Chechnya's Long Shadow

by Mar Preston  

My second mystery, Rip-Off, is a whodunit about Chechen organized crime set in Santa Monica, not
Boston.

The news unfolding in Boston has me and the rest of the world gob-smacked, as the Brits say. It may be that Chechnya in the end has nothing to do with the Tsarnaev brothers, who went so terribly wrong.

They did, after all, spend little time in Chechnya, and some would say their formative influences were right here in America. But Islamic Fundamentalism has a long reach. If indeed, their motivation lies at the feet of some warped image of Islam.

In this fast-moving story, we have no idea what motivated a murderous spree at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. What will be revealed to us on interrogating the surviving suspect will be filtered through Need to Know. It would be foolish of the government to tell us everything he reveals, and they won’t.

I’ve been fascinated with Chechnya and the North Caucusus for years and read Chechen newspapers in English regularly to prepare to write Rip-Off. Take a look yourself.

For example, there’s Chechnya Media: http://chechnyamedia.com/. Or http://www.kavkazcenter.com/eng/ Do some background research yourself on the tenuous links the family seems to have with Kyrgystan. Or Dagestan, or any of the ‘Stans in the North Caucusus.

When I was researching Rip-Off, which was published in 2012, there was an open slave market in Grozny, Chechnya’s biggest city. You remember Grozny? It was bombed back to the Stone Age by the Russians during one of the two Russian attempts to quell Chechen uprisings.

They have oil in Chechnya. Otherwise no one would be interested in this cold, mountainous country.

Here’s a quote from Rip-Off:

Here Mason, a Homicide Detective from the Santa Monica Police Department, is trying to get information from the FBI.

“What do you know about Chechnya?”

“I did some reading up on it.”

De Leeuw snorted and spoke in short bursts. “That’s not going to help you a lot. Things started cooking in about 1994. Start of two wars when Russia went all-out to suppress their independence after Russia per se broke up. There’s oil in Chechnya. Their whole history is about fending off invaders. It’s only got a population of a million and an area of six hundred square miles, less than a lot of counties in California. Kidnappings, beheadings, massacres. There’s nobody to stop it. No law enforcement. No real government. Guerilla warfare. Muslim fanatics, the worst. You know there’s an open slave market in Grozny? The good people left. Then anybody who could get out got out, but first they got great training by criminal gangs. Economy still doesn’t have much to offer but oil theft, arms trade, counterfeiting and drug smuggling. Oh yeah, lots of wire fraud. Extortion.”

Mason quirked an eyebrow. Another agent came in and took the chair beside Mason. He wasn’t introduced.

“Lots of them landed in the US, a big number in Hollywood and Glendale.” He shook his head and the black-suited agent with the short hair beside him took a phone call, not taking his eyes off Mason. De Leeuw was acting squirrelly. It was plain to him that the Feds were only cooperating with him because they hoped he’d lead them to a bigger player in the Chechen mob. But the way the Feds played the game with the locals, he knew they wouldn’t give him the whole story.

“The most dangerous, the biggest organized Chechen gang is the Obshina, but not like a gang in the old Tony Soprano sense,” De Leeuw went on. “Back there they made their money from bank robberies, kidnapping and white-collar crime. Here they get together a team to pull jobs. They come together for a while and then they’re gone. All Chechen. We try to catch them before they disappear into the local Chechen community.”

“Lawless, clannish. There aren’t that many of them but they stick together,” said the agent beside him, speaking for the first time.

De Leeuw gave him a sour look. What? He wasn’t supposed to speak unless spoken to?

“They fly in assassins to do hits and help out with other assorted violence,” De Leeuw continued. “When it’s over, the hired hands just disappear. Then we see a new face coming in just to shore up some criminal operation on an as needed basis.”

“It’s a whole new world,” Mason said, shaking his head.
 

And it is a whole new world. Nowadays Chechnya is ruled by a strongman ally of Putin, but not much has changed back in Chechnya. But in America our sense of safety and sanctuary has once again been shattered the way it has been in so many countries around the world. I became fascinated with Chechnya because the savagery there was so unimaginably distant.

No longer.


Mar Preston is the author of two mystery suspense novels set in Santa Monica -- No Dice and Rip-Off -- and Payback, set in a town much like the California mountain village where she now lives. But only nice people live there, unlike the fictional Sierra Mountain Village.

