A Glimpse into the Silence of the Dead with Author Frank Zafiro

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is Beyond the Big Screen Podcast with your host
Steve Guera. Thank you for listening to Beyond the Big
Screen podcast, where we talk about great movies and stories
so great they should be movies. Find show notes, links
to subscribe and leave Apple podcast reviews by going to

(00:23):
our website Beyond the Big Screen dot com. And now
let's go Beyond the Big Screen.

Speaker 2 (00:33):
Welcome back, everybody to another episode of Beyond the Big Screen.
We are joined yet again by Frank Scalise, an author
former police officer. You should be well acquainted with Frank
because he has been a multi time guest, but maybe
Frank give us a quick introduction before we dive into
the topic of today.

Speaker 3 (00:54):
Well, Beyond the Big Screen nickname is supposed to be
Triple Threat. I think is what we decided, right, I
like that. Yeah, As you mentioned, I had a career
law enforcement for twenty years. I was an officer in Spokane,
Washington is in the eastern part of the state. There.
Spokane's a mid sized city, about three hundred officers. I

(01:18):
retired as a captain and I was fortunate in my
career to have done the job for about the first
half of my career and then I kind of stumbled
backwards into a leadership position, and so the second half
of my career I was focused on leadership roles, and
in those leadership roles, I pretty much got to lead
the different units that I didn't experience as a line member.

(01:42):
And so that was great for my career because I
really enjoyed it and I got exposed to a lot
of things. It also benefited me and my other role,
and that is as an author. I've been writing since
I was a kid, but I've been a published author
since two thousand and six, two thousand and four if
you start counting short stories, and mostly I write in

(02:04):
the crime genre. Probably about two thirds of my work
is in the crime genre under the pen name of
Frank Sephero, I also write in science fiction and fantasy
as Frank Saverio. In fact, you interviewed me about my
science fiction novel Kemper's House on this very program.

Speaker 2 (02:22):
Yeah, and so today we're going to discuss your one
of your latest novels, at least one of the latest
at this point when we're recording. It's called Silence of
the Dead, and it's within the Charlie three sixteen series,
who you wrote with your co author, Colin Conway. I
think at this point to discuss this book, maybe we'll
go on kind of the meta of your writing process,

(02:44):
and then the meta of this universe that you created
in the Charlie three sixteen, because it's a little different
than some of the other fiction that you've done, and
then we'll dive into some of the specifics and a
conversation about the book. One thing that I'll apologize for
is that I introduced you at one point when you're

(03:06):
on as a true crime author, which that is definitely
not what you are. Maybe I'd love to talk a
little bit about obviously true crime is nonfiction, but it
really does take a narrative approach to it, and most
true crime. But then you're writing crime fiction and I

(03:30):
reading more crime fiction, I see that they're really two
entirely different genres. Even if you ignore that true crime
is nonfiction. What do you think the difference is to
you of between true crime and crime fiction? And then
maybe why do you a skew true crime?

Speaker 3 (03:51):
You know, so in true crime, I think you're taking
real events and you're trying to find a cohesive narrative
in there, and you're trying to nudget towards something that
is entertaining because it's already interesting or you wouldn't want
to write about it. I mean, the case is already
has some interesting elements to it, and so you're trying

(04:11):
to nudget towards the fictional so that it is more
palatable in an entertainment sense or more digestible, more consumable.
And I think on the crime fiction side, you're taking
a story that you made up that's interesting to you,
or you wouldn't be writing it, and you're writing it
in a way that nudges it towards the more realistic,

(04:32):
so that those people who you know, want some genuine,
authentic sort of police elements to their fiction are getting that.
And so they're almost like starting on opposite sides of
the line and pushing towards the center, which is that
you know, realism, and they're just coming at it from
what you know, opposite sides. I think the best true

(04:54):
crime is told in a very narrative sense that I
have a call league who writes crime fiction named Derek
Pruitt who did a great long form podcast about eight
episodes I think called The Long Dance about a true
crime uh story and and he he's also a filmmaker

(05:17):
and obviously, like I mentioned, he's written a number of
books and short stories that it's a particular yet it's
a magazine called Dark Yonder. Just a great guy, great storyteller,
And so when he delves into true crime, it's you know,
he's telling a story even though it's not fictional. And
and I think that's the best approach for that. My

(05:41):
wife loves true crime. She watches uh, true crime stuff
documentaries on on you know, streaming services and stuff. It's
a little too much of a busman's holiday for me,
and it always was. And and so I also like
the fact that I can control the story to a
degree in fiction. And so rather than going out and

(06:04):
trying to find an interesting story that I then would
have to write about in a mostly factual way, to me,
it's much more appealing to say what if and then
run with it and create a fictional story instead. So
that's really more my cup of tea. But you know,
I mean, I think if I wanted to make some
serious money, I'd go into your crime because I think

(06:25):
there might be more of an opportunity there.

