Monthly Archives: January 2009

Ten Stupid Things Cops in Books Do

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Robin Burcell .2008.Today The Kill Zone is thrilled to host Robin Burcell, despite the fact that her credentials make some of us feel horribly inferior in comparison. For more than two decades Robin has worked in law enforcement as a police officer, detective, hostage negotiator, and FBI-trained forensic artist. As if that wasn’t enough, she’s won an Anthony Award for her Kate Gillespie series. We especially appreciate her post since it addresses cliches that can be terribly vexing for crime fiction fans. One lucky commentor will receive a signed edition of her latest book. Read on to find out more…

Let’s say you’re writing a book (or perhaps reading one) and you want to verify that the cop stuff is correct. Where do you turn for accurate info?

The secret is… watch CSI. 

Just kidding. The real secret is to ply me or any other current or ex cop at mystery conventions with alcoholic FaceofaKiller mm c beverages, then remind us of whatever promises we made in our drunken state to answer questions you might have on your work in progress. But what’s a writer to do if they can’t get to those conventions and bribe us with free drinks? I thought I’d compose a Top Ten Stupid Cop Things in books to help you guide your way until you can meet us in the bar.

10. Getting the jargon/slang wrong for a particular department or part of the country. It’s more than the age-old discussion on perps versus suspects. I’m talking the everyday lingo. It’s the difference that tells me which generation of cop is talking. Saturday Night Live could have done a whole skit on some of the double entendres of this stuff. Typical phrase heard on the radio: "Put your unit at the back door." For years I resisted, instead calling my or anyone else’s "unit" by the more recognizable name of "patrol car." We won’t even go into the whole "back door" thing. And I also resisted calling the detective bureau the "dick squad." I don’t think I was the only generational upstart who started reshaping the language in a department.

9. Really dumb radio transmissions no cop would ever make. Short transmissions are a must. In real life, if you have a long transmission, you “break," for any emergencies that might arise while you’re hogging the mike. So if your characters are busy saying anything longer than one or two short sentences on the radio, have them pick up the phone instead. Radio transmissions vary by region. Some talk in "ten" code, some in "nine,” and many are moving to "plain English," because who the helllpd car remembers the damn codes when the $#!+ hits the fan?

8. Not knowing the elements of the crime, or what constitutes a crime. A cop looks up, sees a young lady falling to the ground, sees a man running away, and thinks: Purse snatch, a felony. He and his partner jump out, chase after the suspect. One problem. No one saw the crime. They assumed. At least have your cops stop and ask the victim before they get in a foot chase, tackle the suspect and cuff him for a crime they think he committed–because when those officers get to court, the defense is going to rip them apart.

7. The clichéd loner, alcoholic cop with the rumpled raincoat, whose wife and kids were murdered by the serial killer while he was out eating donuts. Wcoffee-bagelshy doesn’t this scenario work? Because the whole donut eating thing is so passé. Let’s pause for history. Donut shops were the only thing open on graveyard shifts where the coffee could be found. That cliché would never work in California. There’s a Starbucks on every corner, and a bagel shop two doors down. And who buys their bagels from Starbucks, when you can get really good ones from Noah’s? 

6. Having cops hired/fired on a whim. Unless a cop resigns on his own, it’s almost an act of congress to hire or fire one. But an even bigger pet peeve is the shoddy hiring background investigations I’ve seen in some really Big Name novels. Backgrounds that allowed, say, the FBI to hire someone who had an arsonist serial killer for a father, but the father’s guilt (and the suspect’s identity) are questionable, and so we should be surprised when our agent turns out to be the real killer. And if they do pass the background, are you saying these arsonist/serial killers are going to pass the psych? There’s a reason why it takes months to complete the background investigation. It almost takes that long just to fill out the background application, which is longer than the average book contract.

5. Evil or stupid police supervisors. Repeat after me: Only some of the bosses are evil or stupid (and no, they didn’t all work for my department). There are actually some pretty decent supervisors still out there. The standing joke is that to get promoted to Sergeant, you have to first have a lobotomy. To make it to Lieutenant and Captain, you have to have your spine removed. True in all cases? No. But some…

4. The hated, despised Internal Affairs cop, who is usually evil or stupid. See # 7 above (which is not to say that if you’re the one being investigated, you don’t tend to think of the IA cops that way, but that’s a different story).

