Tag Archives: Writer

JOSEPH WAMBAUGH — INTERVIEWING CRIME WRITING’S MASTER OF CHARACTERS

Joseph Wambaugh is crime writing’s master of cop & crook characters. Unlike many crime writers, Joe Wambaugh policed in the Los Angeles trenches. He’s worked with guys like Roscoe Rules, a fictional yet true-to-life rogue in The Choir Boys whose behavior was delightfully over-the-top. Wambaugh also served with psychologically-wounded real-life officers like Karl Hettinger portrayed in The Onion Field as a PTSD victim sadly spirally down after his partner’s on-duty execution. And, after 50 years in the police and crime writing business, Joseph Wambaugh knows his characters and remains down-to-earth. I’m honored to share the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) Quarterly magazine’s recent interview with crime writing’s master.

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In 1971, Little, Brown & Company published a novel with a catchy title, The New Centurions. It was the first book from a young writer who described his profession in a way never been done before. The author was a homicide detective with the Los Angeles Police Department and the book was an unorthodox look at policing—full of colorful characters tossed together in a zany, chaotic world of life and death. Joseph Wambaugh was describing policing in the City of Los Angeles, but it might as well have been any city. The New Centurions was a runaway bestseller.

Joe Wambaugh went on to write 15 more novels and 5 non-fiction books. He wrote TV scripts, contributed to movies and television shows, and became a household name in police and literary circles. Fame forced him to leave policing and propelled him onto the author’s circuit in countries around the world. He made appearances on countless TV shows, including The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.

Wambaugh’s fame continues to this day. His books continue to sell, phrases he coined are commonly used in policing and—most of all—he left a profound mark on the police profession. Joseph Wambaugh understood cops. He also recognized the emotional toll of “the job” on police officers, long before Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) was a diagnosed condition.

Joe Wambaugh also exposed the disparities in society through his examination of topics as diverse as dog shows and prostitution, describing the opulence and hypocrisy of some, as a counterpoint to the pathetic underbelly of society. Wambaugh described the job of a police officer in a gritty, realistic way that upset the prevailing view of policing as a mechanistic, black and white world of good and evil, typified by TV shows such as Dragnet and Adam-12.

No one underestimates the role Wambaugh had on policing and its perception by the public. Police officers came to understand the heroic qualities and tragic frailties of their peers and themselves. The public saw police as dedicated and brave, but imperfect human beings like themselves. Through Joseph Wambaugh’s works, policing became seen as a high-risk profession—physically and emotionally. Police Story and Hill Street Blues became the new TV paradigm of policing.

Today, Joe Wambaugh remains an astute observer of policing from the distance of his California home. He’s a husband, father and grandfathera youthful 82 and sharp as a tack. The Quarterly had the pleasure of interviewing this most unassuming man. Here’s the conversation.

Joe, you grew up in East Pittsburgh and joined the Marine Corps at age 17. Why?

I had been living in southern California for three years before joining the USMC. I joined because after graduating from high school, I did not want to go to college, and was too young to get a decent job. Thanks to the military, I benefited from the GI bill and used it for college later on.

What inspired you to become a police officer?

I took college classes while in the military, then doubled up on classes when I left the Marine Corps at age 20, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts before my 23rd birthday. I had intended to become a teacher but saw an ad in The Los Angeles Times that the LAPD was paying $489 a month to recruits. It was very enticing, as I was bored with school and wanted some action.

At what point in your career did you decide to mix writing with policing?  Did someone influence you to write?

I had majored in English and every literature major who has ever lived is a closet writer. I read John Le Carré’s spy novel, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. For me, it was the ultimate story of police undercover work. I decided to write that novel.

How did you break into the publishing world?

I sent short stories to all the cheapo magazines and received rejections. I sent one story to the same magazine twice because I was convinced they had not read it the first time. It came back to me with a note: “Dear Schmuck, it’s no better this time than last time.” In desperation, I tried a literary magazine, The Atlantic Monthly. They encouraged me to try a novel. That did it; The New Centurions was the result. I could never find the “Dear Schmuck” letter to send it back to him.

Tell me about the reaction to The New Centurions.

I knew my Chief of Police would not approve of the book. I violated Departmental policy by not submitting the manuscript for editorial approval. It became the main selection of the Book of the Month Club. I received a check for $50,000 in 1970. The Chief ’s public comment was that he was glad Sergeant Wambaugh is making a lot of money because he won’t have a job much longer. The press jumped all over it. Everyone was on my side. Everyone had to see what this young cop had done. The book remained on The New York Times best seller list for 32 weeks.

You‘ve been referred to as the father of the modern police novel. Comments?

