Guest Post: Ryan Gattis

Last year the novel All Involved was released to great acclaim. I, however, missed that bandwagon and am excited about this month's paperback release. The book's author, Ryan Gattis, is here today with a special guest post.

Gattis is rather extraordinary. He's a member of UGLARworks, which is a street art crew. They paint murals for the city of Los Angeles. He's also a board member of 1888 in Orange, County. This organization works for the "preservation, presentation, and promotion of cultural heritage and literary arts." He taught writing courses at Chapman University and started a course on writing for video games. He's lived all over the world and performed some impressive hands-on research for All Involved.

To learn a little more about this talented young man, you can listen to his TED talk.

In the mean time, today he's sharing a soundtrack for All Involved, his fictional recreation of the 1992 L.A. Race Riots as told through 17 interconnected first-person narratives. Hope you enjoy...

The All Involved Soundtrack: A List of the Music in the Novel 

1. “Run, Run, Run” by The Supremes
The fact that Motown has such a hold on South Central Los Angeles is due in large part to Art Laboe and KRLA opening it up for a new generation. This track appears unexpectedly in Ernesto’s section to announce a very specific tone and pace change. I just love the rhythm of it, and the command it gives the character in the title.

2. “I Wish It Would Rain” by The Temptations
Motown makes another appearance, but this time for a more emotional push. Payasa has just lost her brother, and in a gang life where crying and sadness can be equated with weakness, it seems important to hide it, and this was the perfect song to strike that conflicted note in her.

3. “Mi Vida Loca” by Kid Frost
This anthem of gang life was a lock for evoking the time, and fit best with the loosest cannon of the crew, Lil Mosco (which means mosquito). It was very easy to imagine Mosco popping this brand new tape in—the album only came out a few days before the riots—and heading out to Riverside on an errand for Big Fate.

4. “More Than A Feeling” by Boston
I searched high and low for a song to capture the first giddy moments of the riots for those who wished to go out and do bad. Perhaps it was the unexpectedness of it in the gang context, but this just felt right when I heard it; I could see the scene roll out before me: Big Fate not quite sure what he’s listening to, but then getting into it as the crew speed around Lynwood.

5. “We're Gonna Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley
For Lil Creeper’s wild, destructive ride through Day 2 of the riots, I needed something pacey, unexpected, and a little off-kilter. This Bill Haley hit ticked all those boxes, and added a beat beneath the action that felt just right.

6. “To Be With You” by Mr. Big
Ah, the love song, it had to be done. I had to find the right one for Anthony and Gloria, but it didn’t take much looking. Released in late 1991, this was an eventual #1 hit in 1992, so it seemed most timely. There’s also a whitebread sweetness to this that stands in genuine contrast to much of the rest of the book, and I felt it to be a useful counterpoint.

7. “54-46 (Was My Number)” (Live) by Toots & The Maytals
One of the most chilling bits of background that I got during my research on Los Angeles in 1992 was the knowledge that a Jamaican gang ran Harbor City and had the m.o. of dumping lye down the throats of those who opposed them and chucking the bodies on railroad tracks. It’s a song about lived consequences and wanting to stay free, and it felt right for scoring the gun deal between Rohan and Momo, especially with Trouble being present.

8. “Hand on the Pump” by Cypress Hill
This plays in the casino house on low volume before the big shootout on Day 4. It’s amp-up music, a stakes-raiser. Released in August of 1991 on Cypress Hill’s debut album, everything about this track captures 1992 Los Angeles: the diversity and difficulty, the casual violence, and a soul sample (from Gene Chandler’s “Duke of Earl,” which isn’t quite Motown, but is almost certainly Motown-adjacent).

9. “The Bomb” by Ice Cube
I can’t recall if this song is specifically mentioned in the book, but I do know it applies to Irene, Clever’s girlfriend, who has a poster of Ice Cube on her wall. This track is the ‘what goes around, comes around’ track of the bunch, and it actually begins with a news clip of the 1965 L.A. Riots. This was neck-and-neck with the controversial “Black Korea” (1991) for inclusion, but this felt a bit more like it described what happened during the 1992 riots, as opposed to what led up to them.

10. “Crime Pays” by Hall & Oates
Personally, I loved appropriating the metaphor in a love song about stealing hearts, and making it apply to the literal crime of stealing. In this case, Sinatra steals a city work truck during the riots, and it is eventually used to provide tactical support for the planning and cleanup of the shootout on Day 4. It’s playing as Apache and Sinatra take a ride to get rid of it. I think I love this track because it actually functions as a believable plot point: the reason Sinatra could steal the truck in the first place is because the city worker was listening to this instead of the radio, and as such, he didn’t know the riots had broken out.

XX. “Of Wolf & Man” by Metallica
This didn’t actually make the final edit, but it was originally in the Anonymous section and played immediately after the Goon Squad completed their mission. I still love how it complements that tone of dark victory.

11. “America” by The Original West Side Story Cast
Technically, it’s Gloria’s track because it was in her car, but it’s FREER who hears it and immediately dismisses it. It’s a shame too, because the guy loves soundtracks, and if he listened to the lyrics, he’d probably understand why Gloria wanted him to hear it. In a city that has suffered through multiple riots, it seemed important to evoke that idea of cycles of violence, and this did so sonically in an interesting way, so I kept it in.

12. “A Message to You Rudy” by The Specials
I needed a setup track for Mikey, a mod Chicano wannabe writer, growing up on the periphery of gangland L.A., and this just felt right for his journey, because ultimately what he sees will be a message.

13. “Dedicated to the One I Love” by The Shirelles
In a novel with 17 different first person narrators, the most consistent character is actually the city of Los Angeles and this track sums up how I feel about the book: it really is dedicated to the city, to how it was in 1992, and what it became. I love this city, flaws and all, and I think Mikey does too. This song plays on the last few pages of the book as Mikey is being driven away. This is the last song, the show-stopper, the haunter, the one meant to stick with you, and if the soundtrack is on repeat, it folds nicely right back into the Motown that started it all.

(Listen to the All Involved soundtrack on the Spotify playlist)

A Visit from Hector Lassiter

Good Guys, Bad Guys

&

The Not So Simple Art of Murder

By Hector Lassiter

(Originally printed in Writer’s Review, October 1957)

I live and die by words.

In addition to writing novels, I’m an occasional screenwriter and journalist.

On any given day, the newspaper I string for has more than its share of crime reporting. Occasionally, when somebody gets murdered by another in the reading area, family members from both sides of the crime—the loved ones of the victims and of the presumed perpetrators—reach out to the reporters or editors.