3. Dirty cops planting phony evidence in that overdone bad cop cliché manner. If you’re going to write this, do it better than anyone else. One of the best scenes I saw in a movie was where a dirty cop was seen committing a crime on a surveillance video which was booked into evidence and was going to nail him. The dirty cop set up a “window smash” of a business—with a highly magnetic device used to shatter the window. It in turn was booked into evidence right next to the surveillance tape, which it then demagnetized and was rendered useless. Such a scenario would be difficult to accomplish in this digital age, but back then it was way cool.

howdunit_lofland2. Stupid blunders at crime scenes. Being aware of what can contaminate a crime scene takes more than simply watching the latest episode of CSI. Just knowing the basics can help, everything from keeping a crime scene log to what constitutes trace evidence and cross-contamination. Keep this in mind next time your sleuth picks up a phone at the scene of the murder, tromping across a carpet, leaving fiber evidence.

And the top ten pet peeve, in my opinion?

1. Bad officer safety. This is equal to the sleuth investigating a noise outside, when she knows the killer is lurking around somewhere. Cop-wise, I’m talking things like cops showing up at a suspect’s house without backup. These guys are assigned partners for a reason. Safety is one of them, but so, too, is having a second set of eyes and ears for investigative purposes, as well as for testifying later in court. I hate it when writers shove the TSTL syndrome (too stupid to live) on their characters to foster an exciting climax.

So, aside from the age-old "safety on a Glock", what are your stupid cop (or amateur sleuth) pet peeves in books?

Robin Burcell, a veteran cop of twenty-something years, dutifully avoids all the above pet peeves in her latest novel, FACE OF A KILLER, about an FBI forensic artist. You can verify this fact by reading the first chapter on her website

Is That Noise An Avalanche Or A Stampede?

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By John Ramsey Miller

In case you haven’t noticed, TV shows like THE TODAY SHOW are basically 95% advertisement/ promotion content and 5% news. Seriously, unless there’s a disaster of epic proportions, the first five minutes of the telecast contains the most news you’re going to see for three hours. The other morning Al Roker stood before a Sharp TV monitor to wave his hands at the high def map of crappy weather happening (and he shamelessly plugged “This Sharp Monitor”). That was followed by one of many “What’s new in Electronics” features. Then cooking with chef whoever, make-up tips, some stuff about babies, and a controversial author hawking her book condemning the left-wing media over the left-leaning media. I love irony. Yet I watch it every morning and I’m a consumer and I want to see or hopefully own the latest electronics just like everybody else. Since I am officially downsized for life I am not buying all of that totally unnecessary shiny crap like I used to. For Christmas I got an iPod. It’s on my dresser and one of these days I’m going to figure out how to use it and at that point I intend to load it with music and books and possibly videos of my dogs lying under the porch.

The world is all about promotion of products because unless we all buy, buy, buy, the economy collapses. Most of us fall for sales pitches in some form or another every day, and night until we sleep. In order for someone to act on a sign or ad, they have to see it nine times and have to be open to the product, or they zone it out. Of the millions of messages most of us are exposed to, our brains screen out all but a few. I spend a few years in advertising and I was pretty good at making people want things. But after twelve years at this craft I still have no idea how to promote my own books. Even though I understand that if I don’t do it, it probably won’t get did, I curl up in a corner at the thought of promoting myself. It’s no secret that the authors who best promote themselves …sell best.

My first fiction editor told me something that stuck with me, “It is your job to write the books and ours to sell them. You handle your end and we’ll handle ours.” The perfect situation for this author, and most other authors I know. She wanted me to spend my time writing and not out at signings because she explained that they could sell more books with one small ad than I could crisscrossing the countryside pen in hand. And she was right …at the time. Gilstrap told me recently that what she said was probably true twelve years ago but that the days of being an author and staying away from “flogging” the work and letting the publicity department at the publisher take care of it, is in the same trash can with last year’s Sony Play Stations. Don’t get me wrong, my present publisher’s publicity department does a thorough job, but none of the houses have the budgets they had in the old days and not a farthing to waste. If your books sell in big numbers it’s a different story, but most of us don’t knock Patterson off the best-sellers lists with any regularity.

I’ve been thinking about doing an infomercial where a reader can (if they act immediately) get two books for the price of one if they pay the ten bucks shipping and handling plus they’ll get a bonus offer of a plaster pig-lying-in-the-sunshine-smiling paperweight.