It was my intention from the beginning, to tell the story of policing from a different and more realistic perspective – the gritty, cynical, slapstick and emotional side of policing. The public was ready for truth, in place of entertaining propaganda. Jack Webb, the creator and star of Dragnet, became involved in all the kerfuffle over the release of The New Centurions. He got a man to contact me to say that Webb would read the manuscript and if it deserved to be aired, he would protect me from being fired.

My homicide partner and I drove to Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills and dropped off the manuscript. Well, it took a couple of weeks. I finally got a call that the manuscript was there to be picked up. We drove back in our detective car. The manuscript was in a wrapper. I said to my partner that the manuscript was heavier than when I brought it here. Every place where Webb worried about the content, he placed a paper clip – 500 in total. Every page had multiple paper clips. I kept the paperclips and never met Webb.

The practice of letting off steam after a shift is seen in The Choirboys. But that book also described a darker side to the police profession, in which the emotional toll can be greater than the physical danger, occasionally leading to suicide and divorce. Comments?

If I had still been in the LAPD at the time that The Choirboys was published, it would surely have gotten me fired. I have always said that the physical dangers of policing were overstated by TV shows and movies, but police officers are constantly exposed to the worst of people and ordinary people at their worst. This produces premature cynics and makes it one of the most emotionally dangerous jobs in the world.

Your writing style is somewhat unconventional, described as a series of connected episodes involving colorful characters, more so than plot-driven. How did you develop this style?

The style reflects how I see life: episodic. That leads to character-driven stories, rather than plot-driven stories. I am no Agatha Christie.

What techniques did you use to document the many great stories which you fictionalized?

I took lots of secret notes as a cop and kept them in boxes and drawers in case I ever decided to try writing.

You also faced danger yourself.

I happened to be one of a dozen besieged cops at Manchester and Vermont Streets on Friday the 13th of August 1965 when Watts erupted in rioting and all the shooting started. I don’t know if one of the hundreds of rioters fired or if it was a cop, but a couple of bodies fell. And then all hell really broke loose for three days. We were ordered to 77th Street Station earlier that afternoon from all over Los Angeles and assigned to three-man cars with cops we’d never met before. We were given a box of ammunition and a shotgun and sent to unfamiliar streets, with the intent of stopping the riots.

It was not police work, but a crazy kind of urban combat in a state of anarchy. We mainly tried to protect each other while mobs looted. The windows were smashed from our car within minutes, and at some point, one of the cops I was teamed with fired a shotgun blast in the general direction of a muzzle flash and managed to hit a looter in the ankle with one pellet of double- aught buckshot. Taking that looter for medical treatment and then to jail got us off the street for nearly two hours and was a welcome relief, ut then it was back out to hell. Anyway, that wasn’t really police work.

Joe, tell me then about a police incident that had a lasting impact on you.

I was a patrol officer in south central L.A. We had a lot of shootings and action. I was training rookie named Fred Early. He was only out of the Academy for matter of weeks. We got a call of shots fired at a pool hall and arrived just ahead of another black and white. A guy stepped out of the pool hall with a shotgun. Pellets whiz past us and he heads back inside.

I didn’t pay attention to Fred Early. Everyone was yelling, and the radio was blaring. It turns out that Fred had run around the building and covered the back door. He was assertive and smart. The robber runs out the back door holding the shotgun at port arms. Fred fired one round. I arrived to find the suspect on his back with a grimace on his face and a hole between his eyes.

That, however, wasn’t the end of the story. Five years later, Fred Early was on his way home from work. Something happened. He reported a burglar breaking into a commercial business. He tried to arrest the suspect. A fight ensued, he was repeatedly beaten and kicked in the head by his assailant and shot in the leg with his own gun. The guy got away. Fred eventually died during one of his surgeries, having suffered irreversible brain damage.

You’re a New York Times bestselling author and the winner of many awards, including Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America. Did you anticipate your novels’ impact and it would become next to impossible for you to resume work as a homicide detective?

Nobody could have anticipated the instant success. I simply wanted to publish something. I never dreamed that I would be unable to complete my 20 years with the LAPD and get my pension, the security blanket all cops want. Many times, I regretted my success. Fourteen years was seventy per cent of what I agreed to serve. I thought about it a thousand times. I would love to just have completed it. Also, in those years, I was used to packing a gun and no longer had a right to carry a gun.

Do you have a favorite character in your novels?

I don’t really have a favorite character, but nonfiction books are like my step-children, novels are like my biological children.

Is Joe Wambaugh in the novels himself?

Pieces of me are probably in some of the fictional characters.

At some point, you decided to write non-fiction, beginning with The Onion Field, which was a huge hit. Why did you expand from the fiction genre?

