The Blood Turns to Ink: How Real Crimes Influenced My Fiction

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:  Do all crime fiction readers devour the newspaper? (I still read three a day, and on paper!) Every crime story I see, I think—is that a plot for me? And often, I decide I could never use them, because no one would believe them.  Real life is infinitely surprising, terrifying,  coincidental, unusual, unique. Crushingly sad.

And—haunting. When we least expect it.  What a riveting backstory to day—from the incredibly talented Stephanie Gayle.

 How Real Crimes Influenced My Fiction

By Stephanie Gayle

I’m from a small town. East Bridgewater, Massachusetts. Population: almost 11,000 when I last lived there. That was 1993, the year I graduated high school. A half-year earlier Kent “Rusty” Taber Jr. was stabbed to death in my small town. He lived in an apartment over the funeral home where he worked part-time as an embalmer. It was very big news. People weren’t stabbed to death in my small town. And the funeral home detail? Made it even spookier. Twenty years after that brutal killing, I wrote my first mystery novel, Idyll Threats. And it wasn’t until I was amidst my copyedits that I realized how much Mr. Taber’s murder had influenced my thinking about policing and murder investigations in small towns.

“When are we calling the Staties?” is something that Chief of Police, Thomas Lynch, hears constantly during the murder investigation I created in Idyll Threats. The locals in his small town don’t think his police force with its one and a half detectives, is capable of catching a killer. This is the exact refrain I heard from locals (including my family) during the search for Kent Taber’s killer. “When will the staties be called?” And eventually the staties were contacted to help, though they didn’t crack the case.

Kent Taber was gay. When this became known, it was assumed that fact that must’ve be key to his killing. To be gay was to be other. My protagonist, Thomas Lynch, is gay. And he’s keeping that fact a secret. Because he thinks his homophobic cops can’t handle the truth. This leads him to withhold crucial evidence pertaining to the murder, evidence that threatens to out him. How much did I internalize from Ken Taber’s murder, from small town talk and hateful speech? Impossible to say. But I’m sure it influenced how Thomas Lynch sees his community. And why I bristle when people say, “Oh, it would’ve been no big deal for him to be out.” I recall what a big deal it was, in 1992, to know a man was gay.  I set my novel in 1997. The same year Ellen DeGeneres made headlines for telling the world, “I’m Gay.”

My fictional crime is more easily resolved than the true-life crime that inspired it. By book’s end the killer in Idyll Threats is identified and arrested. Kent Taber’s murder remained unsolved until seventeen years later when Christopher Colucci was indicted for the crime. Colucci had worked with Taber. Someone reported that Colucci reacted badly to an advance made by Taber.  Five years after the murder, Colucci was involved in a car accident that left him paralyzed. He was deemed incompetent to stand trial due to the mental debilitation that resulted from the accident.

I’d been gone from my hometown so long, the news didn’t reach me. I thought Kent Taber’s killer was still at large. It wasn’t until after I’d finished my novel that I thought to look up the case. It was then that I learned of Colucci’s arrest.  And of Mr. Taber’s family’s disappointment at not having Mr. Colucci stand trial for his terrible crime. It made me grateful for my fictional world, where I can dispense justice in a way the real world sometimes cannot.

It took time for me to realize how pivotal one small town murder was in shaping how I thought about crime. I was quicker to realize that my second book, which features Chief Lynch investigating a kidnapping of a small boy, also owes a debt to history. The second biggest crime sensation of my life? The kidnapping and murder of a small boy from a nearby town. I can still see the yellow ribbons tied round the trees, the ribbons that tattered and faded after the boy had been found and buried.

Violent crimes live on in our emotions, our thoughts, and memories. Sometimes more than we realize. And for me, the blood turns to ink and spills out, many years after the original crime.

HANK:  Yes, Stephanie, so true... we can “dispense justice in a way the real world sometimes cannot.”  And  yet we devour the truth, since it’s a path to understanding.

So, Reds and readers, what do you think? And do you still read newspapers? How? Electronically, or on paper?  

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StephanieGayle’s mystery, Idyll Threats, earned a starred review from Booklist. Her first novel, My Summer of Southern Discomfort, was chosen as one of Redbook’s Top Ten Summer Reads. Her short fiction and non-fiction have appeared in Kenyon Review Online, The Potomac Review, Punchnel’s, and other publications. She’s twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She co-founded the popular Boston reading series, Craft on Draft. She tweets under @stephoflegends.

 Idyll Threats

In the summer of 1997, Thomas Lynch arrives as the new chief of police in Idyll, Connecticut—a town where serious crimes can be counted on one hand. So no one is prepared when Cecilia North is found murdered on a golf course. By chance, Chief Lynch met her mere hours before she was killed. With that lead, the case should be a slam dunk. But there’s a problem. If Lynch tells his detectives about meeting the victim, he’ll reveal his greatest secret—he’s gay.

Headlines to Die For

HALLIE EPHRON: A few months ago I had the great pleasure of meeting Deb Pines at an MWA chapter meeting in New York that she'd organized. She's working on a mystery, of course, but what floored me is her day (actually, night) job: she writes headlines for the New York Post, a paper famous for its headlines.

