Guest post for Diane Coto, a literary blogger doing business as FICTIONZEAL
What Inspired You to Write a Police Procedural Series Set in the Smoky Mountains?
Most cops would like you to believe that they worked their entire career in a combat zone-like sector with more inherent action and danger than that encountered by the Army’s long range reconnaissance patrols during the Vietnam War. Certainly, some places are busier than others and I worked in one that never lacked customers. On New Year’s Eve 1991, just four months before I retired, I left the headquarters building at five o’clock (okay, it was ten to five as the deputy commissioner so often accused me of doing) and while heading home in my company car, the dispatcher cleared the airway and assigned a precinct car to handle a motor vehicle accident with injury. Then in an uncharacteristic, out-of-sequence action he said, “CC (central complaint number) for your paperwork: one million.” That was a lot of responses to calls for service for a department that covered a territory only fourteen miles wide by fifty-five miles long with a population of about one-and-a-half million people.
In truth, no matter where you work as a cop, no one escapes the “cat in a tree” call and sooner or later everyone gets to handle at least one “big one.”
I chose to transplant my former Long Island detective lieutenant from his crowded area of responsibility and 3,000 comrades to a small touristy town in the Smoky Mountains because stories about small town cops solving big time murders are popular. Writers like Robert B. Parker, Craig Johnson, Julia Spencer-Fleming, and Philip R. Craig are only a few who have cashed in on these crosses between hardboiled and cozy crime stories.
I did it because I could also factor in another popular premise, the fish-out-of-water hero. When I left New York and relocated to East Tennessee I experienced CULTURE SHOCK. We had vacationed there a half dozen times, scouted out the territory during different times of the year, and then set about buying suitable land upon which to build a retirement home. But nothing provides emersion training like leaving the familiar (forty-six years worth) and dropping yourself into a new environment. It’s not terribly unlike parachuting behind enemy lines to organize an indigenous resistance in an unfamiliar land. Well, perhaps I exaggerate a wee bit, but you get the idea.
To make writing his part easy for me, I wanted my protagonist, Sam Jenkins, to have had a similar career as I and to have retired to the same area where I did. I’d write about what I knew. I’d let him revisit my old cases in a new venue as the police chief supervising only twelve other cops. A vastly different department, but he’d encounter the police officer’s universal bugaboos—quirky characters, quirky cops, oddball cases, and the ever present meddling politicians.
In more than twenty novels and novelettes, Sam has done the bulk of investigating on his own. That’s a tough job which requires a bit of suspension of disbelief from the reader. Occasionally he gets help from his desk sergeant and right-hand woman, Bettye Lambert, or a few of the patrolmen who steal time from their regular duties. But in a department of only thirteen bodies it’s difficult to solve major crimes. And if you believe what I write, you’ll think that sleepy little Prospect has a homicide rate higher than Detroit. Jessica Fletcher did it in Cabot Cove and Jesse Stone still does it in Paradise, why couldn’t I do it in Prospect? Up until PIGEON RIVER BLUES, I’ve had Sam obtain additional help by bamboozling his friends, FBI Special Agent Ralph Oliveri (another expatriate New Yorker) and TV news anchor Rachel Williamson, into doing him often outrageous favors. But in this new novel, I’ve allowed Sam to hire John Gallagher, a retired NY detective who used to work in Sam’s squad and, after falling on difficult economic times, sold his expensive house in Boca Raton and purchased a modest home in Prospect. The idea that Prospect PD doesn’t have budgeted positions for detectives didn’t trouble Sam Jenkins. Gallagher needed a job. Sam had an opening for a clerk-typist—the match was made in heaven. The mayor agreed to change the job title to police operations aide, Sam swore him in as an auxiliary officer, and made him an honorary detective and comical sidekick.
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