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Guest Post: RESEARCHING FOR THE POLICE PROCEDURAL by Jim Doherty (Part Five)

Please welcome back SMFS list member Jim Doherty as continues delving into the various ways of researching and writing the accurate police procedural. This is the fifth and final part of the series that began last Saturday.

4) THE COLLIN WILCOX METHOD – HUM A FEW BARS AND FAKE IT

Most of your readers aren’t going to be cops, so most of them won’t really know whether or not you’ve made an error.  Why not just fake it?

Collin Wilcox, who wrote twenty novels featuring SFPD Homicide Lt. Frank Hastings, once claimed that he researched his subject by watching TV shows like The Streets of San Francisco and Barney Miller.  He admitted that he once spent two hours hanging around SFPD’s Homicide Detail, but found it was a waste of time.

“Research,” he said, “is endlessly beguiling but writing is hard work.”

His books have a great sense of place, and he’s a fine stylist and craftsman.  The novels are well-paced, and highly readable. 

But they are replete with errors about SFPD.

Still, he managed to get twenty novels published.  So maybe he had a point.  The idea, after all, is to get published.

So, if you can get away with faking it, what’s the drawback?

Well, aside from the obvious point that your books will have an element of superficiality, I think you’re breaking a covenant with your audience. 

Readers who read police procedurals expect technical accuracy.  If that’s the sub-genre you’ve chosen to specialize in, I really think it’s your job to provide it.

But Wilcox proves that success, both critical and financial, doesn’t hinge on this. 

CONCLUSION

I said at the beginning that the things I’d talk about could be applied to any kind of research you do for your fiction.  And, reviewing what I’ve written, I’ve found that to be even truer than I realized.  Research, when all is said and done, can be broken down to four types:

1)  Find out as much as you can about the subject before writing.

2)  Use what you know and get an expert to correct your mistakes.

3)  Work in the field yourself so that you’re speaking from experience.

4)  Fake it.  How many people will even know the difference?  Don’t worry about getting it right.  Worry about getting it written.

In the police procedural sub-genre, they’ve all worked, and worked well.  And they can all work with whatever kind of mystery, indeed whatever kind of fiction, you choose to write.

Jim Doherty ©2020

A cop of some kind or another for more than 20 years, JIM DOHERTY has served American law enforcement at the Federal, state, and local levels, policing everything from inner city streets to rural dirt roads, from college campuses to military bases, from suburban parks to urban railroad yards.  He’s the author of the true crime collection Just the Facts – True Tales of Cops & Criminals, which included the WWA Spur-winning article “Blood for Oil,” Raymond Chandler – Master of American Noir, a collection of lectures about the pioneering creator of hard-boiled private eye Philip Marlowe used for an on-line class; and An Obscure Grave, featuring college student and part-time cop Dan Sullivan, introduced in a series of short stories, which was a finalist for both a CWA Dagger Award and a Silver Falchion given at Killer Nashville.  He was, for  several years, the police technical advisor on the venerable Dick Tracy comic strip, and was a guest writer for a short sequence that ran in April and May on 2019.   Coming in 2020 are The Adventures of Colonel Britannia, written as “Simon A. Jacobs,” an unlikely (but incredibly fun to write) mash-up of Jane Austen’s Persuasion with Captain America, and an as-yet-untitled collection of Dan Sullivan short stories. 

Guest Post: RESEARCHING FOR THE POLICE PROCEDURAL by Jim Doherty (Part Four)

Please welcome back SMFS list member Jim Doherty as continues delving into the various ways of researching and writing the accurate police procedural. This is a multi part series that began on Saturday and will run through tomorrow of this week.

3) THE JOSEPH WAMBAUGH METHOD – BE A COP

            If you want to write about a particular job with authority, the best way to research the job is to do the job.

Herman Melville, was sailor on Naval, merchant, and whaling vessels before writing novels like Redburn, White-Jacket, and Moby Dick.   He would later say that his time at sea was what gave him something worth writing about.  And whether you regard his books as thumping great adventure novels, or poetic allegory, they are all technically accurate depictions of what the life of a seaman was like at that point in history.

