not only access OMNI from their phones, but they could also upload vehicle traces, photographs of suspects and the fingerprints of suspected terrorists with ease. I employed a plot device I’ve dubbed near-technology, wherein I use every day technology and simply expand on our own personal use of it. Can the black box in your car be automatically tracked by satellite? Maybe. Can your fingerprints be scanned and analyzed remotely? They already are by the biometric device on newer iPhones. Can someone listen in to your phone or activate its camera without your knowledge? Certainly.

To a greater extent, could an organization like The University exist, one that isn’t funded by the government but has immense power and reach? That’s for the reader to decide. I certainly hope I’ve painted a convincing world in which the reader cannot only believe, but about which they will want to learn more. Through careful research and a bit of story telling, I strive to strike a balance that strains credulity only far enough for the reader to escape their reality and not fear for their safety. Because, like a wise person once told me, I’m not writing a textbook. I’m telling a story.

 

To find out more about Terrence McCauley and his books, check out his website and follow him on Twitter and Facebook. Grab a copy of A Murder of Crows via online stores or through your local bookstore.

Author R&R with Jean Heller

 

Author Jean Heller takes some "Author R&R" today on In Reference to Murder. Heller's career has included serving as an investigative and projects reporter and editor for The Associated Press, The Cox Newspapers, Newsday, and the St. Petersburg Times. Heller has won multiple awards, including the Worth Bingham Prize, the Polk Award, and is an eight-time Pulitzer Prize nominee.

Heller's new thriller is The Someday File, which asks the question, "What happens when the profession you’ve known all your adult life threatens to kill you—yet suffocating guilt and insatiable curiosity won’t let you walk away?" That's what happens to Deuce Mora, a columnist for the Chicago Journal, whose encounter with an aging, low-level Chicago mobster throws her into a world of political and criminal intrigue and confronts her with a horrific crime more than 50 years old that she will either solve or die in the trying. 

Heller offered up her take on "Author R&R" (Reference and Research) from her journalist's perspective:

 

Someone Will Notice

Jean Heller

A good friend of mine, a mystery writer of some renown, once spent nearly two weeks researching what type, appellation, and vintage of red wine would have been served with a cassoulet at a fine Parisian restaurant in the 1920s.

When I asked him why he had spent that much time on such a small thing from so long ago, he replied, “Because if I get it wrong, someone will notice.”

Indeed, my friend was not being totally anal. When you write fiction, you are asking readers to suspend disbelief and take a trip with you into their imaginations. But if you hit a pothole along the way, and write as fact something the reader clearly recognizes as an error, the suspension of disbelief bubble bursts, and the trip comes to a crashing end.

So it was for me when a famous writer wrote about a character field-stripping a weapon and got it all wrong.

As a former newspaper reporter, research and adherence to fact are ingrained in me. Like my friend, I don’t want to break the axle of a good story by hitting a pothole.

I believe in the old saw that writers should write what they know, but we can’t know everything about everything. I am a licensed pilot, but not an airline pilot. For MAXIMUM IMPACT, I had a steep learning curve. I have worked in skyscrapers, but when I wrote HANDYMAN I didn’t know enough about the “dirty places” in the buildings, the offices and closets and alcoves that make the building work.

Some of the research I had to do for my current book, THE SOMEDAY FILE, was almost as obscure as identifying a red wine from the 1920s. I had to learn a lot of minutiae about Chicago’s criminal history, current laws, geography, neighborhoods, customs, and Chicagoans’ unique ways of speaking. Fortunately, I live in the city, so I didn’t have to travel terribly far to scout settings or to find experts who could answer my questions, including a professor of linguistics at the University of Chicago.

That’s my key to researching a book: I talk to people who know everything there is to know about what I don’t know.

For MAXIMUM IMPACT, I talked to several airline pilots and accepted United Airlines’ invitation to come fly their giant training simulators in Denver – the same mockups you saw on television when reporters were trying to explain the causes of several recent, tragic plane crashes.

For HANDYMAN, the manager of a new skyscraper in Tampa actually spent a day with me crawling around those areas of his building that most people never see.

On one occasion, I actually convinced the director of pharmacy at a large medical center to help me find a drug that would kill without leaving a trace and describe for me how such a drug could be stolen from his hospital.

These experts, even if uncertain initially about taking the time and making the effort to abet a work of fiction, all got into it as the exploration went along. They admitted when we finished that they’d had fun.