They maybe do that in an attempt to shape coverage. Sometimes it’s to try and give the paper’s staff a fuller sense of the victim. Sometimes it seems it’s simply to talk. Their grief is always unimaginable. Their sense of loss is palpable and clearly nearly insupportable.

The family of the villains are particularly tricky to talk to. They can’t get around their own memories of their loved ones. There’s an old saying among fiction writers: “The villain is the hero of his own story.” I’m not sure villains really think that way about themselves, but their loved ones unquestionably do.

Then there are the instances when loved ones of the victims are still trying to kindle the fire under cold cases. They come seeking a retrospective news story that might put backward pressure on law enforcement to give an unsolved crime a fresh look. The crime might be a decade old, but wounds of survivors are still raw and hurting.

This is all to make clear that every death means something.

Consequently, I can’t take a crime like homicide casually, even in fiction. To my mind, too many crime and mystery authors do just that. They trivialize or gloss loss. Corpses, like car chases, are just another genre trope to these so-called writers.

In truth, most murder victims know their killer.

Terrible fact is, if you’re going to end up murdered, you’re probably going to be killed by someone you know, and it’s going to be on impulse. It’s going to be messy and it’s apt to be stupid or spastic in its execution.

This is where I run into trouble with a lot of my presumed peers. I call myself a “crime writer” for a reason. I’m emphatically not a “mystery writer.” That term I regard as a kind of obscenity.

Treating murder as a bloodless affair, something cozy mystery writers like Estelle Quartermain and her ilk do all the time, is a more offensive creative choice than depicting a crime in all its graphic squalor, at least to my mind.

In Paris, in the 1920s, I made the acquaintance of a very talented female “mystery writer” who came around to my way of seeing things in terms of murder and its treatment on the page.

Having just witnessed the commission of a couple of true-life, brutal killings, mystery author Brinke Devlin was left questioning the morality of her own previous writings.

She confessed, “I write comedies of manners with bloodless murder stirred in… Locked-room mysteries can get a little deadening after a while… In life, arguments escalate and a too-hard blow falls. A man comes home from work early because he’s feeling ill and finds his wife in bed with his brother, or with the fellow down the hall. Sex fiends murder strangers as opportunity arises. Robberies go bad and somebody innocent dies. Killers simply don’t kill for the complex or arcane reasons that they do in mystery novels.”

Her epiphany ultimately drove Brinke Devlin to reinvent herself; to write very different kinds of novels in which the terror and obscenity of murder wasn’t slighted simply to advance some puzzle plot.

My new novel, The Land of Dread and Fear, focuses on a single murder. A rock is thrown into a quiet pond and the ripples not only spread wide, but gain momentum as they radiate out from the point of impact. Actions have consequences; sometimes terrible ones.

I feel a sacred obligation to give a true sense of what the act of murder exacts in every direction.

It’s an old argument really—this debate between how realistically murder should be depicted in crime and “mystery” novels.

In a famous essay titled “The Simple Art of Murder,” my old Black Mask stable mate Raymond Chandler famously wrote of Dashiell Hammett, “Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare, and tropical fish. He put these people down on paper as they are, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes.”

I have my own guidelines for the stories I tell: “Character is plot. Obsession is motivation. The quest, whatever else it may appear to be, is always a search for self—a race against time to a blood-spritzed epiphany. When that light bulb goes on, the world goes dark. No happy endings.”

Dear reader: Every life touches other lives.

Consequently, the snuffing out of a life should do the same thing.

© Hector Lassiter, 1957

Author, screenwriter and journalist Hector Lassiter makes his home in southern New Mexico. He is the author of numerous, critically praised crime novels and the screenwriter of several critically acclaimed thrillers.

Brad Parks as Darth Vader?

The earliest inkling that I was destined to be a crime writer came during the summer of 1980.

It was a Star Wars-crazed time—or at least it was if you were a six-year-old—and Empire Strikes Back, arguably the most-anticipated sequel in movie history, had just released in theaters. It was a box office smash and, more importantly, a critically acclaimed film in Lambeth Riding, the subdivision in Hockessin, Delaware where my family lived at the time.

From the backyards to the swing sets to the local pool, endless afternoons were dedicated to the reenacting of various scenes and scenarios from the movie, whether it was through Star Wars action figures or through the elaborate duels we choreographed using Whiffleball bats as lightsabers. Pretty much every kid in the neighborhood wanted to be either Luke Skywalker or Han Solo—you know, one of the good guys.

Not me.

I wanted to be the guy with black mask and the raspy breath. I wanted to be the ultimate intergalactic villain.

I wanted to be Darth Vader.

I would walk around, imitating his heavy breathing like some kind of crank-calling pervert. I would sing “The Imperial March”  during our lightsaber sessions (“Dah-dah-dah, dunt, dah-dah, dunt, dah-daaaaaaah!”). I would imagine myself with legions of Stormtroopers at my disposal and an Imperial Starfleet at my command.

I had a life-sized Darth Vader cut out in the corner of my room—all six-foot-five of it—even though it scared the crap out of me at night, when the lights were out. I repeatedly told my friends, “You have no idea the power of the Dark Side.”

Sometimes, when I could get away with it, I would steal my mother’s black leather gloves—the nice ones she saved for formal occasions—because it made me feel more like Vader. I was a nut for capes.

Mind you, this was all at a time when we had no clue about Vader’s full back story—that he had once been a good-looking guy played by Hayden Christensen; that he had shacked up with Natalie Portman; that he had been looked upon as a force for good whose grief over the loss of his mother and, subsequently, of Natalie Portman, turned him bad. (And, really, losing a babe like her would knock any guy for a loop).

No, no. All that Episode I-III stuff was only alluded to in the vaguest of ways. There was nothing redeeming about the Vader we knew at all. He was just evil. Pure and simple. He sliced Obi-Wan Kenobi clean in half. He air-strangled people who disappointed him. He hacked off his own son’s hand. He was a Bad Dude.

And I couldn’t get enough of him.

In retrospect, I realize this kind of fascination with evil was only going to lead one of two places. And thankfully it ended with a life of crime writing, not a life of crime.

But even though I don’t write the darkest of material—my WASPy, preppy, wisecracking protagonist, Carter Ross, isn’t exactly a noir-style anti-hero—Vader did help me get in touch with my own Dark Side at a very crucial time in my development. For that, I will always be thankful. And I’d like to think there’s a little bit of Darth Vader in me somewhere.

Though I should probably stop doing all that heavy breathing on the phone.


This may very well explain a lot. And if you see someone at the Bouchercon bar in a cape this year, it's probably Brad.


