What's in Your Rearview?

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HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: A  somewhat thoughtful post today. We all remember Sue Grafton, who, incredibly, died almost two years ago now. We learned a lot from her, of course,  and one of the many things that stays with me is how careful she was about the victims in her stories. She made sure they were real people, that their lives mattered, that they weren’t simply pawns for crime fiction writers, objects for them to use to  get the action going.

 Steven Cooper feels just he same way.  As an investigative reporter, he’s seen those victims—what happened after they were killed—close up and raw, and personal.  And he says, they haunt his fiction,  including his brand new third novel,  VALLEY OF SHADOWS.

And what he says will haunt you, too.  You don’t get to choose what’s in your rearview mirror. 

The Shadows of Death

Steven Cooper

 There are murders I’ll never forget. Murders that stay with me, that echo through time, that intersect with the muse and find their way into the consciousness of my writing. There are murders that haunt me, that taunt me.

Did they really find the killer? Did the guilty really go to jail? How do the heartbroken heal?

I’ve long since left my life as a crime reporter, long since left my life as an investigative journalist, and long since left those days of clandestine meetings with sources who often shined a light but sometimes came in disguise to thwart my quest for the truth. When a significant part of your career is spent racing from one crime scene to the next, however, the horrors of humanity never fully secrete from your skin. They linger there at the outermost layer. You wonder why. You wonder how. Life never quite looks the same. You hope the ones who grieve get back up on their feet and learn to love again.

You don’t get to choose what’s in your rearview mirror. I’ll never forget Joan Andres. I never knew Joan Andres. I never knew any of the victims. I only heard their life stories in the past tense. Joan Andres was a 27-year-old bright, up-and-coming lawyer in Springfield, Massachusetts. She was shot dead and brutally stabbed one cold, winter night in her apartment in the Forest Park neighborhood of the city. She had been shot once and stabbed twice, I recall. To a reporter hell-bent on accuracy, the number of bullet holes and stab wounds mattered. But she mattered more. This happened more than twenty years ago. And she still matters to me. In part, her story inspired Deadline, a novel I wrote long ago. I thought it would end there on the page. I waited for catharsis. And it came, but only partly.

Murder is profound. It’s explosive, violent, incomprehensible, and so often random. It’s a punch to the gut. Even in the stillness of a crime scene, it rages. It rages through the darkness. It rages through the light. It rages through the minutia of trial. It rages through the verdict. 

I remember, gavel to gavel, the trial in the Joan Andres case. I remember the defense attorney whispering conspiracies in my ear, trying to deflect his client’s guilt. I’m still, all these year later, not convinced of his client’s guilt. A random guy broke into her apartment and shot her in the face? I don’t know. I wasn’t convinced by the evidence. 

The district attorney, nearly foaming at the mouth, all but threw me out of his office when, in a one-on-one interview, I questioned the evidence. Perhaps I had been too easily influenced by the colorful imagination of the defense attorney. I’ll concede to that. But the DA hammered me. Every ounce of vitriol he had ever suppressed about the media he unleashed on me. Lucky me. His anger made my skin crawl. But both sides felt dirty. I didn’t know whom to believe. But I believed Joan. I believed she was too young to die. I believed she was the only one who knew the truth. I believed her soul would never rest in peace.

Murder, quietly or violently, reminds us of the society we live in. We can shut our eyes but we can’t shut out the evil. Murder has a name. It has lots of names. We can’t forget the names. The names of real people make us seek justice, or light, or redemption. Probably all three.

 Joan Andres was a real person to me because Joan Andres was a real person. So was 13-year-old Danny Croteau. And 24-year-old Lisa Ziegert. And 5-year-old Eric Steven Dostie. And 16-year-old Arnaldo Esteras. The grief of Arnaldo’s mother was palpable as she clung to her son’s casket, her body shuddering, her agonizing cries the only sound in the cathedral. The intimacy of grief and despair I was allowed to witness in the Dostie home followed me to my own home, insidiously lurking in my psyche, and informed me, rather emphatically, that it would never fully leave me.

And it hasn’t. It has informed my writing, all of it. It reminds me to be truthful, even in fiction. It reminds me to be respectful of my characters, even the bad ones. It reminds me that making my characters real people requires treating them like real people.

