Author R&R with H. N. Hirsch

 H. N. Hirsch is currently Erwin N. Griswold Professor of Politics Emeritus at Oberlin College in Ohio. Born in Chicago, he was educated at the University of Michigan and at Princeton. He has also taught at Harvard, the University of California-San Diego, and Macalester College, and has served as Dean of Arts and Sciences at Oberlin. He is the author of The Enigma of Felix Frankfurter ("brilliant and sure to be controversial," The New York Times), A Theory of Liberty, and the memoir Office Hours ("well crafted and wistful," Kirkus), as well as numerous articles on law, politics, and constitutional questions. He is currently writing the Bob and Marcus Mystery series, the first of which, Shade, was published in 2021, with the sequel, Fault Line, following in June 2023.

 

Rain is the third installment in H. N. Hirsch’s acclaimed Bob & Marcus Mystery series featuring Marcus George, a professor at UC San Diego, and his life partner, attorney Bob Abramson. Bob is enlisted to defend one of Marcus’s students who has been accused of murder, in a plot that—naturally enough, in sunny southern California—includes handsome hustlers, arrogant multi-millionaires, and twists and turns that boggle the reader’s mystery-solving skills. Jean Redmann, author of the award-winning Micky Knight Mystery Series, has called the duo of Bob and Marcus "a gay Nick and Nora, a couple you’ll want to spend time and solve mysteries with."

 

H. N. Hirsch stops by In Reference to Murder to take some Author R&R about writing the books:

 

My Bob and Marcus mystery series began on a beach in Maine.

It was the summer of 1984, I was 32 years old, and I had discovered the lovely resort town of Ogunquit, about ninety minutes north of Boston. At the time I was an assistant professor at Harvard and living in a ramshackle apartment on Beacon Hill. Harvard doesn’t pay lowly assistant professors very much, and Boston was an expensive town, even back then, but I saved my pennies and spent a few summer weeks in Ogunquit.

In many ways, the days I spent there were the happiest of my life. The town was charming. It had a small gay colony, was also a magnet for French Canadians, and it had a beautiful, white-sand beach. Every day, if it wasn’t raining, I would rent a little plastic chair from the hotel at the entrance to the beach and sit on the sand and read, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends.

That summer, I had discovered the mystery novels of Amanda Cross. Cross was in fact Carolyn Heilbrun, a distinguished professor of English and American literature at Columbia University in New York. Her amateur sleuth was (not surprisingly) also a professor of literature at Columbia, Kate Fansler. Many of the books had an academic setting.

Most novels in the series were delightful and fun, but one day, I finished one I didn’t think was very good. I slammed it down on the sand and said to my friends, “We could do better than that!”

These friends, like me, were young academics.

So we started hatching a mystery plot. I don’t remember what moved us to do so, but once we got going, we were throwing ideas around, who killed who, how, why. Of course, since we were all academics, the murder victim was a Harvard student and the amateur detective a young Harvard assistant professor, like me.

I took notes. In the Fall, back at Harvard, nose to the grindstone, I put the notes away.

Flash forward to the Spring of 2020—thirty-six years later. That Spring, of course, is when Covid hit and we all put ourselves on lockdown. As it happens, it was also my last semester of teaching before retirement—I was now sixty-eight years old and teaching at Oberlin College in Ohio.

Like everyone, Covid meant my plans shifted abruptly. I had been planning to move to Chicago, my hometown, travel, possibly do some research at the Library of Congress in my academic field, American constitutional law—but, of course, none of that was now going to happen. Everything was on hold.

I needed something to do.

So after finishing the semester via online teaching, and then sleeping for a month, I puttered around the house, and one day took out the notes from 1984. It was the first time I had looked at them, and reading them over, I could almost smell the ocean and the sunscreen.  

And I thought, “you know, this isn’t half-bad.”

So I ordered several books from Amazon on how to write mysteries—there are some very good ones—and got to work. I had always been a fan of mystery series—Dorothy Sayers, Tony Hillerman, Stuart Woods—and had a pretty good grasp of what made them work.

So I started to write. To my delight and surprise, I enjoyed it, and the writing went quickly. I had never written fiction of any kind, and it felt a bit like I was using muscles that I had neglected during decades of scholarly writing.

And in fiction, you got to make things up. Who knew.

I set that first mystery, Shade, in 1985, around the time I had first made the notes. Marcus, my amateur sleuth, was of course gay like me, and some of what I wanted to accomplish in the novel was to document what it was like to be a gay man back then, although I’ve also tried to be  careful to write the novels in a manner that would appeal to any reader.

