Sidestepping Tradition

 We've entered that period in America known as the Holidays! And with my schedule here on Type M For Murder, my posts coincide with the big holiday celebrations, Thanksgiving and Christmas.

While Thanksgiving is about getting together with loved ones and friends and sharing a meal in a spirit of gratitude, hosting Thanksgiving dinner is an exercise in anxiety. This year, my girlfriend and I decided to sidestep tradition by hosting a low-key breakfast for my sons and their significant others. While the meal was simple--waffles, omelets, sausage--there was a bit of anxiety since there's this pressure for everything to be perfect. I'm happy to report that a good time was had by all. 

We did enjoy a Thanksgiving dinner of sorts by dressing up and going out that evening to nosh at The Ship's Tavern in the swanky Brown Palace. Followers of this blog will happy to hear that dinner conversation involved stories of murder at the Brown Palace and other tales from Denver's sordid past. On the way home we drove by the Denver City and County Building and saw that it was decked out for the Holidays!  

The Writer's Junkyard

I've started a new manuscript and to my surprise, it was a challenge putting words on the page. I found myself struggling with the perpetual dilemma--either going forward as a panster or as an outliner. For the last few years I've been a ghostwriter and prided myself on churning out prose like a machine. In order not to waste my client's time, we'd discuss the story and I'd put together a chapter outline. I cautioned the client that an outline was a place to deviate from but at least the narrative had direction.

If this worked well for me as a ghostwriter, why not an outline for my book?  Honestly, I tried but my story became a jumbled mess. I had several challenges, the first being world building. Although I'm writing about modern Denver, a place I'm very familiar with, the issue was, what to tell? How to capture the ambiance of the city without bogging down into a travelogue? And the plot involved characters from a social environment outside my experience--conniving politicians, treacherous gangsters, and overworked, cynical police officers. Writing a thriller set in space or one involving vampires and werewolves, no problem. Readers in that genre are quite willing to suspend disbelief. But write a story, even in obvious fictionalized form, about the contemporary world and the bar to hold the reader's trust is much higher. Plus, writers often talk about the "white room," a scene where characters are little more than disembodied voices. I had the opposite problem, the creative space in my head was like a junkyard, crammed with pieces of research and ideas that I'd accumulated. There was so much detail that I got overwhelmed and my word count stalled. 

I tried the technique of writing chapters as separate episodes instead of chronologically. I found myself wrestling with the story timeline and the risk of devoting too much attention to secondary characters in a way that would derail my original plot. So I took the advice that we published writers give to newbie scribes, and to quote Pablo Picasso: "Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working."

Thus self-chastised, I returned to my proven strategy of sitting at the keyboard and proceeding from beginning to end. Before I knew it, I was ten chapters in, a quarter of the way through this new book. Spoiler alert. Expect lots of murder in the near future.

A Labyrinth of True Crime

 I've just finished Julian Rubinstein's excellent, The Holly: Five Bullets, One Gun, and the Struggle to Save an American Neighborhood. The book won the Colorado Book Award for General Nonfiction. (My Western, Luther, Wyoming, was a finalist in Historical Fiction but didn't get the prize.) The Holly blends history and memoir with the central character being Terrance Roberts who can't seem to run away from his gang past. Roberts' odyssey unfolds as he goes from small time hoodlum to hustler to gang boss to peace activist with time served in jail and prison.  Rubinstein does a great job giving the backstory of Blacks migrating to Denver, the arrival of the Black Panthers, followed by their dissolution, then the emergence of the Crips and Bloods. The book is named after the shopping center where the Bloods used to hang out and has since been razed and the neighborhood gentrified. While I enjoy true crime, what most drew me to the story was that it overlaps my time in Denver. I could follow the action and events though I seldom ventured into gang territory east of Colorado Boulevard. 

