 I'm Betsy Peck-Learned, Dean of the University Libraries. And I'd like to welcome you to our final talking in the library event this evening. Featuring the crime novelist, Archer Neyer, is with us here to my right. Dean of Justice Studies Bob McKenna will be introducing Archer in a moment. But I wanted to take some time to tell you a little bit of information about our coming three speakers in the spring. In February, we have Tommy Shea, a journalist who was one of the first reporters to write about the pre-sexual abuse in New England. He should be pretty fascinating. In March, we'll feature the playwright, comic book writer, children's book author, and journalist, Manjula Padmanaban. I actually got that right. Who has won multiple awards for her plays and her comic book character, her Indian comic book character, Suki. And in April, as part of our Vermont Writers Fellowship, we will have Rick Moody as our distinguished visiting writer. And Rick is best known for his novel, The Ice Storm, some of you may have read. And his latest novel is called Hotels of North America. We'll have more information about them up on our website shortly. Just a side note to those students who are here, our Vermont Writers Workshop application has gone out. So if you are interested in being part of the Vermont Fellows Workshop, which will be in the spring, please get your application in by December 15. We're meeting this afternoon in the Mary Teft White Instant Theater. And Mary Teft, or Happy White, as she was fondly known, was an alumna of the university who earned her degree very late in life. I think she was in her 80s. And she visited the campus often. It was her generous endowed gift to the library over a decade ago that made this talking in the library series possible. And her hope was that by introducing students to accomplished writers and professionals and sharing their personal and professional stories, that that would inspire them and motivate them in their own career choices. We're also grateful to her son, John Hazen White, Jr., who donated funds to transform this space that you see here last year into an instant theater, which is an architectural term for a space that can transform quickly from student collaborative space to a space like this for events or a space for faculty workshops. And that's exactly how it's been used. So without further ado, I'd like to introduce Bob McKenna, who's going to introduce our speaker. Good afternoon, everyone. So thank you. You're taller than me. Oh, sorry. So Atchamair is the author of highly-claimed Vermont based series featuring Detective Joe Guntha, which the Chicago Tribune describes as the best police procedures being written in America. The 26th book, which I actually put this question, have Atcham sign while I had a captive audience, just came out September 29. He's the past winner of the New England Independent Book Sellers Association Award for Best Fiction, the first time a write-up crime literature has been so on it. In 2011, Atcham's 22nd Joe Guntha novel, Tag Man, earned a place on the New York Times best-seller list for a hot, his critically-acclaimed series of police novels featured Joe Guntha, formerly a lieutenant in Brattleboro, Vermont, but now the leader of the Vermont Bureau of Investigation. The books, which have been appearing once a year since 1988, good fortune to read most of them, have been published in five languages, as his bio says, if you count British. And routinely gather high praise from such sources as the New York Times, Washington Post, L.A. Times. We have most writers based their books only on interviews and scholarly research. Atcham's novels are based on actual field experience. And that's sort of what we like to do here at the University now is take concept and practice, practice and concept and refuse that, students with that experience. So this is perfect. So it's my privilege to welcome Atcham this week. So thank you for coming. We're going to start with a sound test. I'm the bottom of six kids, so I'm supposed to have a loudest voice in the room. I'm also not fond of electronic equipment because it restrains me, and I like to move. I don't know how many of you have now seen what was once a new movie that is now ancient history, right? Just shy of black and white silent movies called Butch Cassie and the Sundance Kid, where this famous gunslinger is supposed to show his stuff. And so he positions himself to draw on fire. And the guy says, no, no, no, no, just shoot the can. And the guy says, I'm better when I move. Well, if I'm better at all, it's when I move. So if you can hear me in the back, we're good. Well, they're all nodding. So that's good. We'll stick with that. Bob touched on the experience thing as he wrapped up and what is otherwise way too over-the-top introduction. I made up most of those quotes myself, by the way. But the weird part was is that, and I say this because some of you in the room are interested in writing and being writers and what's writing all about and all that. So a word of warning is that about two minutes from now, I'm going to run out of things to say. That's a fly-by, by the way. And then I'm going to open into questions. And we'll do this majority of this event, stimulated on a conversation, because I'm one of those ignorant people you're ever going to be. So I like to pick people's brains and find out what makes them tech, and maybe vice versa will also fly. But point being, and way back when in prehistory, this is maybe 1975 or thereabouts, I sit down because I'm vastly underemployed as an editor at a scholarly press at the University of Texas. And I'm being punched, actually, because I went out on campus. I found a book that's made for bestseller material. Well, that means you generate income, and you never supposed to generate income in a university setting. It's tacky, suspicious. It probably shows you're not of an intellectual demeanor. So I really screwed things up. We were