I knew there was a great true story that had to be told, not so much about the murdered officer, Ian Campbell, but about the survivor, Karl Hettinger. I was working Wilshire Vice the night that Campbell and Hettinger were kidnapped in Hollywood Division, the next division north of us. Everyone was looking for them. I stayed close to the case. When I heard what happened to Hettinger within the Department, I knew it was wrong and that he would pay a terrible price. He surely did.

Your books spawned TV shows and movies and turned the existing genre of television shows, such as Dragnet and Adam-12, on their head, helping spawn a new paradigm, typified by Police Story and Hill Street Blues. Thoughts?

I’ll give you an example. I worked on Police Story which aired on NBC television. After some rookies have a year or so under their belt, their badge starts to feel heavy and they begin to swagger a bit. We created an episode about what we, at LAPD called the John Wayne Syndrome. For some reason, the producer submitted the script to John Wayne Productions. Their response— “absolutely not.”

The production company got cold feet and changed the term to the Wyatt Earp Syndrome. The badge heavy cop loses everything, including his wife. At the end of the episode he is seen sitting on the bed of his empty apartment. The tough guy suddenly breaks down weeping and the show ends with the sound of a radio call playing over his sobs.

Using a radio call has become a part of line of duty police funerals, where the fallen officer is called on the police radio and fails to respond. Did this tradition begin with your writing?

Not to my knowledge. However, not being too vain, the tradition of playing bagpipes at police funerals started after The Onion Field was published. The book introduced it by recounting Officer Ian Campbell’s funeral. His grandparents on both sides were from Scotland and Ian loved everything Scottish. There is a photo of him playing the bagpipes. They were played at his funeral, and this was repeated in the movie. It was heartbreaking.

Another non-fiction book, The Blooding, tells the story of the first successful use of DNA profiling, which occurred in England. How did you learn of this case and did you anticipate the huge impact that DNA would have on policing?

I read about the case and knew at once, if it could be true, that this would be the biggest event in crime detection since inked fingerprinting.

One of your most entertaining books must be The Black Marble, a story about dog shows and crime. But there appears to be a deeper meaning in this and other books, which appear to use satire to pan the excesses of modern American society.

That is probably true. As with most of my work, all the comedy is tempered by some intense and painful scenes involving PTSD in police work. I really liked the movie of Black Marble, but the mix of funny and harrowing stories, including the torture and death of a child and a cop going crazy, confused some viewers who either loved or hated it. Harry Dean Stanton was a great comedic villain in the movie.

Do you have a sense of the impact that your books had outside the United States?

My books are fading into distant memory. I’m not sure that there is a large society of avid book readers left, anywhere in the world. At the time, however, I met cops in Europe, Australia and New Zealand during book tours. I did become aware of their impact. It was very flattering.

Have you visited Canada and met Canadian police officers?

I did the book tour to large cities and met a few Canadian coppers. I also spent a month in Toronto prepping Echoes in the Darkness, a TV mini-series, where we made Toronto look like Philadelphia. We brought in palm trees and placed them on the shore of Lake Ontario, turning it into Miami! One day in April it was so hot that we were in t-shirts. The next morning, the snow was six inches deep! While in Toronto, we had to fly to New York to interview actors, but everyone had the same feeling—New York was foreign to us, Toronto was like home. Such a great city. I thought about it the other day when I read about a terrible shooting in Greektown. I used to go there all the time for dinner.

Would you recommend a policing career to young people today?

All my life I’ve seen it getting worse and worse. The police can do no right. They are criticized more and more. Criticism starts before the facts come out.

One important point in terms of police shootings. The critics are endless. So called bad or shaky shootings arise from fear not anger. Fear is the motivator in the case of bad shootings. Shootings arising from police rage are uncommon. This is a fundamental thing that has to be understood. I would not recommend policing as a career today.

How does Joe Wambaugh spend his time today?

Dee and I married when I was an 18-year-old Marine and we have two children and two grandchildren. I hate the idea of retirement. The worst part of old age is the loss of creative energy and being unable to write more books. Three of my four grandparents were Irish immigrants – the fourth being a German-American originally named Wambach – so mostly Irish DNA means that I tend to see the world and my life through a glass darkly. On the other hand, it is probably my Irish DNA that made me a writer in the first place. So, what do I have to bitch about? Semper cop!

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Joe Wambaugh took a chance almost 50 years ago to write about policing from the perspective of a street cop. He forever changed how the public perceives police officers, their role in society, the pitfalls of the profession and its strengths. It’s from such realistic—in your face—writing that we have a better understanding of the mysteries of what it means to be a police officer and the heavy toll it takes on officers and the larger police family. May we continue to learn from the wonderful tales told by Joseph Wambaugh and enjoying his captivating pages.

