@SuzanneChazin: "I made it up, I swear"

HALLIE EPHRON: Suzanne Chazin writes a mystery series featuring Jimmy Vega, a flawed and complex but deeply humane cop navigating the veiled world of the undocumented in upstate New York. Her fans includes Lee Child, who says Vega "hits the heart, not just the pulse." 

Her new book, A PLACE IN THE WIND, is scary because she wrote it more than a year ago and the story has turned out to be more than a little prescient. 

SUZANNE CHAZIN: A funny thing happened on the way to the publication of my latest novel. The world changed. 

This isn't the first time this has happened to me. I published my first novel, a thriller about the New York City Fire Department, in February 2001—seven months before the Twin Towers fell.
In 2014, I published the first in a series of mystery novels about a suburban New York cop named Jimmy Vega whose work often takes him into the undocumented immigrant community. This was not a hot-button issue when my first book came out.

What a difference a few years makes.

By the time I began my fourth book, it was the spring of 2016. Donald Trump was picking up voters with his hard line rhetoric on illegal immigration. He was a dark horse back then. Nobody—myself included—thought he'd win. But even so, it was clear he'd struck a chord. Overnight it seemed, more and more people across the United States were voicing strong sentiments against immigrants, particularly the undocumented. 

I found myself intrigued by a singular question: what would happen if I introduced a man with Donald Trump's views into Jimmy Vega's little fictional upstate New York town of Lake Holly? It seemed fantastical to consider back in the spring of 2016. And even more fantastical to imagine what the outcome might be, especially given that my book wouldn't be in the stores until October 2017.

What sort of crime, I asked myself, would spark such a divide?

I settled on a teenager's disappearance. I invented a blond-haired, blue-eyed girl from a prominent family who walks out of a community center one night after tutoring English to immigrants—and vanishes. Jimmy Vega's girlfriend runs the center. A lot of her clients are undocumented.

Into this divide, I threw a local politician named Mike Carp, with strong anti-immigrant views, and a teenager named Wil Martinez, a DACA recipient fearful of losing his temporary legal status (who knew this could turn into a real fear?) Then I got Jimmy in trouble and had him demoted to Carp's driver.

Fiction is always a little larger-than-life. Heroes are more heroic. Villains, more villainous. The consequences of every action, more extreme. So of course, I imagined the worst. Marches that turned violent. Immigrants afraid to gather for fear they might be assaulted or deported. Young people with DACA who feared for their futures.

I pictured Carp as a man who uses his political office to cut personal business deals. A man who twists the truth and then defends its lack of accuracy. "Not every fact is a truth," he tells Vega. "And not every truth is a fact." Knowing Vega is a musician, Carp uses a musical score as an analogy. "Notes and beats—those are facts. But how you play them? That's truth."

As I was making up these scenarios over a year ago (really, I was), I had one overarching fear: that everything I was writing about would feel dated and irrelevant by the time the book came out. Donald Trump would be back on television, firing people on prime time. Readers would find my imagined scenarios over-the-top. Surely, no one behaves like this in real life.

I never feared the thing I should have: that it all would become too real. 

HALLIE: We won't blame you, Suzanne, but I for one can think of some other scenarios that I wish had turned out to be true. 

So what about incorporating current events and politics into a novel? What are the risks?

Bio: Suzanne Chazin is an award-winning novelist and author of seven mysteries, including her fourth and newest Jimmy Vega, "A Place in the Wind" (Oct. 2017). Her novels have received praise from USA Today, People Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and such authors as Lee Child, Hallie Ephron, Robert Dugoni, Jeffrey Deaver, and William Kent Krueger. Suzanne's first Jimmy Vega mystery, "Land of Careful Shadows," was chosen as one of the five best genre mysteries of the year by the American Library Association. Her third Jimmy Vega, "No Witness but the Moon," was named one of the ten best books of the year by the New Jersey Star-Ledger. Visit Suzanne on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/suzannechazinauthor/ or at www.suzannechazin.com 

Everyone needs a bad guy!

JAN: I admit that I was lured in at first. Even though I wasn't a fan of Donald Trump, I gave the first couple of seasons of The Apprentice a shot and liked it. Not only did I gain respect for the Donald, I also learned some interesting marketing lessons.