on the bestseller for six months. The money was pouring in. Immediately, the press sold the rights so that we wouldn't make filthy paperback income off of this hardback product. And we distanced ourselves as quickly as possible. And I was restricted to quarter. So here I am, the purported special projects editor with those special project to edit. So the first thing that crossed my mind in 1975 was let's write a murder mystery in which the press director is the first body. That stimulated what became what, unfortunately, unbreakable heaven, because as Bob pointed out, we're now 27 books later. So at 28 finished, you'll be glad to know I'm just editing it as you speak. So I'm typing away. And these truly are exercises in typing. From 1975 to 1980, I keep my employment because my writing is very much like my first bicycle ride. I don't know what your first bicycle rides were, but I didn't have training wheels. And the end results were eloquent in terms of bandage and scrapes and broken appendages. So writing is somewhat along the same lines. You gotta practice, practice, practice, the same way you get in the Carnegie Hall. And you do so down a rough and rocky road of flat-out incompetence. So if someone comes to me and usually says, not advice yet, and says, oh, Mr. Mayor, oh, I hear you're a writer. You've been at it forever. I've just finished my very first novel. Very first. What should I do with it? Well, usually I make sure there's a very large piece of furniture substantially bigger than this between the Inquisitor and myself. And then I say, earn it. That's all I guarantee you, it really stinks. It's your first bike ride. It's not a reflection of you. It's a reflection of reality. It's a reflection of the learning curve. And I think my personal prejudice is, of course it's just because I've traveled from the vineyards for 10 years or something, but if you are an overnight success, you are oftentimes damned by that because people pigeonhole you become quite expectant that this is what you do and they'll restrain your broadness of mind, your creative abilities, your search for your true inner voice by labeling you this, that, or the other. So in a way, failure can be extraordinarily rewarding, but you've got to keep at it. That in itself is a good thing to do because writing is everything about perseverance and putting up with people saying this stinks and putting up with your own inner voice saying, I actually knew that stuff. So much as it hurts and much as I'm crying, I will in fact rewrite it because that's what it deserves. So we go down this rocky road and I did so from 75 to 1980. But in 1980 there was a sort of, I don't know, a cataclysmic alignment of planets. Are we sitting at the same publishing house? I guess at that point maybe I moved over to the LBJ library, which is our country's largest mausoleum. And we were talking about some publications project or another and I realized that in fact, given the 10 people around the table, that I could be this stupid all by myself because the commonly arrived at solutions were abysmal, but we were protected. That's at that point we were part of the federal government. I mean we moved out of academia and jeez Louise, so I think they're probably guys at the LBJ library that have been dead for 10 years and they're still at that table. And their votes are still being counted. Well if you die like that, you get counted. So I left and that was, actually I misspoke, that was 1979 and I haven't been employed since. That's enough and writers should get used to. So where do you go when you're unemployed, you have no money, no prospects, no real idea what you want to do, but you want to create, you want to serve something in here and you need to get out. You go to Vermont because misery loves company and they're all out there waiting for it. So I went in, was instantly embraced, was instantly encouraged to take down three jobs and in no time flat I did in fact take on three jobs. Now I started as a professional historian because someone said, you know, you probably went to college, you were probably trained in something. I had a hard time remembering what that might be, so I took out my unfolded truth be known, my diploma and read that I was a historian. So I immediately called Texas because the land in the rich in the main, apologies anyway, from Texas. And I sold myself as the best historian since Sliced Cheese which actually has nothing to do with the other but you get the idea. And I got a job in under two weeks. So now I was a professional, itinerant historian and for the next several years, I traveled all over the United States in a car that the customer bought and I wrote history books, not just one but several. This was kind of cruel because for the first time in my life, I recognized that I could laugh at all my professors who knew that although they had just given me a degree that I was never going to do anything for that degree. And here I was a professional historian and not a teacher either. I was actually burning my teeth as a writer of history. So this was fairly good except that at some point during a blinding snowstorm in upper peninsula of Michigan, I heroically battled myself to a phone booth. Needless to say, how that dates me. I still don't use a cell phone. So anyhow, so I picked up the phone, I called my wife and I could hear our child crying in the back. I had now been on the road for nine weeks when I made this phone call and I sort of heroically said, hi honey, here I am, you know. And she said, if you were here right now, I'd kill you. I thought, okay, it's time for a career change. History thing, we're not as welcome. So that was the end of history. Turns out that during weekends, people don't like to see historians. I don't know why. It's an unrecognized American prejudice. I recognize and recommend all you hit the streets and start putting up signs and placards and all that because we are an unrecognized minority. But