Writing Too Close To Home

by Mar Preston, mystery writer and guest blogger

I live in a mountain village in rural California, and my third mystery suspense novel, Payback,  is set in a fictional Sierra Mountain Village somewhat like the village where I live. But I assure you, only nice people live here in Pine Mountain Club. 

Nonetheless, the novel details a story that is somewhat like an event that happened here. Being writers yourself, you know how your ears go ping, ping, ping when you hear something that you know is a good story. Your imagination dances. You can’t wait to get home and make notes. That's what happened. 

The female protagonist is loosely modeled on a close friend of mine who is a patrol officer here. The male protagonist, the dismissive homicide detective from Big City Bakersfield is a composite of all the detectives I've come to know over the years in researching my previous two police procedural novels set in Santa Monica.

The villain? You have to have a good villain as a foil to your protagonist, so I have taken an event or two from life, splashed it around, and enhanced it considerably. Admittedly, if you’ve had your ear to the ground as far as local politics and scandals, and gifted with a good imagination you might draw some conclusions that the villain might be somewhat like this or that guy.

Now I’ve had the experience of readers identifying with characters. In my first book, No Dice, the villain changes his name, hoping to disguise his perfectly respectable Latino background, but even more to distance himself from a brother who is a felon, well-known to the LAPD.

I named him something like Gomez, which he changed to Edwards. Now Edwards is a name that would fit in a blue blood catalog anywhere. A big red, obnoxious Hummer had just charged in front of me on the freeway without looking as I was driving home, scaring me witless. So in the next chapter Gomez/Edwards drives a red Hummer. Never gave it a second thought.

The husband of a friend of mine walked out of the room on my arrival a few days later, giving me a dirty look, and making a stinging remark. Surprised, I asked her about it and she told me he had changed his name from Gomez and had I noticed that a red Hummer was parked out in the driveway? He had read the book ragged, pointing out to her where he was portrayed here and here and here in the pages. I was amazed.

For some people there will never be enough assurance that the name of the villain came from your imagination. Or that the local handicapped Church Elder is not the hypocritical philanderer who appears in your book. They think the School Superintendent who has red hair must be the local politician on page 234.

Some of you may have had the opposite issue. What about the fiftyish beauty parlor-Big Hair lovely who just knows that you had her in mind when you wrote your heroine who is, yes, a blonde but twenty-six, lithe, and a Cambridge graduate? You smile and keep your mouth shut, that’s what you do. My friend, the patrol officer, is delighted that the protagonist of Payback is loosely modeled on her.

All my friends and neighbors are excited to read about themselves in Payback. Any fiction writer knows that characters are a composite. For one thing, it’s damned difficult to capture all the nuances and contradictions of a character you’re drawing from life.

For another thing, that’s what your imagination is for. If you’re any sort of observer and watcher from the sidelines, you’re always playing the what if game. What if that biker over there was a Sierra Club butterfly collector? That woman with the sweet smile with the baby in her arms? What if she was a cult leader just waiting for the opportunity to tell you about her alien abduction and the real father of her baby?

Lately, I've heard rumors that a certain faction in the community are rumbling about retaliation for their supposed negative depiction in Payback. 

Every day, we are reminded that terrible things happen in this world. Readers of mystery and thriller fiction like to dance close to the dark edge. But retaliation rarely happens to people who love to curl up in an arm chair and read about a likeable or noble protagonist undergoing death-defying challenges.

I’m not taking these rumblings too seriously. We’ll see, won’t we? Nevertheless, if you hear about my violent demise, be suspicious.

Readers - have you ever felt an author had created a character partly based on you? How did that feel?

Writers - What techniques do you use to disguise any traits of real-life people that appear in your characters?

And, in case you're interested, here's a little about Payback:

A forest fire burning in the mountains surrounding a remote California village interrupts the Oktoberfest celebration, followed by the discovery of the mayor who has been beheaded. Sheriff’s Detective Dex Stafford concludes everybody hated the mayor for different and very good reasons, but nobody will talk.

Patrol Officer Holly Seabright of the village’s security force becomes a prickly ally in uncovering the hints and whispers of something much worse than the murder of the mayor. Stafford pools resources with the attractive and smart patrol officer on a twisted trail of discovery as winter and the big snows shut down the town. A killer beyond his imagining haunts the town. Sometime soon, unless they can stop it, there will be another death, and then still another.

Interview With Crime Novelist Mar Preston

Jodie Renner: Today’s guest is crime fiction writer Mar Preston, a Canadian who been on vacation in California for more than 40 years.

