Author R&R with Terry R. Bacon

Terry R. Bacon is a poet, playwright, and novelist, author of the Sonny Marshall series of suspense thrillers and The Cerulean Ark, a science-fiction thriller. He is also the award-winning author of a dozen non-fiction titles, and was named one of the Top 100 Thinkers on Leadership in the World by Executive Excellence magazine. He has a Ph.D. in Literary Studies from the American University and a B.S. in Engineering from West Point. In his varied career, he has been a soldier, an intelligence agent, an educator, a political activist, a corporate leader, a global consultant, a musician, a blogger, a student of history and cosmology, and a world traveler. His latest project is the futuristic Sonny Marshall thriller, Storm Damage.

In the book, musician and reluctant hero Sonny Marshall faces a new storm brewing in San Francisco. A wave of horrific, random violence sweeps the city, turning ordinary citizens into savage killers. The cause: a deadly designer drug called Zombie. At the same time, another drug, Rapture, promises a blissful escape that ends in a catatonic state—a fate that befalls Sonny’s own bandmate. With detective Kat Hastings, Sonny hunts for the ghost-like chemist behind the chaos, a brilliant and ruthless mastermind playing God. They must stop him before his storm of engineered madness consumes the city entirely.

Terry R. Bacon stops by In Reference to Murder to take some Author R&R about researching and writing the book:

Hearing the Mystery: How Sonny Marshall Solves Crimes Through Music

By Terry R. Bacon

Every detective needs a way of seeing the world. Sherlock Holmes notices details others dismiss. Hercule Poirot studies psychology. Philip Marlowe expects everyone to be lying. Sonny Marshall listens.

Sonny is a saxophonist, a blues and jazz musician who approaches a mystery much as he approaches a piece of music. He listens for recurring phrases, notices variations, and senses when something has fallen out of rhythm. He believes scattered clues are not isolated facts. They are notes in a composition. Find the pattern, and you can hear the melody. Hear the melody, and you can begin to understand the story.

A collection of unrelated tones is noise. It is chaotic, formless, and indecipherable. Music has structure. A phrase creates expectation, a rhythm repeats, and one chord introduces tension that another resolves. Even experimental music establishes some relationship among its sounds. There is an underlying logic, whether the listener recognizes it immediately or not.

Sonny believes criminal behavior works much the same way. Criminals may want the police to think their actions are random. They may alter certain details, plant false evidence, or deliberately create confusion. But most criminals do not reinvent themselves every morning. They learn from experience, discover what works, abandon what does not, and develop habits. Those habits become a modus operandi.

A burglar learns which windows are easiest to force. A kidnapper develops preferred methods of surveillance, capture, transportation, and concealment. Criminals adapt, but their adaptations create patterns. In Sonny's mind, criminals are composers, although usually not very admirable ones. Their actions form the song of their criminal behavior. Every decision becomes a note. Every repeated technique becomes a refrain. Every deviation may signal a mistake, an improvisation, or a change in the person playing the tune. The detective's task is to listen carefully enough to recognize the composition.

Imagine that a girl is kidnapped by a man dressed as a security guard. That is the first note. By itself, it tells the investigator something important: the kidnapper used the appearance of authority to approach the victim without immediately alarming her. The disguise was part of the strategy.

Then comes the second note. Witnesses report that the supposed security guard placed the girl in a car driven by someone else. Now the investigation has direction. This was no soloist. It was a duet, and maybe an ensemble. The kidnapping required coordination, planning, and assigned roles. One person made the approach while the other drove the getaway car.

The third note arrives when the car is found burning near a freeway entrance. That changes the composition again. The kidnappers disposed of evidence. They picked a disposal site that offered a quick escape, which suggests another vehicle was waiting nearby. The burning car was not an act of panic. It was part of the plan.

Three clues do not solve the crime, but they begin to reveal the kind of song the criminals are playing. Investigators can now ask better questions. Where did the abductor get the uniform? Who did the burning car belong to? Was it stolen? If so, where and when? How much planning went into this abduction? And was the victim random or chosen?

Once Sonny begins to hear the melody, he can anticipate where the music may go next. This does not mean he possesses some supernatural power to solve crimes through jazz. His musical thinking is a form of pattern recognition. He holds the clues in his mind, listens for relationships among them, and searches for the structure that turns apparently disconnected facts into a coherent sequence of decisions. Other investigators may arrange evidence on a board. Sonny arranges it in his head like a musical score.

