Author R&R with Janet Roger

 

Janet Roger trained in archaeology, history, and English Lit, with a special interest in the early Cold War. Her debut crime novel, Shamus Dust: Hard Winter, Cold War, Cool Murder, is being compared to the Marlowe novels of Raymond Chandler in five-star reviews and centers on a private investigator seeking to solve a series of holiday murders:

Two candles flaring at a Christmas crib. A nurse who steps inside a church to light them. A gunshot emptied in a man's head in the creaking stillness before dawn, that the nurse says she didn't hear. It's 1947 in the snowbound, war-scarred city of London, where Pandora's Box just got opened in the ruins, City Police has a vice killing on its hands, and a spooked councilor hires a shamus to help spare his blushes. Like the Buddha says, everything is connected...so it all can be explained. But that's a little cryptic when you happen to be the shamus, and you're standing over a corpse.

Janet Roger stops by In Reference to Murder today to talk about writing and researching her book.

 

How did Shamus Dust come to be? Well, that’s going back a while. Let me explain. It’s a novel written and then set aside in a drawer - well in a computer file, it wasn’t quite that long ago - then looked at again years later when I had some time to reflect on it. That initial draft dates way back to when I first lived and worked in and around the City of London, the capital’s financial Square Mile - or for our American gumshoe, London’s Wall Street. Now that I think of it, I doubt the idea for Shamus Dust could possibly have sparked outside that time and place. For three reasons.

In the first place, just then I’d been re-reading two very different crime writers that I thought most impressive. Raymond Chandler and Georges Simenon had both left indelible portraits of the cities where they set their stories. Neither was a native son, any more than I was native to London, yet both seemed to have a direct line to the essence of the places their characters moved through. In fact, they did such a job on the moods and atmospheres of Los Angeles and Paris, that they still colour our images of those cities today. When it comes down to researching, they show you that nothing - but nothing - beats breathing the air of the streets you plan to write about. It so happened that, at the time, I was breathing the air of London’s Square Mile. 

The second reason needs some recent history explaining. The City really is, more or less, the single square mile contained inside the arc of its ancient Roman walls. Its southern edge runs along the Thames shore. If you knew where to look, even in my days there, it bore some last scars of the wartime blitz. But reel back to the early Cold War, and a third of that square mile was still flattened rubble. It was archaeologists’ dreamland. For a few short years, digging in those blitz sites gave them unimagined access to a two-thousand years old Roman city right beneath their feet, and they wasted no time. Before reconstruction got seriously under way they’d already made monumental discoveries: a Roman temple, a Roman fortress on the line of the wall, even the foundations of an arena - a Roman coliseum, no less.

And there’s the puzzle. The discovery of the temple and the fortress made instant splash headlines. Yet London’s very own Roman coliseum - yes, there really is one - got overlooked. Seriously. And then entirely forgotten about until a rainy day almost forty years later, when the drawings were noticed in the archaeological record. That chance rediscovery intrigued me when I heard about it. Not only that, I was right there where it had been found. And where better to be able to follow the story back? I had the marvellous Museum of London. The Guildhall Library close by (with Cecil Brown’s astonishing birds-eye drawing of bomb damage in the Square Mile, made from a wartime barrage balloon). And of course, I had the bookshops. Which brings me to my third reason.

The London Encyclopedia? It’s a compendium history of the capital, street by street and too heavy to lug around, but a bible that sent me walking everywhere. (And left me with a habit of walking any city I’m in). Muirhead’s Short Guide to London 1947? It was a sort of visitor’s Baedeker, post zone by post zone, invaluable for checking that streets had survived the bombing and buildings still stood. There were many, many others, but you get the picture. We’re talking pre-internet search. There was no substitute for trawling the bookstores, and the irreplaceable second-hand bazaars. Then, far more than now, London was a book hound’s Aladdin’s cave.

So how did that coliseum puzzle work out? Happily, in the end. After its rediscovery in 1988, the amphitheatre was excavated for more than a decade, then opened to the public in a spectacular new gallery below ground (don’t miss it if you haven’t seen it). As for how evidence of a Roman arena - it’s the size of a football field - simply went unnoticed for so long, it still gets explained as a regrettable oversight, one of those things.

Shamus Dust tells the story rather differently. It goes back to the early Cold War years, when rebuilding the City was up for grabs, fortunes were staked on a construction boom and those blitz sites were some of the most valuable real estate on the planet. In this telling, the interests include high-end racketeers as well as corrupt City grandees, who think delaying construction would be very bad karma. Cue a monumental discovery on a construction site that nobody will get to hear of. Cue the apparent vice killing that gets Shamus Dust under way. And cue the hardboiled gumshoe who gets hired for the cover-up.

