Across the table from a serial killer

By Jenny Hilborne
Author of mysteries and psychological thrillers

Authors are some of the most fascinating people. Almost every time I meet one, I come away with an intriguing new story. Often, it has to something to do with research they've conducted for a novel, as was the case last Saturday with one of thirteen authors who attended a public library book signing event in San Diego.

In researching one of my books, I spent hours inside a police station, experienced the arrest procedure, and found myself locked inside a cell. I wasn't expecting the lock up. The police sergeant treated me to that to give me a true flavor of what a prisoner goes through. The heavy slam of the thick metal prison door and the isolation in a cold concrete cell is something I'll always remember.

One thing I haven't done as part of my research is actually talk to an inmate. I'd love to do it and hear the words of those doing it the hard way. Apparently, it's not that easy to arrange.

One of the mystery authors at the Paradise Hills Library event told me about his interview at San Quentin State Prison with a serial killer. While the shivers ran up my back at the idea of sitting a few feet away from a shackled serial killer, I was engrossed...and a little envious.

Once the prisoner agreed to the interview, arranging it took months. Preparations included a full background check on the author, who told me he got the opportunity via personal connections. Without those connections, he may never have had the chance.

When the day arrived, the author was allowed to take a notepad and pen in with him. He was granted one hour to conduct his interview with the serial killer. An hour with a violent offender seemed like a long time to me. As described by the author, the prisoner was sufficiently shackled with his movements severely restricted. The inmate could bend his head forward to take a sip of his drink, and not much else.

After the interview, the author said he had to hand in his notes for inspection...or scrutinization before he could leave. Every page was carefully examined by the prison guards.

I asked the author his feelings...was he afraid, nervous? Was it difficult to think of questions to ask? What was it like to talk to a man convicted of serial murders? I imagined I'd have butterflies at the very least. (That's a polite way of saying I think I'd be crapping my pants). The author said he felt no fear. In fact, he felt perfectly safe. He said the prisoner was "reformed" and it didn't feel like he was talking to a serial killer at all.

I used the quotation marks around "reformed" as I had to take a step back at this point in our conversation and ask the author, "Can it be so? Do you truly believe anyone convicted of such atrocious crimes could ever be considered reformed?"

The answer surprised me.  

The author explained how the inmate killed during a "blackout."

"What does that mean?" I asked, my first thought being of electrical failure.

In this case, blackout meant under the influence of drugs and alcohol. The author said the prisoner battled with severe addictions and told that him he would "wake up" and find himself covered in blood, with no knowledge of what had happened. He knew he'd killed someone in a violent rage, but was not conscious of doing so at the time. Now that the inmate is no longer controlled by those substances, he no longer suffers from those faults. He is reformed.

Fascinating. Even if I wasn't sure I was convinced, it sounded plausible. The more I listened, the more willing I was to consider it possible. I love psychology. It makes the lines between good and evil that much more complex.

For the rest of the signing event, the question rumbled around inside my head: Can a violent offender, such as a serial killer, ever truly be considered reformed?

What are your thoughts?

Authors: have you had the opportunity to interview an inmate? What was your experience?

Research and Realism

I'm busy traveling today, so my two-time client and all-round great guy, thriller and horror writer Allan Leverone, is filling in here at CFC for me today. Take it away, Al!
- Jodie Renner, freelance editor and craft-of-fiction writer

RESEARCH & REALISM, by Allan Leverone

As a genre author, my goal is to immerse the reader in the story. I want you turning the pages late into the night, knowing you should put the book down and go to bed but unable to force yourself to do so. I want you so involved in my fictional world that if the phone rings, you don’t even want to take your nose out of the book for three seconds to check the caller ID.

That’s my goal. And without putting words in anyone else’s mouth (or on anyone else’s keyboard), I think it’s probably a pretty safe bet that’s the goal of everyone who writes fiction.

In other words, I want to achieve a measure of realism you will accept as a reader. Since I’m only expert in a small number of subjects (people who know me might suggest that number is zero), a certain percentage of my time as an author must be spent in research.

I hate research.

Let me clarify: I like learning new things but don’t enjoy doing research for research’s sake. When I’m writing, I would much rather be writing than researching. I want to learn enough about a subject to ensure that you, as a reader, are not forced out of the story by a lack of realism in the writing.