Readers, particularly American readers, like books about the workplace, and if you’re a veteran of that workplace, you can write about it with authority.  And that’s why military novels by soldiers, medical novels by physicians, trial novels by lawyers, and espionage novels by spies are all so popular.

Joseph Wambaugh was not the first cop to turn his experiences into fiction.  He was preceded by, among others, Leslie T. White, Gordon Gordon (in collaboration with his wife, Mildred), and Dorothy Uhnak in the US; by Maurice Procter, John Wainwright, and Peter N. Walker in the UK; and by A.C. Baantjer in the Netherlands.  Nor is he necessarily the best (though he’s certainly one of the best).

 And he’s undoubtedly the most famous.  Moreover, he’s been successful in a variety of forms.  Novels like The New Centurions, The Blue Knight, and Hollywood Station.  Non-fiction about cops like The Onion Field, The Blooding, and Lines and Shadows.  The creator of the award-winning TV series Police Story.  An award-winning screenwriter adapting his own work to movies like The Onion Field and The Black Marble.  And, though he wasn’t the first, he certainly started a trend.  Hundreds of cops, including me, have turned their real-life experiences into fiction in the wake of Wambaugh’s success.  What had been a tiny stream before Wambaugh has become a flood in the years since his first novel was published. 

A flood you’ll have to compete with if you want to write police procedurals.

 William Caunitz (NYPD), Danny R. Smith (LA County Sheriff’s Office), Hugh Holton (Chicago PD), B.J. Bourg (Chief Investigator, LaFourche Parish DA’s Office), Frank Zafiro (Spokane PD), Joseph D. McNamara (San Jose PD), O’Neil DeNoux (Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office), John Robert Coffin (Portland, ME, PD), Lowen Clausen (Seattle PD), Gerald Petievich (US Secret Service), Paul Lindsay (FBI), Nevada Barr (National Park Service Law Enforcement Division), Marc Cameron (US Marshals Service), James O. Born (FL. Dept. of Law Enforcement), K.T. Mince (CA Highway Patrol), Graham Ison, Joan Locke, James Barnett, and Roger Pearce (all Scotland Yard), Karen Campbell (Strathclyde Police in Scotland),  Don Easton (RCMP), John Galvin (Irish Garda), Friedrich Neznansky (Moscow Prosecutor’s Investigator), Omar Shahid Hamid (Karachi, Pakistan, Police), are just a few of the cop-novelists who’ve appeared in Wambaugh’s wake.

There is a “been there, done that, bought the t-shirt” sense of knowing in a cop novel written by a cop that can’t quite be reproduced.  And you’re also less likely to include stuff that doesn’t really need to be included.

Hemingway once said that if you leave out something you don’t know, your story is hurt, but if you leave out something you do know, the sense of authority in your writing makes it seem as though you included it.  It’s easier to do this if you’re a cop.

Undoubtedly many of you are wondering how you can be a cop when you’ve already firmly ensconced in some other profession.  It’s one thing to be interested enough in police work to want to write stories about it.  But it’s something else altogether to make it career just for research purposes.

But many police departments and sheriff’s offices have a police reserve program.  Apply, go through the training, pass all the tests, and you could be a part-time cop, the law enforcement equivalent of a military reservist or a volunteer firefighter.  Patricia Cornwell, John Ball, Stan Washburn, and Patricia Smiley all work, or have worked, as police reservists.  I started my own police career as a reserve cop while I was an undergrad at UC Berkeley.  This is a way for you to get that convincing element that only comes from actual experience without having to make it a full-time career.

And you might just find you really enjoy it. 

Jim Doherty ©2020

A cop of some kind or another for more than 20 years, JIM DOHERTY has served American law enforcement at the Federal, state, and local levels, policing everything from inner city streets to rural dirt roads, from college campuses to military bases, from suburban parks to urban railroad yards.  He’s the author of the true crime collection Just the Facts – True Tales of Cops & Criminals, which included the WWA Spur-winning article “Blood for Oil,” Raymond Chandler – Master of American Noir, a collection of lectures about the pioneering creator of hard-boiled private eye Philip Marlowe used for an on-line class; and An Obscure Grave, featuring college student and part-time cop Dan Sullivan, introduced in a series of short stories, which was a finalist for both a CWA Dagger Award and a Silver Falchion given at Killer Nashville.  He was, for  several years, the police technical advisor on the venerable Dick Tracy comic strip, and was a guest writer for a short sequence that ran in April and May on 2019.   Coming in 2020 are The Adventures of Colonel Britannia, written as “Simon A. Jacobs,” an unlikely (but incredibly fun to write) mash-up of Jane Austen’s Persuasion with Captain America, and an as-yet-untitled collection of Dan Sullivan short stories. 

