Research 101 by Allison Brennan

LUCY BURDETTE: I'm delighted to have Allison Brennan back as our guest today--she's got some wonderful stories about the research she does for her books. This post has me yearning for another citizens police academy...Welcome Allison!

ALLISON BRENNAN: I love my job.

I can work in my pajamas.

I can take a break in the middle of the day to go for a walk, or take the kids on a field trip, or go to a ball game. I just make up the writing time late at night.

I love writing, and my job is 90% writing. It doesn’t get much better than that … well, sometimes it does. Like the annual Regional SWAT Training put on by Sacramento FBI.

For me, research is not only important, it’s an essential part of writing. I want to get the details right. At the minimum, I need to understand what I’m writing about—not just the technical details, but the people. Every detail, personality, backstory are part of the “big picture” story.

I didn’t do much, if any, hands on research while writing my first seven books. Most of the details came from my love affair with true crime books and television shows; from my avid reading background and talking to a few people in the know—like a friend of mine who’s a retired cop. It wasn’t until I was a New York Times bestselling author that I started taking research seriously … and I’m glad I did.

My research journey landed me in the FBI Citizens Academy in 2008 where I was lucky enough to meet a variety of law enforcement types in all areas of the business, from analysts to special agents to special agents in charge to the assistant US attorney for my region. I’m invited to quarterly briefings about contemporary topics in law enforcement — such as a presentation by the lead agent in charge of the Unabomber investigation. This case was particularly interesting because I worked in the California State Capitol at the time when Theodore Kaczynski killed a lobbyist up the street.

How I got into the Citizens Academy is kind of a funny story. I had written my eighth book, TEMPTING EVIL, and the copyeditor had a couple of questions I didn’t have answers to. I contacted my local FBI media resource officer and, after I went through a background check and phone interview with national headquarters, he was authorized to speak to me. In my story, my FBI agent character was pursuing a fugitive who’d escaped during an earthquake in San Quentin (California) to Montana. My question didn’t have anything to do with that – it was more technical. But immediately, my FBI contact said, “He wouldn’t.”

I learned that if my FBI agent from Sacramento had learned the whereabouts of a fugitive, he would contact the local FBI office to follow-up – he wouldn’t pursue the fugitive himself. (File this under: Things I Didn’t Know I Didn’t Know.) Yikes! My book was done. I was only going over copyedits. I began to panic because Mitch was an important character and I couldn’t just change him into another person.

Do I asked, “What if he went after the guy anyway? Against orders?”

My contact essentially said, anything. Nothing might happen. Or he’d be reprimanded. Or he’d be sent up for discipline to the Office of Professional Responsibility. Or he could be fired. Nothing? To termination? I had a big canvas to play with. As long as I kept to the reality that an FBI agent would not normally be sent to track a fugitive cross-country, I could do anything I want. And it actually worked so much better for the trilogy because in the last book, Mitch is pulled from the case and reprimanded and that created far more conflict organic to the story and the characters – because he did in TEMPTING EVIL what he felt was right. And I only had to add a brief scene in the copyedits.

The Citizens Academy opened up many other doors for me, including two trips to Quantico which were invaluable in helping me write two books set at the FBI Academy. I was able to interview a new agent in Sacramento who helped me understand what it was like being an agent-in-training now … not ten or twenty years ago.

But my favorite … FAVORITE … research trips involve role playing with SWAT.

I’m often asked what I do at these training events. Role players are either bad guys, hostages, or injured victims (during medical/triage drills.) We are live bodies who are given a role in a variety of scenarios to help SWAT teams work together to develop the mental muscle necessary to deal with high-stress situations. The same team will go through a drill multiple times, often with slight variations so they never know exactly what they’ll encounter. Having people to play the parts makes the drills more realistic, as they have to deal with us as well as take down the bad guy.

I’ve done many of these all-day training drills—as a role player and as an observer—and they’re all a little different. They use simunition (paint bullets, essentially) which hurt, but aren’t deadly. Still, they can cause serious injury to sensitive parts of the body, which is why we role players wear protective head gear.

Drills may involve hostage negotiation, serving warrants, and active shooter scenarios. These can be the most fun—and scary!—because a SWAT team will come in to deal with the wounded, the witnesses, and try to find and stop the bad guy. They have to quickly separate the threat, handle triage, and secure the scene. This can happen fast, and intel is the single most important factor in knowing where the bad guy(s) are hiding. I have a great respect and admiration of law enforcement who risk their lives to save others, and have a better understanding of how fast these situations can occur—and how fast they can escalate.