you gotta do something when you're living in motel sixes across the United States pursuing the histories. And so I wrote more murder mysteries. Why? Because I was interested not in who done this. I actually don't even read murder mysteries. They have no interest in Bob and I were laughing about how we entertain ourselves with law enforcement backgrounds turning on TV and watching true fiction. They're reflecting on nothing out there. So I don't wanna read books like that for reasons I'll shortly explain. So I began to write these books based on the premise of why do we do what we do? In other words, I sort of approached detective fiction or murder mysteries, not from an enthusiast's viewpoint, but more from a sociopathological viewpoint. In other words, why are they so popular? Why does everybody love to read a good murder mystery? A good murder mystery? What are you people thinking? So obviously it's attractive. Obviously it's rising with a bullet. I just think you said it, sorry. And, but there's no explanation for that. So I began to sort of look into that and begin to wonder. And I, of course, went to newspapers. I went to all the news on TV. You surround yourself with all the stuff and you realize, oh my God, all this murder mystery stuff, it's around us 24 seven. You will never open a newspaper without seeing something reflective of law enforcement in its contents. It's our reality. And what it reflects is our ability, indeed, our want and desire to beat the hell out of each other on a regular basis. It's just a human thing we do. And we try to keep it under control, more or less, and we try to be civilized and organized. But all the way down to the little types, don't hit your brother. The impulse from birth, desire was to beat the hell out of your little brother. So we are forced into good behavior oftentimes. As the soul began to sort of run around in my head and I began to think, it's time for me to write why guns. I don't actually care when someone comes up to me and says, oh, well, I didn't like this particular book all that much because I figured I'd be done it. You should pack yourself a bag. That should be a reward, right? I don't care if you've done it. And in fact, in some of these books I've written, I actually wrote in the wrong bad guy. And then during the editing, I kind of went, eh, you know, I don't really like you all that much because I sure like her. So I grabbed that character in the middle of the book and made her the bad guy. And it works much better. And then the readers come to me and said, I never would have guessed that. I'm like, oh, I'm in here. So we're sort of getting into this, but I am writing from the outside in. And this brings me to the historian and before that the journalist who trained and will be a writer. And this, I recommend everybody, by the way, journalism and all that kind of stuff. All this is good work. You hit deadlines, you work against pressure, you learn not to fall in love with your words, but to make your words precious to the reader. Be efficient, be effective, and most of all, move on quickly. Don't fall in love with your purple prose. All this is good training for eventually becoming an effective writer. So anyhow, I was on the outside of law enforcement, writing about law enforcement. Now, why was I writing about law enforcement? Because even back then, I was turning on the TV set and watching what I knew to be hoody. Now, wouldn't it be reasonable to expect that real law enforcement officers are actually doing interesting, and dare I say in a creative way, sexy stuff? Instead of having Arnold Schwarzenegger steal janer coins in the name of his municipal police job, bit of a disconnect, you could actually just detail the municipal police department and tell people what they do. Maybe if you did it effectively and interestingly enough, it might be entertaining, it might even be educational, it might sell a series of books. So that's how I began to approach this, and thus I approached the law enforcement officers and interviewed them. Well, the journals of the thing I touched on, the historian backgrounds, I just applied everything I learned in college, all the stuff I learned in the street, and I applied it to this new job of mystery writer. And it worked like a charm. I would do anywhere from 30 to 50 interviews per book, and I would take all that stuff, only it would be historians' sweet history binge. If you don't like the facts, lie. It's fiction. So if characters that people tell you about aren't really conforming to what you want out of the book, you can then tell the person you're interviewing. So is there a variation to what you just told me? Is it remotely, perhaps remotely possible that this, that, and the other might be able to happen? And she or he might say, oh, yeah, I'm not. It doesn't usually happen that way, but it certainly could. That's what's gonna happen. So you can twist things around a little bit. I never write so far outside the envelope that it's incredible, but I will sometimes manipulate things. And I do, all my cops do a whole lot less paperwork. That's two, so that's my own revenge. Well, so down the line, I'm turning out these books. Local cops are enjoying it because they're sort of reluctantly reading the books, you know, almost like wearing gloves and going, oh, here we go again. And then they go, hey, he actually wrote down what we told him. And so I became embraced by the law enforcement community. That's only 12 people in Vermont, by the way, so. Not having left him, but you get the idea. So end result, though, is that I'm having lunch. At this point, I've been hired, parenthetically, by the medical examiner's office state of Vermont to be a death investigator, which now I've been, something like 15 years or more, more or less, whatever. And I'm having lunch professionally, talking to a guy who's another investigator who happens to be the sergeant, which is the number two guy in this department, at