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Showing posts with label Robert Knightly. Show all posts

Coming Back to Life

I always liked to talk books with Tom when he worked at Murder Ink® on the Upper West Side, the best mystery bookstore in the City, Tom the most knowledgeable Mystery Man in the City. Then he went and wrote six well-published Thriller/Mysteries in his spare time. He has another six, he explains, ready to go.

Robert Knightly

This is a story with a moral. It’s the story of a writer, well-known and respected, who fell by the wayside for several years before being granted a surprising reprieve. Once upon a time, he was a bookseller at a famous mystery bookstore, and he wrote six novels in six years that were published to general acclaim. He had many fans and admirers, and even Hollywood came calling, making a film of one of his works and optioning two others. Then, at the height of his popularity, this writer did something peculiar: he stopped. He didn’t stop writing, mind you; he merely stopped publishing. Why he did that, and what happened to turn his fortunes around, are the subjects of the tale.

I happen to know a great deal about it, because the writer in question was I. My last published novel, Scavenger, appeared in 2000, and since then many changes have taken place—in my life and in the publishing industry.

First, my life. You’ve heard of the “one-two punch” that sends a boxer to the canvas? Well, I received five punches in a row, and I was staggered. I worked for two years on a really ambitious thriller to follow Scavenger, but I picked the wrong subject, the then-unknown abuse scandal in the Catholic Church. I knew about it beforehand, from an investigative reporter friend who was working on the story in Connecticut long before it became public knowledge. I handed the manuscript to my agent just as the worldwide headlines arrived. Oops! My prophetic thriller was instantly Yesterday’s News, and no one would touch it. Two years down the drain. (First punch.) I lost my mother in 2003 and my sister a year later (second and third punches), and for a while I wasn’t able to write anything. In 2006, Murder Ink®, the bookstore where I worked for many years, closed its doors forever, so I was suddenly unemployed. (Four.) Then I parted ways with my agent of fifteen years. (Down for the count.)

I spent the next three years sitting around my Greenwich Village apartment in a bathrobe. I continued to write novel after novel, a grand total of four, but I didn’t show them to anyone. I was too busy feeling sorry for myself.

Then something wonderful happened. S. J. Rozan, my writer friend who lives near me, yanked me out of my house one day and dragged me, kicking and screaming, to a meeting of her writing group. I’d always sworn to eschew any sort of reading/commenting group situation, so this was the last thing I needed--or so I thought. But once I got there and saw how these people worked, how they helped and encouraged one another, I was hooked. I liked their company, but if I wanted to join them, I’d have to bring samples of my own work-in-progress. So I started writing in earnest again, and soon I was writing a new novel, A Penny For The Hangman. We met every two weeks, and I got involved in their work as well as my own. Next thing you know, I had a completed manuscript, and the group told me that it was time for me to go out and find a new agent.

I was lucky; I found one immediately. She knew my work and liked A Penny For The Hangman, so she took me on and began sending it around. But I’d been away for a long time, and I was unaware of the dramatic changes in our industry. Everyone I ever worked with was gone, and the new, young editors at the reconfigured publishing houses (now known as the “Big Six”) had never heard of me. Fact: A writer in his fifties who hasn’t published in years is actually in a worse position than a new kid starting out with a clean slate. Who knew?

The manuscript made the rounds for two years and racked up an impressive number of rejections from editors who obviously didn’t even look at it. And why should they? It isn’t just the industry that’s different—the really seismic change of the last decade is in the book-buying public. My thriller doesn’t have teenage vampires or shape shifters or ultra-right-wing Special Ops agents, and there isn’t a single “shade of grey” in sight, let alone fifty. What on earth was I thinking?!! I was out of step with the new reality, and I was beginning to despair, bracing myself to slink off to the sidelines once more.

Then, a few weeks ago, my agent informed me that Alibi, a new Random House line of electronic-only books, was interested in acquiring the rights. Somebody actually wanted it! But I soon learned that these “e-book only” imprints have come under a lot of fire, and with good reason. For starters, there’s no book—merely a concatenation of electronic impulses that you download to a reading device. How the hell do you bind that in Moroccan leather or autograph it in bookstores? And while they offered national advertising and the cachet of a major house, they also offered co-op contracts(!) and no advances(!!). I would never agree to those terms, so where did I fit into this?

Did I mention my new agent? And my writer friends? These two life-saving entities came to my rescue. My agent went to work, hammering out a “classic” deal with Random House, and my writer friends encouraged me to take a chance, to step out into the void where no writer has gone before. E-books are uncharted territory, they told me, the new frontier in publishing, and somebody has to be Neil Armstrong! And while you’re at it, they added, start a website (I did) and a blog (ditto) and bring back all your out-of-print titles as ebooks (double ditto). Thanks to them, I’m published again, and it feels like I’m coming back to life. Which is exactly what I’m doing.

The moral of the story: Writers need one another, and we need agents. We’re entering a brave new world of publishing, and—thanks to my agent and my writer friends—I’m in the first launch. I don’t know what I’m about to discover, but the view from here is lovely.

If you’re in my predicament, learn from my experience. Take chances. Get out of the bathrobe, get out of the house. Join a writing group. Find a good agent. And always be willing to help your fellow writers, because they’re always willing to help you.

Tom Savage

Tom Savage is the author of four suspense novels: Precipice, Valentine, The Inheritance, and Scavenger. He also wrote two detective novels under the name T. J. Phillips, Dance of the Mongoose and Woman in the Dark. His short stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and anthologies edited by Lawrence Block, Harlan Coben, and Michael Connelly. His bestselling novel, Valentine, was made into a Warner Bros. film. Raised in the Virgin Islands, he lives in New York City, where he worked for many years at Murder Ink, the world’s first mystery bookstore. His new novel, A Penny For The Hangman, will be published by Random House Alibi in 2014.

Radio Waves in my Head

When I was six years old and in the First Grade at St. Anthony of Padua school in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, I got exposed to Daytime Radio and, in bits and pieces, it’s been in my head ever since. I’d come home for lunch and my grandmother would feed me soup and a sandwich and milk at the kitchen table and we would listen to her programs. (It wasn’t until Sixth Grade that I would be given money to buy a Hero and a soda at Bruno’s Grocery Store, to be eaten by us boys on the stoops of the houses along Leonard Street, the school block.)

Nan and I listened to: “And now, Our Gal Sunday, the story of an orphan girl named Sunday from the little mining town of Silver Creek, Colorado, who in young womanhood married England’s richest, most handsome lord, Lord Henry Brinthrope—the story that asks the question, can this girl from a mining town in the West find happiness as the wife of a wealthy and titled Englishman?” All of this I remember, and the name Black Swan Hall where Sunday and Lord Henry were beset by ex-lovers, fortune-hunters, shady lords and ladies, even kidnappers, for fifteen minutes every weekday at 12:15 p.m.

Then, the Romance of Helen Trent. I recall, almost word for word, the signature opening: “Time now for the Romance of Helen Trent…the real-life drama of Helen Trent, who—when life mocks her, breaks her hopes, dashes her against the rocks of despair—fights back bravely, successfully, to prove what so many women long to prove in their own lives…that because a woman is 35, and more, romance in life need not be over…” I checked my recollections against “On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio”, by mystery author John Dunning (Oxford University Press, 1998). Independently, I remembered the name Gil Whitney, Helen’s perennial suitor. That she was a sought-after dress designer in Hollywood, changed her men like a whore changes her panties, yet was a straight-shooter and didn’t smoke—this I didn’t know at age 7. Helen Trent was also 15-minutes-long and as the music faded, I was out the door and covering the four blocks back to school before the bell rang summoning us to line up in the street to march back in by class.

After school, I ran home to do my homework before hitting the street—“go out and play” were the magic words, accompanied by “Don’t go off the block and be home for supper. (In Fall and Winter, that meant darkness, about 5 p.m.; in Spring as it stayed light longer, you’d push it.) We played in the streets in that time: stickball, punchball, kick-the-can, ringolevio; my block, Oakland Street was a narrow, cobble-stoned City street, lightly traveled by cars. When it got dark, my Aunt, leaning out the window of our fourth-floor tenement, would shout “Bobby”—loudly enough for me to hear her over the street din, in that summonsing voice that set me in instant motion.