Acknowledgements

My DyingWords thanks to two retired RCMP members for contacting Joseph Wambaugh for a talk. Staff Sergeant (ret’d) Michael Duncan, who I worked with in the 1980s, is on the editorial board of The Quarterly It’s been the RCMP voice since 1933. Deputy Commissioner (ret’d) Peter German is a Quarterly contributor who spent time with Joe Wambaugh and put this piece together. It’s a unique insight into how Joseph Wambaugh’s police and writing career progressed. It’s also a fascinating insight into Wambaugh’s thoughts that captivating crime writing isn’t about how cops work on cases—it’s about how cases work on cops.

MERRY CHRISTMAS & WHATSUP FOR 2019 WITH GARRY RODGERS’ WRITING

First off, a very Merry Christmas to each and every one of you. And if you’re offended by the “C” word, I’m not sorry. I’m actually offended by the politically and culturally correct crowd who can’t say Christmas. Having worked in different levels of government, I’ve experienced these onion skins. I don’t know what makes these twits tick, but how anyone gets upset by hearing “Christmas” seriously baffles me. For example, some idiot city councilor in Victoria, British Columbia near my home recently got his knickers knotted because somebody gave him a potted poinsettia and he made a big deal because that was too close to Christianity for him. “F” him, I say.

Enough of that rant. So, 2018 was a busy writing year for me, though you wouldn’t know it by the sheer number of books I didn’t publish. This was a swing time where I did an enormous amount of research for forthcoming projects. I also wrote a pile of commercial website content pieces for my daughter’s writing agency. And, from time to time, I managed to pen a few blog posts. But most of this year was prepping for whatsup in 2019. Here’s what’s about to happen with Garry Rodgers and the DyingWords brand in the coming year.

The biggest news—by far—is that Adam Croft is taking me on as a personal understudy. If you don’t know who Adam is, he’s one of the world’s top-selling crime & psychological thriller writers. At one point in 2018, Adam Croft held the #1 best-selling spot on all of Amazon, right ahead of JK Rowling. Adam will work with me on all parts of my indie writing business from craft to marketing. This will take my writing career to an entirely new level, and I am absolutely honored to be one of five select students Adam will tutor.

Another interesting venture is entering the CBC Books 2019 Short Story Competition. My piece is The Old Stone Butter Church. It’s inspired by an epiphany experienced inside an abandoned 140-year-old stone church on southern Vancouver Island. The first prize is 6-grand in cash plus a 2-week writing residency at the prestigious Banff Center for Fine Arts. Wish me luck. The coin will help offset Adam’s fee for tolerating me.

The Lindsay Buziak murder is one of Canada’s highest-profile unsolved homicides. It’s also one of the most solvable, given the circumstances. Someone knows something and they’ll eventually talk – as long as the suspect tree shakes. Eleven years ago, Lindsay was a vibrant 24-year-old Victoria, B.C. real estate agent stabbed to death while showing a vacant high-end house. There is no doubt Lindsay Buziak’s death was a planned killing and the case is as murky as a pail of used engine oil. The suspect list reaches from her beefcake boyfriend at the scene, his mother, one of Lindsay’s closest friends, into an international organized crime cartel, and upward to the highest levels of a corrupt government scandal. This year I’m helping to shake the suspect tree with a proposed book on the case facts called Someone Knows Something – The Shocking Story of Lindsay Buziak’s Unsolved Murder.

I’m almost finished the manuscript for Sun Dance – Why Custer Really Lost the Battle of the Little Bighorn. This started 2 years ago with a root cause analysis for a blog post. I found an angle to one of the most researched and written-about North American historical events that no one seems to have dug into. That’s the psychological impact Chief Sitting Bull’s sun dance ceremony had on psyching his warriors to annihilate the U.S. 7th Cavalry in 1876. It covers the events leading to, during, and the fallout after this famous event. I’m out of the rabbit hole now and will shop Sun Dance to traditional publishers.

Continuing on my based-on-true crime books like In The Attic and Under The Ground, I’m 2/3 of the way through the manuscript for From The Shadows. It’s about a family of 6 — 3 generations — who were savagely murdered with their bodies concealed. It resulted in one of Canada’s most-encompassing homicide investigations. From The Shadows should be ready for indie publishing in the spring of 2019. If anyone’s interested in a free advanced reading copy (ARC) in digital form, give me a shout.

Next up for 2019 are two more based-on-true crime books where I was involved in the investigations. One is On The Floor which is about the most cold-blooded execution murders I ever saw. The husband and wife owners of a gun store were robbed of a horde of assault weapons and handguns, then laid on the floor and shot in the back of their heads. On The Floor follows the investigation through the biker world and the Asian drug triads before ending in an extraordinary gunfight with the perpetrators. Watch for On The Floor in the summer of 2019.