And that’s pretty much how Shamus Dust came to be. Thank you for asking! And one last thing. In 1949, just after the film’s huge critical and box-office success, Graham Greene wrote that The Third Man had been meant to entertain, make an audience laugh, and frighten a little. Of the grim Viennese penicillin racket it revolves around, he says it was the reality - but that the reality was only background to a fairytale. I think that’s spot on. Wonderful storyteller as Greene is, he’s no slouch at research. But he also understands that it’s never more than a point of departure. What you need then is to conjure some magic. I’m really glad you didn’t ask me where that comes from.

 

Published by Troubador, Shamus Dust is available for purchase on Amazon UK and Amazon US. Learn more about the book and Janet Roger via the author's website, and follow her on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Goodreads.

Author R&R with Mark Bergin

 

Author Mark Bergin’s career as an award-winning crime reporter then police officer spanned nearly 30 years and resulted in him being named Police Officer of the year twice, for drug and robbery investigation. His career also put him in close contact with a difficult and often overlooked issue in American culture: police suicide. Currently, more police officers are lost to suicide than to conflicts in the line of duty. Bergin brings awareness to this weighted issue in his debut work, Apprehension, and plans to donate a portion of his sales directly to the National Police Suicide Foundation and similar programs.

Apprehension tells of the four best and worst days in Alexandria Police Detective John Kelly’s life. Preparing for a pedophile trial to save a young boy, Kelly discovers that a terrible, secret act he committed after his niece was murdered is about to surface. It could mean the end of his career or his freedom. And his girlfriend, the molester’s defense attorney, has a secret, too, one that will destroy Kelly on the witness stand. Crushing challenges and violent horrors rain on Kelly, pushing him to the brink and beyond.

Bergin stops by In Reference to Murder to take some Author R&R and researching and wriring Apprehension:

 

I researched all my life for my first novel, APPREHENSION. Right up to my death. 

I started writing it more than thirty years ago, during a bad personal and professional patch. I was a police officer on a busy plainclothes drug unit in Alexandria, Virginia, working fifty to sixty hours a week, and another ten or twenty in court (lots of police work equals lots of trials.) I was also going through a divorce, in part because my wife didn't like cops and I had just become one. 

I think personal angst is good for artistic impulse, and I found myself compelled to write several pages of notes for a mystery novel about a cop under stress. Write what you know. I promptly put the notes away and had a successful divorce, followed by a very successful marriage, children, a slower but satisfying career, promotion to a command level and, finally, two heart attacks. I actually died in each, but came back, leading to retirement. 

Suddenly off the force with nothing to do, I pulled out the old notes and began linking together what was essentially a beginning, some disjointed middle bits, and an ending. From the time I was a teenager I had seen writing a book as the peak of creative success. I had been a newspaper reporter for four years before joining the police, but that form of writing seemed far from artistry.

I began thinking of this story in 1988, so its narrative, crisis, and denouement stayed stuck in that time frame. When I picked it up again years later, I had to remind myself about the nuts and bolts of police life back then: what cruisers we drove, what radio identifiers and procedures were in place, how Headquarters was laid out.  But I also wanted to write a timeless novel that cops, especially my former partners, could read and say, "This is how it is, how it was, how it feels to be a police officer." I wanted it to be a novel they could give to family and friends as an example of what some cops go through physically and mentally. 

The truth is that I got most of the details wrong at first. A beta reader and retired Alexandria captain pointed out that we drove Plymouth K-cars in 1988, not Dodge Monacos. A former deputy chief helped me remember the patrol command structure on the street back then. A friend and Veterans Administration social worker gave me articles and advice on stress and PTSD. Very little of it was deliberate research, more like intelligent conversations with smart people who kept me on the right path to accomplish two of my goals: to write a compelling story for the general public and to satisfy my knowledgeable and demanding police audience.

My heart attacks led me to a third goal. Right before surgery I met a nurse who told me my one-hundred percent blockage of the left anterior descending artery was known in the medical field as "The Widowmaker."  She put her hand on my shoulder and said, "You're not supposed to be here anymore. God's got something more for you to do." When I finally began writing, I decided to give the book a greater purpose than just storytelling. I switched up the themes of the book to fully emphasize stress and PTSD and decided I would dedicate half my profits to programs that combat law enforcement suicide. Every year, more cops kill themselves than are killed on the street. In my time with the Alexandria Police Department, one fellow officer was murdered, while three shot themselves to death, and two city deputies also were victims of suicide. Five to one. A higher ratio than the national average, symbolic of a problem much unknown outside the law enforcement profession and mostly unconfronted inside. 

In APPREHENSION, Detective John Kelly prepares for a trial of a pedophile to protect the offender's son and victim but learns his own terrible but hidden act of violence committed last year is about to be discovered. Kelly will lose his job and maybe go to prison, but he can't stop it from surfacing. Meanwhile, the defense attorney in the case is his secret girlfriend, with her own secrets; one she can joyously share with Kelly, the other she must destroy him with in court. Kelly's stress pushes him to a desperate end. 

I hope the book raises awareness of police suicide and some funds to combat it. I hope it can act as a conversation starter among police agencies to help knock down the walls of weakness, shame, and privacy that stop us from seeking help. I also hope folks enjoy the mystery, but that's no longer up to me.