My new book, THE LAST DAY came out in Mass Market paperback December 30th. That’s a picture of it up there in the first paragraph because I couldn’t figure out how to put it right here where this “X” is.

I am presently writing a new book without a publisher signed on, which is not really unusual, but sort of scary in the current currents. I am told that the mood at the major houses is akin to Paris in the days before the Terror where necks are being eyed for the blade, and agents are worried because selling books to the houses is harder than selling new Chevrolets. For years I’ve told aspiring authors the odds of a financially successful career are slim, but possible. Lately a lot of best-selling authors are seeing their numbers plummet and it appears that the ranks of new works being purchased by the houses are being trimmed down, and the amounts of advances being lowered. I think we may be seeing the death of big-house publishing as we’ve know it, even when the economy improves. What we do now will determine our own survival as authors. I don’t intend to be a dinosaur standing around chewing plants wondering what that growing bright thing in the sky might be. Okay, now all we have to figure out what we are going to do about selling our work in a new way and in a whole new world. I think we best be looking for alternatives to depending on the traditional houses, and living without their advances, and not thinking primarily in the printed-books-shipped-in-boxes model, is something we’d better explore sooner than later. Or we can look for a career change. So far I have my eyes open, but I can’t see anything clearly through the fog of uncertainty. Yet I am pretty sure I hear a thundering herd of something large coming toward me.

Check out my newly improved site: http://www.johnramseymiller.com/

So, gang, what can we do to stay ahead of the game? Curling up in a corner isn’t working.

There’s No Such Thing as a Silencer

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By John Gilstrap
http://www.johngilstrap.com/

Sometimes, I think I think too much.

Our job as authors is to create fictional worlds that resonate with our readers, and in the process tell stories that keep them turning pages. That means making sure that “the narrative spell” is never broken. If you throw in a twelve-dollar word in the middle of a paragraph, or if your subjects and verbs find themselves suddenly at odds, that spell is broken, and the reader realizes that he’s hungry and he puts the book down. I hate making it easy to put my books down. In fact, if we all do our jobs well, we bear responsibility for sleeplessness and ruptured bladders.

Okay, that last part is actually an unpleasant image.

Here’s my dilemma: Everybody who’s watched more than a dozen movies in their lives knows that a silencer can be fitted to any gun, and when it fires, it goes phut and no one in the next room can hear a thing. That’s the comfortable reality that will keep them turning pages.

But the comfortable reality is wrong. There’s not even such a thing as a “silencer.” There are suppressors, however, and they’re considerably larger than the ones that movie guys use. When you shoot one, that tiny phut is in reality a significant crack which will easily draw attention from the neighbors. It’s way better than the unsuppressed bang, but it ain’t no phut.

And that scene where the assassin makes the 700-yard shot with his “silenced” sniper rifle? Absolutely not.

Thing is, I want there to be a silencer. I want it to be on a pistol that is easily pulled from a shoulder holster, and I want to be able phut, phut my way through a shoot-out. It’s a crutch that would make my life as a writer easier, even though I know it violates the laws of physics.

Is it worth incurring the wrath of my buddy John Miller—or worse yet, the wrath of the people whose respect I gained in writing Six Minutes to Freedom—for the sake of a plot point that 98.999% of the reading public would accept as reasonable? Or is it better to shock that majority out of their spell by startling them with something new? I mean honestly, is it worth calling into question all the good done by the likes of Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin simply for the sake of accuracy?

Even though we write fiction, where does our obligation to research end? Is it just about what we can get away with, or is there a loftier responsibility to our readers?

Am I really just thinking too much?

My Obsession with Twilight

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twilight And no, I don’t mean the wildly successful book by Stephanie Meyer, or the film based on the book. Although I hear they’re both excellent.

Something became painfully clear to me last week as I mapped out the timeline for my next book, The Gatekeeper. Since I never start with an outline, one of my final acts before handing in the draft is to map out exactly when and where each scene takes place. The main action in all of my books occurs over roughly a week, give or take; that’s never the problem. No, what I invariably discover is that almost everything happens at night. Particularly at twilight. I’ve been known to have twenty-five incidents of twilight in a weeklong span. It’s not pretty, trust me.

I wish I knew where this unhealthy predilection originated. I’m a big fan of the daytime, and there’s no good reason why, in a thriller, critical scenes can’t take place, say, mid-afternoon. There is admittedly something spooky about the darkness, but in Gatekeeper, spookiness wasn’t really what I was after. So why was the sun constantly going down?