As the series has continued, I have moved forward in time. The second novel in the series, Fault Line, is set in 1989, after Bob and Marcus have moved to San Diego (just as I did), and the third, Rain, is set in 2004.

There have been a number of very well done gay mystery series—Michael Nava’s books perhaps the most distinguished contemporary example—but it was a genre that was, and remains, relatively under-developed. There were potboilers published constantly, but “serious” gay mysteries, mysteries with something to say beyond the sex, have been relatively few and far between.

In my reading of mystery series over the years, what kept me reading was less the murder or the crime and more the character of the detective or detectives, seeing them develop as people and change over time.

Since Marcus, the amateur sleuth at the center of Shade, was also a young professor, the novels also offered me an opportunity to describe and comment on academic life. I made Bob, who becomes Marcus’s partner in life, a law student and then a lawyer, which allowed me to focus in subsequent novels on his defense of various criminals. And, since I taught constitutional law for the bulk of my teaching career, including a course on Criminal Law, I was already familiar with police investigations and the complications that can ensue.

So my research has in my many ways been shaped by my own life and observation—as a gay man, as an academic, and as someone with an interest in the law. When I’ve needed more detailed information about the finer points of the law, I’ve found most of the information I need on the internet, and have on one or two occasions also called on former students, many of whom are now lawyers, with my questions (one of them helpfully offering to represent me when the novels are sold to Hollywood. If only.)

After Shade, the next entries in the series are set in San Diego, where I moved in 1986 to teach at the branch of the University of California. So once again I was able to draw on my own experience and make location a central element of the story. California is different—amazingly so. Going from Boston to San Diego, and from Harvard to a large state university, was a bit like moving to another planet.

The third entry in the series, Rain, will be published shortly. In this entry, it is now 2004, and Bob and Marcus have been together for a long time, almost twenty years. Marcus is approaching 50 and Bob is coming up on 40. Following them over time has given me a chance to comment not just on crimes but also on how lives shift and change over time, something we all experience, gay and straight alike.

So, after a lifetime in academic life, I have, much to my surprise, become a writer of  mysteries. . .and perhaps, if my former student is right, the executive producer of a television mini-series.

Life is full of surprises. And mystery.

 

You can learn more about H. N. Hirsch and his books via his website and follow him on Facebook. Rain is now available via Pisgah Press and all major booksellers.

Author R&R with Peter Colt

 Peter Colt is a 1996 graduate of the University of Rhode Island with a BA in Political Science and a 24-year veteran of the Army Reserve, with deployments to Kosovo and Iraq as an Army Civil Affairs officer. He is currently a police officer in Rhode Island and married with two sons and two perpetually feuding cats. He is the author of the Andy Roark mysteries: The Off-Islander, Back Bay Blues, Death at Fort Devens, The Ambassador, and the latest installment, The Judge.

The Judge is set in Boston, December 1985. Judge Ambrose Messer, who’s overseeing the bench trial of a chemical company accused of knowingly dumping chemical waste—causing birth defects and cancer—becomes the target of blackmail. The judge doesn’t want a threat to corrupt his judgement, but he also has secrets of his own he doesn’t want revealed. Ex-military operative turned private investigator, Andy Roark, is sent on the blackmailer’s trail, but the disturbing, unexpected revelations he uncovers make him a target of some very dangerous people, who seem determined not only to wreck the life of his client, but to destroy Roark's too.

Peter Colt stops by In Reference to Murder to take some Author R&R about writing and researching his books:

 

The Off Islander was born out of two things, Facebook and John Plaster's excellent book Secret Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines with the Elite Warriors of SOG. In 2008 my wife introduced me to Facebook, and I started to reconnect with old friends from my hometown of Nantucket Island. I was also reading Plaster’s outstanding account of Green Berets conducting extremely hazardous reconnaissance missions on the Ho Chi Minh Trail during the Vietnam war. 

One night after the duty day was done, I started to write the type of detective novel that I liked to read. I wanted to set the book in a time period that was pre-Google, pre-GPS, pre-Air Tag and pre-internet, but I didn’t want it to be so far in the past that I was going to be in danger of getting the day-to-day details wrong. I settled on 1982 and I made my protagonist a veteran of the U.S. Army’s ultra-secret Special Forces element in Vietnam, known as the Studies and Observation Group (SOG). I had taken Raymond Chandler’s advice about private detectives having to be loners, and what could be more secluded than being a survivor of an elite unit within the Army’s elite?

I was very lucky to end up with an agent and a book deal which led to five Andy Roark books (I am working on number six now). The Off Islander was something that evolved with the bare idea of a plot and the final gunfight, whereas my next book, Back Bay Blues, was a much more heavily plotted and researched book. Back Bay Blues was set in 1985 and dealt with the experience of Vietnamese immigrants in the U.S. The mothballed fleet of Navy vessels in Suisun Bay, California, figured heavily in the story.

