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The opening of my first published crime novel, If Angels Fall, begins with a toddler being abducted from his inattentive father while they are riding San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit System, known as BART.
Readers have told me that it reads as if I’d drawn it from a real case. I
didn’t. The scene is entirely fiction. However, the seed for that moment of
terror arose from a real moment of truth I experienced years ago while I was
working at The Toronto Star, the paper that Ernest Hemingway reported for early
in his career. The summer I was a Star cub reporter, a tragedy In that climate, I was riding Toronto’s subway when I saw a father and his toddler. Dad was hidden behind the newspaper he was reading, one that happened to be blaring the latest on the tragedy. His little boy was toddling up and down the full length of the subway car aisle. The father was oblivious. The train would stop. Doors would open. Waves of commuters would rush in and out, even bumping the toddler. Doors would close. The train rumbled to the next station.
The father was had no idea what was happening as the scene was repeated at the
next station. Then the next. Then the next. As I witnessed this, I became a
little angry at the father for not watching his kid. Then I grew a little
fearful as my imagination went into overdrive. If I were a crazy person, I could
easily abduct that boy without his father noticing until it was too late. That moment haunted me until years later, when I fashioned it into the opening of, If Angels Fall, the book which introduces my ongoing series characters, San Francisco reporter Tom Reed and SFPD Homicide Inspector, Walt Sydowski. I drew a lesson from that subway ride. By beginning with a seed of ‘reality’ I was able to shape a stronger story. It was in keeping with the universally accepted notion that writers should write what they know. A larger part of my news reporting experience involved working the police beat. It put me face-to-face with the best and worst of the human condition. I was expected to write about it. Expected to derive some sense out of horrible incidents that made no sense at all then present it to readers on deadline.
Take the basic elements to two true cases. In Australia a mother was convicted because no one believed her sensational account that a wild Dingo dog took her young child, which turned out to be the truth. In the U.S., the case of six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey, found murdered in her Colorado home in 1996, raised disturbing questions.
I thought of the anguish for the families in these two cases. As a parent, I
thought they were heartbreaking. As a novelist I reflected on the most chilling
aspects and thought about a story. I’ve For me, these elements offered a premise which emerged in my second book, Cold Fear. What if, I thought, a little girl vanished in the Rocky Mountains while hiking with her parents during a time the family was in crises over a guarded secret? What if the mother and father’s account of what happened to the child didn’t add up for police and rescuers searching for her? That got me started on Cold Fear. The universal truth that nearly every person at one point in their life feels lonely, was the genesis for my third Reed-Sydowski book, Blood of Others. I got thinking of a character, a woman, a young painfully shy woman, whose only desire was to meet the man of her dreams, get married, have a family and live a happy life. How would she set out searching for him in contemporary urban society. Well, there’s the Internet. Mix in a little more reality. When we lived in another city, my wife and I often drove by a bridal boutique. It had the most beautiful display of mannequins wearing bridal gowns. Always had four in the window. One day, I thought, what if there were five? And what if on closer examination, the fifth one looked slightly different. Looked as if she were not really a mannequin at all. Well, I think you get the idea. Working on the police beat means having to rush out to breaking stories of all sorts. Fires, homicides, rescues and robberies. Banks, armored cars, jewelry stores. You interview the victims and later, depending on how successful the detectives are, you might get to interview the robbers. Behind bars. Such cases got me wondering what it would be like to be caught up in a heist gone awry. What if, like millions of other people, you’re going about you daily life and in a heartbeat, you’re staring down the barrel of a gun? What goes through your mind? And if that weren’t bad enough, what if the robbery plan went wrong and things went from bad to worse with your life hanging by a thread? A thread that is quickly unraveling? This is what launched the story for my fourth, Reed-Sydowski book, No Way Back. My forthcoming book in the series is a journey into a dark world the exists between two others. I’ve reported on the actual murders of police officers and have seen first-hand the terrible toll these cases take on a department and everyone connected to it. Such a tragedy is the seed for my fifth book in my series. Set for release in the summer of 2004, it looks at the collision of San Francisco’s Homicide Detail and the newsroom of Tom Reed’s San Francisco paper. What if one night, Molly Wilson, a crime reporter, discovers her boyfriend murdered in his apartment? What if that boyfriend was a homicide detective? And what if Wilson’s friend, Tom Reed, was pressured to break exclusive news stories on the case which is ripping the homicide detail apart? What if the case takes Sydowski, a veteran homicide detective, into dark places he does not want to enter?
Again, take a grain of truth, mix it with the code of restoring order to the
chaos, and you present what you hope will be a strong story, one that will keep
readers racing through the pages until they reach the end.
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Rick
Mofina
hit
the city. A child who vanished under chilling circumstances was later found
murdered. Fear gripped the metropolitan area and the story screamed from page
one headlines of Toronto’s major papers.
Sadly, the
true horrors that happen everywhere everyday, seldom end well. If they end at
all. This is something I bear in mind in writing crime fiction. I try to apply
the fundamental code of most crime fiction, which is the restoration of order to
chaos. And I try to start with a ‘grain of truth’, to build on a solid
foundation for a compelling story.
covered many rescues of people lost while hiking. And I’ll never forget
spending many late nights with homicide detectives. One night they got thinking
about the perfect murder. They reasoned that a top contender was a wilderness
accident. A push that appears to be a fall. No one sees it. No physical
evidence. And if you can’t squeeze a confession from the suspect,
you’ve got nothing.