by John Gilstrap

Write what you know. Good God, how many times have we heard that over the years? As if Jack Ryan was Tom Clancy’s pseudonym, or Lincoln Rhyme Jeffery Deaver’s. For way too many years, that write-what-you-know counsel was a real problem for me. I grew up in suburban DC, a middle class white kid with no respectable non-academic. What the hell was I supposed to write about that was, you know, interesting?

As I got a little older, I came to realize what my writing instructors really meant with that cryptic advice: you have to be convincing. Unless you’ve loved, you’ll never be able to write about it convincingly. Until you’ve had a child and you’ve surrendered that part of your soul to another human being, I don’t think you can write parental angst in a way that will convince parents who are living it. It’s not about relaying events that you know; it’s about conveying emotions that you’ve experienced.

For me empathy came early, when I joined the fire service at age 22. A recent college grad with spare time on my hands, I couldn’t think of a more engaging, exciting way to spend my time—especially since I didn’t have a girlfriend at the time. (I would claim that I never hit on an ambulance patient in her weakest moment while I was there making her feel better, but that would be less than true. Hey, I was 22 and I was a pig. What can I say? I was also thin and had hair. Everybody changes with time.)

The first time I met Jason Bryant, he was sitting Indian-style in the dusty driveway of his home in that part of the Washington ’burbs that hadn’t yet shed its rural past. My most vivid memory from that summer night in 1981 is the sound of pure anguish, the guttural wail that poured from Jason’s mom, whose cigarette had triggered the fireball that consumed her little boy. He’d been siphoning gas to feed the slightly-used trail bike that had been his birthday present. Clearly afraid to touch him, she squatted at his side wailing, “I’m sorry, baby, I’m sorry.” Over and over again.

When she saw me approaching with my ambulance crew, she ran to meet us, grabbing the sleeve of my uniform and pulling me along, the story of the cigarette and the fire spilling out of her as if confessing to a crime.

Jason himself was surprisingly stoic. Fully conscious, he sat with his arms out to his sides, his elbows bent. His scorched flesh hung like rotted draperies from his arms, his chest, his belly and his back. Where the meat below had not been charred black, it had been cooked to a lifeless mottled red and blue. He’d been wearing only a pair of shorts when the fireball erupted. What was exposed was consumed.

His hair was gone, incinerated to a curly mat of carbon. And the stench. Oh, my God, the stench.

“You’re okay now, baby,” Mrs. Bryant said. “The ambulance is here. They’re going to make you better.” She looked straight into my brain. “You can make him better, right?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said; but my hesitation betrayed the lie. The truth was that I was only a kid myself and I was terrified by the horror of Jason’s injury. At that particular moment, I was as concerned about not vomiting up my dinner as I was about caring for her child. I lied because it seemed easiest. And then I went to work.

Actually, there was precious little to do. Those were the days before mobile intensive care units and medevac helicopters—when your only viable option with a critical patient was to load him into the ambulance and run like hell to the hospital. We called it “scoop and swoop.”

The only time Jason screamed was when I grabbed him under the arms, across his chest, and lifted him onto the ambulance cot. Raw agony from a teenager sounds a lot like raw agony from any other wounded animal.

A half hour later, we were done with him. We handed Jason off to the hospital staff, where for the next year or more he would endure daily tortures of a breed that only burn victims can adequately describe. Suffice to say that it involves the routine scouring of raw flesh and the stretching of fused, contracted tissue.

I went back to the firehouse, took a long shower and threw my uniform into the trash. I spent the rest of the shift in a pair of borrowed coveralls.

Two years later, we were called back to the Bryant home. We parked our ambulance among the police cars in the yard. A much older Mrs. Bryant met us at the front door, and her eyes zeroed in on me. “You were here for Jason’s accident,” she said.

I nodded, embarrassed to be recognized. The dispatcher had made it clear what we were here for, and frankly, I didn’t know what to say. As Mrs. Bryant led us through the house toward the bedrooms, I noted the pictorial shrine to a Jason I had never met: a normal, healthy, athletic teenager whose flesh was whole and flexible. I looked away.

