Introducing Jim Doherty

Steven: I've been reading and greatly enjoying "Just the Facts." It seems that each of these stories is capable of carrying a novel's worth of development. I wonder what your process is for writing them. What kind of research goes into one?

Jim: Most of the chapters in JUST THE FACTS originally appeared as magazine articles in a small press quarterly called MYSTERY READERS JOURNAL. The JOURNAL devotes each issue to a particular theme. My JTF column has to tie into whatever the theme of the issue is. So the first thing I do is try to find a true-life case, one that might be particularly interesting to fans of crime FICTION, that ties into whatever the upcoming issue's theme is.

For example, a recent issue was entitled "Mysteries Down Under" and dealt with crime fiction set in Australia. Surfing the 'Net for Australian true-crime cases, I found out that an acquaintance of Arthur Upfield, the creator of the first really successful Australian sleuth, Inspector Napolean Bonaparte, had murdered several men and used a method for disposing of the bodies that Upfield had concocted for an upcoming Bonaparte novel.

This met my two criteria. It was an actual crime case that occurred in Australia, and the involvement of Upfield, who still has a fairly loyal following in the States, would make it particularly interesting to mystery fans.

I then searched for more detailed information, on the 'Net and in print, and when I had enough material to flesh out into an article, that's what I did.

I would say my fiction writing style is probably most influenced by the spare, lean style of writers like Hammett, Donald Hamilton, Joe Gores, etc. Hammett and Hamilton's no-nonsense first person narrators, like the Continental Op and Matt Helm, are particularly influential, I think.

Interestingly, since you cite dramatic mediums like radio, Jack Webb's style on the original '50's-era DRAGNET (carried out on TV and radio by Webb and other writers like Jim Moser and Richard Breen) is close, deliberately close, I think, to that sort of lean style in a dramatic medium, and is probably as big an influence on me as some of the prose writers.

How much of my fiction voice carries over to my non-fiction is anyone's guess. Non-fiction isn't as much an artifice for me. Like the title says, I just report the facts. Or, for a critical piece, I just give my opinion. People who know me well who've read the JTF collection, say the style reminds them of the way I talk.

I know you have worked in law enforcement for many years, but your novel "An Obscure Grave" isn't at all a straightforward police procedural - there is a psychic involved and the protagonist is a police reservist rather than a full-time detective. What was behind the decision to go this route rather than the more traditional way?

Well, I disagree with the premise of your question. I think AN OBSCURE GRAVE is very much a straightforward police procedural. A police procedural is nothing more than a piece of crime fiction (in any medium) in which the main, or at least a major interest, is the authentic depiction (or at least the APPEARANCE of the authentic depiction) of the profession of law enforcement. That's really all there is to it.

Now if you start with the premise that, for example, the hero's being some kind of cop other than a detective makes a particular piece a non-police procedural, you're inevitably led to the conclusion that, say, the TV series ADAM-12, which focused on a two-man team of uniformed patrol cops, isn't a police procedural, and that's just ludicrous.

I had a friend once who said that police procedurals were, by definition, urban, which would mean that the rural cop novels of writers like Tony Hillerman, Donald Harstaad, Hillary Waugh, and Ted Wood, aren't police procedurals. Harstaad and Wood are cops, for crying out loud! And they're not writing police procedurals?

For you to conclude that using a psychic renders the novel something other than a straightforward procedural, you would have to contend that, in real life, law enforcement never makes use of psychics, which of course they do and have done for decades. Two famous cases in which the police consulted psychics are the Lindbergh kidnapping and the Boston Strangler serial murder case. There's a documentary TV series on Court TV called PSYCHIC DETECTIVES in which psychic police consultants are interviewed about cases they've worked on. The current dramatic TV show MEDIUM fictionalizes the experiences of a full-time professional law enforcement psychic.

Similarly, to conclude that using a reserve police officer as the protagonist renders the book a non-procedural, you would have to contend that, in real life, police forces don't use reservists, which of course they do. Saying a book isn't a police novel if the hero's a reserve cop is like saying if the hero of a war novel is a reservist or a National Guardsman instead of a soldier in the Regular Army, it's not really a war novel, or that a novel about firefighting in which the hero is a volunteer fireman instead of a full-timer, isn't really about firefighting.

If the police procedural seeks to authentically depict law enforcement, and that's what it does, or should do, then anything that the police actually do is fair game for the police procedural.

My particular reasons for including the psychic elements in my plot and depicting Dan Sullivan as a Cal undergrad working part-time as a reserve cop, are really pretty simple.

The plot very loosely derives from an actual case I was involved in during my own tenure as a reserve officer in the Berkeley Police. There was a very minor psychic element in the case which interested me, so I decided to expand on it, and make it a major part of the fictionalized version.

Since reserve police officers are relatively untouched in fiction (there was an ADAM-12 episode about a reserve cop recruited by Kent McCord's character, and Peter Robinson has begun a series of short stories about a schoolteacher in WW2 England who's a special constable, the British equivalent of a reserve police officer, but that's about it), and since I actually WAS a reserve during the case I loosely based the novel on, I decided to depict Dan as a reserve.