Guest Post: RESEARCHING FOR THE POLICE PROCEDURAL by Jim Doherty (Part Three)

Please welcome back SMFS list member Jim Doherty as continues delving into the various ways of researching and writing the accurate police procedural. This is a multi part series that began on Saturday and will run through Wednesday of this week.

2) THE JOHN CREASEY METHOD – WRITE FIRST, RESEARCH LATER

You may already know more than you think you do about police work in general or the police force you want to write about specifically.  If you can put that knowledge to work for you, then you can save yourself some time and effort.

John Creasey published his first novel in 1933.  For next 10 years he wrote in many mystery sub-genres, such as amateur sleuth, espionage, criminal protagonist, adventurer, as well as other genres like westerns, science fiction etc. 

At the end of that ten years, he was well-known for his protean productivity. 

One day he learned that his next-door neighbor was retired Scotland Yard detective.

“Write about us as we are,” his neighbor advised.  “You can leave out the dull stuff.” 

              With his neighbor as technical advisor, Creasey created Chief Inspector Roger West of the Yard, whose first appearance was in the 1942 novel Inspector West Takes Charge. 
                Creasey’s method was to write a draft first, have his neighbor read it, correcting errors, and then write a second draft incorporating the corrections. 
                Result:  A technically accurate police novel. 
                Despite the authentic details the West series was very melodramatic.  West may have been doing realistic police work, but the plots were still out of Sax Rohmer and Edgar Wallace. 
               Thirteen years and sixteen West novels later, Creasey, inspired by Dragnet, which proved that police work could be interesting in itself without the crutch of melodrama, and also by a friendship he developed with another Scotland Yard detective, Commander George Hatherill, Operational Head of CID, wondered if the “dull stuff” his neighbor had advised him to leave out was, to the layman, not really dull at all.  He created George Gideon of the Yard, a fictional counterpart to Hatherill, this time leaving that supposedly “dull stuff” in.  Awards, excellent reviews, a major movie, a stage play, and a TV series all followed. 
               Each novel showed Gideon supervising the investigations into a number of different, unrelated crimes, many inspired by real life cases.  They are still among the best cop novels ever written.
               And he used the same method.  Write a draft, submit it to Hatherill for corrections, and write a final draft incorporating those corrections.
               By this time, however, there were fewer corrections.  After 13 years, Creasey wrote about Scotland Yard with the self-assurance of one who knows what he’s talking about.  Using the “write first – research later” method, Creasey had, over time, perhaps without being aware of it, engaged in a form of long-term, slow-motion total immersion.
               Nevertheless, the obvious drawback to this method can be the appearance of superficiality.


Jim Doherty ©2020

A cop of some kind or another for more than 20 years, JIM DOHERTY has served American law enforcement at the Federal, state, and local levels, policing everything from inner city streets to rural dirt roads, from college campuses to military bases, from suburban parks to urban railroad yards.  He’s the author of the true crime collection Just the Facts – True Tales of Cops & Criminals, which included the WWA Spur-winning article “Blood for Oil,” Raymond Chandler – Master of American Noir, a collection of lectures about the pioneering creator of hard-boiled private eye Philip Marlowe used for an on-line class; and An Obscure Grave, featuring college student and part-time cop Dan Sullivan, introduced in a series of short stories, which was a finalist for both a CWA Dagger Award and a Silver Falchion given at Killer Nashville.  He was, for  several years, the police technical advisor on the venerable Dick Tracy comic strip, and was a guest writer for a short sequence that ran in April and May on 2019.   Coming in 2020 are The Adventures of Colonel Britannia, written as “Simon A. Jacobs,” an unlikely (but incredibly fun to write) mash-up of Jane Austen’s Persuasion with Captain America, and an as-yet-untitled collection of Dan Sullivan short stories. 