Mrs. Bryant took us as far as the back hall, and stopped abruptly. “He’s in there,” she said, pointing. The police were finishing up the last of their pictures. In Virginia, suicide is considered a form of homicide and it is investigated accordingly.

“We can take it from here,” I said. From where I stood, I could see a revolver in a plastic evidence bag and a trace of blood spatter on the wall.

“Thank you for your kindness,” Mrs. Bryant said, gently squeezing my arm.
I gaped back at her, not trusting my voice. “He just couldn’t take it anymore,” she explained. “He used to be such a happy boy.”

I first met Jason Bryant on his sixteenth birthday. On his eighteenth, I zipped him into a body bag.

The conflict between good and evil never fails to fascinate and thrill.

I love to write villains because they’re a lot more challenging and more fun to write than good guys. Making a villain frightening is easy, but making them somehow sympathetic is always a challenge. The bad guys may or may not see themselves as evil individuals, but they all somehow justify their behavior . If I write effective villains it’s because I’ve met a few in my life and they made one heck of an impression of me.

I think you have to have tasted evil, been laid open by it to write a good villain. I first encountered evil as an impressionable youngster, and it made its impression. As with the majority of young boys my father was the ultimate good guy–a liberal Methodist minister during the Civil Rights era. No big deal except for the fact that he was a preacher in the great state of Mississippi during that time. He made a moral stand and could not be moved by outside forces. He opened his church to blacks, and even sent ushers home who couldn’t go along. “This is God’s church,“ he said. “And it is open to all of His children.“ To me, and a lot of others, he was a flesh-and-blood Atticus Finch.

Ah, Mississippi in the sixties. I have always loved Mississippi. It was my first home, but it was in those days it was a paranoid schizophrenic setting. A lot of the people in Mississippi during that time were being robbed of their long-held convictions that white people were the bomb, and black people were subhuman. The other people throughout the state knew this was a flawed theory, but the prevalent historical viewpoint, passed down by their forefathers, and largely accepted. As a small child I thought Mississippi was an idyllic world. Small towns were great places to grow up. We children wondered the neighborhoods pretty much unmolested and unaware of the evils that surrounded us due to the fact that the media hadn’t yet discovered the value of scaring the cold crap out of the populace so kids weren’t encouraged to stay in their houses and grow sedentary and fat watching TV because parents weren’t under the impression that their homes were under siege by child-abducting pedophiles.

I ran across two pedophiles before I was a teenager. One of them was a man with limited intelligence who pushed his lawnmower all over Starkville, Mississippi. He wore a yacht captain’s cap and was cross-eyed and dentally challenged. Instead of calling this man “cross-eyes,” or “Captain Briggs and Straton,” we kids called him “Goober Puller” due to the way he was always straightening his equipment with his hand as he walked about searching for tall grass. One day he stopped and asked a group of us kids if any of us might be interested in being corn-holed. According to Mr. Puller it paid a quarter. We didn’t know what he was inviting us to do, so we laughed and ran off hollering “Goober Puller! Corn Hole! Corn Hole!” That night I related the story to my father, who had me retell the story to the police. Mysteriously, after that night anytime Mr. Puller saw any of us he would turn and rush off, pushing his mower down the street at amazing speeds. The second pedophile was a man who was the music director at my father’s church. He gave several of the male boys choir members masturbation instruction in his music room. His tenure was short, he was invited to leave the state, and I suppose he modified lots of young boys in Southern California for many years afterward. These men were certainly both villains. If they weren’t truly evil men, they were certainly evil doers.

At Boy Scout camp one year, carved into an upright post along with scores of other names, I read the name of a boy along with his troop number and home town. Other scouts had pointed out the name as it was one immediately recognizable. I had heard of the young man, John Mattox, from Columbus, Mississippi, who a few years earlier had been convicted of murdering a female socialite using a coat hanger. I remember feeling chilled to think that this young boy grew up to become a murderer and he had stood in that very spot years earlier and used a pen knife to leave his signature. I doubt at that point in his life if he imagined he’d be famous and be electrocuted at Parchman.

