Legal/Procedural
My First Thriller: Patricia Cornwell
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“There was no call for him to be as unkind as he was,” says famed author Patricia Cornwell, who single handedly created the forensic science crime fiction genre. Robert Merritt, the theater and arts critic for the Richmond Times-Dispatch in 1989, trashed his fellow Richmonder’s first crime novel, Postmortem, calling her protagonist, Medical Examiner Dr….
Fictional Versus Real Settings: A Writer’s Dilemma
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Every story has to start somewhere. And be somewhere. Take Dennis Lehane’s 2003 novel, Mystic River. Its setting is so pivotal to the plot that you can find it right there in the title. As it happens, Mystic River is a real river in Massachusetts, coursing seven miles through the towns of Arlington, Somerville, Everett,…
‘UNSUB’ Is Mostly Forgotten, But It Launched a New Era of Crime Procedurals
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Back when I was a newspaper reporter, I was hanging around our local prosecutor’s office when an investigator for the prosecutor was fondly recalling his days as a police officer and how cops would interrogate someone by holding their head underwater in the toilet in a police holding cell. I thought of that moment when…
Lee Goldberg on Westerns, Crime Novels, and Writing A Genre Mash-Up
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I’ve always loved crime novels and westerns. I’ve written dozens of crime novels, but not any westerns. Or so I thought. A few years ago, at a book signing event for one of my “Eve Ronin” series of police procedurals, a reader told me I was her favorite western author, which I thought was a…
A Childhood Full of Love and Death: On Growing Up With a Father in Forensics
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It wasn’t a surprise to those who knew me as a child that when I start telling stories for a living, they were centered around the forensic and crime investigation world. I started my forensic training almost at birth. My father was a medical examiner for three counties in north Michigan and the coroner’s office…
Michele Campbell Leans into the Truth
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Michele Campbell worked at a prominent Manhattan law firm before spending eight years fighting crime as a federal prosecutor in New York City. She launched her fiction career in 2005, writing as Michele Martinez, with the Melanie Vargas legal thriller series. Then in 2017 she pivoted, boldly shifting into a new subgenre and, perhaps even…
Why James Patterson and Mike Lupica Came Together to Write a Thriller
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For such a hotshot lawyer who’s never lost a court case, you’re a lot younger than anyone would expect. And it’s your win/loss record, not your good looks, that’s wooed Rob Jacobson—publishing and real estate heir—to hire you. He’s accused of killing three and needs you to get him off on a murder charge. This…
10 Big Pharma Conspiracy Thrillers
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Big Pharma is an industry that touches most everyone in some way. We have connection to it on a personal level as individuals and, even more importantly to many, our families. It touches us whether we want it to or not. The first draft of The Deadly Deal was written when I worked in an…
Crime Novels Featuring Interpreters, Transcribers, and Other Invisible Law Enforcement Professionals
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It’s the detectives, the private investigators and the lawyers who are usually front-and-center in crime fiction, but there are scores of professionals working in the criminal justice system to whom most of us give little thought. There are archivists who manage police records, people who clean police stations, who service their cars, and IT specialists…