The perils of not doing this kind of research are evident:

I once read a novel in which there was a car chase through the streets of Lucerne, Switzerland. If the chase had occurred as the writer conceived it, it would have run along the bottom of Lake Lucerne.

In another novel, the writer blew up a tank farm in Iceland, apparently believing the tanks, in real life, hold petroleum. They don’t. The tanks sit over a lava basin and hold the hot water supply for the city of Reykjavik.

The moral of the story is, if you don’t know, do the research.

Because for every minor detail you get wrong, someone will notice.

 

You can learn more about Jean Heller and her novel The Someday File via her website, Twitter, or on Facebook.

Author R&R with Seth Margolis

 

Seth Margolis has written six books over the past two decades including Losing Isaiah, made into a feature film in 1995 starring Jessica Lange and Halle Berry. He's also written a number of New York Times articles about travel and entertainment. His latest thriller is The Semper Sonnet, in which a long-lost manuscript, written for Elizabeth I, holds the key to unlocking hidden secrets of the past—and to eliminating the future.

Margolis stops by In Reference to Murder today to take some Author R&R to discuss how he went about writing and researching the book:

 

My new novel, THE SEMPER SONNET, is a thriller that takes place in contemporary New York and Elizabethan England. I’m pretty well versed in the former, having lived in Manhattan for most of my life, but sketchy on the latter.

THE SEMPER SONNET is about a current-day Ph.D. candidate who comes across what she feels certain is a heretofore unknown sonnet by Shakespeare. But when she reads a portion of it on the air, she’s attacked and quickly realizes that the sonnet contains clues to a long-buried secret involving Elizabeth … and possibly the knowledge needed to cause global destruction.

Fortunately, I came across a marvelous book, ELIZABETH’S LONDON by Liza Picard. It is so well researched and so energetically written, you can practically smell London in the sixteenth century, taste the codlings (baked apples) and sheep lungs (no explanation needed), hear the cries of street vendors along Cornhill and Cheapside. There’s also fascinating information about Elizabethan childbirth, which was useful, since in my novel the Queen does indeed … but I’m giving too much away.

This book, along with a couple of biographies of Elizabeth and some strategic Googling, gave me the confidence to get started. But pretty soon I realized that secondary research just didn’t provide what I needed to set scenes in sixteenth and seventeenth century England.  I wanted readers to see, hear and even smell what it was like to live in Elizabeth’s England. So I booked a flight to London.

My first destination was Hatfield, Elizabeth’s childhood home. After a short train ride from London, I walked from the station up the hill to the palace, having made an appointment with Hatfield’s publicity manager. (It was closed to the public during the time I visited.) I was able to walk the same walk my current-day character would walk as she investigated the meaning hidden in the sonnet, which gave me invaluable perspective. I was given a private tour of the “old palace,” where Elizabeth was essentially imprisoned by her half-sister, “Bloody” Mary. This is where a pivotal – and invented – scene in my novel occurs, and standing in the great hall gave me the information I needed to write it with confidence. I took dozens of photos while I was there and scribbled pages of notes on the train back to London.

My second research visit was to Westminster Abbey, specifically Henry VII’s Lady Chapel, considered last great masterpiece of English medieval architecture. More relevant to my novel, it’s where Elizabeth is entombed. In a great irony of history, her tomb was placed directly on top of her hated half-sister’s. I was planning to set a climactic scene in the Lady Chapel, so I spent several hours there as groups of tourists came and went. I took notes on the architecture, the various memorials lining the walls, the points of access where my characters could enter and leave.

I imagine I looked more than a little suspicious to the beadles standing watch – yes, they really are called beadles. Their suspicions were no doubt confirmed when I queried them at length about the security cameras installed throughout the Chapel. To my relief, they were as knowledgeable about modern heat-sensitive surveillance technology as medieval history. I couldn’t have conceived of the scene without their expertise.

The beadles, and the welcome I received at Hatfield, reaffirmed a lesson that I’ve learned only gradually over the course of writing seven novels: people are eager to share information, not matter how arcane or unexpected. You just have to ask.

 

Find out more about Seth Margolis and how to order The Semper Sonnet via Seth's website, and you can also follow him on Twitter, Facebook, and Goodreads.

Author R&R with Lis Wiehl

 

Lis Wiehl earned her Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School and her Master of Arts in Literature from the University of Queensland and has forged a career in both tracks. As an attorney, she served as a Federal Prosecutor in the United States Attorney’s office, was a legal analyst and reporter for NBC News, NPR’s All Things Considered, and Fox News, and is a Professor of Law at New York Law School. On the literary side, she has published a series featuring Seattle prosecutor Mia Quinn and homicide detective Charlie Carlson, although her latest legal thriller is The Newsmakers.