I was in middle school the year John Kennedy was assassinated. That year things were heating up in Mississippi, and people from the north were descending on the state in droves to change the way things had worked in the state for hundreds of years. The air was crisp with racial tension, and people were choosing sides. It was about changing one very complex, but large social evil against one larger good. My father chose easily–to behave as a Christian, and his public stance put him at odds with a lot of people, some of them very dangerous individuals.
One day in 1963, I walked the few blocks to middle school, and I was in a store across the street from the school, and I was buying candy. The owner was in the back of the small store and I was at the counter. A tall, skinny man entered the store and walked straight to the counter. He asked me if my father was “Red” Miller, and I said yes. My father had red hair, so I assumed he was referring to that. At this point the man grabbed my shirt and twisted the material in has right hand and lifted me off the ground so that we were literally nose-to-nose. I can remember the smell of liquor on his breath and the hate in his eyes. “Your daddy is a nigger lover,” he told me, adding something on the order of, “Tell him we know where you Millers live and if he doesn’t shut his communist mouth we’ll be visiting your house late one night real soon.”

I remember the store’s owner rushing up and yelling at the Klansman, who set me back on the floor, left the store and got into a car with several other people. The store owner called my father, who came to the store and took me home. The store owner told the police who the man was–a known lowlife Klansman–and some time later my father told me that the man who’d assailed me had passed out with a lit cigarette in his hand and burned up in his plaid recliner. So, not only had I seen the face of evil–and smelled its breath–but I got the distinct impression that God had punished him for his evilness, which also gave me a sense of divine justice.

In 1982 I spent a day on Death Row at Angola, Louisiana photographing Death Row inmates who were in lined-up cells waiting for the executions to start up again after years of them having been stopped cold. After over a year lining up permissions from inmates, attorneys, and prison officials, I set up a formal studio with a backdrop and lights in the main hallway on “The Row.” I photographed those men wearing street clothes, and there is nothing in the pictures that lets the viewer know these men are anything but normal individuals in average circumstance, not men awaiting their scheduled deaths. There is nothing at all frightening or threatening in their eyes or their expressions that would telegraph the horrific acts that put them on Death Row. I always look at the pictures and wonder why murderous history doesn’t show through. All of the men–now long executed–looked like anybody you’d see anywhere. Normal. Not at all evil. Not at all. Killers, once in captivity seem to be extremely personable individuals.

Often, when I speak to book-loving groups, I tell the Klansman-in-the-store story to illustrate why I write thrillers. As an author I am always trying to make my readers feel some of what I felt when real villains crossed my path, and I realized that they could do me serious harm. And I also realized at some point that my father wouldn’t always be there to make the world safe again. I have met more villains than I can count, and I do my best to protect myself and those I love from bad things and evil people to the best of my ability. Some evil is obvious, but most of the time it lies just beneath an innocuous and seemingly harmless surface. And sometimes the most dangerous things come to us with open arms and a smile. But seeing evil first hand allows me to write about threat and fear. Evil isn’t usually all that well defined, and it certainly is not simple. Villains should be complex, and human, and understanding them well enough to adequately portray them (in words) remains the ultimate challenge for writers.

By Kathryn Lilley

Yesterday Clare asked us to describe our notion of the ‘ideal’ villain in fiction.

I’ll be honest—when I pick up a thriller, I want the slayer to be super-sized. My killer’s got to be so cold and bad-ass, he’s doing the Monster Mash all over the page, leaving behind a trail of bloody footprints.

Fiction-wise, that makes Hannibal Lecter my kind of evil doer. Also Dexter Morgan of Darkly Dreaming Dexter—and Dexter’s actually likeable as he plunges the blade into his victims.

I don’t know why I prefer to read about fictional villains who are larger than life. Maybe it’s because I came of age in the seventies, an era when serial killers seemed to be stalking the nation’s youth as well as our collective psyche via the nightly news. Ted Bundy, David Berkowitz, John Wayne Gacy, and later the BTK Killer—each psycho’s saga chilled me to the bone. I started to dwell on all the ways I could possibly die at the hands of a cold sociopath. I probably got way too carried away with my projections, to the point that I’d scan the faces of charming, needy young men and smiling clowns, searching for signs of a hidden killer within.