After dinner, The Fat Man awaited. Each Monday night at 8:30, I’d be sitting cross-legged in front of our big RCA console in the parlor when a harp starts playing and a woman intones: “There he goes into that drugstore…he’s stepping on the scale.” (We hear a penny tumbling into the scale) “Weight?...237 pounds.” (A clicking sound of the fortune popping out of the scale), then: “Fortune?---Danger! Who is it?” she asks. “The Fat Mannnnnnn!” PI Brad Runyan answers. I don’t remember a single adventure of the Fat Man although I sat with him for 30 minutes on countless Mondays from 1946 to 1951.

My keenest memories, though, are of Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons (Thursdays at 8). Mike Clancy, his operative, eventually says in a vaudevillian turn: “Saints preserve us, Mr. Keen, do ya mean…?” “Yes, Mike,” Keen replies, explaining how he solved the crime. A charming, old stuffed shirt, Mr. Keen was Philo Vance for the lower classes. And Boston Blackie (Friday nights at 10), “enemy to those who make him an enemy, friend to those who have no friend.” Those lines are forever inscribed in my brain. Although I listened loyally to Bulldog Drummond, the Green Hornet, Johnny Dollar, I Was a Communist for the FBI, Mr. District Attorney, Renfrew of the Royal Mounted, I remember the names only, with a touch of nostalgia. “Hi Yo, Silver, Away!” … “Faster than a speeding bullet, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound!”…Spooky organ music, the unholy laugh, then: “Who knows…what evil…lllllurks…in the hearts of men?...The Shadow knows!” Goes without saying, they will always be with me.

From ages six to ten, I was captive to the Magic Box. Then a spinster lady, Josie, who lived with her brother George next door, got an Admiral TV, the first in our building. She invited me in for Milton Berle’s Texaco Comedy Hour and Ronald Regan’s General Electric Theatre, and Radio Days were behind me.

Well, maybe not. Years after I’d stopped listening, I become a NYC policeman. Then, a criminal defense lawyer like John J. Malone, Attorney at Law (Murder and Mr. Malone, Saturday nights at 8). My first business card as a criminal lawyer read: Robert J. Knightly, Attorney at Law.

Robert Knightly

Open Pores

I introduced myself to Tom at the 1992 MWA Edgar Awards Dinner. I’d read Dark Maze and believed it the best crime novel of the year, so I brought it to the dinner for Tom’s autograph. It got the Edgar and I made a friend. Ten years later, Tom was in L.A. waiting to be discovered when he persuaded his buddy, the late David Mills, to buy our pilot script, ‘The System,’ for Aaron Spelling-TV Productions. That got us two free weekends in Hollywood working with Mills in his trailer on the set of his then ill-starred ‘King Pins,’ a gory Mexican cartel melodrama, as we revised and blackboarded our script. Spelling flew us from NYC to the Coast First Class. On arrival, the agent Tom had arranged as our representation said words to us I’ll never forget. “You’re hot in this town,” she said.

In the end, NBC passed on filming our opus, and flew us back home—Coach. We’d cooled.

Robert Knightly

Thus begins a fog-bound Thursday in the life of Yours Truly, mystery writer of yore:

I awake, scratch myself, consider the merits of shaving (or not), drink up the newspapers and a pot of coffee, wonder where I might find a spot of cash, decide who among the people in my head are quick or dead, and wonder about a cryptic e-mail.

A decade ago, my place in the demimonde of crime literature, as I prefer to call the noble genre, still flickered, if weakly. Two decades ago, I established myself in that world on the wonderful April evening of ’92, when I collected an Edgar Allan Poe Award. Now in the year 2013, you have likely never heard of me. My last crime novel, Grief Street, was released in 1997. Its forerunners—Sea of Green, Dark Maze, Thrown-Away Child, Drown All the Dogs, and Devil’s Heaven—have been promoted to Glory, to employ the Salvation Army eulogy. There are two ways of looking at this: negatively, or positively. Which is to say, Nothing recedes like success—or, To everything there is a season.

My comrades in the writing dodge—scriveners like me, whose claims to fame are now mainly down the drain—frequently blame publishers for their plight. (To be sure, publishers deserve a measure of ill repute. As a species, they are unlovely, possessing all the imagination, romance, and élan of—pigeons. Yet they are not so beautiful against the sky.) But just as often, and to their great credit, my comrades recognize a time to move on.

A few of us, having moved on and aged with some degree of grace, harbor the hope of one more of life’s rewards before we croak—perhaps one more book that we may set upon the brag shelf. Such is how it is with me.

Presently, I compose essays for a daily online journal of literature, music, and politics—the Berlin-based CulturMag. My usual dateline is “New York, near America,” and my stuff usually involves the absurd behavior of a fading empire. I am a foreign correspondent in my own country. Besides this, I slowly labor toward completion of Lovers & Corpses, which I think of as a novel with murder. The book involves a minimum of shaving, what my German colleagues call Gesäß aus Eisen (buttocks of iron), and a number of choices regarding who shall live to tell a tale and who shall die trying—and more importantly, why.

The tale concerns a burned-out cop who evolved as a burned-out journalist. Since I came within inches of becoming a cop as a young man, I am able to imagine myself as the former character. And having spent several decades in American corporate media, I know whereof I speak as regards the latter.

Should Lovers and Corpses sound rather downbeat, I hasten to add my happiness on discovering that I retain the Writer’s Soul: still, I have need of fiction’s ingredients—a cast of characters, a ripping plot, an alter ego—to sort through the chapters of my own true life.

Good cops, good journalists, and good writers walk around with their pores open. That way, everything gets under the skin. Most people don’t like feeling itchy all the time; as mentioned, though, I scratch a lot. In true life, things much stranger than fiction will occur. This very drab Thursday morning, for instance, I opened an e-mail message under the subject line, “GET BACK TO ME ASAP.” It reads, word for mangled word—(and I swear, I am not making this up):

…Someone you call a friend wants you dead by any means and the person have spent a lot of money on this. The person also came to us and told me that he want you dead and he provided us with your name, picture, and other necessary informations we needed about you. So I sent my boys to track you down and they have carried out the necessary investigation needed for the operation on you, and they have done that but I told them not to kill you that I will like to contact you and see if your life is important to you or not since their findings show that you are innocent…

If Lovers & Corpses ever sees the light of a publication day, and should you be willing to plunk down twenty-five dollars or so for your very own copy, you will recognize the foregoing as an excerpt from a larger fulmination of menace.

And know that beyond the obvious grift, the e-mailer’s lie could be a truth somewhere in time.

Thomas Adcock

How I Got To Be Sam Cabot

SJ Rozan, born and brought up in the Bronx, is, as SJ Rozan, the Edgar, Shamus, Anthony, and various other award-winning author of 13 novels. Feeling like that was a lucky number, she's now taking a break and being the Sam half of Sam Cabot.

…And she's a fair hand in a pickup game of hoops.

Robert Knightly

A book called BLOOD OF THE LAMB is coming out on Aug. 6, by a writer named Sam Cabot. It's a paranormal thriller, full of vampires and the Vatican. Now, the thing is, Sam Cabot is me. Or, half of him is: the Sam half. The Cabot is my writing partner, Carlos Dews. (Get it, Sam = SJ, Cabot = Carlos?) What this means is, I've co-written a paranormal thriller set in Rome. Right in that sentence are four things I never thought I'd do. Co-write, paranormal, thriller, Rome. How did this happen?

I was swept up in a perfect storm.

I'd finished the third book on a three-book Lydia Chin/Bill Smith contract (GHOST HERO) and had not been struck by the lightning of a great new idea yet. A few months earlier I'd a written my first ghost story, "The Path," for the Charlaine Harris anthology HOME IMPROVEMENT: THE UNDEAD EDITION, and found out thereby how much fun, and how challenging, the supernatural can be. The book before GHOST HERO, which I know sounds like a paranormal but is not, was a Bill Smith-narrated novel called ON THE LINE that I'd written as a ticking-clock thriller just to see if I could. And in three of my previous books—a Lydia Chin book called THE SHANGHAI MOON, and my two standalones, ABSENT FRIENDS and IN THIS RAIN—I'd used multiple points of view. So all those ingredients were in place when Carlos Dews, whom I'd met about six months before, announced over drinks with friends one evening that he had a great idea for a thriller, a truly fabulous doozy of an idea, but being a literary academic (he is, classically, an English professor; he teaches at an American university in Rome) he knew enough to know he had no idea how to go about writing a thriller and did anyone know anyone who might want to collaborate? One of the other folks there turned to me and said, "SJ, this is right up your alley, why don't you work with Carlos on this?"