My new thriller, Parallax View, is set late in the Cold War, in 1987, and action takes place inside the Kremlin, as well as in East and West Germany and the United States. The plot revolves around a secret communique, written by Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, to be delivered to U.S. President Ronald Reagan by beautiful and clever CIA clandestine ops specialist Tracie Tanner. A shadowy cabal is determined to ensure that communique never reaches the White House, and the chase is on.

As I mentioned before, there aren’t many subjects on which I could be considered an expert. What few subjects there are do not include KGB operations. Or CIA operations, for that matter. I’ve never been to the Kremlin. Never met Mikhail Gorbachev, although most of a couple of chapters in PARALLAX VIEW is spent inside his head.

To prepare for writing the book, I could have immersed myself in research; the subjects were certainly fascinating enough. But doing so could have meant taking years to write this one novel, rather than months, with only a minimal net gain in realism, if that. The stark reality of being a genre author early in the 21st century is that taking years to write a single book is not economically feasible.

So what’s the solution?

God bless the Internet. Instead of studying scholarly tomes on the history and construction of the Kremlin, instead of spending thousands of dollars I can’t spare to fly to Moscow (although I would love to do so some day), I was able to go online and inside of an hour’s time spent on the right websites, gain sufficient knowledge to allow me to write scenes with (hopefully) enough realism to keep the reader immersed in Tracie Tanner’s and Mikhail Gorbachev’s world, rather than our own.

The same thing goes for Soviet sniper gear. Soviet cigarettes, televisions, monitoring equipment. All these things required research, which I was able to do online in significantly less time than it would have taken twenty or thirty years ago. And my editor, Jodie Renner, collaborated by keeping an eye out for any possible discrepancies for the time period of the novel.

Another example: Ramstein Air Base in West Germany. Never been there. If you served in the United States military during the mid-1980s and your tour of duty took you through Ramstein, you may not recognize the base from its appearance in PARALLAX VIEW.

But here’s the point: you’re reading fiction. Ramstein Air Base is going to look like what I need it to look like to advance the story. My goal as a writer is to draw you into the fictional world through steadily increasing tension, and through characters who live and breathe and become real to you. If you’re looking for a detailed historical account of the Cold War, you should probably look elsewhere. If you’re interested in a detailed description of U.S. military bases in Europe during the Reagan years, you should probably look elsewhere.

But through the magic of the Internet, any writer can become well-enough versed in almost any subject to enable him or her to write compelling fiction. Because, after all, the cliché says authors should “write what you know.” With the web at your fingertips, you can now “know” almost anything.

That’s my opinion. What’s yours? Is it cutting corners to do all of your research online? Copping out? Are only ex-Soviet Red Army snipers capable of writing about Russian sniper activity?

Allan Leverone is the author of the Amazon Top-25 bestselling thriller, THE LONELY MILE, as well as four other novels, including the brand-new PARALLAX VIEW. He's an air traffic controller in the real world and lives with his family in Londonderry, New Hampshire. Connect on Facebook, Twitter @AllanLeverone, and at http://www.allanleverone.com/.

Click on these titles to go to Allan's novels on Amazon: Parallax View, Revenant, Paskagankee, The Lonely Mile, and Final Vector.

A Fragrant Crime Writer

Guest post by Denise Hamilton.

I’ve never been a ‘girly’ girl. 

In childhood I was the short-haired, freckle-faced tomboy who climbed trees, rode bikes with the neighborhood boys and went out for track, not cheerleading. As an adult, I don’t read fashion magazines or follow trends. I abhor shopping. My one concession to make-up is lipstick and I keep my nails blunt and unpolished.

So you can imagine how perplexed I was, some years ago, to find myself sliding, almost despite myself, down the fragrant rabbit hole into the world of perfume obsession.

Wait, I remember thinking. This is so girly. It’s not like me at all! What on earth has come over me? But I couldn’t stop.

It was like a fever. A journey of discovery. A secret that I didn’t want to confess for fear people would think me shallow and silly. I still don’t talk about it much outside of those who share my obsession. I’ve learned to beware of the overly bright smiles, quizzical looks, lets-humor-her nods and slow backing away at cocktail parties.

But I don’t mind admitting it here. My name is Denise, and I’m a perfumista.

I refuse to say how many bottles are in my collection. The bald truth is that I’ve got so many I have a hard time keeping track.  But I cherish each one and I’m conversant on notes you’ve probably never heard of: galbanum, petitgrain, oud, indole. When I bring out my perfumes - often for curious friends – I feel like Gollum caressing his precioussssss. It is both a source of pleasure and shame for me that I covet and lust after these perfumes with the same intensity of the dragon Smaug lolling atop his gold treasure.