the Bellows Falls Police Department. And he and I are old friends. We got along very well. I picked his brain on some of these books. And he says, you know, you've been outside so long and doing so much research and talking to so many of us that you probably know our job better. We know our job, because we're so insulated, so we're all over work, but you're covering the whole state and interviewing everybody. You want to join up. And I looked at him, he was startled. My hair color wasn't a whole lot different back then. And I said, do you know how old I am? And of course, he appealed to a geriatrist hard by saying, that's exactly why we want you. It was a cheap shot, but I'll take it. And so I said, absolutely. And it went back far enough that in those days, they literally sort of gave you the car keys and a gun. And they said, okay, see you in 12 hours. Remember, don't forget to call home. Bellas Falls in those days was known as a boot hill. I'm sorry, Dodge City. Boot hill was a little later. Dodge City, and because the stats for Bellas Falls were through the roof, the place tomorrow was very small and thus the responsibilities of each cop were universal. If you caught a case, even if you were just a floor clunker like me, you ran with it. So if it was a full-fledged sexual assault, you didn't call in an outside agency. You called on your peers and colleagues, and you said, how the hell do I work this case? And everyone checked in and said, do this, do that, call this, put this, fill this in, build this, this file, and give it to the state attorney. In our case, district attorney down here, I guess. Anyhow, so that's how we learn on the job. And that's how I learned law enforcement. Well, technically, I'm still certified as a cop. I'm now semi-retired. I moved up, sort of, if not up, through the ranks, at least among the ranks. I ended up running something kind of like a rural version of the SVU, you see that, you know. So I've dealt with sort of raped kids' cases for several years. I ran that squad down in the crowded world. All of this long story short, between the dead bodies, the abused bodies, and writing about murdered bodies, began to commingle into this perfect symphony of cross-connectedness, and informed my work, and began to focus it more and more and more so that the whole wide unit incentive at the top of the hour began to really grow roots. And now, the ambition to write social anthropologies is absolutely solidly set in me. So when people come and say, well, you're still driving a second-hand truck, you know, if you wrote something else, you'd actually make money, you know. You could make a rolled-o, you could retire, you could, you know, own something new. You could do all sorts of radical things. But you gotta get rid of this Joe Grumford guy. Stop writing police procedures about, you know, who's ever heard of Vermont kind of stuff. I, however, don't do this for the money. I do it for the insight. I do it for the brain. I do it for the intellectual income. I do it so that I can bring us back to us. The way I approach these books is not a good guy, bad guy, car chase, and a solution. Those may be in there, but those are hardware artifacts. Those are so that I can make a living. All the interstitial tissue of these books, the other 299 pages of a 300-page book, are made up of people I don't describe, people I hand over to you. Bob, funnily enough, put his finger right on it and said, we were walking over here when he said, I've been reading your books for years, and I know exactly who you're describing in your books. Well, here's the kick, is that I actually don't describe very many of those characters at all, because this is a collaborative enterprise. You know, I have one thing to say before I shut up and take questions, is that you understand that writing is a collaborative enterprise. It is not sitting alone in a room and telling a story by yourself, to yourself, for yourself. It is, in fact, you are engaged in a storytelling enterprise, and if you don't have ears out there to hear your story, then you're dying alone in us, and you may have an ego problem, okay? Now, if you remember as a writer that everybody starts as a reader first, then you will never forget that you are working with fellow creative people, readers, and I would suggest that everybody in this room, when they're reading, lose themselves in a fictional daydream. You forget your journey pages. You forget that the laundry's growing milder. You forget sort of the everyday reality because that movie has been ignited in your head, and that's good storytelling, but what put the movie there? Your imagination, your creativity, your ability to fill in the rough outlines I give you of these people with your knowledge of people who would fit perfectly into that template, and that's the trick. So the writer's job is to write eloquently enough that she or he becomes invisible. Don't show off, don't screw off, and hand everything over to your reader to the point where if someone were to come to you and say, who are you reading? I would hope that your impulse would be to close the book and look and go, oh, this guy. Because in that split second, you were the writer. It was your story. So that's what you're trying to do, I think, at least that's what I'm trying to do in this series of books. And why do I write about Joe Gunther and all these people? Because I'm writing about us. Why do I write a guy whose name's Joe Gunther? That is the dullest name I can think of. And I did so because there's Joe Gunther in every phone book in America. We are all this guy, we are all his people. If I have two major characters, I have a whole subgroup of people who go from book to book to book. One is named Joe Gunther, and he's the hero. He's a vuncular, thoughtful, and supportive, and I mean, he is a really, really good guy. And then the second main character is a guy named Willie Kunkel. And he is everything opposite. He's cranky