The Newsmakers centers on TV reporter Erica Sparks, who is detemined to success in the cutthroat world of big-time broadcasting, even if it means leaving her eight-year-old daughter in the custody of her ex-husband. Erica lands her dream job at Global News Network in New York, but on her very first assignment, Erica inadvertently witnesses — and films — a horrific tragedy, scooping all the other networks. Mere weeks later, another tragedy strikes — again, right in front of Erica and her cameras. But when she becomes a superstar overnight, is it due to her hard work or the result of a spiraling conspiracy that may expose her troubled past?

Wiehl stops by In Reference to Murder today to take some Author R&R and discuss the inspiration for the novel:

I was sitting in a steakhouse in midtown Manhattan when the idea for The Newsmakers hit me.

I'd been casting around for an idea for a new mystery-thriller series. I quickly decided I wanted to set it in a world I knew intimately: cable network news. After all, I'd been a legal analyst and anchor at FOX News for almost 15 years.

I've always been fascinated by journalism and its search for the truth. I think it's a noble and important profession. But it does have a darker side. It gives rogue reporters a platform to advance their careers by embellishing, or even making up, stories. I remembered the Jayson Blair scandal. Blair was the young New York Times reporter who both plagiarized and fabricated stories, often inventing characters and putting words in their mouths that bolstered whatever point he was trying to make in his article. What would happen, I wondered, if an ambitious, even ruthless television journalist engaged in the same thing, with devastating repercussions?

I felt the idea was promising but that it lacked a certain oomph. Then one day my friend Steve Berry, who also writes thrillers and mysteries, and is also an attorney, was in New York. He visited me at FOX news headquarters at 1211 Sixth Avenue, and we then went out to lunch at Del Frisco's steakhouse directly across the street. I was sitting facing the street and over Steve's shoulder I could see 1211 and it scrolling news ticker.

I told Steve my thoughts about my new series, the idea of a reporter who basically creates news to further his career. Steve listened thoughtfully, nodded, and then said the two words that ignited my imagination: "Go big."

I looked across the street at the towering skyscraper that seemed to pierce the clouds, its lower floors belted with the continuous news feed, and it hit it me: What if it wasn't one immoral reporter who was manufacturing the news, what if it was an entire network, led by an evil megalomaniac? And what if his goal wasn't just personal ambition, it was nothing less than world domination?

I felt an immediate surge of adrenaline and ran my brainstorm past Steve, whose eyes lit up. I'm afraid I was lousy company for the rest of the meal, because I couldn't wait to get back to my office and start making notes.

As I scribbled, my excitement grew and I called my agent, Todd Shuster, who has a fantastic editorial eye. Todd loved the idea. He had just read a psychological thriller called The Mentor by Sebastian Stuart, and suggested Stuart might be a strong collaborator. I called Seb and we had an immediate rapport, bouncing ideas off each other with mounting enthusiasm. To my delight he came on board.

The star of the series is Erica Sparks, a young and ambitious regional reporter with more than one dark secret in her past. Erica is the product of an abusive childhood, and struggles to build a healthy relationship with her own 8-year-old daughter. When she's hired by a fledgling cable news network founded by tech billionaire Nylan Hastings, she moves to New York and slowly finds herself pulled into a web of evil and depravity. While the story is certainly big and plot driven, we worked to layer the book with emotional complexity and suspense.

It was great fun to take readers behind the scenes at a cable news network and introduce them to everyone from the hair and makeup people, to the sound and camera techs, to the CEO. It's a messy, thrilling, and ruthless world that literally has its finger on the planet's pulse.

That's how my new series was born. Sometimes I wonder what would, or wouldn't, have happened if Steve and I had swapped places at lunch that day.

© 2015 Lis Wiehl, author of The Newsmakers

 

You can read more about Lis Wiehl and her novels via her website and follow her on Facebook and Twitter.

Author R&R with Scott Allan Morrison

 

Scott Allan Morrison was a journalist for almost twenty years, covering politics, business, and technology in Mexico, Canada, and the United States. Morrison arrived in Silicon Valley as a reporter for the Financial Times during the darkest days of the dot-com crash. Over the course of a decade, Morrison covered most of the world’s top tech companies and chronicled many of Silicon Valley’s greatest stories, including the rise of Internet insecurity and the explosion of social media. Morrison's new thriller Terms of Use, which deals with the weighty issues of cyber security and social media, was inspired in part by Scott's background as a journalist.