Now a bit of the business side of writing -- you've successfully placed several short stories and many non-fiction pieces. You've won a Golden Spur award and been short listed for a Debut Dagger by CWA. You're also pursuing publication of a novel. So we have nonfiction/fiction; short forms/long forms; awards/publication. Can you say something about the different hats you wear? Which are most satisfying? Most productive? Do they draw on different skills from you? This question is a bit of a mess, but maybe something good will come from the answer.

My answer is likely to be something of a mess, too. I guess what it comes down to is that I like reading all those forms, and enjoying all the various mediums made me want to try my own hand at them.

Sticking specifically to fiction, for the moment, I went with short stories first because they seemed, to me, more manageable than a novel, in the same way that a sprint seems more doable than a marathon. I mean you don't have to be in very good shape to run a hundred yard dash. You have to be in good shape to WIN, but not just to get from the starting line to the finish line. On the other hand, you DO have to be in pretty good shape to finish a marathon, even if you only come in last place. As a novice, short fiction was less daunting to me.

Plus I had a series character, Dan Sullivan, in mind, and it seemed to me that a novel about Dan would be easier to sell if I could show that, via the short story medium, he was already an established series character.

Now that I've written a novel, I have to say I find the process quite gratifying. Short stories are a lot of fun to write, and I think I'll always enjoy doing them, but it was amazingly liberating to find that I suddenly had all that ROOM.

Short story editors always want you to cut words. By contrast, I recently pitched AN OBSCURE GRAVE to a book editor who said he wanted to see it, but only if I ADDED, at an absolute minimum, another 5000 words. Talk about a paradigm shift!

The critical stuff I've written is just opinions that people thought were worthy of seeing print. I have a fairly wide knowledge of crime fiction, so that lends a little credence to the opinions I'm always so willing to spout.

The true crime came about more or less as an accident. Janet Rudolph, the editor of the MYSTERY READERS JOURNAL, had announced an upcoming issue on cross-genre mysteries (romantic suspense, sci-fi whodunits, puzzles on the prairie, that sort of thing), and I'd just read two novels based on the life of a famous frontier lawman named Bill Tilghman, one set during the frontier era,the other, set at the end of his 50-year career, taking place during the Roaring '20's. It occurred to me that, by serving as a peace officer in two wildly different periods in law enforcement, the "Wyatt Earp" era and the "Eliot Ness" era, so to speak, Tilghman was a real-life cross-genre character. So I pitched the idea of a non-fiction article on Tilghman to Janet. By the time my pitch was done, it had grown from an article about Tilghman to a regular column in the magazine. The column led to the book. A previously unpublished chapter led to the Western writers of America awarding me the Spur. It was all just wonderful good fortune.

Lastly, since you are in law enforcement - are there any fiction writers who get it right? Is this a concern for you as a reader and writer?

Yes, there are police procedural writers who "get it right," and, yes, this is a concern to me as a writer and as a reader.

As to the first part of the question, cops who are also novelists tend, for obvious reasons, to get it right. Journalists, like Maj Sjowall & Per Wahloo, Michael Connelly, Julie Smith, Thomas Walsh, Joseph Harrington, etc., also tend to get things right, particularly if they covered police beats during their reporter days.

But lots of people with no background in either law enforcement or journalism also make an effort to sweat the details. Most of the writers who might be regarded as the "founding fathers" (or mothers) of the police procedural sub-genre, Lawrence Treat, Ed McBain, Creasey, Hillary Waugh, Jack Webb and his writing staff, had no background that gave them an inside track to authenticity. They just researched the topic in one way or another.

And yes, when I read mistakes, it bugs the living bejesus out of me. And what REALLY frosts me is an author who makes errors and then brags about how much research they do to get it right.

There was an author some years ago, Elizabeth Linnington, who, during her lifetime, was known as the "Queen of Procedurals." She had three different series of cop novels going under three different names. She wrote about an LAPD homicide detective named Luis Mendoza as "Dell Shannon." She wrote about a suburban cop named Vic Varallo as "Lesley Egan." And she wrote about a detective named Ivor Maddox working out of LAPD's Hollywood station under her own name. She was very popular and, judging by her three Edgar nominations (two of them for Mendoza books), well-respected by her peers.

Thing is, she made all kinds of obvious mistakes that I, who never even worked for LAPD, never even lived in Los Angeles, had no trouble spotting. She called local stations "precincts," for example, when they were actually called "divisions." She had Mendoza working out of Homicide for years after LAPD ceased to have a separate Homicide Division (it was merged with Robbery in 1969 to become "Robbery-Homicide"). She had lieutenants running squads that should have been run by captains. And that's just a short sample.

Then she'd write articles in THE WRITER and such talking about how important it was to do the research and sweat the details. Research my ass! If you ever watched a half-hour DRAGNET rerun, you did more research on the LAPD in that 30 minutes of TV viewing than she did in her whole writing career.

I should admit, in all fairness, that no one stays as popular as she has without having something on the ball, but an accurate depiction of police work isn't it.

