origins

Well, here we are.  In my last Ask the Author, I spoke briefly about that it was my interest in the criminal justice system that led me to wanting to write crime novels when that career path closed on me.  I wanted to talk a bit about what led me to that path.

That was watching Crime Dramas.  (As a side note, I also really enjoyed picking out clues and doing research and putting these together to figure out what happened or what is going on.  This will become relevant later.)

When I was a kid, my school would have a winter break in February.  Every winter break my mom and I would spend with my grandparents and I always remember them watching the shows Jag and Cold Case.

I don’t think it really interested me too much at that time, mostly because I only watched those shows one week out of the entire year.  At that age (I was 11 or so at the time) it was totally uncool to like the same shows as grandma and grandpa.

That changed in 2005 when I found the show Bones.  I was immediately hooked.  It was during season one when I became a “crime junkie” and several other shows quickly followed.  As much as I loved these shows, at that point I wasn’t even thinking about what I might want to do for a career.

In season 2 of Bones, 2006, we were introduced to the killer “The Gravedigger” after they murdered two boys.  During the course of investigating the case, the killer kidnapped and buried alive two of the scientists working on the case.  The scientists were saved, but they did not find who killed the boys and kidnapped the scientists.  Which didn’t seem so strange, I mean not every case is solvable.

But then this storyline was revisited in season 4, 2009. To those of you who are watching Bones currently for the first time and haven’t made it to this episode (Hero in the Hold), skip this paragraph.  Well, this time the FBI agent was kidnapped by The Gravedigger.  But by the end we had the identity of the killer, Heather Taffet.  And let me tell you I was FURIOUS.  I mean first of all she was kinda tiny and you want to tell me she both managed to pick up two adult scientists and managed to bury a car in a really deep pit.  Not even to mention in this episode she picked up a 300-pound (estimated by one of the characters) FBI agent, carried him out of his third-floor window ON HER OWN with BROKEN RIBS.  I was so annoyed with how little that made sense.  I completely fail to understand how the writers didn’t realize that issue.

Now I realize that is a fictional crime, but that is my point of why it is so bad.  I mean you have all the important facts (and the details that should be considered important.  You also have the suspects in front of you and can design the case knowing who the criminal is.  With real crimes you don’t have the answers before you begin, but they had all the answers and still couldn’t satisfactorily close the case.

Well after bitching about that for over a week, and I am still not quite sure how it worked its way around to talking about real crime one of my parents suggested to me that I’d probably like working in the criminal justice field.

And well to make a long story slightly shorter, that idea held and so I eventually went to college in 2010 for a criminal justice degree.  And I went back to my roots and did my master’s thesis on crime dramas.