I’ve watched live ammo drills, which are as intense and suspenseful as any movie. I’ve played the part of a non-ambulatory victim, a hostage, and one of my most fun roles — the wife of a wanted fugitive. We ran through this drill in a variety of ways to help train agents. For example, they will first drill on gaining access to the house when they didn’t have a warrant. I, the wife, was first told to make it easy—let them come in and arrest my no-good husband. Then I was told to make them work for it—they had to convince me to open the door. I was told to be “real” – think the COPS show – and swear at them, push all their buttons, be belligerent. Then the final drill they had a warrant and had to break down the door and detain me and search for my fugitive husband. I was told be become part of the “problem” and get in their face—but unarmed. They had to deal with me bitching and screaming at them while also knowing there could be weapons in the house as well as a violent felon.

I learned that handcuffs are NOT fun. When SWAT really gets into the drills, they will cuff, search, and secure — and make sure I’m down on my knees or prone and not moving. The training teams don’t always know what the supervisors are looking for in the drills. Once a team was criticized for not searching one of us who had been told to hide a weapon under our shirt, as part of the drill.

I have a lot of respect for law enforcement, especially the guys in the trenches. My ride-a-long with a Sacramento County Deputy Sheriff reminded me that they go into every situation not knowing what they’re going to face; few people are happy to see them; they have people swearing at them and flipping them off for no reason except that they are cops. My deputy said once he went to a call and a five year old kid answered the door, looked up at him, and said, “I hate cops.”

Well, I don’t. The stress and pressure that they’re under while trying to protect and serve is intense, and they’re required to do more with less resources and less officers in an era where every call could end in violence. Where cops are getting ambushed simply because they are wearing a uniform.

For me, as a writer, the best part of these scenarios is not the actual drill — it’s what happens after the drill. When the team goes through what they did and why, step by step. I get to listen and absorb how these men (and a few women) process a scene, how they communicate and trust each other, what they’re thinking and why they do what they do. They share experiences with all the collected teams (all over northern California) that they’ve had in real life scenarios. They learn from their mistakes (another important part of the drills) and because of the time they spend training, they are more effective on the street when we really need them.

One of the drills we did last time involved an officer down situation — the first officer through the door was shot and incapacitated, and the team has to handle the man down while there were also hostages and an active shooter.  It was probably the most intense drill of the day, but one where I learned the most.

While these drills and research trips are fun for me on the one hand, they are also very serious for those who participate. The retired SWAT leader of Sacramento FBI (who’s a big fan of my books—just saying!) had in his email signature line, “Failure to train means training to fail.” He took his role seriously, like most of these men and women do.

I take what I learn in these drills—mostly about the people I get to meet who all have their own stories and experiences and backstories—to help create believable stories for my own fictional characters. To me, that’s the best part of research—the human factor.

But as a writer, the most important part of the story is that I get it right (and believe me, sometimes I have gotten it very, very wrong ...) while making my research “disappear” in the story. I never want the research to “show” on the page, so to speak. I want my reader to be immersed in the story so deeply that the research I’ve done is simply part of the story and doesn’t stand out. I’m not an expert on anything ... my job is to entertain. And if the research points stand out and are not organic to the story, then I have failed.

What authors do you think have successfully incorporated their research? Have you ever cringed when you saw something that you are an expert about but the writer got it all wrong? 

New York Times bestselling author Allison Brennan has two books out this summer, TWO TO DIE FOR and SHATTERED. You can read more and follow her here:

facebook: http://facebook.com/AllisonBrennan

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Lisa Black--The Joys of Research

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I love research nerds--maybe because I am one... And when I find another author who really and truly believes that research is a joy, I know I've found a kindred soul. But Lisa Black is an honest-to-goodness certified research nerd--she's a forensic scientist who writes novels with characters who are forensic scientists. The best of both worlds, I say. Not to mention that she is a gripping story teller who puts all that research to good use.  Here's Lisa on what else but--The Joys of Research!

LISA BLACK: The surest argument against the idea that the NSA is actually reading all our emails is the fact that they have not yet shown up at my door. I write murder mysteries for a—well, not for a living certainly, but with great regularity. Among the topics I have researched online are: decapitation as method of murder, how to mix up plastic explosives in your garage, the water supply of New York City, crystal meth recipes, the system used to organize and track international shipping containers, and the location of every nuclear power plant in the United States. No one seems to have noticed. 

Yet.

Research can be the most fun part of writing, because you get to sit around reading books and tell yourself that you’re doing important, hard work. (Plus one looks quite intellectual holding a copy of Reflections on the Financial Crisis on the subway.) Sometimes it can be frustrating—I discovered, for instance, that decapitation as a method of murder is so rare outside a political realm that there simply isn’t any research on it. And in my current book, That Darkness, I found that while a truly objective vigilante such as Charles Bronson portrayed has been quite popular on the screen, they don’t actually exist in real life.