Collin Wilcox, who wrote about my hometown police force, the San Francisco PD, used to make all kinds of mistakes, too. Errors just as egregious as Ms. Linnington's. But at least he didn't brag about how much research he did. His philosophy was "Research is endlessly beguiling but writing is hard work." Well, aside from the procedural errors, his books about SFPD Homicide Lt. Frank Hastings are damned good. But they'd've been so much better if he'd just gotten the details right.

Stephen Hunter in DIRTY WHITE BOYS. Norman Katkov in BLOOD & ORCHIDS. A few others I could name. Sure, their books have drive, great characters, smooth plots, and fine writing, but they get so much stuff wrong that it's distracting. And when they get so much stuff wrong, I truly think they're letting their readers down. DIRTY WHITE BOYS has an un-put-downable quality I can only envy, and BLOOD & ORCHIDS is similarly compulsive. But would getting the technical details of their protagonists' professions right have detracted from the books, or enhanced them?

The answer is obvious (but I'll give it anyway). I would have enhanced them.

The essence of the police procedural is technical accuracy. That's its raison d'etre. That's what readers pick them up for. When you set out to write a police procedural, you're entering into a covenant with the reader. You're saying that, within the framework of fiction, you're going to try, to the best of your ability, to give a true and accurate picture of what police work is like. If you don't at least attempt to do this, if you settle for just giving the appearance of accuracy, for "humming a few bars and faking it," then you're breaking that covenant with your readers, just as surely as a writer of a traditional, "cozy" whodunit breaks his contract if he fails to "play fair" with the reader by giving him all the clues he needs to solve the mystery.

I guess I'm asking where you weigh in on the "This is just escapism so focus on a good story cutting out the drudgery of policework and adding excitement and adventure to what is often a rather mundane process of evidence gathering vs. This can't be a good story unless it accurately reflects what goes on in real life because literature is about making a connection to what it means to be human" controversy. There. Did that clear it up?

Well, I think I've made it pretty clear that I think the police procedural is defined by technical accuracy. And I don't believe that being accurate, being true to the profession you're describing in your fiction, means being dull. Nor is inaccuracy inherently more exciting.

Most of police work CAN be pretty dull, true. At least it can be pretty dull to read about. But much of it really is quite interesting and exciting. And fiction isn't about the normal days; it's about the exceptional ones.

You don't have to minutely describe the process of filling out a report. You should, however, make it clear that paperwork is an important part of the process. You don't have to minutely describe the process of your character's putting on his uniform before going out on patrol, but you shouldn't call his badge a "shield" if it's a star, or describe him as a "bluesuit" if he works for a department where they wear tan uniforms.

Anyway, a good writer (filmmaker, whatever) can make the actual details compelling if he wants to. Recall the scene in Thomas Harris's RED DRAGON, or its movie version MANHUNTER, in which the crime lab has a limited time to harvest physical evidence from a note one serial killer has sent to another. Nail-bitingly suspenseful, but no one's in immediate danger. They're just trying to keep the bad guys in the dark about how much they know, and this makes it imperative that they get the note back in Lector's cell before he returns from a routine medical or dental check-up.

A vivid, suspensful scene based on nothing but the accurate description of a forensics work-up.

Of course, accuracy might have to take a backseat to the needs of the story. Our job is telling stories, and the needs of the story have to take precedence. Jack Webb, for example, wanting to give as broad a picture of how policemen work as possible, had his main character, Joe Friday, transferring to a different detail every week. Wouldn't happen in real life, but Webb compromised in the interests of the story he wanted to tell.

Similarly, while I wasn't entirely convinced by Andy Sipowicz's deciding to go for a promotion to sergeant in the last few months of N.Y.P.D. BLUE, I know it was done so that the show could end with Andy in command of the squad he's served for so many years. I think it was a mistake. But I know it wasn't done out of ignorance, but to serve the needs of the story they were telling.

Your decision to create a rural Sheriff's Office in Puerto Rico, which has no county sheriffs in real life, is another example. I might disagree with the approach you took, but I know you took that approach because of the needs of your series character, not out of ignorance PR's law enforcement set-up.

Jim Doherty's Stuff…

If you haven't caught Jim's writing yet, get to it. Here are some links he sent to help you along: Here are some links to short stories featuring Sullivan that were published on the 'Net. This one -- http://handheldcrime.com/issues/2002-30/background-check/index.html ... is, like AN OBSCURE GRAVE, set in Berkeley during Dan's undergrad days at Cal.

The next... http://www.overmydeadbody.com/deathtaxes.htm was actually written earlier, but is set later in Dan's career, when he's an officer in an obscure federal law enforcement agency in the Midwest.

Finally, here's a non-Sullivan story... http://handheldcrime.com/issues/2002-26/red-handed/index.html ... simultaneously my first western story and my first private eye story. The protagonist is loosely modeled on a real-life frontier Pinkerton detective named Charlie Siringo, and the plot is loosely derived from the real-life story of Texas train robber Sam Bass.