Brad Parks is a winner of the Nero Award and the Shamus Award. His latest book, The Girl Next Door, released from St. Martin’s Press/Minotaur Books on March 13. For more Brad, sign up for his interns’ newsletter http://www.bradparksbooks.com/newsletter.php, like him on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/BradParksBooks or follow @Brad_Parks on Twitter.

Eddie Perlmutter Meets a World Famous Killer

My name is Eddie Perlmutter. I’m the sixty-one year old protagonist from Steven M. Forman’s three Boca mystery comedy novels. I’m an ex Boston cop, the most demoted, promoted officer in the department’s history, a former undefeated Golden Gloves Champion and a current private detective in Boca Raton, Florida. I’m still undefeated, even in my dreams.

Somehow I had an appointment to meet a world famous assassin at a seedy hot spot in the netherworld called Hell’s Kitchen, right outside the gates of Purgatory. I saw eternal flames burning in the distance and heard the feint cries of people in eternal anguish.

“This must be the place,” I said to myself, opened the door and looked around the smoky room.

Adolph Hitler was seated at the first booth peering at a map.

“Invade Russia,” I whispered in his ear.

“What a great idea,” Hitler said, looking up at me with the eyes of a maniac.

I walked on, nodding to serial killer Ted Bundy and his date. I didn’t bother with David Berkowitz, (Son of Sam) who was engrossed in a conversation with his dog. Jeffrey Dahmer was having dinner alone and I didn’t ask what he was eating.

“Johnny boy,” I said when I saw the man I was meeting. He was handsome with a trimmed mustache and thick wavy hair. I recognized him from pictures in history books.

“I prefer John,” he said in a smooth actor’s voice.

I sat down across from him. “Okay John it is,” I said to John Wilkes Booth, the man who assassinated Abraham Lincoln.

“How did you get here? He asked.

“In a dream, I think. It feels like one.”

“And you want to know why I killed Lincoln, right?”

“I’m a cop. I like to study a killer’s mind,” I said.

“It’s simple, really,” he said. “I’m a white supremacist and Lincoln spoiled my fun. Blacks are third class citizens who should work for the white man. You can quote me on that.”

“Tell that to Barack Obama,” I said.

“Who?”

“The President of the United States,” I told him. “He’s a black man.”

“Now I know you’re dreaming,” Booth laughed. “In my day there wouldn't even be a black dog catcher. Plenty of people thought like me; men like George Atzerodt, Lewis Powell and David Herold who helped me kill Lincoln. We hoped to go down in history as great men.”

“You didn’t,” I said. “You’re all reviled as assassins…like Lee Harvey Oswald.”

“Who’s he?”

“Another nut-job who killed a great man,” I said. “He was a coward like you. He shot a president from a long distance and you shot one up close in the back of the head. Oswald was shot to death the same day. You were hunted down and shot in a burning barn by a union shoulder. You died as hated men by your generation and mine.”

“If you hate me so much, why did you come here looking for me? He asked.

“To give you this,” I said standing up and punching John Wilkes Booth in the mouth.

He was already dead and didn’t feel any pain…but I felt better. It was like a dream come true.

Many thanks to Steve Forman and his protagonist Eddie Perlmutter for joining us this week. As Eddie mentioned, Steve is the author of the Boca mystery series. You can take a look at my recent review of Boca Daze here. This book also comes highly recommended by my dad who really enjoyed it as well.
 
We all have a "villain" we wish we could one up; whether it be the bully from junior high school, the girl who got the guy you wanted to date, the mean boss who made work a living hell, or even a person who changed history with his/her wicked wicked ways. If you could "give it" to one person, who would that person be? Leave a comment today and you'll be entered to win a book and a bookmark. 

Perfect Place for a Murder

Earlier this week I reviewed Hilary Davidson's second novel, THE NEXT ONE TO FALL, that is due out on Tuesday. And incidentally I also tag-team interviewed Hilary with Ruth Jordan in Issue #45 of CRIMESPREE Magazine. So if you don't subscribe give Murder by the Book a ring and get a copy! Hilary was kind enough to stop by and talk about the exotic locale of her book. And you just have to love a person who travels to Peru and thinks:

"This would be the perfect place to kill someone." - by Hilary Davidson

I’m almost embarrassed to admit that’s what I said just after I arrived at Machu Picchu. When I first got there, the rain and fog were so heavy that a gray shroud hid most of the Inca city from view. It was only when the rain stopped and the sun burned off the fog that I saw Machu Picchu in all its glory. I’m not sure what it says about me that I can visit a place, fall head-over-heels in love with it, and then decide to plot a murder there. A fictional murder, to be precise, but does that make it any better?

Machu Picchu with a llama!

My new novel, THE NEXT ONE TO FALL, is set in Peru, a country I had the good fortune to visit for three weeks in the fall of 2007. It was love at first sight for me. When I travel, there are certain things that I gravitate to. One is ancient or historic sites. Another is beautiful scenery — especially when it includes adorable animals (you may already know of my llama obsession). Good food is a big attraction for me. I also love museums, especially small collections that focus on the work of local artists. Most of all, I love visiting a place where it’s easy to get into conversations with locals and with other travelers; some of the best discoveries I’ve made when I travel have come out of casual discussions like that.

Peru got a perfect score on every front — and, in particular, the city of Cusco and the nearby “Sacred Valley” that leads to Machu Picchu. The combination of Inca and Spanish colonial history and sites caught my imagination. Even though the Inca Empire fell hundreds of years ago, the way that they reshaped the Peruvian landscape has stood the test of time. The Incas carved terraces onto the sides of mountains so they could grow crops there; when you stand in a place like the Sacred Valley or the Colca Canyon, all you see for miles are hundreds of terraces.

Inca terraces

Cusco, the city that was the capital of the Inca Empire, is filled with colonial architecture, much of which is built on Inca foundations. The Cathedral and several churches and convents now double as art galleries, featuring work by the Cusco School (also called the Cuzco School) of the 17th and 18th centuries, which had European painters come to Cusco to teach local artists to paint in the European style. The results were beautiful, beatific, and occasionally bizarre. The indigenous artists converted to Catholicism, but they retained certain Inca ideas. For example, depicting Jesus in a loincloth was profoundly disrespectful in their eyes, so Jesus wears the knee-length linen skirt of the Inca nobility in scenes of the crucifixion.