At which point I turned to myself and asked, "SJ, why didn't you leave this party ten minutes ago?"

Yes, I thought it was a terrible plan. Co-write? Me? I hadn't heard Carlos's idea yet, and I didn't want to. I wanted no part of the entire project. But I couldn't say to the guy, "I don't care how &^%#*! good your idea is, it's not good enough for me." I mean, how high-falutin' is that? So I agreed to meet with him over coffee a few days later to hear this idea.

And from that moment on I backed into this project every step of the way. Okay, I agreed it was a great idea, but we couldn't possibly have the same notion of what "working together" would mean. Yes, shockingly, we did; but Carlos, being an academic and not a genre writer, would have no thought as to how much world-building would have to go on before we could even start a paranormal. Well, yes he did, and had worked out most of the answers to my world-building questions already. Fine, but since I'd be the writer on this project and he the research, edit, and co-plot guy, he was bound not to like the loss of control over a story he'd had pieces of in his head for a year, once I started actually bringing the characters to life. We got that far: I sent him three chapters. He was back in Rome by then, so I sat back and and waited for the explosion from across the sea.

He loved them.

So, well, what the hell. BLOOD OF THE LAMB was underway. We sold it on 20,000 words and an outline and the publisher, Penguin/Blue Rider, wanted to know if, one, we were planning it as the start to a series and could we give them a second one if they made an offer; and, two, would we be willing to use a single, pseudonymous name on the book.

And that's how I, and Carlos Dews, got to be Sam Cabot.

Sam's working away on volume two in the Novel of Secrets series, a book to be called SKIN OF THE WOLF. He hopes that you check out BLOOD OF THE LAMB, which, though a paranormal, is really about faith and religion and the differences between them. He really hopes you like it. So does Carlos Dews. And so do I.

SJ Rozan

On Umbrellas, Rule Books, and Other Writing Hazards

Frankie Bailey and I met as members of the National Board of MWA in 2005. She later became Executive-VP of MWA, then President of Sisters in Crime — all while teaching Criminal Justice fulltime at SUNY Albany, and, in her off-hours, publishing five traditional mysteries with her amateur detective, Lizzie Stuart. Her latest, THE RED QUEEN DIES, breaks new ground: a police procedural set in Albany in the year 2019, starring Detective Hannah McCabe of the APD.

Robert Knightly

I am solemn, thoughtful, and prone to worry about anything that one can worry about. I am one of those people who is appointed to committees and given responsible tasks. When I fail to do what I said I would do or what I think I should have done, I suffer from pangs of guilt for days, weeks, months, or even years. I carry an umbrella and check the Weather Channel several times a day. And, yes, I do believe that sensible and fair rules should apply to both me and you. I am what most people would describe as a “serious person”.

However, after study, observation, and reaching the age of too old to worry about what others may think, I decided that a serious person functions much more effectively when she indulges in occasional silliness. Silliness from a serious person can be disconcerting for those who are convinced she has no sense of humor. They may be shocked or even distressed. But they will get over it. And the advantage for the serious person is that after having established in work and social situations that she can indeed tell a joke or engage in an imaginative leap, the serious person can then focus on what needs to be done. A twinkle in the eye, an occasional nod and sly smile, is sufficient to remind others that the serious person can engage in fun.

However, the idea of applying this life lesson to my writing did not occur to me until recently. Not to say that I have never had fun as a writer. But it was quiet, private fun. The kind of fun that a person who loves to do research has when she is reading an old newspaper and finds a wonderful detail that will be perfect for her book. The mouthed “Yes!” because she is in the library and knows that etiquette requires one not disturb other patrons.

When it comes to sitting down at my computer to write, I have often gone about it with teeth gritted, research notes in front of me, eye on clock or calendar. Writing requires discipline. Although it would surprise many people to learn this, I have no discipline. I am an expert when it comes to procrastinating. I would rather sprawl in an armchair, watching a really bad movie, than sit down at my computer to continue my struggle with a stubborn first draft. Having no discipline, I rely on my ability to instill anxiety in myself. I imagine the humiliation and trauma of missing a deadline.

So does Lizzie Stuart, the protagonist in my first mystery series. She is a criminal justice professor/crime historian, and, like her creator, a serious person. Not only because I began by writing what I knew, but because her own autobiography has convinced her that she has no other choice but to be responsible and controlled. She does not want to be her mother’s daughter. Five books into the series, she has loosened up a bit – thinks in part to her lover John Quinn, but also because of her own efforts. A reader once shared her concern that poor Lizzie never seemed to know where her next laugh was coming from. She does laugh more now. But she is always going to be earnest and concerned. That’s who Lizzie is, and neither one of us wants her to change.

But when I had the idea for a new series, featuring police detective Hannah McCabe, I wanted to do something different. Debuting with THE RED QUEEN DIES, the series will be set in Albany, New York in the near future. The first book takes place in 2019. I wanted to move a few years into the future so that I could think about where we might be headed. What will our world be like in a few years with changes in demographics, wars, haves and have nots, climate change, surveillance and privacy issues, and the interactions of humans and machines? I teach a course on crime and cities. I also wanted to think about how a city functions. But some aspects of the future, such as climate change, could be pretty scary. So it occurred to me that I needed balance. I want to write books in this new series that readers will find thought-provoking but not utterly depressing.

When I realized that if I intended to write about the near future in a real place (Albany, New York), I would need to create an alternate (or parallel) universe, my problem was solved. In the opening scene in The Red Queen Dies, the reader learns that seven years earlier, in 2012, the sighting of a UFO in the desert near Las Vegas sent fighter jets scrambling. And then the UFO disappeared in a blinding flash of light. In 2019, my Albany and my characters exist in a post-UFO world. It is a world that is similar to the world we know, but there are also differences in both the past and the present.

Once I had decided to engage in a bit of genre-blending with a UFO sighting in a crime novel, I was liberated. I could play. I love film noir and 1950s sci-fi movies. I love nursery rhymes and Alice in Wonderland. I love it when real life is stranger than fiction – as in the case of Abraham Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth in Albany. I decided to put all of this in my book, while writing a straight-forward police procedural. I decided to write a book that I would enjoy reading — and I did.

I don’t know how my experiment in deliberate playfulness will turn out. I hope readers will like THE RED QUEEN DIES and become hooked on the series. But, however it goes, this serious person stood on her head and wiggled her toes. I’m doing it again as I write the second book in the series (working title, COCK ROBIN's FUNERAL). The first draft is still heavy lifting, but I’m having fun.

Frankie Bailey
www.frankieybailey.com
Twitter: @FrankieYBailey

Author photo by Jeff Foley Photography

How I Became a Crime Writer, or, What I Did on my Summer Vacations

I met Dennis McFadden five years ago when I joined his fiction writers group here in Albany. He was the dean among a talented bunch. He had been getting his stories published in prestigious literary journals. I noted that he had crimes occurring in his stories; their pace reminded me of the atmospheric style of Louise Penny. After I dropped out to write Memoir (a special kind of fiction), Dennis's recessive crime writer's gene tunneled up (stories in 'Hitchcock' and 'Queen' and appearances in Best American Mystery Stories twice).

Robert Knightly

I must have been meant to be a writer. According to my mother, I was three years old when I looked through the bus window at a busy Washington, D.C., sidewalk and said, “Look at all the pedestrians.” Even then I was a phonetic exhibitionist.

It must have been meant to be, because my upbringing wasn’t much of a factor. Blue collar all the way. There weren’t many books around the house. Nobody in the family had gone to college. Dad told a few bad jokes when he was drunk, but no bedtime stories. I remember getting my hands on some Hardy Boys books (crime novels, now that you mention it), and when I was 15, I picked up a paperback called Boy With a Gun. It was, coincidentally, about a 15-year-old boy. It takes place during the Hungarian uprising, and the kid’s father and brother are killed, he ends up fighting in the revolution, and he and this 15-year-old girl are crazy about each other, but the end left me hanging. The kid was still fighting. The war wasn’t over. He and the girl (with whom I too was in love by then) still weren’t together. What happened? What the hell happened? I had to know.

