Will crime fiction lose its wheels?

One of the staples of crime and crime fiction may soon disappear. I'm talking about the get-away car.

To explain, the tech prognosticators are predicting that soon—within ten years, maybe five—the private car as we know it will be as obsolete as the horse-drawn buggy. According to this vision of tomorrow, to get around, instead of firing up the family jalopy, we'll summon a robotic Uber/Lyft that will whisk us to our destination. The traffic grid will be a commuters' paradise.

So how does crime figure into this? A common argument to fight "gun-violence" is that we ought to register guns like we do cars, ignoring the reality that registered cars are used to commit violent crimes all the time. Try kidnapping someone without a car (or other vehicle). In fact, getting kidnapped by car occurs so frequently that we even have slang for it: getting trunked. Cars are a favorite venue in which pedophiles sexually assault children. Cars are the most convenient and popular way to transport drugs for drug trafficking, which is a major source of violent crime. And cars are used in drive-by shootings and as get-away vehicles in robbery and homicide. If you were the chauffeur during those crimes, you can't excuse yourself by saying, "I was just the driver." Someone dies, you're on the hook as an accessory for murder one.

So how will violent crime happen in this future landscape of robotic cars? Consider that you won't own those cars; you'll sign up for a service that will keep your ID and credit card on file. There will be an extensive record of where and when you were in the car. So much for phony alibis. Plus, the car's wifi (or whatever) will shift through your cell phone and data-mine its contents. That feature is what will make this robo-car service affordable; you'll be a captive font of personal information. Besides that, the car will use facial recognition and other scanners to identify your passengers, and should any of them start using their phones in the car, they'll be data-mined as well. Plus, RF chips in your bottle of meds, your clothing, your purse and wallet, would also be scanned. Everything you do and bring into the car will be documented and analyzed. Additionally, these cars will be used for gun control since their interior scanners could identify guns and under the robotic car company terms-of-service, you would be prohibited from transporting even legally owned firearms without agreeing to onerous restrictions.

So in that scenario, how could you pull off a heist or a hit? Certainly there will be a premium service to ensure that the affairs of the rich remain private, and people up to no good will use that option. Hackers will no doubt mercilessly torment the robotic car industry. Factor in government corruption and bureaucratic incompetence, and criminals will exploit the security gaps using methods we can't yet imagine. So my prediction? Future crime writers will have plenty of juicy, horrific stories with no shortage of ways to vamoose the scene of the crime.

On another front, Blood Business, the newest crime anthology from Hex Publishers, edited by Josh Viola and me, was a Denver Post #1 bestseller.

A Second Hat to Wear

This past year I've had the opportunity to serve as editor on two short-fiction anthologies. In Blood Business, a noir crime/paranormal anthology from Hex Publishers, I am the assistant editor alongside the editor/publisher Josh Viola. For the 2016 RMFW Anthology, Found, to be published by the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers, I am the head cheese--the vato in charge of everything.

In both cases, serving as editor has been an instructive experience. For one, I'm on the other side of the editorial desk and it's enlightening to review manuscripts as they come to me. Hex invited writers with a track record in the genre and for the RMFW anthology, it was an open submission for members only. I got to see manuscripts arrive in various stages of preparation. Some read like first drafts and others were already quite polished, both in story-telling and craft.

Since the manuscripts that arrived for Blood Business came from established writers, I had my eyes opened a little more as to how challenging it is to write a good story. Mostly because we writers are always too close to our work. In our mind, we've tied together loose ends and the narrative flows in one logical current. Tightening the story shows the value of a good editor, and I hope I've been so. In my content editing, I had to be careful that I helped the writer hone the story and that I not rewrite it. Plus, many of the submitting writers have significant authorial credentials and now I'm in the lofty position of judging their work and suggesting changes, a humbling role. That concern is weighed against the publisher's desire to release a great book so Josh and I had to call them as we saw them.

My experience with the RMFW anthology has been more encompassing because I honcho the anthology from submissions through selection, editing, copyediting, cover and interior design, formatting for publication, publication as an ebook and a trade paperback, and marketing. Since we accepted open submissions, the editorial process heavily involved the R-word: rejection. We received 89 entries and I had to whittle that number down to fifteen. What helped--or hurt if you were on the submitting end--was that RMFW published strict formatting rules that I followed to the letter. That knocked 35 submissions out of the running, which was disappointing because that included stories from friends that I was looking forward to reading. The remaining 54 stories were doled out in a blind process to eleven volunteer readers, and we assigned a score to each: 0-pass; 1-maybe; 2-accept. Nine stories received a double 2 score. That meant we had to review the remaining to decide on enough stories to fill the anthology. Although I knew how subjective the process was going to be, I was still surprised how our opinions broke on many of the entries. In sending out the rejection notices, even then I had second doubts about which were the best and wished I could have included more, but I had to draw the line somewhere.

Found will be available this September, and Blood Business will hit the streets in 2017. Buy lots of copies of each and make this editor happy.