It’s the recreation of that goose-bump factor that gets my reader’s juices flowing these days. But I also know that there’s no lack of chill potential in “everyday” murders. To do some research for today’s blog post, this morning I pulled a book off my shelf called Scene of the Crime, Photographs from the LAPD Archive. It’s a picture book filled with vintage images of murder victims and crime scenes.

One photo and its caption from 1951 haunted me all day. A platinum blonde is shown slumped in the passenger seat of an automobile. A black rivulet of blood streams from one ear. According to the caption,her name was Libby. She’d been shot four times by her boyfriend, who’d left a message written on the back of a check:

“She died instantly,” her sweetheart killer wrote. “…painlessly and mercifully, happy with joyous thoughts that could never be brought to reality…The back of her head faced me. I looked at her beautiful new silver blonde hair and I squeezed the trigger…I have no beliefs other than that the end fully justifies the means. And a few paltry dollars made her so happy!”

Now that’s chilling.

Breaking News: Last week’s winner of DYING TO BE THIN

Seanchai won last week’s contest for a copy of DYING TO BE THIN over at the Kill Zone!

Seanchai, send me your mailing address and I’ll mail you a signed copy this week! (I tried to post a notification to your blog but I couldn’t get it to post). Best, Kathryn

We’re pleased to be hosting some great guest authors on Sundays in the near future, and we’ll be adding more to our guest list. So stay tuned for Sundays with the Killers!

Guest schedule:

Sunday, August 24: Tim Maleeny http://www.timmaleeny.com/

Sunday, August 31: David Hewson
http://www.davidhewson.com

Sunday, Sept. 7: Alafair Burke http://www.alafairburke.com/

John Ramsey Miller

We all hear people say that everybody has a book in them. That may well be true, but, if they were actually written, the vast majority of those books would be just awful. When I speak about writing to groups, I always talk about that age old pyramid that’s standing on its tip. The base is the of the millions of books that are started each year followed ¾ ’s of the way down by the small fraction of those that will be completed in some fashion. Of the finished books, (we’re getting right down to the tip now) only a small percentage will find an agent to represent them. Of the agent-represented books, only a small percentage will be purchased for publication. Of all of those books only a handful will be commercially successful. The final category, the best selling books comprise the very point where the two outside lines touch. So the odds are very much against any writer becoming John Grisham, Stephen King, James Patterson, or JK Rowling. But we authors who are able to make a good living with words kept going despite the odds.

Late one night, just after my first novel was published, an uncle of mine called out of the blue to say that I should write a book about his amazingly interesting life. I explained that I only wrote fiction, (My first published book was a biography and the neutron bomb of publishing) and that I couldn’t get a biography published, even if I wanted to write one, and it was about the life of someone as utterly fascinating as I knew he was. That got me off the hook, but I’m fairly certain he believed that I was keeping the world from learning how interesting he was.

If you do write a book that gets published, you’ll quickly discover that everybody who knows somebody you know will magically materialize and ask you to introduce them to your agent, or at a minimum, ask you to read a book they (or a friend or relative) have written. If you can figure out a way to say no graciously, you can save yourself a lot of grief. Rarely will accepting a manuscript submitted for your opinion do you, or the author any good.

In my experience, (and it includes accepting dozens of unsolicited manuscripts), after you read the novel (or as much of it as you can stand) you’ll discover one of several things. The book is awful–and ninety-eight percent will fall into this category– and you have to tell the author something other than the truth. You don’t want to encourage them, because the encouragement may mean they will keep writing thinking they might actually have some talent or a shot at being the next Dan Brown, but you don’t want to be cruel and dash their hopes.

Like a blind pig foraging, there will be an occasional acorn in the pile. Once in a blue moon you will read a manuscript that is good, maybe even very good. This has happened to me twice. I referred both of those manuscripts to my agent and she immediately didn‘t take them on. Not because they weren’t good, but because she didn’t think she could sell them. Maybe she was just being nice to me.

