I never wanted to hang out in a cop bar, or be a cop, but I’ve always
been fascinated with police work and that’s why I write police
procedurals. Most law enforcement jobs offer burst of excitement,
danger, and thrilling action—in sharp contrast to the way I made my
living. For most of my working life I worked on academic social science
research projects.
Wouldn’t say there were a lot of thrills and
chills, would you? Oh, the work had its own set of puzzles and
intrigues, its own small excitements. Except for the earthquake that
smashed through Los Angeles—and the University of Southern California
where I worked for a generation—I felt pretty safe.
Cop life is
anything but safe with a traffic stop or a felony pick up going sideways
in a nanosecond. I’m not alone in my enjoyment of crime fiction with
its thrill me, chill me, scare-me- to-death aspect of getting up close
to Hannibal Lecter on the printed page. We love Halloween, death-defying
roller coasters, tornadoes. Don't we? Why do I feel such glee in
learning new forensic details of death and dying?
I grew up with a
mother who read them all and gave me the good ones. Had she lived
longer I wonder if she wouldn’t have tackled one herself. I had good
models—The McDonalds, Elmore Leonard, John Dickinson Carr, Ed McBain. I
never liked the Grand Old Dames of mystery fiction, the Agatha
Christies, or what came to be known as the “cozies.” I’m bored with
Sherlock Holmes, no matter what contrivances they think up to make him
new. I relish the dark side, a bit of noir, semi-hardboiled.
Crime
fiction has its appeal because we’re assured that in the end goodness
will prevail over evil and the villain will be punished. Things will end
up right. I happily confess my guilty pleasure in crime fiction but I
also know that murder in real life ripples outward and causes life-long
misery and suffering in the lives of victim’s families.
Another
pleasure of crime fiction is that I can dance on the dark side, speed
into a dark alley after midnight, insult a gang banger or talk back to a
cop with impunity. I can do things in fiction that would be unthinkable
in daily life. In my fictional life I can be 32 and 5 foot ten. I can
have curly blond hair and a romance with a hard-bodied cop who can dance
the tango. Sigh. It all happens between my ears.
I can make things come out right. All the loose ends tie up. The villain goes to jail.
What are your reasons for writing crime fiction?
If you're just starting you might like to look at a series of 4 eBooks I’ve
written which cover topics you need to think about in “Writing Your
First Mystery.”
Here’s a link: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=mar+preston+writing
The overview “Writing Your First Mystery” is free on my website: http://marpreston.com
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