So I wrote to the author, James Dean Sanderson, and asked him, and he actually wrote back! I tore open the envelope, about to have all my questions answered, all the mysteries revealed. But he didn’t tell me a damn thing. He was flattered, he said, that the book had affected me that way. He suggested I write an ending. I should write the damn ending! I should talk to my English teacher—I might even be able to earn credit for it.

The bastard.

Maybe that planted a seed, I don’t know, but I still never entertained writing, not seriously, until my senior year, when my English teacher spotted my “talent,” and singled me out for high and frequent praise. His name was MacBeth. That’s right. MacBeth.

Bruce MacBeth maybe, but MacBeth nevertheless.

How could I then not go on to college and major in English? I became known as a writer, publishing a couple of stories in the old “lit mag.” I was on my way. Then a funny thing happened. I took 10 or 15 years off after college to drink and party before I finally got around to writing again. My third book was pretty good, good enough to get me an honest-to-God New York City literary agent. But alas. All she succeeded in doing was getting me a higher class of rejections, and she dumped me after a year. In my despair, Irish activism caught me on the rebound, and I spent the next 15 years getting England out of Ireland. All I wrote during that period was propaganda, but I wrote it well and I wrote it plenty. And you know what? It wasn’t bad practice. Some of those satirical pieces were very much like short stories.

As Irish activism fell by the wayside when peace broke out (thanks in large part to me, I like to think), short satire evolved into short stories. Why not back to novels? Maybe because I hadn’t had one published? Maybe because I was getting older now, the green banana syndrome, hesitant to begin any two year projects? Maybe because I loved the high of finishing a story and craved it more often? I became an addict, jonesing for finishes.

One of my first stories was about an old rummy named Doodle O’Hanlon (my stories always start with character, before plot, before anything else), and I put him in Hartsgrove, a little town in western Pennsylvania bearing more than a passing resemblance to my own hometown. Then I wrote about 25 or 30 more Hartsgrove stories, as well as dozens of stories set elsewhere in the universe. I started sending them out, started getting them accepted in literary journals, small ones at first, then bigger. I was hooked. In 2008 I found myself at a writers conference at Colgate, the instructor liked my work, one thing led to another, and out of that happy serendipity, my collection, Hart’s Grove, was born, published by Colgate University Press in 2010.

A few months later, coming back to my desk from a meeting (yes, of course, the old day job), I noticed the red light on my phone. It was a voice message from a gentleman in the employ of Otto Penzler, calling to tell me that my story “Diamond Alley,” from Hart’s Grove, had been selected for inclusion in The Best American Mystery Stories 2011.

I hadn’t submitted the story. A couple of months later I was lucky enough to be able to meet and talk to Michele Slung, the screening reader for the series, at a Sisters In Crime luncheon in Albany (thanks to an invitation from Robert Knightly). She’d noticed an ad in a journal for Hart’s Grove, judged from the copy that it might involve mystery, and ordered it. I’m grateful her radar system is so extensive.

So how does a writer with little knowledge of the genre, who’s never attempted a thriller, a whodunit, or a procedural, end up in Best American Mysteries? No mystery. As I said, I start with character, but given human nature, crime and character go hand-in-hand. And as for mystery, that’s a part and parcel of everyone’s everyday life—mystery in the sense that we can never really know everything that’s happening in and around our lives, or anything that will happen after them. Maybe that’s why I write, why a lot of writers do: the lure of omniscience is hard to resist. It’s a good way to grapple with those everyday mysteries. It’s good to be God sometimes.

This year I had another story selected for The Best American Mystery Stories 2013, “The Ring of Kerry,” which appeared in the “New England Review” in the Fall. This time I did submit. Good radar or no, why leave it to chance? I also have stories slated to appear in “Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine” and “Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.” (I submitted them too.)

This has led my friend Bob to believe I’m a crime writer.

Guilty (appropriately enough). Proud to be.

Dennis McFadden

Author photo by Heidi Brown

Hey, I've Got This Great Idea!

Janet Reid is a literary agent who drinks scotch and stalks Jack Reacher. Her progress on both counts can be followed on her blog JetReidLiterary.Blogspot.com and on Twitter @Janet_Reid. She's the first agent to be a guest blogger on Crime Writers' Chronicle, and we're very pleased to have her here.

Robert Knightly

Back in the day—before I met that guy down at the crossroads and became an agent—I worked in book publicity. A lot of my time was spent at readings with Q&A segments. One of the worst questions a lot of authors got asked was "Where do you get your ideas?"

The answers ranged from the serious: "I write about what I'm interested in knowing more about" and "I write what the voices in my head tell me" to what I was told Walter Mosley reportedly answered once: "Montgomery Ward."

Now that I'm an agent, I hear from writers who have ideas but are afraid they'll be stolen. One querier emailed me several times concerned about how we disposed of rejected pages; was our garbage collected in a secure fashion? (I howled with laughter at that. NYC Sanitation dudes move too fast to be reading much. The lady who does sort through our trash is looking for something with more immediate cash potential than an unpublished, rejected manuscript.)

Some writers still attach copyright notices to their queries just in case anyone has an inclination to lift their pearls of wisdom and wit. (This is a VERY bad idea. Don't do it. Don't let anyone talk you into/scare you into doing it. All it does is mess up the copyright application when your book is sold and published.)

But those are the flakes and the fodder for cocktail party gossip and writers conference panels. In the reality of an agent's daily grind, we do talk about ideas with authors, particularly authors who have been on submission for awhile and not sold.

While I don't like it if a project hasn't sold, I do like being able to come up with new ideas for my clients. It's fun. And the best part is, I don't have to do any of the work!

Last Friday morning I read an article in Shelf Awareness about people who "bookshop sit"—they tend the store for indie bookstore owners who need to be away for more than a day. My mind immediately turned to murder. What would happen IF… the owners never came back? What would happen IF… the sitter discovered a body concealed in a window seat that had clearly been there for more days than she'd been sitting?

My great good fortune is that I can send these ideas to one of my authors who is looking around for fodder. If it resonates, great. If not, well, back to Montgomery Ward!

I also talk to my authors about ideas for plot and character. When Stephanie Jaye Evans was finishing her second book SAFE FROM HARM, naturally I had the book and characters on my mind. One morning I was standing in the shower thinking about her protagonist Walker "Bear" Wells, and a scene came to me that was so vivid it could have been a projection on the wall. I leaped out of the shower and ran to the phone. I called Steph and shrieked "Eureka!" Fortunately she has caller ID so she didn't hang up.

Some time later, the first 100 pages of Book Three arrived in my in-box. The "shower scene" wasn't the first one, but it was the second. It was very very cool to see my idea there on the page in the hand of a great writer, I must confess.

Not all of my clients want to toss ideas around. Some of them have very fixed notions of what they're going to write, and that's it. Some like to toss a lot of ideas around before settling on one. And some just get calls from their agent, wrapped in towels, announcing they've had a vision!

What does this mean for you if you are unpublished? Think about how you work. Do you like to consider many ideas and get feedback before starting? Do you want an agent who will call you with ideas or do you just want to be left alone to write. Knowing how you work best will help you pick the right agent. ASK as you're interviewing the agents who've offered you representation. We know how we work; we'll be glad to talk about this with you.

What does this mean for if you are published and agented? Don't be afraid to ask for help if you think you need some. Most agents are willing and eager to help their clients with developmental work. I've heard clients of other agents say things like "I don't want to bother her (the agent)." In fact, this is NOT a bother, this is the actual woof and warp of the job. And if you do want help and your agent isn't eager or willing to do that, well, then you have some information you didn't have before, and that's good to know.

******

Back in the day when I worked in PR, another least favorite question was "Hey I've got this idea. How about you write it and we'll split the money." There was no way to respond with anything other than a less stark version of "You've clearly never tried to write a novel or you'd know how stupid that idea is."

Now when I have an idea I tell someone "Hey, I have this great idea. How about you write it and I'll take 15%!" **

**well I'll also sell it, help you edit it, help you develop your online presence, help you manage your career, and get the next book done too. All for that same percentage!