Much of the narrative dovetailed into what I know from CDC and US DOJ research into "gun violence," depicting dysfunctional communities prone to violence where minor beefs are settled with beatdowns, knifings, and shootings. For all of today's talk about stopping the iron pipeline of illegal guns, the gangs had no trouble getting heaters, even Kalashnikov rifles during the much-touted Assault Weapons Ban, and later during Colorado's ongoing "common-sense" gun reform. As the story progresses, what comes into focus are two Denvers. The one Denver of disenfranchised Blacks, mostly men, and the other Denver of wealthy white liberals, some sincere and well-intentioned and others who exploit the carnage for political and economic gain. The present rhetoric of "violence interruptors" and using community activism to prevent violent crime and especially homicide and "gun violence" is nothing new. I've studied Oakland Ceasefire, which used this approach and from 2012 through 2018, reduced homicides in that city by 40 percent. Meanwhile in Denver, over the same period, homicides increased by over 70 percent because the local efforts to address gang and gun violence were a sham. Black neighborhoods were promised much, then had the carpet yanked from under them. What happened in Stapleton was a great example as Blacks were priced out of their homes and the community and its problems dispersed to Montbello and Aurora. Rubenstein provides chilling evidence that the DEA, the FBI, and Denver police gave carte blanche to informants to commit crimes, even murder, and thus stoke gang violence, often to secure more funding as part of the criminal justice industrial complex. In many ways, The Holly reminded me of Death Wish, in which the mayhem and bloodshed take a backset to the maneuverings of big city politics. Rubinstein doesn't scrimp on the details and even if you've lived in Denver for decades, you may need a scorecard to keep track of the dead bodies and the back room deals.

Ripped From the Headlines

 By Thomas Kies

I’m constantly on the lookout for plotlines that I can “rip from the headlines”. More often than not, I don’t.  I make stuff up.

But now and then something comes along that says, “write me into a novel.”

Here on the coast, we have a real-life mystery unraveling right before our eyes. Let me set the scene.  We are just south of the Outer Banks on the coast of North Carolina.  As a matter of fact, my wife and I have a house on Bogue Banks Island.  

There are other banks islands and one of them, Cape Lookout, is run by the National Parks Service.  There’s a lighthouse, some cabins, and lots of space and beaches to camp on.  

On May 23, Jeff West, the Superintendent of Cape Lookout (one of the Shackleford Banks islands) was in my office in Morehead City.  He’s on my board of directors and a friend of mine.  Jeff told me that a young soldier had been camping with seven other soldiers and had gone missing the night before.  

U.S. Army Specialist Enrique Roman-Martinez, stationed at Ft. Bragg, was reported last seen just after midnight on May 22 at the campsite.  He allegedly walked away wearing shorts and no shirt and carrying no supplies, without telling anyone where he was going.  His wallet and phone were found at the campsite. 

Point of information.  The waters off our beaches are home to everything from sharks to venomous snakes to deadly rip currents. 

At the time Jeff left my office, the parks service was still searching for him.

Then on May 29, the severed head of U.S. Army Specialist Enrique Roman-Martinez washed up on the shore of Shackleford Banks.  The parks service and the military launched a search for the rest of his remains.

To this date, they haven’t been located.  The military issued a $25,000 reward for information that leads to the conviction of anyone responsible for the homicide of the paratrooper.

An autopsy showed the soldier had been decapitated, however it’s unclear how he died.  There’s evidence of multiple chop injuries to the head and the jaw had been broken in at least two places. A toxicology report found no evidence of drug use. 

The dead soldier’s family are concerned with inconsistencies in the story of what happened when Roman-Martinez went missing.  The 911 caller told a dispatcher that the soldiers had been looking for help to find their missing friend.

“When we woke up, he was not here and we’ve been looking for him all day,” the caller said.  “We were trying to find a park ranger or their offices, or anything, and so we went all the way to the ferry and found that we needed to dial 911.”

However, a Cape Lookout National Seashore spokesperson said that the park rangers had encountered the group the afternoon of May 23 and asked them to move their vehicles, which were parked too close to the sand dunes.

He continued, “The rangers moved on after hearing the group would comply.  The soldiers did not make mention to them at this point that anyone was missing from their group.”

The 911 caller also had told the dispatcher they were worried that Roman-Martinez might hurt himself because he had “suicidal tendencies.” 

Add to that the fact that the bodies of two more Fort Bragg soldiers were found last week in a remote training area of the North Carolina Army base.  

Then on Thursday, the FBI entered the picture, complete with their scuba team.  Their truck is pictured at the top of this blog.

A tragically sad story for sure that makes for an interesting mystery.  

A strange twist came last night in the form of an email.  Now, because I have a relatively public position here in our area, I get the occasional strange private message through our Facebook page or an odd email.

Four of them came as I was watching episodes of Fargo with my wife.  They came from a woman whose name I don’t recognize.  The first was a link to the story about Roman-Martinez.  No explanation, just a link.

The second was a link to a story from Reuters dated April 2019 headlined, “U.N. rights boss condemns Saudi Arabia’s beheading of 37 men.”  