It might have been my third season of The Apprentice when I realized that Omarosa, the villain, was being coached to say nasty things. And that the director had to be encouraging all the other contestants to hate her. And after that, I saw it in every reality show, from America's Top Model (viewed with my daughter against my will) to Joe Millionaire to Project Runway. It didn't matter what contestants were competing for, the whole point was to see them break bad. They became catty. And underhanded. And there was always someone, like Omarosa, who was the worst.

According to Psyblog, a blog that collects research about how our minds work, (www.spring.org.uk) reality shows make good use of narcissists in the cast. Apparently, we just can't help being drawn to a narcissist's self-absorbed and arrogant behavior. They tend to be confidant, fashionable and witty We are fascinated by their entitled behavior.

At first.

Quickly we come to despise them. Contestants and TV viewers alike. And we want to see them "knocked down," and get whats coming to them. It all makes for great TV.

So do you think bad behavior is the appeal of Reality Shows? And if so, why? Are these people just strangely charming, or do they somehow make us feel better about ourselves??

RHYS: An insider told me that they are scripted just like any TV drama. Lines are cut and used out of context to hint at fights that never happened. Look at The Bachelor or Bachelorette when the most likely candidate for his heart suddenly has to go away or lose her job. Yeah, right. The only difference between TV drama and reality shows is that the latter are playing with pe

ople's lives and psyches. I suppose if they pick narcissists and unpleasant people then they deserve what happens to them. Actually I'm a fan of The Amazing Race, which is often won by nice and genuine people, and, I have to confess, Project Runway which is a fascinating insight into the creative process.

I think we watch, hoping that the unpleasant people get what they deserve. What I find fascinati

ng is that The Truman Show foreshadowed exactly what is happening in real life.

RO: I really do need to see The Truman Show again..this is the third time it's come up in a week. I was on St. John last week and stayed at a resort which had kayaks for guests, but only if they stayed in the small bay right near the hotel. We'd just come back from 5 days of kayaking all over the BVI and thought it was ridiculous to have to stay in one small area as if it was the kiddie pool. We watched one guy take a kayak out and ..it was like the The Truman Show..it was as if there was an invisible screen making him return to shore. Too funny. But I digress.

About a million years ago there was something called The Louds: An American Family on public television. I barely remember it..will have to google, but it followed this middle class family and I think the daughter wanted to be a dancer..and it turned out that the son

was gay, and that was a big thing in the 70's, and then the couple split up. I have not felt the need to watch another reality show since then.

HANK: Oh, I rmember the Louds. Here's the thing about reality TV. It's NOT live. So some producer has taken hours and hours of video, and edited it into one hour. Do you know how easy it is to make that one hour into anything you wnat? And also--the producers know the end result. So they put the puzzle pieces of the show together to make the most interesting or conflict-ridden 45 minutes leading up to the end. The end that they KNOW will happen. See? So we're being completely manipulated along the way.

That said (anyone see that episode of ..was it Curb?) that's the reason I think its fun to watch s

ome of these shows. Rhys, yes, I love Amazing Race (it's almost--inspirational, and you can pretend it's educational) and I love Project Runway (so creative! and I love fashion, and I'm hyper-competitive anyway).

But what makes it the most fun is that the editors know how the shows turn out.

ROBERTA: Hank, that's such an interesting description of how the shows are made. Doesn't it sound something like what we do as we're writing novels? (I mean the most conflict we can imagine...)

I watch NO reality TV. I may be the only one in America. We were watching the Olympics last night and kept seeing the ad for Jerry Seinfeld's upcoming show, in which TV stars intervene in couples' fights. How bizarre is that?? At least Dr. Phil has a little bit of training in the field:)

HALLIE: Oh, I remember the Louds. That was before they figured out how to pare down to the conflict. And of course there were Andy Warhol movies like "Sleep" where his camera watches

some poet sleep for 6 hours.

Like Rhys, I watch is Project Runway and I am completely addicted to it. And my daughter got me hooked on So You Think You Can Dance.

JAN: Lannie and I watched So you "Think you Can Dance," which was "Vous croyez vous pouvez danser" in Aix en Provence last summer because it was the only thing we could follow in French. (They dubbed over the English but competition is the same in any language). My French skills weren't strong enough to pick up any inter-contestant sniping. But I also couldn't always figure out why one contestant was so much better than the other.