Beside The Road is next in line. It should be ready in 2019’s fall. Carrying on in the based-on-true crime theme, this story captures a bizarre case where we found a decomposing body down a bank beside a road. This case ticked off all the forensic investigative aid boxes before identifying who it was and the one-in-a-million cause of death. Beside The Road is the weirdest homicide I ever experienced.

If there’s time left, I have a bunch of working titles on the list. There’s no material shortage out there and it makes for great based-on-true crime stories like By The Book, At The Cottage, Behind The Badge, Off The Grid, and Through The Ice. Realistically, these are 2020 or 2021 undertakings because of another previous project taking shape from a 2018 effort.

This year I developed an outline for a screenplay. It’s suitable for a 10-part series, and it’s based on an emotion-evoking true crime investigation I headed. The working title is The Battered Woman. It follows the path of a battered wife’s fight against “the system” after she repeatedly shot her passed-out husband and evoked the battered woman syndrome defense. We’ll see where this goes.

That’s a wrap on an ambitious agenda. I still plan on doing a blog post every second Saturday morning and will keep experimenting with topics. It seems my pieces on analyzing high-profile events are the most popular. However, I have a few interesting guests in the lineup for interviews. Stay tuned to find out who.

Merry Christmas, everyone! May you have more Christmas eats and drinks than humanly healthy. May you have good Christmas times with great friends around you. And may my books make you sleep with one eye open—at 3 am on Christmas morning—when Billy Ray slips down from your attic with his ax.

~Garry

UNCONVENTIONAL CRIME WRITING WITH L.A. SCREENWRITER & NOVELIST JENNIFER GRAESER DORNBUSH

…Or How to Capitalize On An Unconventional (aka Crazy) Childhood & Other Personal Adventures  Los Angeles based screenwriter, author and speaker, Jennifer Graeser Dornbush chats about her life as a coroner’s daughter, her new mystery novel The Coroner, her love of forensics, the realities of working in Hollywood and what common crime writers can do to capitalize on their own personal stories.

Hi Jen! Welcome to DyingWords! We’ve kicked around crime writing & screenplay ideas for a while now, but have something in common besides forensic and scribing stuff. You grew up in northern Michigan, close to me in southern Manitoba, Canadaboth of us under very unusual circumstances. I won’t shudder you with mine, but tell us about yours.

Long before American television was saturated with CSI and Forensic Files, I was living my own weekly CSI adventure with my family in northern Michigan. My father was a medical examiner for three counties and my mother assisted as his office manager. They ran the office out of our home because the county was underfunded.

Dad performed autopsies at the small county hospital morgue, but all the records, paperwork, and photographs were kept in our family office. Samples of blood and body tissue were stored in a basement freezer, right under the pork chops and frozen beans like some B-rated horror flick. Dinnertime conversations often revolved around the case of the week. “Let me tell you about an interesting suicide I saw today,” my dad would say. “Oh, and pass the corn, please.”

When I started writing I began to tap into my past and the treasure trove of knowledge from those decades of death investigation with my family. My new novel, The Coroner is one result of that.

The title “Coroner” is sorta familiar to me… like deja vu all over again. What’s your new novel The Coroner about?

Recently engaged and deeply ensconced in her third year of surgical residency in Chicago, Emily Hartford gets a shock when she’s called home to Freeport, MI, the small town she fled a decade ago after the death of her mother. Her estranged father, the local medical examiner, has had a massive heart attack and Emily is needed urgently to help with his recovery.

Not sure what to expect, Emily races home, blowing the only stoplight at the center of town and getting pulled over by her former high school love, now Sheriff, Nick Larson. At the hospital, she finds her father in near total denial of the seriousness of his condition. He insists that the best thing Emily can do to help him is to take on the autopsy of a Senator’s teen daughter whose sudden, unexplained death has just rocked the sleepy town.

Reluctantly agreeing to help her father and Nick, Emily gets down to work, only to discover that the girl was murdered. The autopsy reminds her of her many hours in the morgue with her father when she was a young teen―a time which inspired her love of medicine. Before she knows it, she’s pulled deeper into the case and closer to her father and to Nick―much to the dismay of her big city fiance. When a threat is made to Emily herself, she must race to catch the killer before he strikes again in The Coroner, expertly written and sharply plotted, perfect for fans of Patricia Cornwell and Julia Spencer Fleming.

You have a set of guidelines you use when drafting stories about real people or events. What does that look like?

There are many more from the hundreds of stories in my memory bank. But when writing about the past, I try to keep the following things in mind:

* Base characters off of real people but give them different names, personality traits, and visual description.

In The Coroner, Dr. Emily Hartford was based off of conglomeration of myself, and my two younger sisters. Emily is little bits of all of us. My middle sister is more blood and guts oriented like Emily. My younger sister has the tenacity, style, and individuality of Emily. And I have lived in major cities, including Chicago, for most of my life, but always find myself returning home to my rural roots.