 For all the shade I throw at TV news, and I throw plenty in my new book, Valley of Shadows, I’m grateful for what journalism taught me about accuracy and authenticity. I’m grateful that, while sometimes harrowing, I took that journey into the darker side of the human condition because often the journey taught me regrettable but unforgettable truths about life. The journey introduced me to real people, real lives, and real suffering and it, thus, made me obligated to those truths, obligated to never, ever fake it in my fiction.

I owe that much to the victims and their loved ones.

HANK: Steve is a dear pal, and a terrific writer, and  I’m interviewing him at New England Mobile Book Fair on September 28—y’all come!  He’s not always this outwardly philosophical—he’s generally hilarious. But I do agree with him-- the job of a news reporter, if you have any heart at all, will eventually break it.

Steve and I both work/worked for local news. And we’re interested—do you still watch it? And writers and readers, do you think about the victims  in the mysteries we all read?

VALLEY OF SHADOWS

A Gus Parker and Alex Mills Novel

   by Steven Cooper

A cop. A psychic. And a dead socialite. Who killed Viveca Canning and where is the Dali masterpiece that hung on the walls of her estate?

So many people had a motive. Phoenix Detective Alex Mills is on the case with the help of his sometimes-psychic buddy Gus Parker. You won’t find another duo like them. And once you hop on the wild ride, you won’t want to get off. 

Who will survive a doomed flight over the Pacific? Who tried to blow up an art gallery? Who saw Viveca Canning as a threat and shot her twice in the head? Those questions hound Gus and Alex as the case unravels. It’s an art caper wrapped in a murder mystery.

 The Valley of the Sun becomes a Valley of Shadows, where everyone has something to hide and the truth lies beneath Phoenix in a labyrinth of tunnels and dungeons. There’s a lot at stake for Gus and Alex. 

With the case swirling all around them, the future of Gus and his rock n’ roll girlfriend hangs in the balance. 

For Alex, it’s a test of family loyalties as a health scare for his wife brings him to the breaking point. 

Cooper’s style is, at once, scorching and wry. He deftly and seamlessly mixes thrills and chills with snark and wit. There’s good and evil, love and despair, compassion, deceit, and danger. The action swerves around twists and turns and collides with a cast of characters you will not soon forget.

 Steven Cooper is a former investigative reporter. His work has earned him multiple Emmy Awards and nominations, as well as a national Edward R. Murrow award, and numerous honors from the Associated Press. He taught for five years in the English department at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida.

Born and raised in Massachusetts, Steven has lived a bit like a nomad, working TV gigs in New England, Arizona and Florida, and following stories around the globe.

 He currently lives in Atlanta. Valley of Shadows is his latest Gus Parker and Alex Mills Novel.

What Happens When He Returns to the Scene of the Crime?

Such a great launch! 

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: There’s nothing more enrapturing than a wonderful book launch—with cheering family and friends and the special joy that comes from knowing you have hit it out of the ballpark with a terrific book.

For his new mystery DESERT REMAINS, the amazing Steven Cooper hosted such a shoulder-to-shoulder launch at Barnes & Noble in Framingham Massachusetts, and an equally wonderful one at New England Mobile Book Fair. We’re colleagues—he’s a journalist, too, and now lives in Atlanta. (As I once did. Small world!) 

Plus, he’s clever and smart and a brilliant writer. And thoughtful, too, as you can see from what happened when he took what he thought was a predictable journey—and it turned into a completely different experience. 

(And see below for a giveaway!)

Returning to the Scene of the Crime

Steven Cooper

Flight 144 glides into Sky Harbor International Airport. And I’m back. Mountains to the left, mountains to the right, and a valley, as flat as a warm tortilla in the middle. Phoenix doesn’t change, but it changes dramatically. New buildings have sprouted like industrial saguaro. New highways loop around the suburban sprawl, and old highways have been extended to bring people home to their increasingly distant subdivisions.

And yet, there is South Mountain, Camelback, Squaw (Piestewa) Peak, and the Estrellas. They have not moved. Not for centuries. They remain stalwart guardians of the valley. I’m grateful for their constancy.

To set a novel, and in my case a series, in Phoenix and its surrounding desert, is to remain fundamentally aware of the constant tug of war between man and nature. 

Between the appetite for development and the preservation of beauty. It can get ugly. As it did when I returned to the scene of the crime. I drove over to a neighborhood that sits on the south side of Camelback Mountain to snap some photos of a shallow cave where I placed one of the murders in Desert Remains, my series debut. It’s an open cave, a small yawn in the mountain, which sits on a low ledge of Camelback. When I lived in Phoenix I would often bring visitors up to the ledge to show them the grand view of the valley.