Her message to me was: Ya’ll could always move in with this bunch.  They’re pretty civilized just like ya’ll.  Do believe in UN rights???

Her second to last message was: Anyone “bother” for investigate?  Or did you just blow it off cause He’s Spanish and from LA?

Weird, right? The last message asked if it was against the law for someone to steal crab pots or kill a spouse for insurance money.  

I believe it is.

Needless to say, I haven’t responded.  I’m the president of our county’s chamber of commerce.  Yes, I write mysteries in my spare time, but I’m not the lead on this investigation. 

Is this staying at the top of my radar screen?  You bet.  We have our share of missing kayakers or boating mishaps, but murders are few and far between. 

Will this find its way into a book?  Most likely, but probably not one of mine.  It’s a little too much like my first book Random Road in which six bodies are found hacked to death on an island.  

I’ll rip another story from the headlines. 

These Kids Are Murder

Sometime back, Lighthouse Writers Workshop invited me to lead a class in their Young Writer's Program. Because of my background in writing mysteries I was specifically asked for this assignment since the kids would be tasked to craft a mystery story. My students were from 11 to 13 years old, with ten girls and two boys. My sons have long since matured past that age bracket and so I was curious about my students. We hear anecdotes about how out-of-control and undisciplined modern kids are, especially middle schoolers, however my charges were attentive and polite. I foresaw a lot of sneaking time on cell phones, but the only calls any of them got were from worried moms. One of the girls mentioned that the class fell between the custody handover between her parents, and I was glad this was something neither my sons or I had to go through. To prep for the class I read a couple of stories from Encyclopedia Brown and so from my students I expected something along the lines of the "Case of the Missing Bicycle" or the "Purloined Hershey Bar."

Our writing prompt was a photo of suburban house surrounded by crime-scene tape. Despite my expectation of a mundane "age-appropriate" crime, my students immediately launched into a tale of murder. I assigned them various aspects of the case. Some worked the crime-scene evidence. Others worked on motives. Reflecting these kids' modern family experiences, it was the wife of an estranged couple who was found dead. Naturally, suspicions pointed to the husband. However, living in the home was the late wife's boyfriend, who the girls in my class emphasized was a mooch with a record as a petty thief. Emails between the wife and her husband indicated that she accused him of stealing her savings and some jewelry. In the husband's car the police found a small caliber pistol, which one of my young detectives insisted was a .22 semi-auto. The crime-scene team was keen on the forensics and noted that the lack of gunshot residue around the puncture wounds in the wife's body meant that she had not been shot, even though spent .22 cartridges littered the area. Furthermore, the puncture wounds resembled those made by an ice pick, plus no bullets had been recovered from the tissue. The motive team discovered that the boyfriend had pawned jewelry the wife claimed had been stolen by the husband. Plus the husband had an alibi for the time in question as he had taken his girlfriend away for a romantic long weekend. An investigation of the pistol revealed the boyfriend's fingerprints but none from the husband, indicating it had probably been planted. Then the motive team discovered that the boyfriend had a girl on the side, and he had deposited lots of money in her account shortly after it went missing from the wife. The police never found the murder weapon but had enough to charge the boyfriend for murder and his girlfriend as an accessory as she had provide the pistol used as the red herring. Definitely not Encyclopedia Brown.

A Tale of Two Books...with a bonus

July 10 is the laydown date, to use a vintage publishing term, for the release of Blood and Gasoline, the latest anthology from Hex Publishers and which I edited. John Hartness wrote the foreword and I lifted this to use as the cover blurb: Mad Max meets Sons of Anarchy. It's a collection of desperate characters cornered in desperate situations--my kind of stories. I won't say which were my favorite because I can't; they all kick ass! Some contributors hit the theme of the anthology square--High-Octane, High-Velocity Action!--while others approached the premise in a more round-about way. I guess the difference is between getting blasted with a shotgun versus getting shivved in the neck. In any event, the stories won't disappoint. If you're in the Denver area, the book launch is July 10, 7PM, Tattered Cover Colfax.