Guest Post: RESEARCHING FOR THE POLICE PROCEDURAL by Jim Doherty (Part Two)

Please welcome back SMFS list member Jim Doherty as continues delving into the various ways of researching and writing the accurate police procedural. This is a multi part series that began here yesterday and will run through Wednesday of this week.

1) THE JACK WEBB/ED McBAIN METHOD – TOTAL IMMERSION

Though he wasn’t really the first to come up with the idea of authentically depicting police work in fiction, and though he never wrote novels or short stories, Jack Webb, more than any other person, deserves the title Founding Father of the Police Procedural.  The success of his radio/TV series Dragnet showed that the authentic depiction of police work was as interesting as the crimes Joe Friday and his various partners were investigating.   Anthony Boucher, in his New York Times mystery review column, pointed this out when he first coined the term “police procedural” in 1956.

Webb, primarily a radio actor, had been hired to play the head of the crime lab for a 1948 movie called He Walked by Night, based on the recent, heavily publicized hunt for cop-killer by the LAPD. 

Between takes, he struck up a friendship with the film’s police technical advisor, Sgt. Marty Wynn, who’d shot it out with the actual cop-killer in real life.  Wynn, discovering that Webb was best known for playing private eyes on radio, characters who routinely made policeman look foolish in every episode, told Webb, “It rankles every damn cop in the country when they hear those far-fetched stories about crime.  They’re all jazzed up, and the detectives are supermen, and they do it all with mirrors.  Real cops don’t work that way.”  Warming to his subject, he continued, “I can arrange for you to have access to cases in the police files.  Maybe you could do something with those.”

Wynn later said that he forgot about the conversation almost as soon as it was time for the next take.  So he was quite surprised when, months later, Webb showed up at his office, anxious to take him up on his offer.

As Webb later put it, “I shook hands with research for the first time.”  He attended police academy classes, hung out with detectives on stakeouts, rode along with uniformed cops on patrol, etc.  And when the radio series he envisioned finally debuted, he continued to try to make every episode absolutely authentic.

When an episode called for Friday to make a long-distance call to Utah, he actually sent an actor to Fountain Green, Utah, made the call while the show was being performed (they were broadcast live at this point), and sent the voice of the real-life operators making the connection out over the airwaves.

“There’s something about the way a real operator says, ‘Los Angeles calling,’ that an actor just can’t duplicate,” he later said.

  When information on a report he was reading was found on the second page of that particular form, the audience heard Friday turn the page.

When Friday entered police headquarters in City Hall, the number of steps he took was precisely the number of steps on the stairway from the sidewalk to the entrance.

When a scene was set at a particular intersection in Los Angeles at midnight, he recorded that street sounds on that street corner on a typical midnight to get the effects right.

When the script called for a rooftop shootout, he recorded gunshots on a rooftop.

When the show moved to TV, he had a set made that duplicated an LAPD detective squadroom in every detail.  Finding that the doorknobs used at police headquarters were no longer being manufactured, he made molds of the actual doorknobs so that tiny detail could be accurately displayed.

When the technical advisor for a particular episode showed up at the set, he looked at one of the desks and said “My God, that looks exactly like my desk.  And that’s my ashtray.  And those’re my cigarette butts!”

Evan Hunter, impressed by Dragnet, started writing short stories about the NYPD for magazines like Manhunt and Verdict, trying to replicate the sense of what he called “clinical verity” that he so enjoyed on Dragnet.  He interviewed cops extensively, got permission to ride along, hung out at detective squadrooms, studied manuals, rank structure, organizational structures, etc.  He reproduced police forms in his fiction.  He made a point of explaining differences between pieces of jargon (e.g. “plants” rather than “stakeouts”). 