Janet Reid

The People Behind the Stories

Suzanne Chazin (rhymes with raisin) has written three novels,The Fourth Angel, Flashover and Fireplay; short stories, essays and magazine articles. She was Senior Editor at Reader's Digest for ten years, and has taught fiction and non-fiction at NYU, the New School and Sarah Lawrence, in the City.

I met Suzanne when I moderated a panel at an MWA dinner (I forget on what). I was intrigued that she wrote about firemen, in and out of the firehouse. I wondered if she were one of those hardy pioneers who had broken into the ranks of the FDNY in the 1980s, then put her experience into books. Not so: her husband is a Chief in the FDNY, but she definitely knows her way around a firehouse. I appreciate her eye and the voice, as I think you will.

Robert Knightly

I’m reading a really great mystery novel by Paul Levine at the moment called Illegal. But what first struck me about the book, before I ever got to the story, was the dedication:

To the woman carrying a rucksack, clutching her child’s hand and kicking up dust as she scrambled along a desert trail near Calexico, California.

I love that dedication because it reminds me that sometimes an inspiration for a story is nothing more than an image you can’t shake. The only way to make sense of it is to write about it.

My first three mysteries were set in the FDNY where my husband is a chief. Yet ironically, the image I couldn’t shake didn’t come from him, perhaps because I was too close to the story to see it. It was the late 1990s. I was working as a writer for Reader’s Digest and my editor asked me to spend three or four shifts (called “tours”) riding with the FDNY for a day-in-the-life story for the magazine.

I got clearance to ride with a rescue company—an elite unit that handles large fires and rescue operations throughout the five boroughs of New York City. As the only woman in an all-male firehouse, I got a quick education in how to “blend in:” get in and out of the bathroom quickly (and don’t put too much faith in the latch on the door). Get comfortable with being dirty and tired. And make sure you’re not the last one on the rig when a run comes in.

I did four night tours—6 p.m. to 9 a.m.—over the course of two weeks and developed a reputation for being “a white cloud.” That’s what they call a firefighter who never seems to catch a job. All the major fires and emergencies kept happening when I wasn’t there. But this gave me a chance to get to know the men and hear their stories.

I soon learned that one of the officers in the company had lost his firefighter brother, a father of three, in a deadly blaze in Queens two years earlier. On one of those long, sleepless “white cloud” tours, the officer opened up to me about the night he was yanked from duty, informed of his brother’s death and then asked to break the news to his brother’s wife. He showed up at their house in the middle of the night and found the whole place lit up like a Christmas tree.

She already knows, he thought. Why else would all the lights be on at 2 a.m.? And then he realized something worse: his sister-in-law kept all the lights on every night his brother wasn’t there. She couldn’t bear the darkness when he was gone. And here he was, standing on her doorstep, bringing her a lifetime of darkness.

Even though I was married to a firefighter, I had never allowed myself to picture such a moment. But that image of the house lit up like a Christmas tree spoke to me deeply, both as a writer and the wife of a firefighter. I knew I had to tell that story—not directly perhaps, but in a way that would capture the uncertainty firefighters and their families face consciously or (in my case) unconsciously every day.

I ended up writing three mystery novels about life and death in the FDNY. Now I’m working on a mystery series that concerns undocumented immigrants in suburban New York. This series also began with a moment. For several years, I had been working with immigrant outreach organizations near my home, helping to write the real-life stories of undocumented Latinos. During this time, I was introduced to a Guatemalan man in his late 20s who had nearly died of dehydration on two separate border crossings. I found myself riveted by his description of those harrowing journeys. Machetes held to his throat. Pistols pointed at his head. Desperate moments in the desert when he was reduced to drinking his own urine to survive.

But what really struck me were the circumstances that led to his second border crossing. He and his kid brother were living in suburban New York at the time. It was winter. Jobs were scarce. A garment wholesaler offered them temporary work in New England sewing clothes. After two weeks, with their wages in their pockets, they were ready for the trip back to New York. To celebrate, the kid brother ordered Chinese takeout—chicken and broccoli—to be delivered to the motel where they were staying. By the time the food came, the brother had fallen asleep so the man went downstairs to pay for the food. Instead of a Chinese delivery clerk, he was met by immigration agents who arrested him, shipped him off to a detention center and eventually deported him back to Guatemala. (His brother, by the way, slept blissfully through the whole ordeal and never got arrested or deported).

Imagine your whole life being upended over an order of Chinese takeout! Imagine having the courage and determination to undertake that dangerous, brutal, near-death journey all over again. (Not to mention still being on speaking terms with your brother afterwards.)

There are writers who could think up these situations out of thin air. Maybe it’s because I started out as a journalist, but my inspiration almost always comes from real people. Their stories keep me honest. And forever indebted.

Suzanne Chazin

The Source Material Assembly Line

My friend Tim McLoughlin is the editor of Brooklyn Noir and its companion volumes. His novel, Heart of the Old Country, won Italy’s Premio Penne award, and was the basis for the motion picture The Narrows, starring Vincent D’Onofrio.

Robert Knightly

The cliché of a writer being asked where they get their ideas, and the numerous clever responses conjured out of desperation, is legendary. My situation is a lot more pedestrian and straightforward. Although no one is ever going to accuse me of being prolific, the fiction I do turn out generally centers on crime, or on the kind of people likely to commit crimes on a pretty low rent scale.

I’ve worked in the criminal justice system for thirty years now. If I had been convicted of murdering someone that long ago in New York City I’d have since been released, so I’ve decided to go over the wall this summer and retire. But my career has certainly informed my choice of subject matter. And as I’m more inclined, in my reading and writing, toward the nickel-and-dime world than high-finance-money-laundering-type thrillers, it has suited me well.

I remember exactly where I was standing and what I was doing the first time I heard a 710.30(1)a statement, but then, who doesn’t? I was a brand new, wet behind the ears Court Officer in the arraignment part of Brooklyn Criminal Court in the bad old early eighties. I was the bridgeman, the officer who stands in front of the judge’s bench, calls the case into the record, hands the judge the pertinent paperwork, and gets out of the way. It’s just like Law and Order, except louder and with physically unattractive defendants. It was my first case, and I announced it with confidence, then prepared the next docket while the key players discussed the fate of the accused. After preliminary conversation and a plea of not guilty, the judge turned to the rail thin blonde waif of an Assistant District Attorney.

“Motions?” he asked.

“Seven-ten-thirty-one-a,” she responded.

“Go ahead.”

“Go fuck yourself,” she said, in an absolutely flat, professional tone.

“Anything else?” he inquired.

“No your honor.”

“Bail is set at one thousand dollars, cash or bond,” he said. “Next case.”

He tossed the court papers into the wire basket of finished work and looked at me expectantly. I glanced between him and the ADA, who was already reviewing a new folder, unsure what to do.

“Officer,” he prompted.

I picked up the next docket, called it in, less confidently this time, and stepped back.

It took me perhaps a half dozen cases before I realized that 710.30(1)a statements were direct quotes from defendants, usually made spontaneously at the time of their arrest. It was therefore not unusual that mixed in with the ubiquitous that’s not my gun and what weed? would be the occasional go fuck yourself or take these cuffs off and I’ll kick your ass. They are basically anything that gets blurted out during the arrest process. Arraignment in New York City Criminal Court is supposed to be conducted within twenty-four hours of arrest. In an effort to keep to that schedule, the processing of cases goes on from nine o’clock in the morning until midnight every day of the year at 120 Schermerhorn Street, just down the block from all of the shiny new condos and hotels now being raised in downtown Brooklyn.

Over the course of the three years that I worked in uniform, I listened to hundreds of 710.30(1)a statements, and came to view them as windows on the unrestrained id.

They can be chilling, as in the case of a man caught in Sunset Park disposing of the bloody remains of his pet pit bull: He farted so I stabbed him.

They can be heartbreaking when a man in East New York is arrested for robbery: I’m sorry. I was hungry. I needed the money. I got the blade on me too.

They can be embarrassing, as in a domestic violence case out of East Flatbush when a defense attorney has just told the judge that the court needs to take into account the social mores of other cultures: She doesn’t have my lunch ready for me when I go to work. I want her to do all the cleaning in the house. Today, I told her to make me breakfast and when I went downstairs she hadn’t made me breakfast. That’s how it started.