My first book had received good reviews and positive feedback from Vietnam veterans. I was very much aware of the fact there were veterans from SOG still alive, as well as other Vietnam veterans, and I had this nightmarish vision of them, or any reader for that matter, throwing the book down in disgust because I got the details wrong. The only thing I could do was research, the type of research my professors in college wished I had done for any paper.

My approach to research is two-fold:  first and foremost, I spent time and money building up a library of books by and about the men of SOG. I practically stopped reading fiction because most of my time was taken up reading the history, learning about the tactics, the weapons, and the kit they used. For instance, if I had my guy at a certain camp in Vietnam, I wanted to make sure it wasn’t some generic description but the most accurate one I could offer.

Many of the scenes and missions that Andy Roark relays to the reader are drawn from the research done in books. This posed another challenge, to make sure any scenes in Vietnam weren’t too similar to the first-person accounts. The best way to ensure I didn’t commit that sin was by meticulously researching the events. In Back Bay Blues, Andy Roark and two of his friends are at a real event that took place when enemy sappers attacked the Special Forces camp in Nha Trang. It led to the single largest loss of Army Special Forces soldiers in the Vietnam War. I wanted to make sure that I got those details right.

Death at Fort Devens, the third Andy Roark book, takes place at Fort Devens and Boston’s infamous Combat Zone (the city's adult entertainment district). I had been going to Fort Devens for various types of reasons since 1991, when it was still an Active Duty post, and later after it was closed leaving a small Reserve/National Guard training area in its place. I had on many occasions cut through the Combat Zone as a kid going from the Greyhound bus station to eat in Boston’s Chinatown neighborhood, but I didn’t trust my memory of either place. Fortunately, I was able to find books about both and relied upon them heavily to get the details right.

The other major tool I use to research my books is the Internet. Google is a fantastic tool. When I was writing Back Bay Blues, I was able to use Google Earth to give me an idea of the approximate location of the U.S. Navy’s mothball fleet. Now when I was writing about Andy Roark swimming from one of the boats, I was able to approximate the distance. I was able to accurately describe where he came ashore versus just inventing it. I was also able to use it to give me an idea of what the roads and businesses were like in the area in 1985.

In Death at Fort Devens, I also wanted to use the taillights of a 1975 Ford Maverick as a plot point. A quick image search showed me the many different variations of the taillights that were used on the Maverick, but I was able to match the image to the year model and accurately describe. Why go to all the trouble, one might ask? Simple, because out there, somewhere is a fan of the books who is a "car guy." If I get an easily researched detail wrong, it takes a little something away from the story for them.

In The Ambassador, a portion of the book is set in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, and I wanted to create a seedy, waterfront area. It wouldn’t do if my fictional area turned out to be in a nice neighborhood or a state park. It might not be important to a reader in Arizona or Wisconsin, but it probably means a lot to a reader in Fairhaven, Massachusetts.

I remember reading a Robert B. Parker novel when I was a teenager. Parker’s Spenser was on a case that took him to a brothel in my other hometown of Providence, Rhode Island. Imagine my surprise when the building in question wasn’t just in my city, my neighborhood, my block, but was either my apartment building or the one across the street! Parker’s description was good enough that I knew he had been on my street and so accurate that I could tell which building it was. But, boy oh boy, I was somehow living in a Spenser novel!

My latest book, The Judge, opens with Andy Roark waiting in the world famous restaurant/bar, Jacob Wirths, a Boston institution with a long history. My dad had taken me there as a kid a couple of times, but I couldn’t describe it from memory. If I had tried and gotten it wrong, then my story’s credibility would have gone down the drain with any readers in Boston who know Wirths. But a search of the internet for images and a look at Wikipedia for the history allowed me to accurately describe it.

Why go to the trouble? Why spend hundreds of dollars on books and hundreds of hours researching small details? Yes, I am that guy who will research the headlines, what was on the Billboard Top 100, even the weather the days that I imagine the story taking place. Why go to all that trouble? The short answer is for the reader. They are paying good money or going to the library for my books. They are investing their time. There is a wealth of books out there, but if someone picks up my book, I want them to get their money’s worth. I want them to enjoy it and when they close the book, I want them to miss the characters and the story. All of that can be ruined in a flash by getting easily researched details wrong. The reader deserves better than that.

 

You can learn more about Peter Colt and his books via his website and follow him on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Goodreads. The Judge is now available via Severn House and all major booksellers.