Invited to create a new series of mystery novels by Pocket Books editor Herb Alexander, he got the notion of making the lead character an entire NYPD police station, the 87^th Precinct, and stepped up his research.  Throughout the first book in the planned series, eventually published in 1956 as Cop Hater under the pseudonym “Ed McBain,” he was continually calling advisors.  NYPD’s a huge department.  And procedures could change fairly quickly.  Hunter/McBain finally set his novel in a thinly fictionalized version of NYC to give himself some wiggle-room.

How to you totally immerse yourself in a police department?   First, pick a department.  Check out the website and other publicly available information.  Many police departments have “citizens’ police academies” specifically to inform the public of what they do and how they do it, and if the one you’ve settled on has such a program, you should attend.  Go on ride-alongs.  Hang around and ask questions.  Conduct in-depth interviews with cops on that department.  If there are any, read biographies or autobiographies of members of that department, histories of the department, etc.  And when you finally think you know that department inside and out, sit down and write.  But as you write, you’ll still find you have questions, so be prepared to do even more research.

Drawbacks?  First, you’ll have found out a lot of information and you’ll be tempted to use every single bit of it, whether or not it enhances your story.  The stuff you don’t need was, after all, just as hard to find as the stuff that you do need, and it’s difficult to just leave it behind.

The president of the American Tobacco Company was once quoted as saying, “Fifty cents of every dollar I spend on advertising is wasted.  Problem is, I don’t know which fifty cents it is, so I’ll just have to go on spending the whole dollar.” 

It’s the same with research.  Except that once you’ve spent that “whole dollar” in time and effort, you’re then going to have to figure out which 50 cents worth of info you don’t need.

Second, you might get so involved with research, you never get around to writing.  All that time you’re researching you’re not sitting at a desk putting words on a page.

Jim Doherty ©2020

A cop of some kind or another for more than 20 years, JIM DOHERTY has served American law enforcement at the Federal, state, and local levels, policing everything from inner city streets to rural dirt roads, from college campuses to military bases, from suburban parks to urban railroad yards.  He’s the author of the true crime collection Just the Facts – True Tales of Cops & Criminals, which included the WWA Spur-winning article “Blood for Oil,” Raymond Chandler – Master of American Noir, a collection of lectures about the pioneering creator of hard-boiled private eye Philip Marlowe used for an on-line class; and An Obscure Grave, featuring college student and part-time cop Dan Sullivan, introduced in a series of short stories, which was a finalist for both a CWA Dagger Award and a Silver Falchion given at Killer Nashville.  He was, for  several years, the police technical advisor on the venerable Dick Tracy comic strip, and was a guest writer for a short sequence that ran in April and May on 2019.   Coming in 2020 are The Adventures of Colonel Britannia, written as “Simon A. Jacobs,” an unlikely (but incredibly fun to write) mash-up of Jane Austen’s Persuasion with Captain America, and an as-yet-untitled collection of Dan Sullivan short stories. 

Guest Post: RESEARCHING FOR THE POLICE PROCEDURAL by Jim Doherty (Part One)

Please welcome SMFS list member Jim Doherty with the first of several posts over the next few days as he explains how to research and write police procedurals.

RESEARCHING FOR THE POLICE PROCEDURAL

By

Jim Doherty

Let’s begin by defining our terms.  A police procedural is a piece of crime fiction, in any medium, in which the main, or at least a major interest is the authentic depiction of the profession of law enforcement.  It’s less about the crime, or even about the solution of the crime, than it is about how cops work on the Job. 

And maybe, at its best, as Joseph Wambaugh has suggested, it’s about how the Job works on cops.

To a degree, what I’ll be talking about here is applicable to research for any mystery, or, for that matter, any piece of fiction.  But the police procedural is the only mystery sub-genre which is defined by its technical accuracy (or at least by the appearance of technical accuracy).  So, for this article, I’m talking about research in the context of that sub-genre.

God’s in the details, and nowhere is that more true than in the police procedural, because what’s true for one police force probably won’t be true for another.  Sticking strictly to US municipal police departments, let’s look at how different things can be.