And of course, they can be hilarious. After all, if you can’t occasionally find humor in someone else’s misdeeds you have no business being a crime writer. My personal favorite was the young man arrested exiting the basement of an apartment building in Crown Heights where every washing machine and dryer in the laundry room had been vandalized. He was carrying a screwdriver, a hammer, and a pillowcase containing 250 quarters: Those are mine, I’m on my way to a PacMan tournament. The tools are to fix the machines.

This parade of tragedy and comedy occurs fifteen hours a day, seven days a week. And though the poor and anonymous comprise the majority of cases, every demographic makes an appearance. I have witnessed the arraignments of lawyers and doctors, police officers and priests, a former major league baseball player, and a judge. They are not the worst of humanity, but what they share is the airing of their worst behavior. The criminal justice system, by mandating long ago that these proceedings be open to the public, invented reality television without the TV, live and unscripted.

So if you’re looking for ideas, or trying to fine-tune that street lingo to be current to the last forty-eight hours, come down to any of the criminal courthouses. Not Supreme Court, but regular Criminal Court, where the nobodies stay, and even the superstars make that initial appearance. Enter through the smoke-stained revolving doors, their broken glass long ago replaced with Plexiglas. Pass through the magnetometers and be searched for weapons, and then step into an arraignment part and have a seat in one of the rows of church pew benches scored with decades of carved initials and expletives.

There’s a new show every three minutes.

Tim McLoughlin

Remembering Sergeant Major Russell Keene, U.S. Army

Between Memorial Day and D-Day, June 6th, I always have a thought, even if fleeting, for Sergeant Major Russell Keene, my savior.

It was fifty-one years ago—in the summer, I remember—that I first met Sergeant Major Russell Keene, the man who single-handedly ran the day-to-day life of the U.S. Army Battalion in which I found myself an unwilling draftee, in the Antilles Command, San Juan, Puerto Rico. I stood before Sgt. Keene that day in 1962 as a prisoner, having been transported back to Ft. Buchanan in San Juan from the Town of Salinas in the mountainous interior of the Island where I’d been assigned as an “Acting” Military Policeman with the rank of “Acting” Corporal, in a contingent of regular Army (as I was) to keep order in a Puerto Rican National Guard Summer Training Camp. I had been very much “acting”—I’d been issued no bullets for my .45-caliber sidearm since my primary job in the Army was “English Language Instructor” (the Service calls it your MOS), my fellow instructors being also armed with empty pistols, all of us just there as some extra bodies on loan to the real MPs. It was the real MPs who chased and arrested me for “misappropriating” the Lieutenant Colonel’s Staff Car to go into town for a “couple of pops.” That’s how I met Sgt. Major Keene. Under guard.

My problem had begun at the thrice-weekly Martini Cocktail Hour the Instructors threw in their tents (which ‘hour’ ran longer). That night I needed a cold Corona which meant a trip to town. I immediately thought jeep but inspection at the Motor Pool revealed none with sufficient gas. Only that four-door shiny black Buick had a full tank. Off I went solo but immediately had a problem in not being able to turn on the headlights, but with a full moon in a starlit night of deep inky blackness, I could just manage to navigate by the flashing of the directional signals. I roared past the MP Guard Post, and they followed. I met my pursuers in a Beer Shack by the side of the road far short of town after I ran the Buick into a ditch, damaging the left front fender. I managed to down a couple before being apprehended.

In between two MPs, I was ushered into the Battalion HQ Hut into His presence. You weren’t required to salute Non Commissioned Officers (NCOs)—even the top enlisted rank of Sergeant Major, but I resisted a powerful urge to do so. Sgt. Keene was a big man: six-two, broad in the shoulders and waist, barrel-chest, military-cut salt-and-pepper hair; I guessed his age at fifty. Being 21, old to me was 50. I stood at rigid ‘attention’: shoulders back, eyes straight ahead, head level with and centered atop my shoulders. (The man had that kind of effect on you.) Coming from behind his grey metal desk, he stopped two feet away, stooping a bit to peer intently in my face. I stared back at the clean-shaven face, noting absent-mindedly the gossamer tracery of burst red capillaries in the hollows of the cheek and the drinker’s nose.

“What in Sam Hill do you think you’re doing, Corporal?” he said. The tone perplexed, not unkind. After awhile, he told me to consider myself under arrest and confined to the HQ Company area, specifically a vacant barracks next door. I was ordered to stay put until further notice, except to go to the Company Mess at feeding times. He dismissed me then, directing his Orderly to get me bedding and escort me to my place of confinement. He’d forgotten something, and so called me back to surrender my Class A Pass (like a Passport, it allows you to enter onto or leave a military base).

Jail was not what I’d expected. I was alone in a barracks that usually was home to forty men. I took three meals at the HQ Company dining hall like the other soldiers, undistinguished by my status as prisoner. Days and evenings I read in the barracks. I consumed the “Studs Lonigan” trilogy by James T. Farrell. I felt no urge to flee; I accepted that I was ‘On My Honor’, sort of an Honored Guest. I never saw Sgt. Keene at the Company Mess Hall; the enlisted men’s grapevine said he took his meals at the NCO Club, where you could get a drink. He was rumored to put away a case of beer nightly at the Club; there was no Missus Keene, on the Base at least. Sgt. Keene was a Lifer, having parachuted into Normandy on D-Day, and fought in Korea in the early 1950s. I calculated that he was likely no older than me, probably 19, when he landed in France with the 82nd or 101st Airborne Divisions on June 6, 1944.

Ten days later, I was summoned again by Sgt. Keene, who informed me that if I wished to plead guilty to “misuse” rather than “misappropriation” of the Lieutenant Colonel’s staff car, I would be sentenced to 30 days at “unconfined hard labor” and loss of rank—busted back, that is, to the lowest enlisted rank, Private E-1, with a consequent loss of pay. Since I had only managed to rise one grade to Private E-2 despite my unpaid Acting Corporal rank, I readily agreed to the plea offer. That same day, in the afternoon, I appeared before the Battalion Commander, Colonel Bishop, to formally plead guilty and be sentenced at a Summary Courts Martial. The formalities swiftly done, the Colonel disappeared and I was left with Sgt. Keane who instructed me on my next assignment. First, he asked how many pairs of “fatigues” (the work uniform) I owned. “Two,” I said.

“Draw three more from Quartermaster and soap at the PX,” he said. “Report tomorrow at 0630 hrs. in full fatigue uniform to the Work Detail Sergeant at the northwest corner of the Parade Field. He’ll show you what to do. Dismissed!”

And so I was “Courts Martialled”. Next morning, I drew a pick and shovel, alternately, and broke ground, dug post holes, and hoisted lumber into place for the next thirty days—that is, me and successive platoons of Puerto Rican recruits. The only constant face in the work gang was mine. We were building a Combat Proficiency Course, the first on the Island. All regular Army would be tested—swinging on ladder bars, running over and under obstacles, climbing walls, while being timed—to measure our Combat-Readiness. This was during Cuban Missile Crisis time, which gave the Commanding General of the Antilles Command a purpose. The other half of the Command was located in Panama at the Jungle Fighters School. Their Combat Proficiency Course would not look anything like ours. In the event, I qualified on the course easily, being in the best shape I’d been since Basic Training.

When I was summoned by Sgt. Keene some days later, he informed me that I had completed my sentence, was reassigned to the HQ Billet (a/k/a the Havana Hilton for some obscure reason, but an actual three-story stone building), and would henceforth drive the Battalion Laundry Truck—delivering the dirty linen and picking up the clean from the Base Laundry. I mentioned that I’d never had a driver’s license, so he called ahead to the Motor Pool Sergeant to qualify me forthwith on the Army’s Ton-and-a-Half flatbed. The Motor Pool Sergeant rode with me till he couldn’t take the strain, then issued me a Military Driver’s License, stamped “Restricted to Base”.