Speaker 2 (06:28):
Yeah, Actually, mustache Chris and I somebody contacted us about
a true crime that he was involved in that there
was a situation, and we talked with the guy for
like three hours and were Chris and I were thinking like,
maybe we could turn this into a couple of episodes series.

(06:48):
But I personally got overwhelmed with the fact that you
have to make some sort of narrative out of it,
and it seemed very difficult to do that. And I
think that to really do well you have to do
a lot of research. You're basically turning into an investigator yourself,
and that not an easy task.

Speaker 3 (07:09):
Yeah, you got you have to be an investigative journalist
essentially to do a good job of it. Certainly if
you have a policing background, your investigative abilities could come
to bear as well. Uh, you know. And so it's
it's probably not as easy as people think. Uh. I
think it was Mark Twain's that said, you know, easy
reading is damn hard writing and so and you know

(07:33):
what that's all about. And I think it's the same
when you present true crime and they make it look
really seamless, and they make it look really coherent, and
they make it look very smooth. But I think the
actual process is probably very difficult, and there's a lot
of research that has to be done and a lot
of puzzled pieces put together. And that's not even to
speak of all of the legalities that come up there.

(07:54):
You know what you can and can't use, and you
know what's public information and what's privileged. You know, privacy,
and you know that kind of stuff that comes up.
And fortunately with fictional characters, I might violate their privacy,
but they can't sue me for because they're fictional. So yes, exactly.

Speaker 2 (08:15):
Now, you wrote this series, So this entire series, the
Charlie three to sixteen series in which Silence of the
Dead is a one of the books, and.

Speaker 3 (08:24):
You wrote it.

Speaker 2 (08:25):
You're writing it this series with their co author, And
I wonder before we dig into the content of the
series in the book, what is it like writing with
a co author?

Speaker 3 (08:37):
Well, it's different with every co author. I've written books
with five different people, and while there are similarities in
each of those, every single one of them was a
very different experience, and I would equate it sometimes when
I'm giving talks on on collaboration, I do presentations on it,

(08:57):
sometimes inevitably end up comparing it to like a friendship.
Or even better a marriage in that you know, if
you've been married more than once, every marriage is different.
You know, if you talk to different married couples, every
marriage is different. And I think every business relationship is different.
And so sometimes we kind of did our own thing

(09:21):
and then got together and hashed it out after it
was mostly done. Other times, we you know, started at
the drawing board pen in hand together, you know. And
so that's just one small example. Colin is the only
person that I'm still currently collaborating with, and that's not
because the other ones didn't work out. They just ran

(09:43):
their course. In a couple of instances, this series that
we're working on, we finished, and so series is finished,
and you know, and we never came up with an
idea that was one that we wanted to work on again,
so we haven't worked together again. So the way call
it and I work together is very collaborative. It's very

(10:05):
much fifty to fifty. You know. We started the idea phase,
you know, pen in hand, you know, drawing easel, empty
and ready to write on and we share that process
from the very beginning in almost every case. And so
it's fifty to fifty all the way.

Speaker 2 (10:26):
Can you give us a little overview of this series.
Because this series, the setting is in the real world Spokane, Washington,
which is a little different than some of your other
books that are set in the fictional town which is
kind of based on Spokane.

Speaker 3 (10:42):
Maybe you can tell.

Speaker 2 (10:43):
Us the genesis of this series and give us a
little overview on it.

Speaker 3 (10:48):
Yeah, it is set in a fictional version of Spokane, obviously,
but it is set in Spokane. My River City series
is my main series, and that's a very thinly veiled Spokane,
and I've written other series set to different versions of Spokane.
I think there's like four different versions of the city
throughout all of my fiction. This is this series is
kind of interesting because the genesis of it was Colin

(11:13):
called me up and said, hey, I got this great
idea first for a book. I want to set it
in Spokane, and I want it to be about an
officer involved shooting. But I want to kind of flip
the script a little bit. It's almost always when it
causes a scandal, it's almost always a white officers shot
a minority, usually a black person. And you know in

(11:38):
Spokane it's like eighty seven percent white, and so that's
probably the way it would happen there too, just because
I mean, the population of the black population Spokane's like
two and a half three percent, it's pretty small minority,
and so he thought it would be it would make
people have to think about the situation a little bit
differently if we flip the script, and if it was

(12:00):
a black officer, particularly a really solid officer who's you know,
tactically solid, who's a stand up person in the community,
who's well respected, who shoots a white person on a
traffic stop and then scandal erupts, and how would that look,
you know, would it look different, what would look different,
and how would people respond or would it be exactly