And there are a lot of people out there who should write books and have them published. I have a close friend who has a great storytelling ability, a great sense of humor, she reads mysteries voraciously, and I know she can write with the best of them. She just finished her first cozy, and I read it and I was correct. She can write, and I have no doubt that she will write several books and with luck and determination, she may just find an agent, a publisher and an audience. She develops great characters, gives great description, knows how to create a setting, and she’s funny. I hope she succeeds, and she’s certainly got the determination one needs. And she doesn’t write thinking she’ll get rich, she writes because she loves it and has discovered how difficult our trade is. All of us should encourage people like my friend.

People on the outside think what we do is easy. Once at a cocktail party a dermatologist came up to me and said when he retired from his practice he was going to write novels. I told him that I’ve always thought that when I retired from writing I’d become a physician. He looked at me like I’d dropped road kill into his lap. He said writing could hardly be compared to being a physician. I told him I’d bet him five hundred dollars that I could put on a white coat and freeze off a wart with an hours instruction, but he couldn’t write a publishable novel in two years.

I’ve been successful in that I’ve supported my family for twenty years by stacking words into stories. I never cared if I made a lot of money. All I ever hoped for was that I could entertain people with my stories and make a living at the thing I most love and feel compelled to do. So far, I have, I should say, because you are only as good as your last book. I’ve never minded the hard work, long hours, the solitude, the deadlines, the insecurity, the anxiety, or all the other things we authors go through to bring an our ideas into manuscript form. Making your living doing something you love is heaven. But almost anybody who becomes an author thinking it is a quick and easy way to get rich is a fool, and that person is more than likely wasting perfectly good time and energy they could be devoting to some criminal enterprise like lawyering or banking.

Like most things, writing is only hard work if you do it right.

By John Ramsey Miller

At some point during our careers we get something wrong and editors and proofreaders miss it, but some reader somewhere will always find it and might just rub your nose in it. And there it is forever––the screwing of the pooch––immortalized, bound between covers. Some readers are so anal they’ll go through a novel with a fine tooth comb to find every misused semi-colon, every missing or extra comma throughout a novel so they can perform a “superior” jig. But for some readers there is no bigger turnoff than stumbling over an inaccuracy on a subject or a location that they know. Turning off readers is the last thing we authors can afford to do.

It has been my experience that we authors can’t depend on our editors, or copy editors, to catch inaccuracies because those professionals may assume we know more about a subject than they do, and the author should indeed be in that position.

I remember a copy editor on INSIDE OUT made a note on the manuscript informing me that New Orleans didn’t have an Italian “mafia” like the families in New York and Chicago. Sam Manelli, (my fictional Don), was therefore not plausible. I sent an e-mail to the editor explaining to her that Carlos Marcello’s organized crime organization was the single largest industry in Louisiana in the 70s and 80s, generating an estimated two billion dollars a year. Marcello’s crime organization was larger, more successful, and just as violent as any other Mafia organization. (http://www.crimelibrary.com/gangsters_outlaws/family_epics/marcello/1.html)

I’ve always been interested in guns (particularly handguns) and I have owned dozens of them and I’ve been shooting most of my life. But when I write about guns I still double-check my technical information with people who are more knowledgeable than I am with a specific gun, or other ordnance. I also own several volumes of Shooter’s Bible and Gun Digest––available in any bookstore––which offers technical information on thousands of firearms. These reference books contain critical details on thousands of guns and will tell you how many bullets (or shells) a gun holds, how to spell the name, what caliber(s) a gun is made to handle, its weight, size, barrel lengths, and other tidbits you might leave out but that should know. You can go to a gun store and ask the clerk to show you the guns you are going to write about. And shoot one. Some gun ranges rent handguns, so you can become familiar with the experience of firing a weapon.

And, outside of Hollywood (the Capital City of inaccuracy), those who are shot with guns are not propelled backwards. Due to the way muscles and tendons operate, most humans will collapse forward (even collapsing toward the weapon). Even victims of a machine-gun burst or a 12 gauge double-ought blast will not take flight because bullets and even buckshot do not transfer the energy necessary to move the weight of a human being. Don’t just take my word for it, those two goofy debunkers on TV’s Mythbusters gleefully shot a hog carcass with handguns, rifles and shotguns, and the hung-up carcass didn’t even swing from the impact. Okay, the point is, people out there know their stuff, and if a gun person reads that a revolver has a safety (or a clip) you will loose that reader forever, and he will tell his gun buddies and they will laugh at you and never again open one of your books.

