After graduating from the University of Maryland with a degree in Economics, Mel Harrison joined the US Department of State, spending the majority of his career in the Diplomatic Security Service, winning the State Department Award for Valor and its worldwide Regional Security Officer of the Year Award. Following government retirement, Mel spent ten years in corporate security and consulting work with assignments often taking him throughout Latin America and the Middle East, before turning his hand to writing. He’s penned six books in the series featuring Alex Boyd, a State Department special agent and regional security officer with the Diplomatic Security Service, including the latest installment in that series, Crescent City Carnage.
In Crescent City Carnage, Alex Boyd and Rachel Smith are only a day into their long-awaited vacation in New Orleans to join their good friend and colleague, Simone Ardoin, when she is brutally murdered. Simone’s well-connected parents, long-time residents of New Orleans, are devastated by the tragedy and implore both Alex and Rachel to work with the New Orleans Police Department to find her killer. The city is infamous for its laissez-faire attitude, as well as its corruption. Nevertheless, Alex must work with the city's cops to break the case, also drawing support from State Department special agents. Identifying the killer is one thing but locating him proves more complicated than anticipated—Is the killer just lucky or does he have an inside source who is helping him stay one step ahead of the cops? The more Alex and Rachel delve into the case, the more they discover that New Orleans is a unique city full of its own traditions, family ties, and way of life. But the clock is ticking, and they need to capture the killer before he disappears forever.
Mel Harrison stops by In Reference to Murder to take some Author R&R today about writing the book:
Toward the end of my twenty-eight year career in the Foreign Service, serving as either a special agent with Diplomatic Security or as an economic officer, I realized that I had experienced a number of adventures in my lifetime that could be turned into intriguing action thrillers. After State Department retirement, I worked another ten years for corporate security, accumulating even more experiences. Finally, in complete retirement, it was time to challenge myself and start the writing process.
I have always enjoyed the action-adventure/thriller genre for my own reading, and so began my writing journey. I decided to write about what I knew and where I had served or visited, rather than struggling with unfamiliar territory. My six novels are based upon my personal experiences, albeit, with embellished characters and scenes to excite the audience. While the books and characters are fiction, they are often composites from real life, either experienced by me, or drawn from situations of which I am aware.
Many of the location settings, such as Rome, London, or Paris, I have visited again and again. Additional places, like Cairo or Islamabad, I also worked there and visited in retirement, even if less frequently than the former set of locations. As an avid photographer, I can research details of sites that my memory is vague on. Also, I use the internet to research technical details on everything from weapons to foreign police structures to plants and vegetation. Finally, nothing beats firsthand knowledge, so I have sought out subject matter experts, as needed.
While most people will say that thrillers are plot-driven, I love to create memorable characters as well. Just as the stories are fictional, so are my characters. Yet, I have drawn on people I have known, put them in different settings than where we met, and added features to their personality or appearance to make the reader feel that they can visualize the character or understand his or her motivation.
Equally important, I always think a long time about how to create villains. Reading how other authors handle this issue can be instructive. No one who buys a book wants to read about cardboard characters, and this includes the bad guys. The villains may be evil or demented, but they also have families and friends. Therefore, they need to be three dimensional and realistic. The reader needs to understand the villain’s motivation. Without excellent villains, the author doesn’t have an interesting story to tell.
I must note that I have a lot of restaurant scenes in my six books. Okay, I admit it, my wife and I are foodies. Here is a tidbit readers should know. Every restaurant in every book is real, and what my protagonist, Alex Boyd, and his wife, Rachel, are eating, my own wife and I have eaten at that very restaurant.
When I began creating my stories, I knew I wanted to put my protagonist, Alex Boyd, in harm’s way. Since he is a trained special agent, I needed to have him carry a firearm. For me, the best solution was the simplest. He either uses the real weapons issued by the Diplomatic Security Service, or in the one book, Moving Target, where is working in the private sector, I gave him a weapon that I personally owned and fired many times. Sometimes authors who are not familiar with guns get tripped up trying to write firearms scenes that just would not work in the real world.
An area that can be difficult to write about involves the sexual relationship of my two main characters, Alex Boyd and Rachel Smith. When they first meet in Death in Pakistan, there is an immediate attraction, both physically and intellectually. The question is how far an author should describe this relationship. I took the view that the reader must believe their love for each other is deep and real. It must be based on something more than a casual handshake. Therefore, sex is part of that relationship and needs to be presented to the reader without going over-the-top into pornographic description. Since Rachel is put in harm’s way several times in my novels, the feelings Alex and Rachel have for each other must be based upon the full spectrum of emotions.
I will close with a final point about politics. I try to leave politics out of my books as much as possible. Readers buy novels to escape everyday life. They want to be entertained, not lectured too. Of course, Alex and his colleagues occasionally mock a specific Washington policy as wrong-headed, but that is different than the author taking gratuitous shots at either political party. When I worked in the Foreign Service, the internet had not yet been created. Therefore, there was no social media or even cable TV channels. I honestly did not know the politics of my fellow Foreign Service officer. It wasn’t important to getting the job done or to protecting employees from terrorists, kidnappers, spies, or criminals.
You can follow Mel Harrison on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Goodreads. Crescent City Carnage is now available via all major booksellers.