(12:22):
the same, no difference, you know, let's explore it. And
I thought that was a fascinating idea, and he said, well,
I want to work on it with you, because like,
there are, you know, there are aspects of this kind
of an event that I just don't have any experience in.
And then I was a captain during my career, and
I was familiar with what happens and an officer involves

(12:43):
shooting scenario and what goes on in command staff meetings
and things like this, and Colin had experience as a
police officer, and he had experienced in the Union, but
he didn't have any command experience, and he'd been a
cop for five years and I'd been one for twenty.
So we felt like our between the two of this

(13:03):
there was a pretty good reservoir of experience there that
we could draw on to make it a compelling story.

Speaker 2 (13:09):
Now in the Charge, in this particular book, it traces
a crime and a series of crimes that start in
the early nineteen fifties, and it's a retrospective from an
author or from an investigator, a police detective who's trying
to turn over a cold case. And the book is

(13:33):
dipping in and out of the narrative taking place in
the time and then going back to the present day.
And I thought to me that the thing then, and
I don't know if it was a theme that you
were going for or it's just something that I personally
grab down to, is this difference in eras that every

(13:55):
single era that they go into, the nineteen fifties to
the early nineteen seventies, to the early two thousands, the
early aughts of the two thousands, that the culture had changed.
But when you're jumping in and out, you can see
that the culture just didn't abruptly change at each one

(14:16):
of these things. It really truly did evolve. And I
think you, as a police former policeman, you would have
seen that in your career and even in teaching where
you work in a big institution. These institutions, they don't
change very fast, but they certainly do change. And one
of my first questions is how did you tap into that?

(14:37):
How did you because it seemed very real to me.
I don't know, I wasn't a policeman in nineteen fifty one,
but it felt very real to me of how they
operated and the outlooks of the cops during that time period.
Steve here. We are a member of the Parthenon podcast network,

(14:58):
featuring great shows like Games, Earlies, Key Battles of American
History Podcast, and many other great shows. Go over to
part and On podcast dot com to learn more. And
here is a quick word from our sponsors.

Speaker 3 (15:17):
Yeah, it was a challenge in that, you know, I
wasn't alive in nineteen fifty one. You know, I was
a kid in nineteen seventy four. You know I did work.
I was working working cop in two thousand and five.
So that was one I could draw on direct experience
from and I haven't been a cop since twenty thirteen,

(15:37):
so you know, I mean, the the tent pole scenes
in the present day are also you know, a period
that I know, not directly experienced as a police officer.
You know, this series. This is the sixth book in
the series technically, but the first four books in it

(15:57):
are kind of a meta arc. We call it the
Tyler Garrett Saga. And then after that we just when
we started writing just books set in that in that universe.
You know, it's not necessarily a continuation direct continuation of
the previous books story. And yet you know, the characters,
many of the characters in this book are characters that

(16:19):
exist in the you know, through earlier or earlier in
the series. And what we wanted to really bring out
was that that evolution of the viewpoints that maybe the
public had and that certain officers had. And we made
sure to show a wide range, you know, I mean,

(16:41):
because you know, people think, well, cops in this era
thought like this, Well not all of them, right, I mean,
in that in the first section in nineteen fifty one,
the two partners, they differ in age, they differ in
which war they fought in the older one. George Amherst
fought in the First World War. Now he's, you know,
nearing the end of his career, while Pierce is, you know,

(17:04):
in the first decade or so of his career, and
he served in the Second World War. And so, you know,
they had different viewpoints on a lot of things, including
UH leadership, including the public, including how policing should be done,
including the question of things like graft, how how people

(17:27):
should be treated, you know, how you should treat the
public and so forth. And so we we just kind
of looked at what the spectrum might be in that
in that area and timeframe wise, and and and went
with it. You know, there's a little bit of a
sidebar here, But did you ever see the Demi Moore
UH movie. H Harvey Kai tells in it as well,

(17:51):
called Mortal Thoughts. I don't believe so. Bruce Willis is
in it as well, and Glenn Headley. It's a it's
a good movie. I I recommend it. And it had
a device in there that I always liked and I
always kind of wanted to employ in a book if
it organically fit, and that is that a large portion

(18:12):
of the movie is anchored by a police interview Harvey
Kaye Tell and his partner and I remember who that is,
interviewing Demi Moore interviewing Glenn Headley, these two best friends
who are the primary two characters in the story. Bruce
Willis plays the husband of Demi Moore or no Place