Repetition matters because it reveals preference. Preference reveals habit, and habit reveals the person behind the crime. Perhaps the offender repeatedly chooses similar victims, attacks near highways, or uses the same kind of deception. The surface details may vary while the underlying purpose remains the same. To another investigator, these may be recurring details. To Sonny, they are musical phrases.

But Sonny also listens for variation. A skilled jazz musician does not simply repeat a melody exactly. He bends it, extends it, answers it, or departs from it before returning. Criminals also improvise. They encounter witnesses, resistance, mechanical failures, or a collapsing timetable. The resulting deviation may be especially revealing.

When one crime differs from the others, investigators naturally ask whether it was committed by the same person. Sonny asks another question: Is this a different song, or is it an improvisation on the same melody? That distinction can determine whether an inconsistency is meaningless or whether it exposes the offender's circumstances. A hurried disposal may indicate interruption. A new target may reflect desperation. A changed location may suggest lost access to a familiar place or fear that police are closing in. The wrong note is not always a mistake in the investigation. Sometimes it is the most important note in the score.

Sonny's musical approach is not only analytical. It is also emotional. Blues and jazz tell stories through longing, grief, anger, humor, defiance, and hope, often without words. A musician learns to hear not only what is being played but what is being felt, and that sensitivity helps Sonny understand people.

A witness may be factually accurate while withholding the emotional truth. A suspect may answer correctly but sound rehearsed. A grieving relative's anger may actually conceal guilt, fear, or helplessness. Sonny listens to speech as a musician listens to phrasing. He notices pauses, repetitions, changes in tempo, and the emotional weight placed on particular words. He hears when a person's story remains technically consistent but no longer sounds true. This is not magic but attention. Music has trained him to recognize that meaning often exists beneath the literal surface. The notes matter, but so do the spaces between them.

Sonny's musical mind is not accidental. It grew from my own experience with music. I learned to play the saxophone in junior high school, played in the school band, and later joined a rock band that became mildly successful in my hometown. I was never the musician Sonny is, but music became deeply embedded in the way I experience the world.

I also experience musical ear syndrome. During virtually every waking moment, I hear an internally generated soundtrack behind my conscious thoughts. As a result, music occupies an unusually large part of my mental landscape. Melodies surface without invitation, rhythms repeat, and one phrase leads to another. Music is part of the machinery through which my mind organizes experience.

That explains why Sonny Marshall became a saxophonist. Authors distribute pieces of themselves among their characters: doubts, anger, humor, and sometimes the courage they wish they possessed. Fictional detectives may be especially revealing because their methods reflect the way their creators believe truth can be discovered. Sonny is not me, but his relationship with music comes from me.

He is also, admittedly, a bit of wish fulfillment. I was never as accomplished a musician as I imagine Sonny to be. One privilege of fiction is creating characters with abilities you once dreamed of developing. Sonny can play the saxophone with the fluency I would have loved to achieve. He can sit in at a blues club and speak through his instrument as naturally as another person speaks across a table. He can also take the patterns I hear in music and use them to solve murders. That seems like a reasonable promotion.

A mystery presents readers with two stories. The first is visible: a body, a disappearance, suspects, evidence, and the tightening investigation. The second is the hidden story: what actually happened.

Every clue belongs to that concealed narrative. The clues may appear disordered because the detective encounters them out of sequence. A burned vehicle may be found before anyone understands its significance. A false statement generally occurs before the hidden truth is known. A trivial object may acquire meaning much later.

Sonny's gift is his ability to listen past the disorder. He assumes the notes belong together. Somewhere beneath the lies, distractions, coincidences, and false leads is a composition with its own internal logic. Someone chose the victim. Someone selected the location. Someone took precautions, made errors, changed plans, and tried to escape the consequences. Those decisions form a pattern, and the pattern forms a melody. When Sonny finally hears the entire melody, he understands not only who committed the crime but the story the criminal has been telling from the beginning. The criminal may not realize he has written a song, but Sonny is listening.

You can learn more about Terry R. Bacon via his website and follow him on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Goodreads. Storm Damage is now available via Amazon.