What’s the official title of the Head of the Force?  Certainly “Chief of Police” is the most common.  That’s what the job’s called in the Los Angeles Police, the San Francisco Police, and the Miami Police, among thousands of others.  But a lot of big-city departments use the title “Commissioner,” like the New York City Police, the Baltimore Police, and the  Philadelphia Police;  “Superintendent,” like the Chicago Police, or the New Orleans Police; “Director,” like the Memphis Police or the Trenton, NJ, Police, “Colonel”  like the St. Louis Metro Police or the Providence, RI, Police; even “Sheriff,” like the Las Vegas Metro Police (a consequence of the Clark County Sheriff’s Office and the Las Vegas City Police merging back in the ‘70’s).

What are local stations called?  “Precincts,” as in NYPD or Detroit PD?  “Districts,” as in Chicago PD or Honolulu PD?  “Divisions,” as in San Diego PD or Dallas PD?  “Briefing Stations,” as in Oklahoma City PD?  “Patrol Stations,” as in Houston PD?  “Zones,” as in Atlanta PD?

What are plainclothes officers assigned to criminal investigation called?  “Detective,” of course, as used in NYPD, Chicago PD, Seattle PD, and hundreds of others, is the most common title.   But some, like the Rochester, NY, Police, use the title “investigator.”  San Francisco PD calls them “inspectors.”  And Cincinnati PD refers to them as “specialists.”

More than likely your cop’s going to be investigating a murder.  What’s the branch assigned to murder investigation called?  The Homicide Squad, as in the Pittsburgh Police?  The Homicide Division, as in the Houston Police?  The Homicide Unit, as in the San Antonio Police?  The Homicide Detail as in the San Francisco Police.  The Homicide Branch as in the Washington, DC, Metro Police?  The Robbery-Homicide Division as in the Los Angeles Police?  The Violent Crimes Division, as in the  Kansas City, Kansas, Police?  Or the Crime Against Persons Section, as in the Scottsdale, Arizona, Police?

Getting the answers to these questions correct is what the police procedural is all about.  And not just about police work, but anything else that impinges on the story.  I started a police novel some years back set in San Francisco in which, on the very first page, the author referred to the legislative branch of San Francisco as the “City Council.”  I stopped reading immediately, appalled at the glaring error.  Anyone who lives in the Bay Area knows that, since the City and the County of San Francisco are co-extensive, the legislative body there is called the Board of Supervisors. 

So how do you avoid those errors?  How do you sweat the details?  There are several ways, and they’ve all worked. Come back tomorrow as I start explaining the various ways.

Jim Doherty ©2020

A cop of some kind or another for more than 20 years, JIM DOHERTY has served American law enforcement at the Federal, state, and local levels, policing everything from inner city streets to rural dirt roads, from college campuses to military bases, from suburban parks to urban railroad yards.  He’s the author of the true crime collection Just the Facts – True Tales of Cops & Criminals, which included the WWA Spur-winning article “Blood for Oil,” Raymond Chandler – Master of American Noir, a collection of lectures about the pioneering creator of hard-boiled private eye Philip Marlowe used for an on-line class; and An Obscure Grave, featuring college student and part-time cop Dan Sullivan, introduced in a series of short stories, which was a finalist for both a CWA Dagger Award and a Silver Falchion given at Killer Nashville.  He was, for  several years, the police technical advisor on the venerable Dick Tracy comic strip, and was a guest writer for a short sequence that ran in April and May on 2019.   Coming in 2020 are The Adventures of Colonel Britannia, written as “Simon A. Jacobs,” an unlikely (but incredibly fun to write) mash-up of Jane Austen’s Persuasion with Captain America, and an as-yet-untitled collection of Dan Sullivan short stories. 

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Guest Post: Fiction Writing As Time Travel by Andrew Welsh-Huggins

Please welcome SMFS list member Andrew Welsh-Huggins to our blog today…

Fiction Writing As Time Travel

           Nailing the details of real-life police investigation is a no-brainer when it comes to writing crime fiction. Anyone who’s read the procedural mysteries of Alafair Burke or Michael Connelly knows the pleasure of encountering accurate information about how detectives do their jobs intermixed with compelling fictional tales. Conversely, everyone has experienced the sinking feeling when a writer confuses a revolver for a semi-automatic or sentences a heartless killer to thirty years in jail, not prison.