Jesus in the linen skirt of Inca nobility

It’s incredibly exciting to me to get to share stories about a place I love, and it is doubly so to do it through fiction. I used to write guidebooks, so I know how people’s eyes glaze over when you recite a bunch of dates and descriptions to them. But having the opportunity to show people Peru through the eyes of Lily Moore and Jesse Robb is thrilling. Lily is, in some ways, going through what I did when I first arrived. I experienced altitude sickness, too (it takes a while to acclimatize to the thin Andean air — Cusco is 11,500 feet above sea level!). She’s seeing Peru for the first time, and even though she’s caught up in her own grief, it starts to intrigue her. Jesse has visited Peru again and again, falling in love with the place as I did. Some people who’ve read the book have said it makes them feel as if they’d visited Peru. The woman’s body on the stone steps at Machu Picchu? That’s fiction. But the magical beauty of Peru itself is entirely real.

Jesuit Church from 1668

Hilary has very graciously supplied the beautiful pictures from this post. Aren't they astounding? She has also donated a copy of her new book for me to give away to a lucky reader. She knows how I am -  I'm not going to part with my own copy!


So, if you'd like to have a chance at winning THE NEXT ONE TO FALL, simply tell me in the comments where you think the perfect place for a murder might be. And be sure I have an email I can contact you at if you win! I'll take entries through next Friday. And the contest is open internationally!

In the meantime, you can find out more about Hilary at her website, check out all the locations she'll be visiting on her book tour. You can follow her on Twitter and you can hook up with her on Facebook. She's just omnipresent these days.

And since THE NEXT ONE TO FALL doesn't come out until Tuesday, you can whet your appetite with the first three chapters that are posted over at Criminal Element!

The Devil's Highway to the Buckeye State - Craig McDonald

Last week I posted my review of Craig McDonald's EL GAVILAN. I have a guest post as a special holiday treat from Craig today. I know I really enjoyed this piece as it's especially relevant to me where I live. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Happy Holidays!

The Devil's Highway to the Buckeye State

—Craig McDonald

My new novel, El Gavilan, examines the effects of illegal immigration and a single murder on one Ohio town. Many of those undocumented workers came to the Buckeye State via a torturous path dubbed the Devil's Highway.

The Devil's Highway technically runs between northern Mexico, across the Sonoran Desert wastelands of blasted-out ironwood and saguaro, and on up into Arizona. It's considered the deadliest stretch of ground to cover for those who would flee Mexico to America, yet thousands try every year and many don't make it to the other side.

El Gavilan opens with a quote of unknown provenance: "Never attach more feeling to a thing than God does."

The poet Ofelia Zepeda said of the region through which the Devil's Highway runs, "You need a new kind of prayers to negotiate with this land."

I'd argue the Devil's Highway knows no true end. The ones who do reach the American portion of the borderlands don't always opt to live out their days in Arizona, California or Texas. They head in deeper, trekking further north to make their meager living at myriad Mexican food restaurants . . . by mowing lawns or picking fruit for half-minimum wages in Georgia or Michigan and all points in-between.

Like the Oakies chased from their homes by the Dust Bowl tragedy nearly a century before -- the destitute immortalized in John Steinbeck's novel, The Grapes of Wrath -- men and women fleeing Mexico for El Norte found their path hastened by the American highway system. Route 66, "The Mother Road," may not be doing so dandy these days, but the U.S. interstate system is cranking right along.

A recent immigration study puts a fine point on it: "Ohio has the nation's 10th largest highway network and is within a single-day drive for half of North America's population. Ohio contains 70 percent of the country's manufacturing capacity. The state links the Northeast and Midwest; thus, much business and cargo traffic passes through its borders on this well-developed highway network. Ohio's economy is primarily based in Agriculture and Industry."

In other words, and in any language: Ohio=Prosperity. (Or it used to; these days, Ohio is just about the hardest hit state economically outside of Michigan.)

But circa 2005, or thereabouts, before the housing bubble burst, my corner of Ohio was literally swamped with undocumented workers. Like drunken sailors, developers were plowing under acres of corn and soybeans and platting out vistas of cookie-cutter subdivisions constructed largely through the sweat and effort of illegal immigrants. The bastards trucked them in by the dozens in old Ford Aerostars to frame-out houses for chump change wages. (An exposed wall of one side of my garage—a house built circa 2000—is covered with Spanish writings scrawled in Sharpie).

The influx of undocumented, unassimilated workers changed the face of central Ohio, nearly overnight. As a journalist, I saw results some while before the average Ohio citizen maybe took notice. When the citizenry of central Ohio realized what was happening, handwringing ensued. Racial tensions rose, then spiked.

The impact on infrastructure and public services here in Ohio was profound.

The immigration report put it this way, by the numbers: "Seventy-two percent of the total population growth between 2000 and 2006 in Ohio was directly attributed to the immigrant population . . . The annual fiscal cost to Ohio taxpayers for emergency medical care, education and incarceration is currently $224 million and is estimated to rise to $372 million per year in 2010 and $627 million per year in 2020."

When the Great Recession hit, a number of undocumented workers ventured back across that dusty line, suddenly finding prospects more enticing in the Mexico they'd earlier fled than in the financially decimated wastelands of post-recession America.

My aim in El Gavilan was to take one family's immigrant experience, trace it up into Ohio, and then watch the ripples flare out when a member of that family falls prey to a seemingly racially motivated spasm of fatal violence.

But before the murder that fires the story of El Gavilan occurs, there is another scene of violence and loss, very near the start of the book:

El Gavilan opens with a tragic fire that claims more victims than necessary when first responders and Latino firebombing victims aren't speaking the same language. Failure to communicate literally kills. The scene is based on all too real firebombing in Ohio that occurred in a mostly Latino, non-English-speaking apartment enclave in what had formerly been a white, working class neighborhood.

The victims were part of a family who'd chased prosperity from central Mexico all the way to Ohio's Capital City -- braving and surviving the passage through the desert wastelands only to be taken down deeper along The Devil's Highway, taken down in Ohio, "the heart of it all," as our state's publicists like to phrase it.

© 2011 Craig McDonald, author of El Gavilan

Author Bio
Craig McDonald, author of El Gavilan, is an Edgar®-nominee and an award-winning journalist, editor and fiction writer. His short fiction has appeared in literary magazines, anthologies and several online crime fiction sites. His debut novel, Head Games, was published by Bleak House Books in September 2007. Head Games was selected as a 2008 Edgar®-nominee for Best First Novel by an American Author. Head Games was also a finalist for the Anthony, Gumshoe and Crimespree Magazineawards for best first novel. His nonfiction books include Art in the Blood, a collection of interviews with 20 major crime authors which appeared in 2006, and Rogue Males: Conversations and Confrontations About the Writing Life, a second collection of interviews published by Bleak House Books in 2009. McDonald was also a contributor to the NYT's nonfiction bestseller, Secrets of the Code. He recently won national awards for his profiles of crime novelists James Crumley, Daniel Woodrell, James Sallis and Elmore Leonard. His new novel, El Gavilan, is available from Tyrus Books.