You find out more about Mark Bergin and Apprehension on his website and follow him on Facebook. Apprehension is now available through all major book retailers.

Author R&R with John DeDakis

 

John DeDakis is a former Senior Copy Editor on CNN's "The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer" and is also the author of five novels in the Lark Chadwick mystery-suspense series.  His fourth novel, Bullet in the Chamber, is the winner of the Reviewers Choice, Foreword INDIES, and Feathered Quill book awards. DeDakis regularly teaches novel writing at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland, at the Politics & Prose Bookstore in D.C., and at various writing conferences and literary centers around the U.S. and abroad. In his spare time, what little he has of it, he’s a jazz drummer. 

His fifth novel, Fake, was published by Strategic Media Books in September 2019. In Fake, Lark is a White House correspondent in a #MeToo era when facts are suspect and reporters are targets. When popular First Lady Rose Gannon dies suddenly (and mysteriously) during an interview with White House correspondent Lark Chadwick, Lark is thrust into the midst of a media-bashing frenzy. Lark, still reeling from the death of her photographer boyfriend, finds herself covering a grieving president struggling with his pain while trying to defuse a looming nuclear war. In the era of “fake news,” when all “facts” are suspect (and reporters are targets), Lark tries to discover the truth while also under personal attack.

John DeDakis stops by In Reference to Murder today to talk about writing and researching his books:

 

Research: Writing What You DON’T Know

You’ve heard it a gazillion times: “Write what you know.” And, for someone who wants to be a writer, that’s excellent advice. The words flow easily when they come from a familiar place.

But what do you do when the story you’re writing requires knowledge about something that’s unfamiliar to you? Yes, the obvious answer is research. And this website is a fabulous resource. But let’s be honest: research can also be an endless detour down a rabbit hole of procrastination.

Here’s the dilemma: you’ll never know everything, but how can you tell when you know enough?

The answer will be different for everyone, but here’s how I’ve answered it over the course of writing five mystery-suspense novels:

Get Oriented: I begin a project focusing on what I DO know. Much of what I write is drawn from personal experience and places where I’ve lived, visited, or worked. Invariably, however, I’ll realize during the project’s planning phase that there are some things I need to know more about. When that happens, Google and Wikipedia become my best friends. I create a research folder and add links to articles and websites that flesh out the details of what I might need. This preliminary research gets me oriented, but it’s also a moment of grave danger. If I’m not careful, I’ll never leave this phase. It’s probably similar to what it must be like for a newly-recovering alcoholic to walk into a bar. For a writer, research is like catnip – you can never get enough.

Write the First Draft Straight Through: The best advice I ever got about writing comes from Robert Ray’s excellent book, The Weekend Novelist. Ray recommends that you turn off your internal editor and write your first draft all the way through. Resist the temptation to allow your forward momentum to be blunted while you track down a fact you don’t know. Simply make a note to yourself in the manuscript, using all caps, to “find out more about X.” Then, move on. Keep writing.

Use Your Imagination: As a writer, I’ve discovered something very spooky: the act of writing is like a straw that taps into my subconscious. Ideas, voices, and images show up as I type. It sounds counterintuitive, but, for me, the best way to break writer’s block is to write. So, when my writing enters unfamiliar territory, I allow my imagination (not research) to propel me forward. The goal here is momentum, not accuracy.

Target What You Need to Know:  Finishing the first draft is exhilarating: It’s done! But it’s also depressing: It sucks!! Yet I can’t say enough about the sense of accomplishment that’s a direct result of having worked through the initial problems inherent in writing a novel from beginning to end. The hard part is over; now comes the fun part. No longer will your research be endless. Now that you have the essentials of your story written down, you can identify those items you need to learn more about.

Beta Readers and Going There:  As I said earlier, “In Reference to Murder” is a wonderful website where you can get answers to many questions that might have surfaced as you were writing your manuscript. But, in addition, let me suggest two other research resources: Beta Readers and Going There. Portions of my second novel, Bluff, take place along the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu in the Andes Mountains of Peru. After I’d written several drafts, I was looking at pictures of the Inca Trail online and realized I needed to go there to experience it. I booked a trip and hiked the trail (four days, 15-thousand feet, 25 miles). I came back with several experiences that added depth and texture to the finished product. In my third novel, Troubled Water, 911 calls play an important part. One of my beta readers, Karen Hoel, used to train 911 operators in Wisconsin. I used my imagination to write the first draft, then sent the 911 chapters to Karen. She corrected some of my misconceptions, but when she read a scene I’d concocted out of thin air, I was stunned and relieved when she told me, “I’ve actually been in that situation.”  Who knew?! (My subconscious did – spooky, indeed.)

Final thought:

Keep in mind that a novel shouldn’t be a pedantic data dump. The story is the most important thing. Your research should serve the story by making the characters, the setting, and the situation come alive.

 

You can find out more about John DeDakis and his books via his website and follow him on Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads. John's books, including Fake, are available via all major book retailers.