The second book is one that a friend turned me onto, Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind by Yuval Noah Harari. This is a study of human sociological evolution in which he starts with the prehistoric origins of humans, moving to how we "homo sapiens" became the dominant of the human species, and then how we progressed through what he defines as the Cognitive, Agricultural, and Scientific Revolutions. His discourse into the Cognitive period was the most illuminating as he explained why we need to cook food, for example, and more to the point of this blog, that we needed to invent stories and myths to bind together as societies. However, the second half of the book drags and he keeps repeating himself. The narrative, sadly, betrays his leftist slant, and he frequently uses the US and Christianity as the bad examples, shying away from similar criticism of his home state of Israel, the European Union, Judaism, Islam, or any other of the SJW sacred cows. In his Q&A, he again chastises the US, this time for our reaction to 9/11, calling terrorism the equivalent to a fly in a china shop. As if the cold-blooded murder of almost 3000 people in a single day was simply the action of a fly. Harari is enamored with technology and gushes on how science can cure our ills while never mentioning how it can overcome poverty and crime. Show me the nanobots and other futuristic gizmos that will eliminate murder, avarice, lust, envy, sloth, mendacity, and greed. I'll bet good money that in Harari's fanciful tomorrow, people will still be as rotten as they've always been. Which is good for us crime writers.

For your summer listening recreation, here's my audio short story about opioid addiction, robbery, a vampire, and murder on Short Tale Broadcasts, Takers Find Givers.

Till Death Do Us Part

Like many of you, I have my favorite programs to binge-watch. At the top of my list are true-crime shows. I once spent a week dog sitting at my sister's house and when done working on the keyboard for the day, I'd mix up a batch of martini's and kick back to episodes of Inside the American Mob. Besides writing, I also paint, and when busy in my studio I key up Netflix in the background. During an extended flurry to complete a series of new works I cycled through all the seasons of Forensic Files. One consequence is that when I look now at any one painting I'm reminded of whatever homicides were investigated during its creation.

Years ago, the top crime show was COPS, which I didn't like. Police raids through trailer parks and Section 8 housing seemed more exercises in class warfare than searching for the bad guys. Not that the low-life offenders didn't deserve what they got, it's just that the crimes committed by the wealthy and middle-class went unnoticed.

Until Forensic Files. The big draw of the show is of course how advances in forensics allow investigators to solve crimes and bring justice and closure to victims and their survivors. While I appreciate the forensic science, the attraction for me is the human drama, usually someone deciding that the solution to their present dilemma is to murder the spouse/significant other/immediate family member/business partner. Sometimes the show deals with serial killers hunting targets of opportunity but mostly investigators don't stray far beyond an immediate circle of the dead guy's acquaintances. Unlike the trailer-trash perps of COPS, on Forensic Files we witness the well-to-do and privileged committing homicide: bankers, lawyers, doctors, real estate agents, police detectives, and even a bestselling novelist (Michael Peterson). Though these people were uniformly educated, they made a lot of stupid mistakes, for instance stashing the murder weapon and bloody clothes in the basement washing machine. Incriminating evidence left on computers has likewise undone many a "fool-proof" plan. I also notice that in Forensic Files, on occasion the police get timely leads via a "mysterious phone call." Makes me wonder what was the source? An informant? A bugged phone? Evidence obtained through extra-legal means?

When I'd run through all the seasons available on Netflix, I moved on to Murderous Affairs. Here the gimmick is love gone very wrong. On the minus side, they use a lot of dramatizations with actors who appeared to have been yanked from the office temp pool or relatives impressed into service. Needless to say, you won't be wowed by the acting. In one episode, the "dead victim" giggled when the EMTs tried to lift her onto a gurney. It doesn't help that the cheesy uniforms look purchased from the discount costume bin at Walmart. Aside from that, the compelling hook is the drama and the violence it spawned. As in Forensic Files, victims and killers are middle-class or higher in socio-economic standing. And they make a lot of dumb mistakes. Occasionally there's crossover in cases between Forensic Files and Murderous Affairs. Though Forensic Files has better writing and effects, Murderous Affairs often sheds light on Forensic Files' mysterious phone calls--usually ex's or vengeful rivals dropping a dime. Rejected romance equals revenge.

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.

Merry Christmas and Happy Killings!

Season's Greetings to everyone. It's been a busy, yet amazing year. I spent a lot of time on the road with WordFire Press, hawking books at various ComicCons from Miami to Seattle and parts in between. I got to meet old fans and make new ones. And I edited two anthologies and got several short stories published. Plus, I taught writing classes at Regis University and Lighthouse Writers. Like I said, it's been a busy year.