I got quite adept behind the wheel of my Ton-and-a-Half, though it never got to go to Town. The months of my enlistment sped by as I picked up the dirty stuff—on alternate days of the week from Companies A, B, C and Headquarters—and came back with clean. Companies A, B and C housed the English Language Instructors. One hundred fifty of them—all of us college graduates sent at the end of Basic Training from Camps all around the country to Ft. Buchanan to teach Puerto Rican recruits to read, speak and write English (more or less), in eight weeks so they could pass a test, then be formally inducted into the U.S. Army. My brother instructors were every kind of engineer, PhDs in the Classics from Harvard and Yale, farmers from Texas A&M, and not a few actual high school teachers. All, with Lesson Plan in hand, saying “Repeat after me” to 30 or more ‘jibaros’, having varying degrees of motivation to learn the foreigner’s tongue. Sgt. Keene rescued me from that fate. In time, I learned that he had intervened to save me from another. Lt. Col. Hayes whose brand new staff car I had “misused” (and abused) wanted me to receive a General Courts Martial which would have sent me to the Federal Penitentiary in Leavenworth, KS, with a Dishonorable Discharge. But Col. Bishop, who outranked Hayes, vetoed that. I believe that Sgt. Major Keene, as trusted chief advisor, whispered in his Colonel’s ear.

When I was a ‘short-timer’ with just one week to go before being shipped back to the States for discharge, Sgt. Keene once again demanded my Class A Pass and confined me to the Base. It was during the small private party he had for me—just him, the Orderly and me, with a small frosted cake from the Mess Hall with three candles on it—signifying my new pay grade of E-3, him handing me a pair of stripes to be sewn on, one to each sleeve, as he promoted me to Private First Class and advised that I keep my nose clean.

Why me? I ask myself. He’d commanded real soldiers, in combat and out, for two decades, and must have dealt with countless drunk fuck-ups. Was that it? Nostalgia? I wonder if he stayed in long enough to go to Vietnam. If he were still alive, he’d be about 93. I’d like to see him once more so he could see that I didn’t end up in Leavenworth after all.

Robert Knightly

Rikers Island Bar

In eighteen years as a criminal defense lawyer in the Courts of NYC, I represented hundreds of clients like my fictional 'Enrique'. The character is made up but the dilemma is real. Rikers Island is our Penal Colony, right out of Kafka.

Robert Knightly

I’m driving over the Francis R. Buono Memorial Bridge for the nine hundredth time (figuring once a week, four times a month, times twelve months, times eighteen years). The bridge connects the Queens mainland to Rikers Island, which is floating in the East River and a mere hundred yards off the runways of LaGuardia Airport. Rikers Island is the main New York City jail, housing 12,000 or more inmates at any given time, depending on how tough on crime the NYPD chooses to be. Rikers Island is America’s largest penal colony, a city of rolling razor wire far as the eye can see. I’m en route there because I’m a lawyer assigned by the Criminal Courts to defend a fellow who claims to be “indigent” (no dough to hire a lawyer), so he gets me, whom the inmates call “an 18-B” (short for the section of the County Law), as distinguished from “a real, paid lawyer,” whom they’d hire if they could. I pay no mind; I’ve heard it all before.

I get to drive onto the Island in my own car with a lawyer’s pass from the guard booth. Civilians have to bus it onto the Island after taking trains from every corner of the City to catch the Q100 at Queensboro Plaza, last stop “the Rock” (as the inmates call home). I get my visitor pass at the reception center, go through electronic surveillance, and head for the bus depot outside. Ancient yellow school buses queue up in their stalls: five separate lines go to ten jails spaced out over 415 acres of mostly landfill. As I wait to board my bus, this Kirk Douglas western, The Big Sky, is playing in my head—green movie valleys filled with fat cattle versus my electrified fences topped with barbed wire near and far.

Bus #3 delivers me to my destination, the Otis Bantum Correctional Center, where my client is housed. Funny thing about the jails, they’re all named after people: the Rose M. Singer Center (women’s jail); the George R. Vierno Center; the Anna M. Kross Center; the George Motchan Detention Center. You get the picture? All dead. I can’t help wondering if Otis Bantum would approve of ‘the Bing’—solitary for the incorrigibly violent—being housed in his jail. Nobody will admit knowing how the Bing got its name; I suspect it’s onomatopoeia for the sound a nightstick makes when banging off the head of an inmate.

Today I’ll see my new client, Enrique. He resided in Washington Heights among a legion of illegal Dominicans, of which he is one. He was arrested a week ago for selling a couple of “20s” of cocaine to an undercover cop. I interviewed him in the feeder pens behind Manhattan Night Court, but it did not go well. Enrique doesn’t know English. Unfortunately, the court interpreter was a Cuban who abbreviated Enrique’s fulsome responses to my questions into either “yeses” or “nos.” (You had to watch the Spanish interpreters: they had fierce prejudices against defendants from countries other than their own.)

Yesterday, by phone, Enrique informed me through his English-speaking jailhouse buddy that he won’t take a plea—he wants a trial. This pernicious idea is endemic to the Rock. Inmates always phrase it as “wanting their day in court.” It is the product of the Rikers Island Bar, a hardcore cadre of inmates who, during long stretches in Upstate prisons, have honed jailhouse lawyering to an art. Daily they counsel innocents on their cases, bad-mouthing the advice of 18-Bs like me, filling heads with legal fantasies. Their fees are assessed in the prevailing currency: cigarettes, sex, whatever. There’s a law library in every jail on Rikers, each staffed by a civilian librarian. The Rikers Bar is as old and as active as any of the County Bar Associations.
Plea bargains are the local currency of the justice system. No way can the courts give every defendant a jury trial. As a reward for not being difficult, defendants plead guilty and get far fewer years in prison. But insist on your day in court and you get hammered upon conviction. Contrary to the opinion of the Rikers Bar, Enrique will be convicted at trial because the District Attorney has physical evidence and witnesses— which I don’t, and seldom do.

I must steel myself for the coming battle. I must erase the word “trial” from Enrique’s mental slate.

A Police Story: Bushwick Burning

In May, 1975, I became a Patrolman again when I was evicted from Police Headquarters in Manhattan, transferred to the 83rd Precinct in Bushwick, Brooklyn. The occasion was Operation All Out, aptly named for the filling of empty police cars in Precincts all over the City as 5,000 patrolmen were laid off by a City facing bankruptcy. Rigged budgets, the flight or collapse of neighborhood-based manufacturing, and reluctance of Mayors to say no to the pay and benefit demands of Civil Service unions were some reasons. Then one day in February, 1975, the banks refused to lend another dollar, to underwrite another bond sale, as the City sank beneath a debt in the billions. State Civil Service law dictated: Last in, first out. Spared by eight years seniority, I got my blues out of mothballs, said goodbye to the Police Legal Bureau, and motored over the Williamsburg Bridge and four miles up Broadway to the Eight-Three Precinct on Wilson and DeKalb Avenues, to take up the lance again.

Bushwick was predominantly Puerto Rican, alongside an older Sicilian section along Knickerbocker Avenue, a main commercial street, bordering Ridgewood, Queens in the north. A block away sat the 83rd Precinct Station House, a Victorian-era stone structure, turreted, with a corner tower and crenellated parapets, a medieval castle or fort. Instead of a moat, it had six steep stone steps leading up to a pair of massive oak doors barring entry. (In six years at the Eight-Three, I would participate in repelling all manner of invaders on those very steps: gypsy cabdrivers outraged at vigorous enforcement of traffic laws, local gangs seeking to spring their arrested hermanos inside, hordes of community agitators demanding entry for one thing or another.) In the 1960s, the 40th Precinct in the South Bronx took to calling itself “Fort Apache” but it couldn’t hold a candle to the Eight-Three which had more crime at the time than any other precinct in central Brooklyn. Impressive for a neighborhood that was just 24 blocks long by not quite as many blocks wide. The Precinct had 130 cops assigned, now including me.

And it was being burned out by its residents, block by block. Most of the houses were made of wood, covered in asphalt siding that burns fast and hot. Most were “old law” structures with air shafts over the toilets and stairwells, efficient chimneys for fires that burned like furnaces. There were three types of arsonists: landlords, for insurance or to clear a building of undesirable tenants; tenants themselves, looking to relocate at the expense of the City Welfare Department; and rejected paramours who’d start a fire in the first floor stairwell to show her. Of course, I didn’t know all this when I arrived in May, 1975, but I saw whole streets that were virtually vacant lots except for the burnt-out hulks of buildings, reminiscent of the city of Dresden. Then, shortly after arrival, I logged my first line-of-duty injury, getting struck over the head with my own nightstick, waking up in a bed in Wyckoff Heights Hospital.