But you run across the most interesting tidbits in the annals of history. 

In Trail of Blood I researched life during the Depression. You know how in every group of years there is some trendy food that the hip people in the know are eating? Like in the 1980s it was sushi, and today it’s all these unusual grains like quinoa. In the mid-1930s it was…spaghetti. A recent import that used—scandalously—spices, it became the daring new thing. Young couples threw spaghetti parties..,much as around the time I got married everyone was making buffalo chicken wings. (There was only one recipe: 50% melted butter, 50% Red Hot. Still the best IMHO.) I imagine pasta also had the advantage of being relatively inexpensive, an important factor during the Depression. I did work this into the story, as one more desire of James Miller’s wife who felt frustrated with her husband for not taking the payoffs like the other cops. 

I also learned that education became mandatory in the U.S. partly because of experiences in the first World War. The military draft couldn’t provide enough officer candidates from its rolls--not enough young men knew how to read and write. But citizens debated mandatory education since it would also apply to children who didn’t really need it, such as minorities and, you know, girls. 

In Defensive Wounds, I discovered that those plastic cards with the magnetic strips actually come in two varieties: high density, which store information, such as your credit cards and driver’s license, and low density, which are made for simpler uses such hotel room doors. I could work that into the book, but not, alas, the story of how a man named Forest Parry invented the cards. He had the cards, he had the magnetic strip, but he couldn’t get one to stick to the other. He came home one day where his wife, like so many wives in the early 1960s, ironed clothes. She asked what had him looking so frustrated so he handed her the card and the strip. She used the iron to stick them together and voila, a technology was born. 

In my self-published e-book The Prague Project, I discovered a million fascinating facts about WWII, the secret tank factory inside a mountain, my ancestral home of Bohemia, and the tunnels under the city of Prague. But I also found that in 1960 the U.S. Army had a network of tunnels under a Greenland ice cap to house nuclear reactors and a missile complex. The idea made sense—the missiles would be close to Russia and invisible from the air, and if the reactors suffered a meltdown, well, they’d be a safe distance from any general population. [Similar to a nuclear submarine. The idea of a disaster in a populated area is why a nuclear-powered plane, pardon the pun, never got off the ground.] However glaciers in the area turned out to be moving at a not-so-glacial pace and the facilities really were very very cold, so the camp was abandoned after five years and nearly eight million dollars. 

I couldn’t work that into the book, but I did get in the meaning of ‘defenestration’—to kill someone by throwing them out a window.

Sometimes my job points me toward the research. When a detective enlisted me in the case of a fifteen year old runaway I discovered NamUs, a national missing persons database that anyone can search and add to. We did find the young girl, but I recreated the situation with a much more tragic outcome in my current book.

In That Darkness, Crime scene specialist Maggie Gardiner’s world shifts when she notices a pattern, a similarity among wildly different murder victims. Both forensics and footwork lead Maggie to an untenable conclusion, and only she can decide what she will sacrifice to do what’s right when she encounters Jack Renner, a killer who simply wants to make the world a safer place.

            But Maggie Gardiner is not safe. And, until she can draw Jack Renner into the light, neither is anyone else. 

DEBS: I'm still laughing over spaghetti... How exotic!!! And I do often wonder if someone is checking my searches. I did research white phosphorous grenades and blowing one up in St. Pancras Station for the last book. I kept waiting for Special Branch to show up on my doorstep... 

Here's more about real-life Lisa:

I spent the happiest five years of my life in a morgue. Strange, perhaps, but true. After ten years as a secretary, I went back to school to get a Bachelor's degree in Biology from Cleveland State University. In my job as a forensic scientist at the Cuyahoga County Coroner's Office, I analyzed gunshot residue on hands and clothing, hairs, fibers, paint, glass, DNA, blood and many other forms of trace evidence, as well as crime scenes.

 

I had my life sorted out just the way I liked it until my husband got fed up with Cleveland snow and moved us to Florida, 1400 miles away from my family and my career. Not that I'm bitter or anything. Now I work as a latent print examiner for the city of Cape Coral, Florida, police department, working mostly with fingerprints and crime scenes.

 

I've lectured at writer's conventions and appeared on panels. In my life as a writer I'm a member of Sisters In Crime, Mystery Writers of America, and International Thriller Writers. In the other half of my double life, as a forensic specialist, I'm a member of the American Academy of Forensic Scientists, the International Association for Identification, the International Association of Bloodstain Pattern Analysts and am a Certified Latent Print Examiner. I have had over 976 hours of instruction in forensic topics and have testified in court over 65 times, none of which you really care about unless you're interviewing me for a job. 

I think this is fascinating. REDS and readers, do you have the research bug? And how much of the facts do you like in your novels?