* Use real places to help with world building.

For instance, the town of Freeport is based on my hometown of Fremont. I know, not a far cry from its original name. But that actually helped me picture the real place when I wrote. Of course, I kept the place of Chicago and I think that helps ground the story some and gives it an element of reality. When I write I picture different places around “Freeport.” The library, the downtown, the lakes, countryside, hospital. This helps me create authentic descriptions. I also have a deep, deep love for the place where I grew up. I think that love shows through in the tone and in how Emily, Nick, and her father view Freeport. I really want Freeport to be a character unto its own.

* Tap into the unpleasant memories.

Some of the memories I have of being a coroner’s daughter are neutral, some comedic, some embarrassing, and some downright unpleasant or scary. For instance, we had a human leg in our barn for years and I was scared to into the barn alone with that leg. This was really bummer (not to mention a bit smelly) because our childhood fort was situated right above it in the barn loft. I would fling the barn door open, flip on the light, and then run past the leg and scramble up the ladder to get to my loft fort where I could spend hours reading and holding tea parties. 

So rewrite your scary childhood memories in a way that takes power away from the scary and unsavory. Keep the emotion and be true to the experience. Writing it removes the negative power it holds in your memory. Sharing makes it seem less scary.

* Feel the fear and use it!

We all have those tangible fears like fear of heights, snakes, or tornados. But what are your biggest psychological fears? Figure it out and tap it that for your characters. One of mine is fear of missing out. I think Emily carries that same fear because of the trauma she experienced when she was left out of her mother’s death investigation. This drives everything she’s done in her life since. She’s gone full out to experience life at its fullest. Even in her romantic relationship with Brandon. He leads her into a world she would have never experienced back in Michigan.

* Embrace the crazy.

Everyone’s childhood is unique and special. Once you can frame it this way in your mind, it becomes less embarrassing. Try to see your experiences as a view into a world that no one has ever experienced before and is dying (no pun intended) to know about. I spent many years been deeply embarrassed and disgusted by what my father did for a living. I thought it was weird and gross. This was pre-Forensic Files era when no one knew anything about forensic science and Abby Scuito wasn’t making it cool on NCIS. Where was Abby when I was a teen!? We woulda been Insta-besties. I know it. After all, dead bodies sometimes slept in my garage.

* Leave the family skeletons in the closet.

We literally had a family skeleton. His name was Sam and he was a made of real human bones. He spent a good deal of time in my father’s medical practice, but in his later years ended up living in a box in our barn. Sam died of lung cancer. Or so we surmised by evidence of a cigarette dangling from his yellowed teeth bones. Sam has since gone on to enjoy the rest of his boney life in a high school biology lab.I suspect I’ll get disagreement here, but I’m not a big fan of using fiction to launch a passive aggressive attack on family, air dirty laundry, or take revenge on a family member by making them an unsavory antagonist.

Show some human decency and respect the privacy of yourself and your real life family. There’s enough other drama and dysfunction out there to go around.  So, just to be clear, none of the things that happened to the Hartford family ever happened to my own mom and dad. Their circumstances, backstories, and demises are purely, 100 percent fictional!

* If it made you cringe, use it!

Those embarrassing moments and experiences of our childhood are universal. Draw from these because they will help your audience become endeared to your characters.I’ve had my share of embarrassing moments as a coroner’s daughter. I’ll never forget the time I was dating my now husband and his friends came over. They were in the basement hanging out when they decided to look in the fridge for some soda. Instead, they found blood vials labeled with the names and DODs of the deceased. This was simply the property of the medical examiner’s office, nothing sinister.

This particular incident didn’t make it into the current novel, but one can imagine how awkward or odd it might have been for Emily, as a young teen, to have a dating life. It didn’t scare Nick away. And thankfully, not my husband either. Honor the real victims. In The Coroner, Julie Dobson’s murder is based off a girl in my hometown who was thrown from her horse, hit her head, and as a result, died. She and I were both in junior high school when this happened.

There was nothing sinister about girl’s death. It was purely accidental, but the tragedy of this young girl’s early demise deeply affected my community. I wanted to memorialize this young victim. She may have died long ago, but she’s not forgotten. When I was trying to come up with a case for Emily to investigate, I started playing the “what if” game. What if a teen equestrian were suddenly found dead? What if it were a murder? Who would want her dead and why? And the rest is between the jacket cover.

What inspired you to first start writing?

I’ve been writing since before I could actually write, so I guess you could say it was a gift that was given to me rather than something that inspired me. I’m grateful every day for this gift and my prayer is that I will continue to be a good steward of it.

What piece of advice do you have for authors or screenwriters starting out?