and rude and short with people and dismissive, and he has integrity as far as you can see. I said, one saving grace is that this man you can trust. But everything else about him is terrible. So there you have all of us. How many of us wake up wishing to live an entire Joe Gunther day? And within the first five minutes you had your first Willie Kunkel moment. I certainly want to do a staff set, recognition in all of this. I will now lapse into silence and entertain questions. On anything. Dead bodies, crooked bodies, fictional bodies. Yes, ma'am. Hi, my name is Kate, and I live here in Bristol, which I'm sure you've seen is a beautiful town. Yeah, but I want to reduce it to dirt soon. I was driving around with a cargo, looking at the scenes and thinking, I could murder someone here. That's exactly my question. One of the things I love about the Joe Gunther books is that sense of place. And I know and have worked in some of the places you've described, even when you move up sides of a lot, and I was surprised to discover you're not a room launcher, but I'm from a way. To me, it sounds like, launcher sounds like blaster, Montreal sounds like a Montreal. So, are you curious how you do it? Yeah, place, we are all of the place. That's something I sort of recognized early on because my father was so restless we thought he had a criminal record. We'd just move, move, move, move. It was like boring, because there's a lot of people who move every time. And in that process, you lose your sense of place. Most of us can sort of say, oh, I was born up here, and I was brought up here, and here's the high school, and everybody in high school knows every stupid thing I've ever done from the age of five, up to the age of 18, or whatnot. I had never lived more than four years or so in any one spot in my life. Sometimes I'm a lot shorter than that. Probably lived in about 30 different places before I finally settled in Vermont. I've now been living in the same house for 30 years. So I overreacted, but before I did that, I learned that basically my identity was what I carried in my head. And my past experience was that. Now, also, as I crossed every new threshold, I've always looked scrawny, and just been thin and sort of weird this way. So I'm a target, you know. I'm not a guy who fills the doorway and scares people. I'm the kind of guy who creeps through the door and all the bullies in the class go on. Oh, there is a God. So as a result, I had to be creative, I had to be inventive, I had to be entertaining, I had to be fast. So I was all of those things, and I told stories. Because if you can divert people with a sense of the gap, then that might slow them down a little bit if they were inclined to do other things to you. So I began to be sensitive to those aspects while I was also sensitive to who are these people, where are they from, what culture formed them, and what do I need to learn about all of that so that I can infiltrate and associate quickly? Okay, because that's the other thing, stop being a foreigner. So you understand their humor, you understand their culture, all that stuff is gonna play to your advantage. I became a quick study. And since the old man was more restless than most, I did it in several different languages because he would travel, I mean, he'd go to South America, he'd go to Europe, he'd go to Canada, most exotic of all. So this whole sort of nomadic upbringing resulted in my being extraordinarily sensitive, not just to people, but to place. And in fact, mingling the two in my own mind's eye, that you are a part of where you are from. So place becomes character. And thus when I began to write fiction, character was as prominent as Joe and Willie and many of the other human beings. And Vermont had to be changeable. It had to be not just Brattleboro, but at the Northeast Kingdom, or Rockland, or wherever. And then very quickly, I think, book three, I was already in Chicago on special assignment for Joe because I wanted my readers to get used to this traveling. And it was sort of in my bloodstream anyhow. I'm always looking over the fence sort of wondering how that works and where this comes from. And indeed, coming here today, we arrived two hours early and just drove around rubber-necking, you know? Why? I'm good burial sites. So it was sort of natural for me to do that. And as a result, I guess it's sort of one of those knacks, you know, some of the things you end up doing in life, yes, you learn how to do them as I was going on and all those terrible exercises, typing that I alluded to, but also oftentimes if you're lucky, you end up doing something for which you have a knack. And where does that knack come from? I don't know. But with me it was communicating either verbally or through writing. The odd part was I never was instructed in English grammar because I wasn't in the United States when all that came around. So I learned English by ear. I actually almost lost English at one point in my life. And so I came back to English orally. And so it's a musicality. And I think that's something you want to pay attention to. I know I'm wandering a little off your geography, but I'm trying to be all purpose here. When you write, write with cadence, write with the sound, we have one of the richest languages on the face of the earth who have such a choice from word to word to word that if you can assemble these words so they compliment each other, not just in terms of their meaning, which is fairly plotting, but in terms of the elements. Now that might enhance a little, not just the characterization and the culture or geography, but also the overall sound that you're filling your readers head with. That's part of the seduction that lies between writer and reader. We all ask each other very quickly, where are you from? Where'd you come from? Interesting accent. Stuff like that will go back and forth between people. Why? Because we identify each other that way. Boy, you're coming from the