After the JetBlue pilot had a meltdown in midair, her headline:
"THIS IS YOUR CAPTAIN FREAKING"

Is that a great headline or what??

Deb, how did you come up with that headline? Did you sit in a cubicle and experience a visitation from Captain Kirk? Or is it a group process?

DEB PINES: At The Post, my team, the copy desk, doesn’t write the screaming Page 1 headline – the wood – every day. When the top editors are stuck, they come over and say something like, “Why don’t we run it by Barry’s boys?” That means my seven male colleagues (on most nights) and me.

Sometimes, the wood is a collaborative brainstorming effort with everyone calling out suggestions. Often – probably due to girly reticence – I submit my ideas on paper.

We all re-use old words or headlines (short ones that fit).  Or we build on prior headlines or concepts. Or, in rare cases, we come up with something new and original. I owe part of my “THIS IS YOUR CAPTAIN FREAKING” to an earlier wood written by a now-deceased colleague, Joe Cunningham.  When a JetBlue steward in 2010 ranted at passengers then fled the plane, beer in hand, out an emergency chute, Joe wrote, “FREAKING FLYER.” I took the “FREAKING” from him and went from there.

HALLIE: Day in the life... what time do you go to work, are you in a big noisy newsroom, and how many headlines do you have to come up with in a given night?

DEB: I work in a big old-school noisy newsroom on the tenth floor of a modern Midtown Manhattan skyscraper.  My shift is from 3:30 p.m. to 10 p.m.  I’d like to say all I do is write headlines.  But, alas, my main functions are far less sexy.  I chop stories to fit the space they’re assigned to.  And, in what’s often a mad rush, I try to catch typos, inconsistencies, misspellings and other mistakes.

Each night, I write between three and fifteen headlines. The number depends on the size of  – the next day’s paper, available staff and stories assigned to me.

I can do many little postage-stamp-sized stories with one-word or two-word headlines like: Luftwaffler (when a Holocaust-denier changed his tune), Mazel Tough (when a family, denied a bar mitvah at the Plaza Hotel due to renovations, lost a lawsuit against the Plaza) and Eyeful Tower (about a different hotel that got cheers and jeers for allegedly encouraging guests to stand naked or have sex in front of curtainless floor-to-ceiling windows).

HALLIE: I inadvertently stayed in that hotel! I wondered why the room was so reasonable.

How on earth did you end up with this job?

DEB: I’m a former newspaper reporter. When I got bitten by the mystery-writing bug, I wanted a “day job” that gave me time and energy to write fiction, too.

My first “day job,” writing entries for a course-catalog from home, turned out to be deadly dull and lonely. My second “day job,” copy-editing a hip-hop magazine (where I changed gangsters to gangstas, players to playas, motherfuckers to muthafuckas, and so on) ended in me being fired.

Missing the camaraderie and adrenaline rush of a newsroom, I applied for copy-editing jobs at every New York newspaper. I got a try-out at The Post that led to the job that I’ve enjoyed since.

HALLIE: Headlines and short, attention grabbing, and pithy. Novels are 80,000 words long. Is there any cross-over in terms of what it takes to get it done?

DEB: Some similarities exist between mystery-writing, headline-writing and any kind of writing. Each has its own rules as specific as those required of writing loftier stuff like, say, a sonnet in iambic pentameter.

All require a consistent voice. For my mystery, I’m aiming to speak in my own authentic voice.  For my headlines, I’m aiming to channel the voice of some leering old right-wing New York guy (who uses words like perv, fiend and thug and loves cheesecake photos of hot models and celebs).

HALLIE: You know, that wouldn't be a bad voice to channel for a mystery novel.

DEB: For both, I try to withhold something – saving a punchline.  For instance, when a Post columnist denounced greedy unions, I headlined it: “Unions sing same old song: Me, me, me, me.”

HALLIE: Last but not least, please tell us about the novel you're writing. Is it about the news business?

DEB: I’ve just finished the first draft of my novel, tentatively called “All I Really Needed to Know I Learned from the O.J. Trial, ‘Law & Order’ and the New York Post: A Mimi Goldman Murder Mystery.”

HALLIE: Laughing! That will take the "longest book title ever" award. And Mimi is...??

DEB: Mimi Goldman, is – no surprise – a tabloid copy editor.  A younger, braver and prettier version of myself, Mimi thinks it would be a lark to solve her own “Law & Order”-type murder mystery.  But, when a neighbor dies and she gets the chance, her efforts – at times comical, at times harrowing – turn into life-or-death struggle. Mimi could end one of two ways – that, at my other job, I might sum up as:

Back at The Post
or she’s toast!

HALLIE: Well, we wish you great success with your novel -- it sounds wonderful. And anyone can tell,  you definitely have a "voice." We can say we knew you when...

Deb will be checking in today, so please chime in. (Any books that need catchy titles? I bet she'd be great at it.) And I'll bet she could have come up with a much snappier headline than I did.