When I write about professionals, I interview them. I’ve talked extensively with US Marshals, Homeland Security personnel, TSA officials, FBI agents, agents with the DEA, CIA operatives, bounty hunters, homicide detectives from several cities, beat cops, and deputy sheriffs. I will interview attorneys, coroners, physicians, judges, herpetologists, forensic experts, and any other professionals who can answer my questions on any related subject. The plain truth is: experts are delighted to help you get it right. Ninety-nine percent of the time knowledgeable individuals will be delighted to tell you more than you need to know about their area of expertise.

For my first Thriller, THE LAST FAMILY, I was imagining a character who was going to kill a child using the curare-like drug, Succinocholine, a fast-acting paralytic commonly used by anesthesiologists. (I later changed the victim to a grown woman and threw the boy off a cliff). Given in large amounts the drug stops the heart muscles cold. I called the Mississippi State Medical Examiner out of the blue, and merely said, “I’m John Miller, and I’m writing a novel. I need to know how much Succinocholine it would take to kill a 9-year-old child.” After about three beats, the doctor replied, “How much does the child weigh?”

Before we hung up, I told him I’d never witnessed an autopsy, and he told me to drive down and he’d treat me to one. Several days later, I was standing beside a stainless table in Brandon, Mississippi, watching the good doctor ply his trade. As a result I can write a believable autopsy scene because I know what the room and the action looks and sounds like, and even why the good doctor smoked cigars while deconstructing corpses.

You can set a story in a fictional place, based on a real one or plucked strictly from your imagination. If you use a real place as a setting, go there and walk it, or change the location to one you can walk. If you write about the French Quarter in New Orleans, you should know which direction the one-way streets run and what the buildings look like on those streets. Being there allows you to gather impressions. Learn what a place smells like, how the people on the street look, and the phrasing and cadence of their speech. Gather names of your local characters from people you meet, from gravestones or local phone books. It’s about the details. It is as important to write where you know, as well as what you know. Your readers––those who know––will notice the difference, and those who don’t will still appreciate your descriptions.

When I set UPSIDE DOWN in New Orleans I walked side streets and used locations around the French Quarter that tourists never see, as well as some they might. When I had a character running for her life, I walked her route, and experienced for myself what she would be seeing, hearing and smelling as she fled from professional killers. Even though I lived in New Orleans for nine years, I made a trip back to the Crescent City to see what things in the area had changed radically during my absence.

I had crucial scenes in UPSIDE DOWN that take place on the Canal Street Ferry, so I went on the Thomas Jefferson, asked for the engineer and he gave me a tour of the vessel. I asked him how my character might go about taking over the boat, and he told me. I walked the vessel with the engineer and took a lot of pictures for reference, timed the crossing, asked the crew questions and I made notes that included my impressions and the names of any items I might want to write into my story.

When I sat down to write those chapters I was able to choreograph action knowing which doors led where, how long the trip across the River took, and exactly where everybody who worked or rode on the boat might be during a run across the river. I knew how many people worked on the ferry and what job each of the crew was responsible for. I studied the passengers, and watched how the cars came on, how they were parked, and how they exited the vessel. When I wrote the action months later, I could close my eyes and be on the vessel. I could smell the river and the engine exhaust, and hear the engine, the horns of other vessels, the sound of the Thomas Jefferson’s bow pushing through the still surface, and the voices of the passengers heading home after a long day.

You can learn a great deal about a place over the internet, and by talking to people on the phone, but the important impressions you certainly can’t get that way, and the little things allow the reader to more fully experience a late-night ride across the Mississippi River. I changed some minor things on my ferry, but I was accurate where it counted. By the time I finished those chapters, I was sure that only the man who designed the vessel and the people who work on her would spot my changes, but I was confident that very few others would.

Poetic license won’t cover blatant ignorance on a subject or a real setting you are writing into your book. Research involves an investment in an author’s time, energy and (often as not) some expense, but I believe that my primary job is to entertain my readers and make sure they get the best story I can write. As an author, I believe I owe my readers as much realism and texture as I can write into a fictional story.