While we push books here at Type M, I can't ignore that many of us indulge in binge-watching. My favorite was the New Detectives on Netflix. The series detailed the use of forensics and old-style sleuthing to solve actual crimes. It was sobering but not surprising to learn that murderers tend to be, in order of most likely: husbands, boyfriends, wives, adult children, neighbors, and strangers. If any of you are contemplating homicide, word to the wise--ditch the murder weapon and destroy the notes or letters where you outline the steps to the crime! Rookie mistakes like that will get you fifty-to-life, if not a date with the needle.

For the New Year I've got an ambitious schedule. More stories to publish. Hopefully edit at least one more anthology. More touring. More teaching. Stay tuned.

Here's hoping 2017 brings good tidings for all of us. 

Real Murder

Our name is Type M for Murder and so I decided to tackle murder for real. This last week, the U.S. had another mass-murder, nine shot dead at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC. As a gun owner, on hearing the tragic news, I hung my head, both in condolences for the dead and their survivors, and to tell myself, here we go again. The American gun-control shouting match immediately heated to white-hot rhetoric before veering into an argument about racism and the Confederate battle flag.

Though many claim gun ownership in the U.S. is defined by political lines, it's not. I've got strong leftist sentiments and own guns, and I know plenty of liberals who stock quite an arsenal. And I know conservatives who have never fired a gun and don't care to. When I'm among gun aficionados, politics is rarely discussed.

The numbers I'm offering below are drawn from the most verifiable statistics available to me such as the FBI crime tables, GunPolicy.org, and others. The comparisons won't be exact but hopefully will paint an accurate enough picture. And any numbers I use will certainly incite trolls of all political stripes.

There's no doubt the U.S. is seen as a violent country. In 2014 we had 12,253 murders, of which 8,454 were committed with firearms. If we take the difference, 3,799, that homicide total still places us at the top of the murder list of Western-developed countries. But not so fast...if we include violent crime that didn't end up with bodies Dead Right There, then England and France are more dangerous than the U.S. What complicates any fact checking is that countries have different definitions of "violent" crime.

To the anti-gun crowd, the answer is quite obvious. Ban all guns, and gun-related crimes (and deaths) will go away. But it's not so simple. First of all, the U.S. is the only country where private ownership of guns is specified by law: the Second Amendment. And, almost all countries do allow private gun ownership in some degree (even Australia, which is often mistakenly touted as gun-free). Two countries that don't allow any private gun ownership are China and North Korea, and I don't think we want them as our model for civil rights.

The U.S. leads the world both in rate of gun ownership and numbers of guns. We have about one gun per person, and so the guns number about 300 million. At number two in rate of private gun ownership is Switzerland at 45.7 per 100 people. Number 3? Finland, 45.3 per 100. Who is second in number of guns? India! With 40 million in private hands.

So if lots of guns equals lots of gun deaths, then Switzerland, Finland, and India should be awash in bullet-riddled bodies, but they're not. Based on that, the argument can be made that strict licensing is what reins in gun-related deaths. However you have the example of Brazil, with 8.6 guns per 100, which translates to about 17 million guns (lots of people in Brazil). Owning a gun and ammunition in Brazil requires a license, with a criminal, mental, and employment background check, and that license must be renewed every three years. But given these controls, the Brazilian homicide rate, to include gun-related, dwarfs that of the U.S. Brazil in 2010 (most recent numbers): 43,272 total homicide; 36,153 gun-related. U.S. in 2010: 16, 259 total; 11,078 gun-related. Plus, in the U.S. as the number of guns is going up, both the numbers and rate of homicide is on the decline. So something else is prompting murder besides the availability of guns. Like poverty. Income disparities. Lack of opportunities.

But if we move to episodes of mass-murder, then what's at work is something more problematic than what motivates other violent crime. It's a failure of the spirit, it's a surrender to nihilism, it's dissociation from society. It's what drives some people to suicide and on that subject is where we can find tools to help address these problems. The recent mass-murders occurred in circumstances similar to what Viktor Frankl discussed in his monumental book, Man's Search for Meaning. He pointed out the irony of an increase in suicide in developed countries despite greater prosperity and material comfort. Killers driven to mass-murder clearly have mental/emotional issues, and here the failure lies with family and acquaintances who didn't step in. Easier said than done. In our family we had a murder-suicide, and the tragedy blindsided us. What could we have done to prevent this heartache and bloodshed? In hindsight, plenty. But looking forward, nothing suspicious or dangerous presented itself.

To stop these mass-murders, we have the responsibility of educating ourselves, of looking out for one another, of reaching out. Of asking questions, showing concern, and acting.