 Sadly, the cave was often filled with empty beer cans and cigarette butts in the aftermath of teenage partying, but the view was sublime. I say “was” because the view is no more. The cave is no more.

At first, I though I was lost. The roads that climb Camelback meander precariously. I drove up and down, back and forth, and then I realized a house, an expansive, obviously expensive and princely house, had usurped the ledge! It had blocked the cave! I had no access!

 I looked around and recognized what I did not recognize: construction everywhere. New homes crawling up to even higher tiers of Camelback. In fact, a Phoenix friend, hearing my dismay, informed me that not only had the princely home usurped my ledge (my ledge!) it had also annexed the cave for its own audacious use: the owners are now enjoying it as their private wine cellar. (Maybe I should have told them that I murdered someone there). Oh, sure, it will win design awards and be the envy of aficionados everywhere, but no. Just no.

Please don’t build on Camelback. Leave the squatting giant alone.

 Soon you will not be able to recognize the beast for what it is. Let nature run its course. As much as the guardians of the valley are constant, they do in fact change. I acknowledge erosion even when I can’t see it. The wind reshapes the desert every day, but the changes are nuanced and might take several lifetimes to notice.

I don’t think you have to live in a place to write about a place. I do think you have to be familiar and return to the scene of the crime often enough to make sure your caves aren’t wine cellars. 

The landscape matters. 

In Phoenix it conjures up mystery and intrigue with so many places for danger to lurk—behind those muscular mountains, beneath those craggy ridgelines, in the cradle of the valley. If that’s not absorbing enough, watch how the scenery changes from hour to hour as the sun and the shadows mingle with the topography.

The desert is like a muse to me, particularly for the current series I’m writing. In fact, I only recently discovered, in the weeks since Desert Remains was published, that my title had a hidden meaning, hidden even to me until now: Once you live in the desert, the desert remains with you. I guess you could call it a retroactive epiphany.

Here’s hoping nature wins the war, and that the desert remains.

HANK: Here’s where I usually say something to encourage conversation. I bet, today, I don’t have to.  You all take it from here.

And a copy of DESERT REMAINS to one very lucky commenter!

 Steven Cooper's latest novel, Desert Remains, is the launch of a new crime series published by Seventh Street Books. 

A former investigative reporter, Steven has received multiple Emmy awards and nominations, a national Edward R. Murrow Award, and many honors from the Associated Press. He taught writing at Rollins College (Winter Park, FL) from 2007 to 2012. He'll be teaching at Kennesaw State University (Kennesaw, GA) in 2018.

Born and raised in Massachusetts, Steven has lived a bit like a nomad, working TV gigs in New England, Arizona and Florida, and following stories around the globe. He currently lives in Atlanta where, when not writing, he spends most of his time in traffic.

Desert Remains is his fourth novel.

In a world of Long Island mediums, “dudes who cross over,” and horoscopes that auto-Tweet, Gus Parker is the real deal. His visions might be murky, but they mean something. That’s why Detective Alex Mills needs his help. Someone is filling the desert caves around Phoenix with bodies—a madman who, in a taunting ritual, is leaving behind a record of his crimes etched into the stone.

Set in the rugged, majestic landscape of the Valley of the Sun, Desert Remains leads Mills and Parker into the mystical world of petroglyphs—crude drawings from an ancient civilization that seem to have inspired the dark, haunted mind of a serial killer.

When Parker sees the crime scenes, he sees visions of a house on fire and a screaming child.  With no leads and no suspects, Mills sees a case spinning out of control. City leaders want the case solved yesterday, and another detective wants to elbow Mills out of the way. As the body count rises, Gus Parker struggles to interpret his psychic messages, knowing that the killer is one step ahead, knowing that in this vast desert, the next murder could happen anywhere. Mills suspects that with every news crew, every bleeding headline, and every dead end, he is one step closer to reassignment. It doesn’t help that a family crisis almost pushes him to the breaking point. Nor does it help that Parker, who’s always been unlucky in love, finds himself the prey of a lovelorn stalker who is Fifty Shades of Crazy.

Desert Remains swerves past the gloriously scenic, ricochets off the darkly absurd, and hurls Gus Parker and Alex Mills into a trap they may very well not survive.