          As a reporter by day and a mystery writer by earlier in the day, I’m accustomed to tapping experts to ensure my imagination has its facts straight. I interviewed both an arson investigator and a retired state geologist for my novel Slow Burn, took a behind-the-scenes tour of the Ohio Statehouse for Capitol Punishment, and talked to experts on human trafficking as well as ex-trafficking victims for The Hunt. Recently, I took on a new research challenge with two short stories set three decades ago in Providence, Rhode Island. Not only did I need to learn about police and court procedure in those bygone days, I enlisted another important source: my own memory of living there in the mid-1980s.

          Despite fond recollections of my wife’s and my sojourn in Providence, I had only been back once—early in the 1990s—before I started my first story last year. That lone return visit was well before the city’s downtown underwent a transformation that included the unearthing of the long-buried Woonasquatucket and Moshassuck rivers, which meant the city was more or less unchanged in my mind. Though a negative for my inner tourist, this time away turned out to be a good thing for my fiction writing, since the era was frozen in place for me.

          I had my temporal landscape; now I needed experts to fill in the blanks. Upping the ante, I wanted information not just on the Providence police homicide division, but on that division three decades ago. Initially, this proved almost as difficult as resurrecting old memories. Providence in the 1980s was still living down its reputation as the seat of the New England mob, a standing that didn’t always stop at the doors to the police station. Locating people who were in law enforcement at the time and who were willing to talk to an out-of-state reporter-slash-mystery writer proved as easy as coaxing brown bears from dens during hunting season. Weeks passed and my multiple emails and phone calls to retired Providence detectives whom I’d located on the Web met with silence. Finally, with just a few days before my deadline, a retired investigator answered an email with an out-of-the-blue call. Soon I was wondering how I would ever get him off the phone as he explained the types of cars detectives drove (Plymouth Furys), the layout of the homicide bureau (“a mish mash of desks”), and the bar that detectives hung out at after work (Christopher’s). The story that emerged from that research, The Murderous Type, appeared last year inSnowbound, an anthology of short New England crime fiction.

          I faced similar challenges locating sources for a follow-up, this time trying to find a defense attorney familiar with legal practices and court layouts in the 1980s. Again, patience paid off as after several weeks I found a lawyer willing to fill in the details, and even offer me his own spin on a possible plot twist. That story, Nice Grammar, That Guy, was published in the December issue of Mystery MagazineWeekly.

          In summary, I used three tools for researching and writing these stories from long in my past:

_ The Internet. This ‘no duh’ helper prodded my memory by providing everything from the location of the city’s paste jewelry manufacturers (in and around Grosvenor Avenue) to the names of long-gone eateries like Winkler’s steakhouse. It also helped me show, not tell, the era, as I researched ways to inform the reader we were in the 1980s, including a reference to the 1986 Bangles tune “Walk Like An Egyptian” and details of the decade’s savings and loan scandal.

_ Experts. The Web helped me find the aforementioned defense attorney and retired detective, but it was calls and emails with them that garnered the kinds of time-traveling details necessary for the story, such as the lawyer’s description of a municipal courtroom at the time: “not traditional looking at all, like a basement rumpus room.” Individuals, not the Internet, almost always provide the best details for a fiction writer.

_ Myself. One of the final lines I added to The Murderous Type came not from anyone I spoke with or online research, but from my own memory of a street we used to live on and the oceanic look of the closely placed houses, so different from the homes where I grew up in a western New York State village. I wrote: The bright red house was a triple-decker, like all the houses on the street, homes tall and solid and honestly built as nineteenth-century sailing ships. An observation that had stayed with me over three decades turned out to be one of the final pieces of my fictional puzzle.

          Of course, my task would have been easier if it had occurred to me back then that I might be writing police procedurals about Providence someday. But that’s one of the fun things about fiction writing. You never know which direction, in space or in time, it may take you.    

Andrew Welsh-Huggins ©2018

Writer, reader, owner of too many pets. Recently asked for pancakes at Waffle House. Author of the Andy Hayes private eye mystery series, including The Third Brother. Winner, 2017 Al Blanchard Award for The Murderous Type, available in Snowbound anthology from Level Best Books.

Online: https://andrewwelshhuggins.com/

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