big cave on the mountain. I would imagine this dates back to when we used to drag clubs around behind us and slay whatever we slayed, slew. Point being that geography, whether we admit it or not, is key to our sense of identity and belonging. And you said from a way. That's a geographical illusion, right? It's not the culture down in the mountain. Yeah, but it's as if I had a choice. I was once confronted by someone at a library up in Woodstock, which is any town that buries their utility lines is no longer part of reality, but anyhow, so where we are. And this woman is an active group, but I'm doing what I call author imitation. So we're having one of these conversations. And she says, so you're writing all these books about Vermont. You're not a native. And you know, at that point in my career, I'd say, well, nope, but I sure arrested a few. It's not where you have to do a born. You didn't have any choice over that, but it sure as hell reflects what you do with your life. How useful were you lately? This poor woman came up and apologized to me. I remember, I was very old with the fence, but you know this, I thought it was important to visit that upon the books. I thought it was also would enhance the series of books if we talked about not just real procedures and sort of kind of sort of real people in that you could populate them, but also a real place. There is a real gravel road, there's a real Rutland, there's a real Burlington. These places are real. And when I wandered to a Chicago or a Boston or in New York, I want to apply my ability as a quick study to this process. And in many ways I apply to geography, same thing I do to characterization. Don't overdo it. Okay, how many of you have read books where the guy is just pretty, he's got a black vest, he's got a slightly tacky old shirt, he's got, you know, you can tack to your pants, he's boots are this and his watch is that. Well, where's the room left for your imagination? Why not just say it's all skinny guy in your room? Then you can join the process. Well, you do the same thing with geography. But then in New York, pick up a few interesting things, things that you go, oh, I didn't know that or the section of New York, and then back away. Because everyone knows there's a New York and you may even have visions of what New York is from whatever TV shows or visitations or movies you've seen. And I would suggest you, therefore, will do the same thing to the geography as I encourage you to do with the character positions. Fill in the blanks and it'll become your creation. Yes. Hi, my name's Rachel Smith. I'm a freshman here. I'm studying criminal justice. Now just wondering, do you find it challenging in trying to keep the realistics of how the criminal justice system works versus like the official aspects of you still have to keep the leaders interested? And if so, like how do you overcome that? Yeah, you do have to be, actually there again, we were kidding about this. I have to, I will discover it. Rutland City in Vermont has been going through holy hell with the drug invasion, a lot of heroin coming up there, a lot of tainted heroin, a lot of real problems. And Rutland's been having a hard time sorting it out until lately where they decided to just take out all the old templates and apply some interestingly imported stuff that ain't anywhere else in Vermont law enforcement. And what do we got to lose? And it began to work, it was interesting stuff. I don't worry over the details, but that's the whole point of the question because I'm into this, I'm trained in some of this stuff. I've experienced some of that, not only as a competent medical examiner with all these people with the needles in their arms, dead as doornails. I mean, I have to deal with that all the time. I've done hundreds and hundreds of these cases. So where do you back off? Okay, I mean, it may be fun for Bob and me to go through all the archaemia of the Rutland system, but everyone else's eyes are glazed over. We don't care. I mean, give us an interesting little something, but then let's go back to the chase seat. And I've had to sort of make my peace with that and it's actually healthy. Don't overdo it. It's like the guy you left for dinner and you keep the effort going to the end. I mean, you're dying because the guy won't shut up. My father, if he ever told me anything, it was always leave them wanting more. I haven't forgotten that. So there's another problem. If you are hyper-exposed to this world as I've now become, how do you manage keeping the reality away from fiction? I mean, I've had to, if I didn't have before, establish a pretty strong ethical line between the make believe and the painfully real. Do I take a real case and exploit what happened there for my enrichment and yours as readers by proxy? That is simply not right. These people have actively suffered and lost. I am in the midst of stress. Can I not poach from what I've observed in those circumstances, not the facts, but the aura of people. That, I feel perfectly entitled to poach and to break over to my other world. Now, I will not deny that once in a blue moon, I've come across a case I couldn't solve, or even worse, I couldn't prove. There are those cases, you know, who've done it. You just can't make a case about it, drives you completely insane. Well, I got the sweetest revenge on the face of the year. I changed everybody's gender, I changed the locale, I changed the details, and then I solved that sucker. In fiction. The point being, though, that what you do over here can't even sound remotely familiar to a, let's say, even a co-investigator wouldn't even recognize it. That's a trick. Again, you breathe the spirit of that over here, but never the hardware. So that then becomes perfectly symbiotic. And to no one's detriment. No idea what your question was, but that's fine. It's been once in a while, I sort of leave. Who else? Yes. You touched upon this briefly when you started, but I've read