For more information please visit http://www.craigmcdonaldbooks.com, and follow the author on Facebook and Twitter

Guest Blogger: Thomas Kaufman

Last year Thomas Kaufman made his crime fiction debut with the book that won PWA/St. Martin's Best First Private Eye Award, DRINK THE TEA. This summer he is following up with his second Willis Gidney novel, STEAL THE SHOW. The jazz-loving PI is desperate for money...desperate enough to commit a crime?

Thomas Kaufman is here today as part of his blog tour to talk about one of those famous questions all writers encounter: "where do you get your ideas." Tom says it's about more than the ideas, but I'll let him tell you. Please help me welcome, Thomas Kaufman!

When I did my DRINK THE TEA book tour, I drank a lot of tea. I also answered a lot of questions about writing, and by far the most-asked question was, where do you get your ideas? I usually say I have a service in Duluth that emails me ideas once a month.

You'd be amazed at how many people come up afterwards and ask for the name of that company.

But having an idea is not the same thing as writing a book. I can say I have this great idea -- doing ROMEO AND JULIETTE as New York gangs in the 1950's. Nice idea, but it's a long stretch from there to WEST SIDE STORY, right?

Similarly, the newspaper is filled with story ideas. But unless the story grabs you, as a writer, unless it makes you think, then it's just an idea.

The genesis of DRINK THE TEA was an incident that happened in a restaurant. I was with some friends, and one of the young professionals at the table, who was a Mexican-American woman, spoke in a cruel and nasty way to the Mexican-American waitress, who had done nothing wrong.

Later, I thought a lot about this. I mean, why would someone act that way? Not only that, but feel they were completely right and justified in doing so? My guess is that, for some reason, things felt wrong to the young professional, out of balance somehow. By trashing the waitress, the other woman was trying to restore balance in her world.

My new book is STEAL THE SHOW, and what got me interested in writing it was something a friend told me – he was working for a company that designs and manufactures a piece of consumer electronics gear. Three people owned the company: a young man who was the designer, his father, and another man.

My friend told me the son got squeezed out of the company – by his father! This intrigued me. Then my friend said that the son –who had designed the gear in the first place -- had signed a non-compete clause. So for the next three years (the duration of his non-compete), the son was making his own version of that same piece of electronics gear. The son was going to use it to drive his father out of business.

Interesting family dynamic, right?

It was for me, and that's how STEAL THE SHOW got started. Now, I had never met any of the people involved, but I didn't have to. All I had to do was create the characters I needed. Also, I try to keep the reader guessing as to the son's true intentions.

Another idea in STEAL THE SHOW is the use of encrypted digital satellites to distribute motion pictures. About 25% of US movie theaters now use digital projection (and have discarded their 35mm projectors). For a long time, Hollywood studios have looked for a different way of getting their movies into theaters. Because I work in the film business, I found this was interesting. So it became part of my story, the technology that the son was so good at.

Okay, now it's my turn to ask a question: Have you ever read a book, and couldn't get into it because the characters left you flat?

I've started more books than I've finished for that very reason. And one of the things people told me about DRINK THE TEA was that they loved the private eye, Willis Gidney. So I wanted to make sure the Gidney fans got their money's worth with STEAL THE SHOW. But how to do that?

The answer was about two feet tall and twenty months old – Sarah, the African American baby that Willis Gidney saves in DRINK THE TEA. At the end of that book, the cops take her away from Gidney.

While I was writing DRINK THE TEA, the Washington Post ran a series of articles about DC and its system of juvenile justice. So I interviewed the two reporters who had written the articles.

In other words, I found an idea that was too interesting to let go of. So I didn't. In the new book, Gidney is looking to adopt this child. But DC Adoptive Services, in the form of case worker from hell Florence Walters, doesn't see an unmarried PI as ideal parent material.

So Gidney has to hire lawyers, commit felonies, lie, cheat, and generally hang himself out to dry, all to help this girl. And I can hear you ask, why does Gidney do all of this?

Because he went through DC foster care himself. He barely survived it. So when he looks at Sarah, he can't quite bring himself to walk away from her. Plus, DC is overrun with kids needing homes. If he doesn't try to get Sarah out of there, no one else will.

I liked this because it dovetailed with what I knew about Gidney. This kind of story also provided multiple level of conflict. And conflict, as we know, is the medium through which story is told.

So while ideas are important, just about anything can serve as the jumping off point for a book.

Even if you're from Duluth.

Thomas Kaufman is an Emmy-winning director/cameraman who also writes mysteries. His first book, DRINK THE TEA, won the PWA/St Martin's Press Competition for Best First Novel. His second book, STEAL THE SHOW, released this month. His blog tour will continue at The Rap Sheet and Writers Read.

A Lesson in Murder from M.L. Malcolm

 M.L. Malcolm has worn many hats, both literally and figuratively, throughout her life. She's a graduate of Harvard Law School and was a practicing attorney; she owned and operated a travel agency; and of course, she's the author of the historical mystery novels, HEART OF DECEPTION and  most recently, HEART OF LIES. Please help me welcome her as my guest blogger today.

Learning how to kill

By M.L. Malcolm

Violence bothers me. A lot. I’m probably the only person alive who thinks that the popularity of the “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” series is a terrifying sign of the moral deterioration of civilization. Maybe even the Apocalypse. Not that the book wasn’t good—I  did make it to the end of the first one, although I did it by skipping long sections of gore—it’s just that confronted with violence like that I shut down like a clam.  I can’t handle it, and I don’t think it’s good that most people can.

I’ve only had to incorporate one actual death scene in each of my novels.  Before writing such a scene, I always ask myself the three important questions relayed to me by a wonderful judge, my mentor back in the days before I found the light and started down the road toward becoming a Recovering Attorney.  I can still hear his deep, sonorous southern voice in my head, asking, “Did someone in fact, kill him?  Did he deserve killing?  And, did the right person do the killing?” (If all of these questions were answered by a “yes” at the end of a murder trial in the Deep South as little as forty years ago, the result would be a verdict of “not  guilty.” But I digress.)

I am very comfortable writing love scenes.  I am very uncomfortable writing about violence. So, before I could finish my first novel, I had to learn how to kill.