Have patience. Have perseverance. Have a real life.

Well put. Now, what was your favorite book when you were a kid? Do you have a favorite book now?

I have so many… I can’t choose just one. My tastes vary a lot. As a kid, my parents led me to the shore of story sea. I waded in and never got out.

Do you ever get writer’s block? If so, what do you do to get back on track?

I guess that depends on what is the definition of Writer’s Block? Do I have those days when I feel stuck and muddy and don’t get much done? Of course. That’s part of the job. Do I even not know what to write about? Never. I think the best tool for a writer is to cultivate the skills of listening and looking around. If you do, you’ll find there’s always fodder for story.

You’ve consulted with writers on various TV series like… Suits, Prison Break, Rectify, White Collar and Bull. Can you tell us about those experiences?

It probably sounds more exciting than it really is. Often times writers on shows will contact me for forensic advice. Some of the writers I know personally. Others, I do not. Mostly I serve them via email correspondence so I’m not on set or in the writers’ room, per se. But they do send me really interesting questions like…

If a body was burned to ash, how much tissue/bone/teeth/other substance do we need to DNA match the remains?

Or this one… a man who already takes smart drugs (like Adderall or Ritalin) is poisoned by someone who secretly put heavy doses of his smart drug in his hand sanitizer. When the man uses the hand sanitizer he absorbs the smart drug through his skin and it’s enough (in addition to the smart drug he already took orally) to cause a heart attack. Would this work?

You started writing in Hollywood before you delved into novels. Or, I think you once corrected that “Hollywood” is actually called the Los Angles film industry business. What’s that like, being around “Hollywood” and all?

That’s right… after several other careers in journalism and teaching, I trained to be a screenwriter and moved to “Hollywood” 12 years ago. I write film and TV. I had a film release in September (God Bless the Broken Road). But my love is TV. I’m hoping to get staffed or sell my own show. My goal for 2019 is to be a working TV writer and use my forensic background on crime dramas.

You also wrote the non-fiction book Forensic Speak? How did that come about?

FS started out as a project for an independent study course I designed in order to earn my certificate at the Forensic Science Academy. To pass the academy, I needed a prerequisite course and when that course was canceled after the first week of class, I convinced the director of the program to allow me to write a handbook for crime writers instead. I was the only writer in the class and I wanted to tailor something specific to my educational goals. The director loved the idea, so off I went. Later, my writing group encouraged me to publish it. But I was so busy at the time that I dismissed it.

What was your process for writing Forensic Speak and getting it published?

After I finished the academy a writer friend sent me a YouTube video to Michael Wiese Publishing. In the video, Ken Lee announced that MWP was seeking material. My friend encouraged me to send in a query. The book was far from ready, but I thought, why not? On a lunch break one day, I wrote a query and sent it off. In less than an hour later, Ken contacted me to say MWP was interested. However… it took us a year from to get the pitch right and figure out what the book would be. So I didn’t actually sign the book contract until a year after I sent the query. From there it took me another year to write the book. This month will mark exactly three years since I entered the Forensic Science Academy and had the idea to write the book.

Having such an intense upbringing around forensic science, how did you decide what to include and what to discard?

My upbringing dealt primarily with death investigation, not so much criminology, DNA, ballistics, and fingerprinting. I wanted to round out my knowledge of crime investigation so I attended the Forensic Science Academy here in Los Angeles. When I was telling my writer friends about my experiences in the academy, they said that they wished they could go through it. I thought, well, why not put the academy in book form for those who aren’t able to take the academy?  That inspired me to create a book built on the forensic foundation we were taught in the academy. Forensic science is vast and growing! My book is a smorgasbord. You get a sample of everything. You can pick and choose what you need. And if you want more of one thing, I’ve provided resources that will bring you to a larger meal.

What are the three biggest mistakes new writers make when writing in the crime genre?

1. Not spending the time, energy, or research to get the forensic facts right.

2. Thinking that what they see on TV or in movies is correct procedure.

3. Writing crime scenes that come off at cliche, plastic, or static (in action and dialogue!).  Learn how to speak forensics! Read Forensic Speak!

Additional advice for crime writers?

  • Read and watch crime fiction.
  • Figure out what brand of crime fiction best suits you.
  • Keep a journal or file of interesting cases you want to explore in your writing.
  • Create interesting, dynamic antagonists. Give them a story, a life, an emotional motivation.

Advice for non-fiction writers?

Write about your hobbies and interests to benefits others. Find your niche and explore 10 ways you can share what you know with others.

For example… I took the concept behind Forensic Speak and created a monthly newsletter that features a forensic fun fact, a forensic link of the month, a forensic term of the month and a crime writer’s Q&A of the month. Then, I created a series of seminars… Writing the Killer Procedural, 10 Essential Steps in Death Investigation, How to Choose a Crime Show That’s Write For You…  You get the picture… be creative and do what inspires you.