that buyers can go into a novel, particularly prime infection with a thought twist in fine, the exact hope being if a thought twist you write doesn't surprise you, it won't surprise a reader. In your opinion, is that the case, or what? Is that the case, or what? I'm glad you said it in my opinion, because I'll give you my feeling as to whether I enter into any of these novels with a sense of foreknowledge in a way, is what you're asking. I do not. I enter into each book filled with ignorance, counter-poised or balanced by curiosity. Those are my twin outboard writers. I had an uncle who was a curator of the Metropolitan Museum, fabulously well-educated guy on the history of prints. There was nothing about printing that he didn't know. And given his long-term tenure at the Metropolitan Museum, who was I to argue, okay? So Hyatt Mayer was a name for me to be associated with when I was a youngster, because he was very well-known. And I turned to one point and I said, Hyatt, you don't even have a PhD. I mean, you're just a dude. How did you get to where you are in the world? I mean, globally, this guy was known for his expertise, his knowledge. And he looked at me and said, ignorance and curiosity. I never forgot that because that is what fuels me through almost everything I do. If I build a piece of furniture, I have a big board working shop to keep my brain straight. I will never set down a blueprint. I will never take a project from a book. If I wanna build a table, I just begin to start get into it and I discover stuff. Is it efficient? No. Is it fast? No. Is it always successful? Sometimes not. But it's exciting, it's rewarding, and it's informative. And in the same way, when I write these books, I want my research, which I conducted because I didn't know the answers, to begin to tell me where these books are going to go and how they're going to develop. And as a result, I'll do the 30 to 50 interviews that I referenced earlier. And the reason I do so many interviews is not because I have a plan, it's because I don't have a plan. But what I now have are maybe five to six different possible plots in my head. And I don't write anything down. And then as I begin down the storytelling path, as a result, as the characters begin to inform me through their sort of own natural organic needs and reactions and responses, then one plot or another begins to slowly assert itself. And I'm secure as I progress because kind of like having consulted multiple roots to a certain place, it doesn't matter if I take the wrong road because I kind of go, oh, yeah, no, I remember that on that and that happened. Oh, I remember this way on that and that happened. So I'll figure out kind of where I'm going. And then of course, there's the editing. Another word to aspiring writers, once you've written something you're only half done, then you have to rewrite and rewrite and rewrite. Now I write, these 300 page books I write, I and other editors I'm involved before I send it down to the publisher, we probably go over these books 20 times each, okay? So there's no such thing as all my life. Yeah, I've got it a couple of times. You edit until you can't bear the goddamn thing anymore. Okay, it's gotta be harder. You gotta do your work and then down the pike it goes. So all of that goes to tell you that my process is one of self-discovery as I go. I have heard through the grapevine that John Irvin writes the last chapter first because he knows where he's going, okay? And then he sort of reconstructs it, he plots very carefully and he heads off towards that concluding chapter and it fits like a T. Now, this has not to pass dispersions on one of the wealthiest writers in America. Okay, who am I? So, box established that in this capitalist society. I will say that my encounter with the world according to God, which I went from one end to the other, I stepped away from and I said, this is one of the best built books I've ever encountered every edge is polished and sanded, every screw is countersunk and covered, every piece is polished and varnished and perfect and it has no personal book of view, okay? A flawless piece of execution but empty of soul for me. I thought to myself, you know what? I sooner have a little soul to screw up than turn out a heartless piece of perfection. So that's why I write the way I write. Would I recommend it to others? No, unless it works for you as it does for me. Very personal business, this writing stuff. You know, unless you're doing technical writing or newspaper writing where you just have to hit a deadline who really cares. But I think you should always care. I mean, when I write an email, I pay attention to my work choice and I want them to be the emails that stood out on your end of the communication. We get to read God damn emails all the time but how many of them do you get that have clearly not even been re-read much less anything. As long as you're receiving it and you read these things, you go, what are they trying to say? That's where the editing and the re-writing, that's where the language and the rhythm, the respect for your reader, that's where all that comes in. Unless you write like my daughter because hurry emails are always eloquent and clear because she usually writes cool. I get that. Oh, you're scratching. Anyone have a question? I do. Yes. When you talk about asking questions before you start writing, who are you asking? Who are you interviewing? Well, yeah, there you might have to, you might have to ask someone who might know that someone. So let's say I want to write about, I drive by, I see a fire. Let's make this up, come up a bit. And I'm also gonna fool myself, fires. God, that's gotta be hard to figure out. What causes a fire? I mean, you're looking at the news and you see, oh, so and so said that it was a wire on the third floor, that a piece of furniture was sitting in. And you're looking at the news footage. It's a hole with a lot of smoke coming out of it. And