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Human Edits
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So... you want to be a Crime Thriller Writer?
We all think that we know about crime.
We we've been educated into believing so via a seemingly endless train of glossy TV programs...
where clues, forensic data and emotional admissions of guilt fall effortlessly into a detectives lap.
We watch countless preened, rouge lipsticked, impossibly attractive, chisel jawed, karate skilled Police Investigators cut an impressive swathe through the criminal classes...
as they barely break into a sweat.
We passively watch Pathologists as they cleave open corpses in stainless steel environments, instantly arriving at detailed conclusions.
We see it...
and so it must be true, isn't it?
Unfortunately, life is not like we see it on the big screen or the little TV box, especially in relation to crime.
Crime and the investigation of it is nasty.
It clings, it smells, it scars,
it impales those who do it,
those who suffer from it, and those who try to make sense of it, on its hooked barbs that are difficult, if not impossible
to be rid of.
I could have written nice cozy crime fiction with the denouement of plots worked out and explained over a very civilized high tea of Fairy Cakes,
neatly squared Cucumber sandwiches and Earl Grey tea.
I decided not to.
I decided to write exactly how it was.
It's action.
It's impact.
It's trail of desolation.
Tears, gashes, broken marriages, fractured lives and all.
But how to do it?
Maybe there would be a course that I could undertake?
An exam that I could study for?
A lovely and sanitized evening class?
Perhaps read a few academic papers or a book or two...
or maybe three!
I realized pretty quickly that to know what I needed to know…
What it was like to stand over a murdered human being.
To witness a crime scene where the spilled bodily fluids were still running and not as dry as a hot summer's riverbed.
What a body smells like as a pathologist's scalpel glides over it's broken topography in a Y-Section cutting.
What detectives feel as they approach a door at midnight,
that on the other side of it is a family hoping, praying, pleading...
and to know that all of their supplications have been in vain, that on the detectives tongue are the well-rehearsed words that are going to shatter their expectations,
their worlds.
To know all that I needed to know, I had to see these things myself.
Experience these things, if I could.
Smell these things.
Mix with and talk to those who traded in such things in various roles and ways.
And so... I contacted the Police.
I formed a tenuous relationship with the pathology department and a reluctant link to a city morgue.
I visited the pubs, the clubs...
Where Police drank their heavy pain to numbness.
Where criminals boasted of their doings in fogs of Havana cigar smoke and expensive smelling colognes.
In time I became trusted,
in a slightly curious and wary way by both ends of this dysfunctional spectrum.
I went out on Police patrols.
I sat in on criminal briefings.
I met gangsters and shared warm pints of beer with them.
I was a bystander at visceral crime scenes and in porcelain white forensic labs.
But it was the little things that hooked me, like the barbed hook that impales the fish.
Always, as a writer, look for the little things.
The language, that the detectives and the criminals who they tracked...
used and shared in common.
The humour, darkly funny...
that was the shared currency of both opposing groups.
Humour that explained away questionable actions.
Gallows humour, that attempted to make light of that which has,
quite rightly, no lightness.
The worst experiences of my research to be a crime thriller writer, this apprenticeship of the dark arts, was attending two post mortems in a Victoria brick morgue.
As I said: as a writer, look for the little things…
The smear of Tiger Balm applied to the pathologist's and detective's nostrils in an attempt to banish death's signature smells.
The opening words from the detective, his breath still stale from last night's bottle of Johnnie Walker whiskey.
'He's a big lad, bet they felt that in Australia when he crashed down.'
The hands of the Pathologist as he carries the victim's greyish-pink brain to the weighing scales.
Double checking the gauge and shaking his head.
'He certainly wouldn't have made a great Nuclear Physicist.'
Again, the humour.
Always the humour to hold back the horror.
A morgue assistant hiding under a sheet in a refrigerated drawer for an hour so he can rise in a rehearsed resurrection as the detective slides it open.
The wild, uncontained humour.
Yes, it terrified me.
But it also gave me an insight:
To deal with the circumstances these fragile human beings are placed in, they have to place other things in the way to divert, to dilute, and attempt to bar that which might eat them like a rabid Cancer.
But alas, just knowing can be as bad and as damaging as seeing...
and so even the most robust battlement of humour is not enough to hold the horror at bay.
Never enough.
So, I learned the hard way how to become a Crime Thriller writer.
But no, not as hard a way as a crime detective whose every day is filled brimful with some of the very worst that humans can shovel up.
Was it worth it, such a deep dive into the horror?
Reluctantly - yes it was.
As a writer, to honour the truth,
for me it had be done.
To witness the true realities:
That the plunge of a sawing knife can sometimes wound beyond repair.
That what we ask of a detective is often more than their humanity can withstand and contain.
That their expectation of fencing off their professional lives from their private lives is as a straw in a Hurricane.
Things leach through, in little ways, in huge ways...
They undermine.
Through all of these realities I learned an incredibly important lesson...
that as writers dealing in fiction,
we have a real responsibility to write in fact, that murders involve people,
husbands, sons, daughters, wives.
As I say in my debut novel, 'DRAGONS EYE,' as my Senior Homicide Investigator stands over a group of butchered innocents... thinking, but not daring to actually say out aloud in case his own humanity is holed and impacted...
'somebody's babies, somebody's children.'