Nowadays my daughter, a CSI devotee and soon-to-be college freshman, could probably describe in disturbingly correct anatomical detail a dozen different ways to off someone and what the precise results of the chosen method of execution would look like; but she was young when I started this process, and not as well versed in the arts and science of murder. Before I could kill someone, I had to educate myself.

Leo Hoffman, one of the main characters in both my novels, is a veteran of World War I.


Heart of Lies,Leo avenges the death of his foster mother by killing her murderer when he is attacked by the same man. Leo is unarmed when this occurs, so I needed to figure out how to kill someone by hand. During my research I came across one of the most appropriate books ever written on the subject: Get Tough: How to Win in Hand-to-Hand Fighting, as Taught to the British and U.S. Armed Forces, by Major W. E. Fairbairn.

      

Originally published in 1943, the book gives detailed instructions on such handy subjects as how to kill someone using a book of matches, numerous approaches to disabling and maiming an opponent, and other techniques necessary to successful “gutter fighting.” 

      

The author had a fascinating personal history. Fairbairn joined the British Royal Marines when he was just a teenager. After serving in exotic places such as Korea and developing new, award-winning ways to prevail in hand-to-hand combat involving bayonets, he left the military, and, in 1907, joined the municipal police force in Shanghai. As one of the only places in the world anyone could enter without a passport or a visa, Shanghai was also one of the most violent and dangerous. It also happened to be the setting for a large portion of Heart of Lies.

Legend has it that early in his career as a policeman Fairbairn was beaten close to death by members of one of the Chinese Tongs, and subsequently took up Jujutsu to decrease the chances that this would happen again. Thus began his life-long fascination with no-holds-barred means of hand-to-hand assault and defense. He established the first SWAT style police unit, and along with Anthony Sykes developed what would become the most famous combat knife of World War II, the Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife. When Churchill founded the Special Operations Executive to send covert operatives into Europe, Fairbairn was hired to train Churchill’s spies in everything from self-defense to stealth assassination, a.k.a. “silent killing.” 

In brief, he knew how to take someone out.  

      

So applying Fairbairn’s teachings, my character first crushes the larynx of his nemesis by…wait.  I don’t want to give away all the good parts.

But I highly recommend Fairbairn’s seminal works to anyone—make that any author—looking for novel ways to maim and kill.

Tom Schreck - A Boxing Social Worker

To wrap up the Moonlighting for Murder theme week, Tom Schreck, author of the Duffy Dombrowski series, is here to talk about his choice of a boxing social worker as amateur sleuth.

Tom himself has spent his career in various social work positions. He's volunteered on a suicide hotline, he teaches psychology courses at a local community college and writes freelance. Tom isn't a pro boxer, but he does judge pro boxing and gets in the ring to spar when he can. That's all in addition to taking care of the three hounds that live with he and his wife.

Tom has a great sense of humor and a love of Elvis Presley, all of which weaves its way into Tom's books. I'm excited to have him here, so I'll let him take it away.

Why a boxing social worker?

I fell in love with mysteries from reading, first the Travis McGee series by John D. Macdonald and then the Spenser series by Robert B. Parker. I loved the first person narrative and I loved how cool the main characters were. They lived on 110 foot houseboats, drank exotic beers, were gourmets and had interesting genius friends.

I wanted to create a character equally as interesting but who was drawn from real life. I wanted someone without extraordinary skills who reached a breaking point when someone vulnerable was victimized.

I’ve worked in human services since 1984. Not in psychology, not in medicine—in human services. It’s where the blue-collar people wind up when they need help—usually because the legal system insisted on it. I’ve been a childcare worker with troubled ghetto kids, a teen age drug counselor, a counselor and salesman for a posh rehab and the director of an inner city clinic.

This kind of counseling isn’t the Freudian therapy Keith Ablow or Jonathan Kellerman  write about. This is the therapy you get for stealing hair extensions at the dollar store after smoking too much crack. It’s real and it’s going on every day. The professionals who do it sometimes have degrees (I have a Masters) but often they have junior college educations or less. They are the heroes doing this work 40 hours a week often on lousy shifts for $23,000 a year.

Many of the clients in these clinics are unlikeable. They are dysfunctional and have little desire to change. They’re constantly scheming manipulative strategies to get their welfare check and beat the system. The clinics are driven to make sure they make their “number” so funding continues which makes the clinics complicit in the system’s dysfunction. The whole thing is a horror show.

But sometimes someone’s life gets turned around. Sometimes someone who wants to change does. Sometimes someone changes just enough to impact their spouse, their kids and the people surrounding their lives.

That is beautiful. That is the most important thing there is in life. That is what keeps human services working at a salary just above the poverty line.

Boxing is also a very central thing to my life. I’m typing this with a sore jaw and a low-level head ache from a well placed right hand that I took yesterday afternoon. My shoulders are tight and sleep will be hard to come by for the next couple of nights because of the soreness. I also judge professional boxing, getting the privilege to decide who wins world championship fights.

Ninety-nine percent of professional boxers make less than $2,000 from it. Yes, it’s professional sports and the very best make multiple millions but the vast majority do it because it’s in their blood.
Yesterday four of us got together to spar. Before it starts there’s a palpable unspoken anxiety in the gym. While it’s going on it’s truly breathtaking and when it’s over it’s the most exhilarating high I’ve ever experienced. I’d shoot it into a vein if I could.

Real life pro boxers have to work jobs. Some are educated; most aren’t so they do hourly gigs, labor and yes, human services. Those jobs don’t define them, their boxing does.

A person who’s been fighting for a long time has a presence. Other fighters can identify it but the general public will miss it. The fighters don’t play office games, get intimidated by being written up on the job or get macho when it comes to the board room. Men do that instead of fighting. Fighters see that shit as silly.

Boxers are real. Guys who really fight are a different type of animal. I’m not talking about someone who takes a boxing aerobics class or someone who learns how to hit a bag. I’m talking about someone who knows that feeling of waiting for the bell to ring knowing he’s about to get punched in the face.

Duffy Dombrowski isn’t Travis McGee or Spenser. His life has more grit and it’s uglier but it is the life that is lived on the streets of every city in this cruel country.
He often decides he’s not excepting that life and it causes him plenty of personal trouble. It also saves the lives and dignity of those who can’t do it on their own.

That’s what drives him.

He isn’t a Japanese assassin, an art appraiser or a CIA operative.

He’s a boxer and a human services worker.

That’s who he is.

The Man in the Goal - Bryan Gruley

Bryan Gruley is presently the Chicago bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal. He's worked at newspapers in Antrim County, Brighton, Howell, Kalamazoo and Detroit as well.  Bryan shared in the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News that the Walt Street Journal won for its coverage of the terrorist attack.