Another problem I quickly discovered: teleporting. This is the first time I’ve attempted to write across time zones. My first book took place entirely on a college campus, then with the second I widened the scope to a region (The Berkshires). Now I’m attempting to portray multiple points of view scattered across the country. Worse yet, the characters fly from one to the other with abandon. Or rather, based on evidence in my initial draft, they teleport, since they frequently get from New York to California in mere minutes. Even with the time change, they probably shouldn’t be landing at precisely the time they left: twilight, of course. (Although after traveling over the holidays, I’m wondering if teleporting is ever going to be a possibility. I’d even settle for a flying car: weren’t we supposed to have those by now? A two hour flight from Phoenix involved three hours of waiting at the airport, another two on the tarmac, no water, threats to divert to Monterey, and an extra $100 because we dared to check bags. Beam me up, Scotty).

So I spent the better part of a week mapping out the action scene by scene, minute by minute, checking flight times to insure that my characters were experiencing the same travel nightmares the rest of us undergo on a regular basis. (It’s pretty much the only time in my life I use Excel, but wow, I love that program. I just wish it was easier to get everything to fit on one printed page).

I rewrote scenes so that characters were no longer darting through the shadows cast by moonlight. I eliminated their flashlights and night vision goggles (another weakness of mine: flashlights have been prominent in nearly every book. There must be some sort of twelve-step program that deals with this). I gave them sunscreen instead and pushed them out the door into the light.

After a lot of work, I got it down to a week of sunrises and sunsets, with plenty of light in between. There are, granted, still scenes that occur at night, but at least now it’s not all of them. And as always, now that the draft is done, I’ve promised myself that next time in an effort to avoid this problem I will absolutely try to work off an outline. (I won’t, though. I never do. I might as well promise to stop eating mass quantities of soft cheese, it’s just as unlikely to happen.)

 

Not For Us!

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By Joe Moore

I wrote my first novel over 20 years ago. I would get up a 4 AM, sit in a dark corner of my living room and type on a device called a Magnavox VideoWriter–a word processor, keyboard and printer all built into one. While my family slept, I worked away until it was time to shower and be off to my day job. For over three years I put in every spare moment, taking away from my family, friends, everything. The day came when I finished my masterpiece; an action adventure novel that I felt would knock readers on their butts. I could easily see my name on the bestseller lists just above Clive Cussler, Dale Brown, Jack Higgins, Tom Clancy, and all my heroes. It was just a matter of time before the critics would call me the next Clive-Dale-Jack-Tom guy.

I picked the biggest NY publisher of action adventure blockbusters I could find and spent countless hours tweaking my query letter. Finally, off it went. And to my amazement, I got a reply back from one of their editors asking to see my entire manuscript. Man, this writing thing was way too easy!

I printed the manuscript, packaged it up and sent it overnight costing me more in shipping than I could afford. Then I sat back, basking in the glow that my master plan was on track. I was about to be rocketed into the action adventure stratosphere and worshiped far and wide.

A week went by. Two weeks. Three, then a month. I theorized that they must be passing my baby around to all the editors, marketing guys, cover artists, and publicists to see who wanted to work on the next major bestseller.

crotons Then one day, I was working in my yard. I had thick crotons growing up against the front of my house, and it was time to trim them back. As I clipped away with the hedge cutters, I noticed a stained, yellowed shipping envelope shoved back behind the crotons. It was addressed to me and was from that big NY publisher. The mail carrier must have put it there to protect it from the weather. Checking the postmark, it had been mailed back to me less than a week after I sent the manuscript out.

I went inside, opened the package and pulled out my weather-worn, damp, rumpled, moldy pages. Written across the front of the title page in red were three words: Not for us.

I had spent 3 years working on that book and over a month fantasizing what I would do with that 6-figure advance. But with just three short words, my dreams ignited like a piece of magician’s flash paper. It hurt. Even thinking back on it today, it still hurts.

Somewhere out there is a guy who decided to write “not for us” on the front of my manuscript many years ago. I’d like to thank him. Looking back, that book was not ready for primetime. And anytime I need a reality check, all I have to do is walk out my front door and look at those crotons. They’re still growing and, hopefully, as a writer so am I.

What was your first rejection like? How did you deal with it? How long did it take to get over it and back on track?

Hey! How about a Book TV channel for FICTION?