you're like, how the heck did they do that? All right, so then you begin to make phone calls. And people like to talk. People like to share. How many times have we been in social gatherings, dinner parties or whatever, where you are literally waiting for the other guy to take a sip of something, to take a breather, to text someone, so that you can begin to talk. Because yeah, they've been babbling and okay, maybe it was interesting if I was even paying attention. But I've got much more interesting stuff to say. We generally converse competitively. Very rarely do you find someone who not only listens, but then says, oh, well, no, that was interesting, but I got a question about what you just said. And they keep you going. We very rarely do that. In fact, we do it rarely enough that when you encounter someone like that, you walk away with a certain glow. Because gosh, you felt curiously enhanced by this person's genuine interest in what you were trying to say. Most of the time we're thinking to ourselves, oh, jeez, my story's a lot better than that one. I wrestled two horses down to the ground, not just one pony. So point being, call people. Tell them you're genuinely interested. Ask them if you wouldn't mind bringing tape recorder or whatever they call it nowadays, electronic recording devices. And they open up because they're sort of speech deprived. They go to a dinner party and say, oh, what do you do? Oh, I'm an arson. And the conversation moves on, but it's actually pretty cool stuff. In fact, the arson investigator, if he or she was given Procter leeway, it could dominate the entire conversation with wicked interesting stuff. But they're not given that opportunity. And they're probably too polite to dominate the stage, unlike certain people in the room. That's who you ask, is who is that investigator? And eventually, or fairly shortly, you'll find out. This gets a little more complicated in Los Angeles than it does, let's say, in a rural environment like Vermont, because you got layers, bureaucratic defenses, if you will. But if you're persistent, and if you are accommodating and seductive, you can get it done. That's the thing, don't go in with a chip on your shoulder, don't get your feelings hurt, and don't give up. That's the other thing. I remember crossing the threshold. Do you ever go to Jimmy Canada? Now, Jimmy Canada was an old-time Vermont state police officer, long retired now, crossed his threshold when I was writing book number one or two. And I said, I got this Vermont state police featuring prominently in this book, it's back in the late 80s, and I just want to pick your brain, tell me how the state police function so I can accurately portray in the book. So I walk into his office to make this interview happen, and he looks up at me and he says, I hate you people. Sounds like a date in the making to me. So, when it turned out, of course, he had a previous encounter with a novelist, had done him dirt, he'd taken all the information, screwed it all up, never ran it by Jimmy, never got the facts right, and last but not least, made the DSP look bad. Don't do that, okay? They don't have to be heroes, but don't make them idiots because they're not that, no one deserves that, unless they do. So I turned it around by saying, Jimmy, not a problem. No problem at all. You know, I just write these manuscripts, and then I go over and I edit them and all that. I'm gonna send it to him, he was horrified. So when I saw my book, it's your goddamn book, I went, oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no, not with that one line or this, and if you've got a problem with it, you're gonna be my proofreader. I don't care how well you read it, but you read the Vermont State Police parts of that book and you tell me where I messed up, because it matters to me to get it right. Well, that was a huge turnaround. That's how you get in to find these people, and this is how you earn and deserve their respect. Did that even come all the same way? Well, it doesn't get quite to the process, but as you describe what you're doing, I'm thinking there's this curiosity, your natural curiosity that drives the questions drives the idea, I might consider writing about that fire, and what kind of information do I need in order to be able to tell an accurate and deep story, surrounding that idea. No interview concludes with you just saying, thank you very much, and you leave, because since you went in not knowing what this person knew, that means that at the end of the conversation, not only will you learn what they do, but you should have half a dozen, at least, additional questions, because now you have more knowledge than you had, and you need more fulfillment of ignorance, or abatement of ignorance. Thus, you will leave that interview by saying, okay, before I go, now, who is it, who's gonna be the chemist who analyzes the stuff that you collected at the burn scene, and then you send it up to the lab, and can you recommend someone that I could talk to? And you know, because I know you don't do that, but they do that, and what about the firefighter, the reconstruction scene, the guide, and what about the heavy equipment guys who bring those walls, if they can, back up so that you can see the burn pattern? Can you tell me, a heavy equipment operator who served DOZAC, and I need to know what kind of equipment you use? See where I'm going? You walk out with five, six more interviews to do on subjects you didn't even know existed when you hit play or record on that machine. And that's why I end up doing 30 to 40 interviews. I just start with one. I'm a little more used to it? Yeah. Okay. There you go. I'm afraid we're out of time. That's good, that's good. But you were fabulous, thank you so much. Good. So Nick Dillon is one of our criminal justice students, and he is the president of the John Jay Society of Criminal Justice Club, and we want to present this to you with thanks for the coming. Thank you.