What do you know now that you wish you knew when you first started writing?

How long things take!!! I wish I had started out with more patience. I still get impatient and anxious at times. I want things to happen sooner, faster, better!

Not to be so hard on myself, but I guess that’s human nature and my stubborn work ethic. It’s okay to push. But you also have to play. Trust in the process and the journey.

Focus on Being Thankful! Have daily gratefulness and keep a gratitude journal. Keeps you sane. You can see how much you really have. Reminds you how far you’ve been. Thank goodness for coffee, yoga, and my wiener dogs.

Could you give a sneak peek into your next projects?

I’m always spinning many plates… here are a few of the dishes I’m working on…

A mystery/thriller novel called Hole in the Woods based on true crime story that I’ve followed for 25 years. We have several publishers waiting to see it. Fingers crossed!

I’ve just finished a crime drama TV pilot called Prey based on the real-life experiences of a group of nuns who pose as prostitutes to save sex trafficked victims. Now we have to go pitch it and try to sell it!

This fall, I’ve been pitching my novel, The Coroner, as a TV series. We have some solid interest so it will be interesting to see what unfolds in 2019 with that project. The second Coroner novel is also completed and releases in fall, 2019.

Which novel/novella/short story have you read that you would like to see made into a movie? 

The short story, Before Gwen by Dennis Lehane. A very good friend of mine who is a female director introduced this story to me. She wants us to partner on it. It’s stunning and haunting. I’m all in.

Thanks so much for sharing your experience, expertise and encouragement to crime novelists and screenwriters, Jen. Leaving off, where can DyingWords readers find you and your work?

Go directly to my website. You can sign up for my newsletter here and it’s a great place to find my books, more forensic resources, other free crime stuff and connect on social media!

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The television or movie screen is the closest most people will ever come to witnessing the forensic world. But Jennifer Dornbush actually lived it. As a daughter of a medical examiner, whose office was in her home, she investigated her first fatality, an airplane crash, when she was 8 years old. Since that first case she has had decades of on-sight experience in death investigation and 360 hours of forensic training through the Forensic Science Academy.

Jennifer now uses these experiences to pen crime fiction for film, TV, and novel. Currently, Jennifer has several crime drama series being developed for television; her mystery novel series, The Coroner, releases in 2018.

Wanting to share her love of forensics with other storytellers, she scribed non-fiction work, Forensic Speak: How To Write Realistic Crime Dramas, published by Michael Wiese Productions, hailed as a north star to creating authentic crime dramas.

 She teaches seminars and speaks on writing crime fiction for screen and novel, surviving and thriving the artist’s life, the novelization process of scripts, crime scene science, forensic fundamentals, and death investigation. A more complete list of seminars is found on www.jenniferdornbush.com.

She is frequently asked to consult with writers and has consulted on shows such as *Beauty & The Beast   *Deception   *Hawaii Five-O   *Leverage   *Prison Break   *Rectify  *Revolution   *Suits   *White Collar   *Conviction

Jennifer hosts a YouTube channel on forensics and crime writing. She has also taught webinars on crime writing through Writer’s Digest; and collaborated with The Writers Store and Script Magazine to produce a video on crime writing for writers. She has taught screenwriting on the high school and university level and mentored writers through the Act One Program, Regent University, and Universita Catholica Milano.

Some of her past speaking clients include The Writers Store, Great American Pitchfest, Crime Writers Weekend, Sisters in Crime, Greenhouse, Act One, Scriptwriters Network, Romance Writers of America, Mystery Writers of America, Story Expo, American Christian Fiction Writers, Highbridge Film Festival, and Universita Cattolica Milano, Italy; Write Canada, and the Pacific Northwest Writers Group.

Additionally. Jennifer’s scripts have placed her on the shortlists of the Fox/Blacklist TV Program, Final Draft Big Break, Nichols, Austin, American Zoetrope, and NBC’s Writers on the Verge. Her half-hour forensic comedy, Home Bodies, received a Humanitas’ New Voices Award. Her feature film, God Bless the Broken Road, with God’s Not Dead director, Harold Cronk released in 2018. She also penned the novel adaptation for Howard Books/Simon & Schuster.

As an award-winning film scribe, TV writer, and novelist, Jennifer delivers story tools that will help you create high stakes, entertaining crime dramas while incorporating current and authentic forensic methods. She has a distinct knowledge of 14 different forensic disciplines and has served as a forensic consultant for TV and film.  She regularly leads seminars on crime writing and forensics for writers in the U.S. and abroad. For more information or to book a speaking engagement, with Jennifer please visit www.jenniferdornbush.com.

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