Mar has written three suspense-mysteries and is just putting the finishing touches on a fourth one. The first two, No Dice and Rip-Off, are both Detective Dave Mason mysteries set in Santa Monica, California. I was fortunate to edit Mar’s last two novels: Rip-Off and Payback, a suspense-mystery set in the mountains of California.

Rip-Off was recently released, and, since I read it and loved it, I wanted to ask Mar a few background questions about the making of this fast-paced page-turner full of suspense, quirky and nasty characters, and international intrigue.

JR: How did you choose to write about something so foreign to you and your Santa Monica locale as Chechen organized crime?

Mar P: For decades, I was an academic researcher at the University of Southern California. All that time I was slowly veering towards the dark side to contrast my rather dry academic life. I lived in Santa Monica, and my first mystery, No Dice, explored its lively political landscape. Dave Mason, my cop, works homicide with the Santa Monica PD.

JR: Where exactly is Santa Monica, and is it really a hotbed of crime?

Mar P: Santa Monica is an eight-square-mile upscale beach city on the balmy shores of Los Angeles. In fact, it’s the place Raymond Chandler called Bay City so many years ago. No, there aren’t a lot of gun battles or gang shoot-outs here. I can't remember where the idea came from to write about Chechen organized crime in my second mystery, Rip-Off. But for the purposes of the story, I needed to raise the stakes.

JR: Before editing Rip-Off, I had barely heard about Chechnya. Where is it, anyway?

Mar P: Chechnya is small country located in the mountains of southeastern Europe. A breakaway republic of Russia, Chechnya has been at the mercy of every invader throughout history that swept across the mountains to devastate its people. It struggles to build the infrastructure of government, law and order, but often loses out to organized crime because crime offers jobs. Those who can, leave. And, of course, not all Chechens are criminals.

JR: How did you prepare to write about this?

Mar P: I’m not sure I prepared. I did the research on a need-to-know basis. Yet once I started burrowing down internet rat holes, it was difficult to stop. Like all writers, I was curious. Do a search for Chechen news sites and you'll see what I mean.

JR: How did you get the speech of the characters to sound so authentic?

Mar P: I set up a Google Alert, read cultural histories, and what novels and accounts I could find in English. For years I read regional newspaper accounts about Chechnya, its wars with Russia, and its increasing fundamentalism. Gradually, individual characters came forward and I began to hear them talk in my mind. No, I am not schizophrenic. Most writers do this.

I heard their stories and the way they speak in the comments they post following pieces in many of the Chechen news sites. The kinds of errors people make writing in English are the kinds of errors they make in speech as well. For example, I saw they commonly left out the definite article “the”

before a noun. I notice this is common to Farsi speakers as well—and probably many other non-native English speakers.

JR: How did you manage to give the reader the necessary background to follow the story without a lot of info dumps?

Mar P: Here are some tricks I used to work in background: Mason reads police reports and he strikes up conversation with a visiting Moscow police official. He meets with an academic at UCLA. I tried to integrate the expository pieces with Mason's need to know as well.

JR: The stakes were high in Rip-Off, with several levels of law enforcement involved, at times almost coming to blows with each other!

Mar P: Yes, Mason isn’t the only law enforcement official who’s interested in the international criminals strolling Santa Monica’s “mean streets.” SMPD butts up against the FBI, whose cases are often trumped by the authority of the Homeland Security. Everybody wants a grab at the credit when Mason solves the case.

Fortunately, these entities only intersect in a couple of scenes at the end of the book. That meant hundreds more hours burrowing down into websites looking for up-to-the minute glimpses into how the FBI and Homeland Security relate.

JR: Was it depressing or tedious doing all that research for the book?

Mar P: No, I loved every minute.

JR: So do you think all those hours of research were necessary to make your book realistic?

Mar P: I'll let the readers decide on reading Rip-Off.

JR: It was a pleasure working on this great story with you, Mar! And the most recent one, Payback, too!

Mar P: Thanks for the interview, Jodie. And I want to thank you for catching the many glitches, times out of sequence, and point of view shifts in both Rip-Off and Payback. Neither would have been as good a book without your clever eye.

To find out more about the amazing Mar Preston and her crime fiction novels, visit her website at www.MarPreston.com, and her blog at http://marpreston.com/blog/.

To order Rip-Off from Amazon, click here.