It was like this. My partner, newly arrived from the Community Relations Division, and myself were sitting in an RMP in front of St. Barbara’s Church on Central Avenue. St. Barbara’s is Cathedreal-size, but you needed a ticket to get inside on Christmas Eve. It was Sunday morning and Mass was letting out when we noticed two males, a father and son as it turned out, rolling around in a bear hug in the middle of the street, god-damning (and worse) each other, not twenty yards from us and the church-goers. Despite having patrolman’s reflexes that had atrophied some during my peaceful years inside (likewise for my partner, it turned out), I leaped into action. I had detached dad from his son and as I succeeded in pining him underneath me as I fumbled with my handcuffs, son picked up my ‘nightstick’ (a 2-1/2-foot long club made of ‘cocubola’ wood from a Jamaican forest) and clobbered me over the head. End of story; also for my assailant who was apprehended a short distance away and occupied a bed in the prisoner’s wing on the floor below. I vowed there and then never to let go of my nightstick again, and, in future, to give rather than receive.

In the next few years, the cop reflexes returned and sharpened. I owe my renaissance to a Sergeant (call him Fred) and his ‘Precinct Conditions Car’. Fred and I had been patrolmen together in the 9th Precinct on East 5th Street, in Manhattan’s East Village in 1968 and ’69 before I went to SPRING 3100. We had been neighbors, dressing next to each other in the Precinct Locker Room on the top floor. In the way of things in the NYPD, Fred added me to his Conditions Car roster in December, 1976. ‘Conditions Car’ was a bit of a euphemism. His squad of three patrolmen and himself patrolled the Precinct, in uniform in an old ‘unmarked’ brown Plymouth—locking up drug dealers, gunmen, extortionate gang members, counterfeiters, and arsonists, of course, and raiding ‘chop shops’ (auto yards specializing in selling off stolen cars in pieces). The Conditions men, bemedalled, experienced cops, accepted me as one of them since “Sarge” had vouched for me.

And I did bring something to the table: I had just graduated with a J.D. degree from Fordham University Law School (Evening Division). I would be drafting their Search Warrants on an old Underwood in the Unit’s cubicle. Arrests came from reliable information, spelled ‘registered confidential informants’ (CIs). Conditions had a dozen CIs: men and women arrested in the past and now ‘working off’ their prospective sentences in the street where they could do themselves the most good. Their fingerprints and pedigree and status were on file with the NYPD. The Brooklyn District Attorney was on board, too, with the proviso that we would not bother Him with inconvenient details. (He needn’t have worried about that.) I drafted all our Search Warrants, bypassing the young assistant district attorneys at Night Court, going direct to the Judge, with my informant in tow to swear to the truth of his affidavit (a/k/a ‘probable cause’). I always tried to go to that same Judge in Night Court.

Even today, I remember our two most memorable CIs, code-names ‘Primo’ and ‘Blue Hat’. Primo, a canny old Puerto Rican, owned an auto yard off Flushing Avenue in the industrial section of Bushwick. He delighted in giving up his erstwhile competitors, and would, on occasion, throw in as added bonus the names and addresses of gun-sellers, counterfeiters and wanted fugitives. Whether a life of crime was truly in Primo’s past, we tactfully never enquired further. ‘Blue Hat’ was our go-to gal for drugs. Yes, a woman. And a bold one. She’d be on the ‘set’ at a street drug spot and go into her act—gesticulating wildly with her hands while dancing a little merengue for her audience, thereby telling us, watching with field glasses, by a prearranged signal like doffing her blue hat that the dealer was holding. Primo and Blue Hat went way beyond the call of duty, you might say. Because they enjoyed feeling like The Man, I believe, being a valued member of an informal civilian auxiliary Force. I remember them fondly.

Robert Knightly

A Police Story: Diary of a Dirty Cop

I had worked the four-by-twelve tour the night before. Early afternoon on October 21, 1971, I awake in my apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, alone and hung-over. The four-to-midnight tour always extends till 4 a.m., the last four hours spent in Cal’s Bar on East Fifth Street, next door to the 9th Precinct (The Nine, as we say) where I’m assigned as a Patrolman. I punch on the TV for the news and there is my Police Academy classmate, my buddy, Eddie Droge. He’s in the witness stand testifying before the Knapp Commission, which has been investigating corruption in the New York City Police Department for the past year. I’m transfixed. Eddie still has that youthful appearance, he’s in his mid-20’s. The only addition to the baby-face is a pencil-thin mustache above his lip.

Four years earlier, Eddie and I were rookie cops in training at the New York City Police Academy on East 20th Street. The off-whiteish-colored building, built in the early-60’s, looked like it was undercover as a four-story parking garage. We had been sworn in as Probationary Patrolmen on May 15, 1967: me, Eddie and 250 other young men. No women (Their Day had yet to come). Eddie and I were assigned to ‘Company 67-17,’ our class designation, like a Home Room in high school. We were 43 boys from Brooklyn: seven blacks (Nobody was ‘African-American’ in those days), seventeen Italians, six Irish, three Jews, two Poles, two Germans, one Puerto Rican, and five of indeterminate European extraction.

There were four other companies, their complements of recruits also assigned by their Boroughs of residence. We were all young, nobody older than 30 and most younger. I was probably typical, at age 26. Eddie Droge was atypical at age 20. In fact, while we entered the Academy together, he was not sworn in till he reached the minimum age of 21, three days after we’d all taken the oath. Many of us had served in the military before joining the Department. It was 1967, Vietnam in full swing. Becoming a cop pretty much guaranteed you a waiver from the Draft. Eddie had not been in the Service, had a wife and three children, and had come straight from a job with Bell Telephone.

The Police Academy curriculum and intensive drill in the use of the ‘Baton’ (the Nightstick) and the Use of Deadly Force (the Gun) was supposed to last six months. It didn’t. On June 15, after four weeks of training, we all went to field commands throughout the City, having been hastily “qualified” with the Service Revolver—the City anticipated a “hot summer” (riots), a thing it anticipated with regularity in those days.

Eddie Droge and I ended up in the old 90th Precinct in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, home to a large enclave of the Satmar sect of the Hasidim. I came to know Eddie as we patrolled in RMPs or walked adjacent foot-posts on Lee and Bedford Avenues, the main commercial streets around which the Hasidic residences clustered. We referred to the Hasids as “Beards” and believed without question the rumor that we had been sent to Williamsburg to save the Beards from their black and Hispanic neighbors: who, at sundown on Shabbos, would swoop down on bicycles and snatch the hats off the heads of Hasid males as they walked to Synagogue. Long fur hats of mink and fox tail—Spodiks—that cost about $1,000.

These were my thoughts as I watched Eddie testifying before the Knapp Commission. I learned later that he had been caught red-handed taking a $300 bribe to deep-six the case of a drug dealer he’d arrested earlier that year on the streets of Crown Heights. Unbeknownst to Eddie that day, in the Men’s Room at the Brooklyn Criminal Courts on Schermerhorn Street, their conversation was being recorded. Knapp investigators had persuaded the dealer to wear a wire. Eddie was allowed to resign from the NYPD without criminal prosecution in return for his depiction of the systemic, from-the-bottom-up corruption within the ranks of the NYPD. By Eddie’s account, his partners in the 80th Precinct spent a lot of their time chasing down gamblers and dealers to shake them down for protection money (known as “putting them on the pad”).

Back then when Eddie and I were rookies, it was not unheard of for street cops to take money. Hell, everybody took money. For most of us, it was a $5 tip for both you and your partner from a City Marshal to keep the peace at the scene of an eviction. A ‘pound’ and free meal for standing a fixed post in front of Ratner’s Dairy Restaurant on Second Avenue because the Precinct Captain had a ‘contract’ with the owner. A sawbuck apiece to accompany the manager of the Fillmore East to the bank with the nightly take. It was viewed as a Gentlemen’s Agreement: a gratuity offered and bad manners to refuse. Of course, it did get out of hand; witness Eddie Droge. Eddie did what he had to do to avoid jail. Cops don’t ‘jail’ well.

Happy ending, though. Eddie became a teacher, got his PhD from Harvard, published his autobiography, “Patrolman: A Cop’s Story.” Lives in Massachusetts now.

Maybe I’ll give him a shout, talk about the Good Times.