Bryan's protagonist, Gus Carpenter, shares Bryan's profession, as well as his passion - hockey. Like Gus, Bryan grew up playing hockey and still plays regularly in Chicago. We've yet to see if Gus is as musically inclined as his creator. Luckily, in addition to all this, Bryan is an incredible fiction writer as well. His first novel, STARVATION LAKE, was nominated for the Edgar Award for best first novel. It won the Anthony Award and the Barry Award for best paperback original. I named it to my list of favorite audiobooks of 2010. So, I'm very excited to host him today as part of the Moonlighting for Murder series. For those who have not experienced Bryan's books yet, this post will give you a taste of the splendor you'll find in his novels. Without further ado, Bryan Gruley!

Ice hockey’s goaltender may occupy the loneliest position in all of sports—which is essentially why I made Gus Carpenter, the protagonist of my novels, a goalie.

“You can never look into their eyes,” he says in his first line of narration in my debut, Starvation Lake. Gus is standing in his net, alone, facing a shooter bearing down on him in a hockey rink in the middle of the night.

On the surface, his words describe a rule goalies follow in trying to stop opponents from putting pucks behind them. At the same time, Gus alludes, however unintentionally, to his own alienation from the people around him, on the ice as well as off.

OK, you don’t usually see the words “alienation” and “hockey” in the same essay. But think about it. On the ice, Gus stays pretty much in one place—his net—while the rest of his teammates roam freely. He doesn’t actively participate in the game, but waits for it to come to him. He wears a mask. If he fails in his duty, he can count on shouldering most if not all of the blame. As he tells us in my forthcoming third book, The Skeleton Box:

You could whine and bitch about your teammates all you wanted, but they knew and, more important, you knew that it didn’t matter which defenseman coughed up the puck to an opponent, or which winger didn’t hustle to cover the point man with the big slap shot, because if the puck wound up behind you, in your net, it was your fault. Your job, your only job, was to keep the puck out, so even if it wasn’t your fault, it was, and you knew it, no matter how much you bitched at your teammates or banged your stick over the crossbar in anger.

It was you and only you.

My first novel came about after my agent asked me, “Why don’t you write me a story about these middle-aged guys who play hockey in the middle of the night?” That gave me permission to write about the sport I’ve played and loved since boyhood. I chose to make Gus a goalie despite the fact that I am not one (full disclosure: I played goaltender for one season when I was 12, and I was a sieve).

Many hockey players are loathe to admit this, but goalies are intrinsically cool. Goalies wear the niftiest equipment (their stick is a “paddle” and one of their gloves is a “waffle”) and have the weirdest superstitions (former NHL-er Gary Smith used to take cold showers between each period of games he played). They flip and flop and dive and waggle. They can be bigger heroes—and bigger goats—than anyone on the ice. Contrary to what most casual hockey fans assume, goalies are often among the best skaters on their teams.

When I was concocting Gus Carpenter, I knew too that he would be a defrocked big-city journalist (a subject for another time) forced to make a humbling retreat to his tiny hometown. It seemed fitting that he should be a goalie—a loner behind a metaphorical mask—as well as the goalie known for blowing the town’s only shot at a state championship years before.

Readers familiar with Gus know he can be frustratingly distant at times, even as he’s speaking directly to other characters and, indeed, to the readers themselves. Chastened by his past, Gus is wary, vigilant, defensive, at the same time that he misses things while “peering out at that little world through the eye holes of my goalie mask,” as he says in the first book.

Most good goalies share these character traits, but for Gus, they also define his personality and the way he approaches his job, his family, his friends, and his love relationships.

Did I intend for all of this to be so neatly packaged? Of course not. I had an inkling that it would be fun to write from the perspective of a goaltender. Then, like a goalie, I got between the posts and reacted to what happened around me as I wrote. As Gus says in that opening scene in the first book:

"By day, I was the associate editor of the Pine County Pilot, circulation 4,733, published every day but Sunday. By night I tended goal in the Midnight Hour Men’s League, surrounded by men I’d known as boys. In between I waited for something to change my life, to get me out of Starvation Lake again. That’s what goalies do. They wait."

Gus’s wait was about to end. What has happened since will eventually make up the trilogy of tales culminating with The Skeleton Box. And then?

A goalie can never be sure of what’s coming next.

If you have any questions for Bryan, feel free to leave them in the comments.

Dana Kaye of Kaye Publicity has generously donated a copy of Bryan's book THE HANGING TREE. If you'd like a chance at winning this book and you live in the United States, complete the entry form below. I'll take entries through Friday at midnight (Eastern) so don't dwadle! Good luck!

Rosemary Harris Picks a "Dirty" Job

I was hooked on the Dirty Business Mystery series after the first page of the first book I picked up. Paula Holliday is simply a fascinating, fun character. She's the kind of gal I'd want as a friend.

When I had the opportunity to meet Rosemary Harris in person for the first time, I found out exactly where all of Paula's charisma comes from. Rosemary has done a considerable amount of traveling, both for personal trips and while volunteering for Habitat for Humanity.

Rosemary doesn't have to moonlight to write these days, but she in the past she's worked in book retailing, direct marketing and video/television/public television. Paula is a former television exec who turned in her business suit for a shovel, some pruning shears and a lot of dirty business.

Rosemary took some time out from her tour prep for SLUGFEST, her duties as MWA NY Chapter president and her golden retriever MAX to talk about why she choose a gardening career for her Anthony and Agatha-nominated series that includes PUSHING UP DAISIES, THE BIG DIRT NAP, DEAD HEAD, and coming out next week, SLUGFEST.

Position Wanted

Must be able to make own hours and not be tied down. Applicant can interact well with a wide variety of people and occasionally be the fly on the wall.

Will relocate – preferably to a city or town with a small or ineffectual (but charming and perhaps single) police force.

Contact : Paula Holliday

Most amateur sleuths need to have a job. Unless you’re writing about an English lord (see Peter Wimsey) or a kindly little old lady (you know who) you’ll most likely want your protagonist to be gainfully employed – preferably in a job that offers the above conditions.

As much as I enjoy gardening, the real reason Paula Holliday is a gardener is that it's a seasonal business which give her plenty of time to solve crimes. She can also reasonably come into contact with people from different socio-economic backgrounds, from the day laborers she hires at the local donut shop to the suburbanites - who aren’t always what they seem - and the bluebloods who hire her to care for their estates. As a gardener she can poke around homes and properties without arousing suspicions because all too often the people who provide basic services – nannies, waiters, housekeepers, hair stylists, etc. are treated as invisible. People will say or do things in front of them that they might not in front of other more “important” people. Is it eavesdropping if you're being ignored? This invisibility exposes her to characters with all sorts of motives for mischief and mayhem, the most common being greed, lust and revenge, all of which exist just as much in the suburbs as they do on the mean streets of the big cities. All Paula needs is a prop – a pitchfork or a pair of loppers – to fit right in. And in a pinch either of those garden tools can turn into a lethal weapon.