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I’m tired of being snubbed by Book tv.

Oh sure, over the holidays I spent lots of time over there at C-Span2, listening to their earnest book discussions, and hearing interesting interviews with new-to-me authors.

But most of that time I spent watching in a state of–I admit it–jealous twitchery.

Book tv, as most of you know, showcases nonfiction books and authors.

Nonfiction books and authors.
Which means that novelists need not apply. Which means that the likes of me et tu waste our time sending in our cunning little media packets and promotional postcards and magnets as pay-for-play. Because even if C-Span is a quasi-governmental organization, bribes will buy us nada much airtime on Book tv.
But honestly–would it kill those serious folks over at C-Span to invite us fictionistas over for some play-dates at Book tv? We might help them sprout another Span or two! They could consider it a service to the dwindling public literary sphere. Or look at is as another government bailout. The publishing industry and authordom: we’re too big to fail. C’mon, Book tv! Give us airtime!!
Or maybe C-Span and Book tv don’t want novelists sullying up the public airwaves with BSP-antics, as we imaginative types are wont to do. So here’s my scathingly brilliant idea: I want to start a cable TV station, one that will be for fiction only. The new book TV channel will include book shows, discussions and reviews. We’ll start off small, by sticking the new station way out in the cable-viewing solar system (this is mostly where the people who watch the History Channel and the Crime & Investigation Network lurk). I predict that my Fiction Book tv cable channel will take root and thrive there.
So has anybody got some spare change to start up a new cable TV channel in 2009? This one will be strictly for works of fiction. The only nonfiction works we’ll take will be discards from Oprah’s memoir pile, the ones that didn’t make the Smelly Cat cut.
But her little stinkers will always be welcome on my Book TV Channel as long as I’m running the show. We’ll just slap a disclaimer on them: “Hey, Dude–it’s fiction. We make shit up over here. Get over it!” (And that ‘tude is probably exactly why you’ll never see me on C-Span).

Meanwhile, I’m getting really excited about my new book cable TV idea. All I need now is someone with business vision and money. Lots of money. To wit, I need me a venture capitalist. Are there any of those left after the crash of ’08? Every day another bazillionaire seems to be biting the dust, so there seem to be fewer to go around.

Hey, is Ted Turner looking for a new investment? He’s a survivor. Can someone please ask his people to give my people a call? Heck, he can call me personally. I just saw him over at C-Span. And let me tell you–at 72, he’s still got it.

Wait–does Ted even still have money? Oh heck, it doesn’t matter. Ted can call me anyway. He sounds totally cool. Or if he doesn’t want to invest in my new Book TV channel, maybe we can just chat about his latest nonfiction book, Call Me Ted. I think he’d like that. Even though it might make me more jealous than ever.

New Year Resolutions and Other Nonsense

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By Clare Langley-Hawthorne

I usually view New Year resolutions as a complete waste of time since so far I have never managed to actually keep (or for that matter remember!) any of them but this year I have a few that I really, really, really want to keep and I thought if I committed them to the blogosphere that would somehow make me feel more accountable. I’m sure there’s logic in that belief somewhere though in this economic and publishing climate I doubt logic has much bearing on anything at the moment…but here goes – my top five resolutions for 2009. One is noble; one is totally impractical; one is probably totally unrealistic; one reveals an embarrassing lack of ability; and one may be the dumbest thing I’ve ever tried to do. I leave it up to you to decide which of the five is which!
1. I will put the writing first. This goes beyond a commitment to no more procrastinating over email or anything else that might hinder my progress but to the core of the matter – to stop worrying about all the things I have no control over or cannot change. This leads to a number of other resolutions about having the confidence to assert that what I do is valuable and worthwhile and putting aside those around me who try to undermine that confidence…This could be a whole other blog post so I’d best stop there or I’ll never get to any of my other resolutions!

2. I will get my boys to preschool by 8:30am every day – otherwise number 1 will be almost impossible to achieve.

3. I will grow my hair long (pure vanity on my part)

4. I will do whatever it takes to get fit/lose weight so I can fit a certain pair of pants I last wore before I had the twins (I’m not fessing up to just how hard this is going to be!)

5. I will learn how to ride a bicycle (pathetic…I know)

So if you have any other noble, pathetic or vain resolutions please confess them here:) At least I’ll know I’m in good company…or you can always tell me again what a waste of time these new year resolutions truly are.