Terms of Use centers on Circles, the most popular social network in the world: vast, ubiquitous, and constantly evolving. Days before expanding into China, Circles suffers a devastating cyberattack—and a key executive is brutally murdered. As he fights to save the company he helped build, top engineer Sergio Mansour uncovers evidence of a massive conspiracy that turns the power of Circles against its users. But as Sergio investigates, someone is watching his every move, someone ruthless enough to brand him a criminal and set a vicious hit man on his trail. Desperate to clear his name, Sergio turns to Malina Olson, a beautiful and headstrong doctor who has an agenda of her own. Now, he and Malina must survive long enough to expose the truth in a world without hiding places, where a single keystroke can shift the global balance of power.

Morrison stops by In Reference to Murder today to discuss researching the book and how his background played a role in its writing:

 

I spent a decade as a Silicon Valley correspondent for the Financial Times, Red Herring and Dow Jones Newswires, so I guess you could say I started researching Terms of Use more than 10 years ago without even realizing it.

I covered a wide range of companies, topics and trends, and over time it became apparent the companies that dominate the Internet have amassed great deal of power, most of it derived from their ability to collect and analyze our data.

I also met hundreds of contacts in Silicon Valley, some of whom became friends over time. Often, over dinner and drinks, we’d get into discussions about data privacy and the power of social media, and I realized that industry insiders were concerned about the direction in which we are all moving. Sometimes we’d get into “what if?” discussions and I began to wonder what could happen if this tremendous capability – which can most certainly be a force for good – were to fall into the hands of people with the wrong motives.

I had a pretty good foundation already in place when I set out to research and write Terms of Use. But while I understood what was conceptually possible, I needed a lot of technical guidance to bring my hypothetical scenarios to life on the page. And for me, that meant relying a reporter’s most important research tool: the interview.

Over the next many months, I interviewed dozens of Silicon Valley coders, network architects, security experts, IT consultants, entrepreneurs and even a venture capitalist. But before asking a single question, I made sure they understood what I was writing and why.

By and large, there were no set rules for these meetings. Early discussions were conceptual in nature, as I needed to build a credible plot. Once I settled on the overall arc of the story, I peppered my sources with questions about tech company practices, coding techniques and security measures. The next challenge was to simplify all the technobabble so that it remained accurate, yet easy for a mainstream audience to read. I repeatedly went back to my sources to make sure my interpretation of their words reflected their true meaning.

I also interviewed a friend who is an emergency room doctor. She was basis for my Malina character and the gnarly ER stories in the novel were drawn straight from her experiences. This doctor and many other female friends helped me shape Malina’s personality, and they guided me through a key decision this character makes early in the novel. My friends assured me they might well have made the same choice in the right circumstances.

My greatest challenge was nailing down the procedures, tactics, habits and language of law enforcement. While I could call on dozens of talkative techies, I didn’t know a single police officer or FBI agent. So I began putting out feelers, asking everyone I could think of if they had any connections with someone in law enforcement, whether a brother, uncle, or friend.

I got my first big break when I met a retired county sheriff and fellow author at a writing workshop. After pointing out that several details in one particular scene didn’t ring true, Dave handed me his phone number and told me to call any time I had policing questions. A short while later I discovered the new goalie on my hockey team was an FBI agent and he too agreed to help as necessary.

I never asked either of them to share confidential information. Instead, I’d summarize scenarios I’d concocted – chain of command conflicts, SWAT raids, taskforce meetings, etc. – and ask them to correct me when strayed outside the bounds of verisimilitude. Occasionally they would figuratively delete entire pages and explain how they’d handle a specific situation, right down to the weapons and gear they’d use.

And finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention all those Google searches (the Lebanese emigration to Mexico, the mines of Bayan Obo, WiFi hacking tools, etc), as well as Google Maps. My novel is set in San Francisco, but it takes readers to southern California, China and the Philippines. I used Google Maps to ensure directions, distances and geographic features were accurate. More importantly, I relied heavily on Street View to help me describe scenes in the novel, particularly those set in Beijing and Baotou.

I may have spent as much time researching Terms of Use as I did writing it. But it was time well-spent, because it was crucial in enabling me to create a well-rounded story that has enough depth, context and atmosphere to draw in readers and hold their attention – hopefully – for hours on end.

 

To find out more about Morrison and Terms of Use, check out his website or follow him on Facebook, and you can order a copy of the book here.