It's often said that one's villain needs MOM to commit a crime - means, opportunity and motive. I think an amateur sleuth needs MOM too. In this job, Paula Holliday has the means and the opportunity to solve the crime. But what’s her motive? That’s the hardest question to answer and one that writers of police procedurals, legal thrillers etc. never have to address. What’s a gardener or a golf pro, a tea shop owner or a television reporter doing solving crimes? Apart from the obvious answer that there would be no book if she didn't (and that would be terrible…) it’s generally that someone she knows is involved or accused. Or she is. Or she accidentally knows something the bad guys don’t want her to reveal. Or the cops don’t think there’s been a crime but our amateur sleuth knows better. Or maybe it’s just that writers know readers love them.

If you are a Twitter fan, like I am, you can follow Rosemary on Twitter (@rosemaryharris1). She's also on Facebook.

Hank Or Charlie?

I am very excited to kick off the Moonlighting for Murder theme week with an author I admire tremendously. She's been a radio reporter, a legislative aide in the U.S. Senate, an editorial assistant at Rolling Stone Magazine, an investigative journalist, and maybe most importantly, a Dairy Queen employee!

Just kidding. Hank Phillippi Ryan has won gads of awards with pretty much every career she's tried on. These days she herself is Moonlighting for Murder. By day she's hard at work for NBC in Boston and by probably every other hour of her day, she's writing award-winning crime fiction. Hank's character, Charlotte McNally, is also an investigative journalist. The series, including PRIME TIME, FACE TIME, AIR TIME and DRIVE TIME has won or been nominated for almost every prestigious crime fiction award available. And if that wasn't enough, Hank finds time to fit award-winning short stories into the mix as well.

Recently she appeared on the Steve Katsos show, and there's video of it, so I'd like to share that with you and below the video you'll find her amazing guest post, which is interactive and terribly fun. Please help me welcome the beautiful, smart, funny, and (her high school classmates got it right) "original" Hank Phillippi Ryan.



(I think Hank started her career when she was 2, by the way!)

HANK? Or CHARLIE?

By Hank Phillippi Ryan

Okay. Quiz for you. How much is the main character’s job reflected in the author’s job? Think you can tell fact from fiction?

Here are five adventures. Which ones are about the fictional Charlotte McNally? And which ones actually happened to her author, Hank Phillippi Ryan? (And hey, why not—let’s give away DRIVE TIME to three lucky commenters!)

Hank? Or Charlie?

My feet are freezing. My hands are freezing. In one ungloved hand I am holding a cell phone. In the other, a tiny camera. I’m waiting in the parking lot for convicted drunk drivers to come out of the courthouse after having their licenses suspended .

Inside the courthouse, a producer and two interns. As soon as someone is convicted, they’ll text me the description. My photographer and I will follow them to the parking lot—and see if they will drive away. Remember they just had their licenses suspended. Here comes one now!

I’m watching. Watching. Watching. Will he recognize me? Notice me? I pull my hood up over my hair and briefly turn my back. I sneak a look. He reaches into his pocket. And he pulls out—car keys. Gotcha, buster.

Hank? Or Charlotte McNally?

I’m curled up in the back of an unmarked SUV. My laptop, wireless enabled, is humming beside me. My producer is on his cell phone, in the vast parking lot of a used car emporium. She’s pretending to shop for a car. (If I go undercover, I’ll be recognized.) My producer is looking through the cars’ windshields, reading me the VIN numbers from the dashboards. We’re focusing on cars that we know have been recalled. Once I get the VINs, I call auto dealers to find out whether the recalls have been repaired—or whether the used car sales people are selling cars that are dangerous. Then, proof in hand, we’ll move in for the confrontation.

Hank? Or Charlotte McNally?

It’s freezing cold (why is it always cold? Oh, it’s Boston) it’s just after dark. Were sitting in the front seat of a news car, eyes glued to the side door of a hospital. Inside that hospital a nurse (oh, how funny, named Charlotte) is off shift in about 20 minutes. She’s had her license revoked for numerous charges of drunk driving. We know that cinnamon-red Mustang in the parking lot is hers.

There she is!

She emerges into the cold evening. Will she drive her car? She does! We pause while she makes the turn, slowly creep in behind her, and follow her down the windy street toward her home town. Shooting video the whole way. In the center of town, she stops. Pulls over to the curb. Goes in for pizza! When she comes out with the steaming pie, we’re there with a camera, waiting. “Why are you driving with a revoked license?” we ask. “#%^&$^*(&#*(& you!,” she screams! She throws the pizza into the front seat, and zooms away. “That was perfect! Did you get it all?” I ask. The photographer pauses. “Ummmm….” he says.

Hank? Or Charlotte McNally?

The living room floor is covered with—paper. Thousands of copies of what state officials call “discrepancy reports.” Each one is the record of a 911 call—an emergency—where dispatchers sent the responders (police, fire, ambulance) to the wrong address. The state fought us for almost a year, saying these records were “not public” and “unavailable.” We were also told “trust us,” there “weren’t many” discrepancies. We battled up to the Secretary of State’s office, which finally ordered the records be turned over.

The records arrived in two huge cardboard packing boxes. Chaotic, in no order, a mess. Now, I’m sorting them. Town by town. And turns out--there are thousands and thousands of them! Thousands and thousands of times, someone called for emergency help, and the dispatchers sent them to the wrong address. I have so many paper cuts from handling these documents, my hands are actually bleeding.

Hank? Or Charlotte McNally?

One more. A notorious (and creepy) child molester is going up for sentencing. What will happen in the courtroom? He’s known for outbursts and crazy behavior. Problem is, the courtroom is in Vermont, up in the Northeast Kingdom. Way too far to drive. “Take the chopper,” the assignment desk guy tells me. “You and Brian.” Photographer Brian and I hop into the chopper, it’s a beautiful warm sunny day, we’ll get here in, I don’t know, an hour.

We slap on our headphones. We fly. I’m looking at the scenery, thinking how cool this is, what a great job I have, they’re actually paying me for this! I look up at the pilot. He’s asleep.

Hank? Or Charlie?

And remember…a signed DRIVE TIME to three lucky commenters!