Perfume is a simple fix of pleasure in a world that grows ever more complex and dark.To put it in words that any three-year-old can understand, perfume makes me happy.

How did I get here?

Well, my mother was a French-Russian émigrée who always kept a shelf of perfumes in the bathroom. As a kid, they were a source of endless mystery and exoticism to me. Many an afternoon, I would take each bottle down with great reverence, examining its curves and labels, then spritz and dab to my heart’s content.

So, from an early age, perfume imprinted on me. I was curious about smells and found I had a good – and sensitive nose. At 16, I was bewitched by a boy who wore Aramis and followed him around like a heartsick puppy just to sniff him. I always wore perfume too, but in a haphazard way: Anais Anais because I’d smelled it on a girl in an Amsterdam hostel; Grey Flannel, a (gasp!) men’s cologne, because it smelled good on a boy I knew; Chanel No. 5 and Cristalle as hand-me-downs from my mother; Halston and Obsession and Fendi because they were popular at college and later.

But it wasn’t until I found a bottle of Donna Karan’s Chaos at the Goodwill some years back that I embarked on studying perfume as an art form. Spraying a bit on, I found it too spicy and rich. Back home, the smell wafting from my wrist intrigued me so I googled it and was shocked to find that Chaos was discontinued, highly sought after and fetching hundreds of dollars on ebay.

So I ran back and bought it, but instead of selling it, I grew to love it and avidly researched the notes to see why this mysterious perfume with notes of oud, cardamom, cinnamon, lavender, wood and incense had captivated so many people.

That plunged me into the online world of perfume blogs and encyclopedic review sites like Basenotes.net. The more I researched and learned about perfume, the more captivated I became by its art. Here was something that engaged me both intellectually and sensually. Not only that, but there were sites online where I could buy tiny samples of rare, niche, discontinued and vintage perfumes and experience the world’s great classic perfumes — or the newest niche offerings—without breaking the bank.

When I sat down to write Damage Control, I decided to make my protagonist Maggie Silver a budding perfumista.

I gave her the Chaos-at-the-Goodwill story from my real life. I found myself writing about the smells of Los Angeles – the tantalizing garlic and chicken whiffs from a Cuban restaurant; the rosemary and sage-scented hills; the smoky forest fire odors that often wreathed L.A.; the salt tang of the sea; the coconut oil aroma of suntan lotion. And I made perfume a clue that would help Maggie solve the murder. For several weeks, I congratulated myself on this cleverness. Smell is the most overlooked of our five senses, and I’d found a completely unique way to incorporate it into my crime writing!

So imagine my surprise when a bit of research showed that crime writers as far back as the late 1920s had done the same thing. Authors such as S.S. Dine, Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming and Ruth Rendell have all written magnificently about perfume. (And then of course there’s the novel Perfume, which I highly recommend.

For a while, I was devastated.  My clever little plot twist was anything but. But eventually I got over it. If so many authors have done it, they must be on to something good. Besides, everyone tells their tale a different way. My plot, my voice, my denouement, would all be different.

And so I relaxed. And I kept sniffing, and writing about my perfume.

Eventually, the Los Angeles Times Magazine gave me a monthly column in which to muse about the world of perfume – for which I’m extremely grateful.

I’ve found a wonderful community of kindred spirits online and in real life. In fact, several other Mommies and me meet regularly outside my son’s middle school an hour before classes let out. There in my family mini-van, we open vials and huff and roll our eyes with pleasure as we pass around the Carons, Guerlains, Diors, Chanels, Serge Lutens, Dawn Spencer Hurwitzes and other treasures that we’ve stumbled across.

Lord knows what the neighbors, joggers and dog-walkers think. I fully expect to see a policeman peering into the window one day, asking us what kind of drugs we’re doing.

“Here,” I’ll say, handing him a vial of Creed’s Russian Leather.  Or maybe Gendarme by Carriere.

“What do you think?” I’ll ask. “Is it you?”

***

Denise Hamilton writes the nationally best-selling Eve Diamond crime novels featuring a reporter who solves murders in contemporary multicultural Los Angeles. Hamilton is also an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in Wired, Cosmopolitan, Der Spiegel and New Times. She writes a monthly perfume column for the Los Angeles Times called Uncommon Scents.