(18:33):
to the husband of. Yeah, I think it's Demi Moore
for I haven't seen it a long time, because what
I remember from it was the interview between Harvey Kaye
Tell and especially Demi Moore, but also Glenn Headley. And
so they're in the box, you know, they're in the
interrogation room, and they show large sections of them talking
and then they will you know, fade into narrative storytelling

(18:56):
where they'll show what it is that Demi Moore is describing.
You know that I was really nicely done. Yeah, I
like that technique. And so when it came time to
do this book, I thought, you know, there needs to
be something in the present day. That's that's the reason
why we're having this conversation about what happened in the past.
And and so that's why the character from the first

(19:18):
four books had a very large role. Detective Wardelle Clint, Uh,
you know, he's he's grabbed onto some tenuous but possibly
very real connections between a whole bunch of cases, and
he's kind of trying to dig up the past. And
he does so with a retired chief who has some
some direct knowledge and then some institutional knowledge, some I
heard it from so and so type of knowledge that

(19:41):
Clint can combine with what's in the official record and
what's in the official case files and so forth. And
so that's that's why you know, each each of these
three time periods is anchored down is kind of tent
polled by a scene with with Clint and the retired
Chief bomb Gardner, and that the inspiration for that came
from from the idea of mortal thoughts, and then the

(20:04):
other big inspiration for this. It was kind of an
odd situation to spark a book. But I used to
live in the country, and so I was driving out
of town going home, and all on a highway just
outside of Spoken. On highway too, I saw a hitchhiker
one day and he was, you know, at least sixty,

(20:24):
you know, maybe could have been in his seventies. I
wouldn't have had all been surprised if he was in
his seventies, but he had a backpack on. His clothes
were not filthy, but they were rugged, and he had
kind of a weathered look to him, and you know,
it looked like a guy that lived pretty rough. And
he had his thumb out. And it wasn't blazing hot summer.

(20:44):
It wasn't yet, you know, super cold. It was like
late summer, early falls, so there was no danger of
him being outside or whatever. But I still started to
pull over to give him a ride, like just barely,
just barely drifted a little bit in the lane thinking
about it, and then I was like, what are you doing?
Like you pick up a hitchhiker? I mean, what are
you stupid? I mean, what are the odds that that

(21:05):
could turn out badly? Well, they're not as good as
if you just keep driving and the guy's not going
to freeze to death or dive thirst here. If this
was your daughter or your son or your wife, or
or if you asked me should I pick him up,
I'd be like, Steve, No, don't. Like the guy's out
there for a reason, he's made a choice, he's got
a backpack, he's walking fine. Let him find his own way.
It's not your problem, and the chances of something bad

(21:26):
happening are significantly greater then if you just go on
your way. That's a little jaded, a little cynical, but
it's what most cops would tell you, you know. In
twenty fourteen, when this happened, well on the rest of
the way home and for a while afterwards, I got
to thinking why, Like I don't pick up hitchhikers, Like
if somebody's but pulled over the side of the road

(21:47):
with a broken down vehicle looking like they need help,
that's the different matter, Right, I'm talking about flat out hitchhikers, Right,
I don't pick up hitchhikers. Why am I thinking about
doing it even for a second here? And I landed
on the realization that's because he was older. He was
sixty five seventy five years old, and for some reason,
that reduced the threat in my mind. And I got

(22:08):
to thinking, well, if the guy was the kind of
guy that would pull a knife on me and when
I picked him up and take my money or whatever,
or take me out in the middle of nowhere and
kill me or something, if he was the kind of
guy that would do that At thirty five He's still
the kind of guy that would do that at fifty
and at seventy five. So what's changed, Well, my perception
of him is changed. And in this country, we kind

(22:30):
of have this view of older people. They're they're cute,
or they're you know, ineffective, or they're you know, they
kind of become almost invisible to a degree. And there's
a character in the book who characterizes it, who says,
we infantilize him, you know, and we kind of do
to a degree. And I got to thinking about how

(22:51):
that person could be every bit as dangerous, maybe not
as physically capable as we all know when you hit
about forty. You know, some things start to change when
you hit fifty. You know, reflexes drop a little bit
and so forth. And yet you know, look at George Foreman.
You know, strength is the last to go. I mean,
he always had a puncher's chance, and granted he's not

(23:12):
seventy five, but you know that's the truth of the
human anatomy, right, Your strength is the last thing to go.
And so I got to thinking, what if there were
a guy that had been killing people for fifty plus
years and getting away with it, partially because police fall
prey to this same sort of blind spot where they

(23:33):
don't suspect somebody who's in their sixties or seventies. They're
looking for somebody in their twenties, thirties or forties maybe.
And that sat with me for a long time, and
then slowly things like this mortal thoughts, you know, format
or structure and other aspects started coming together. And finally

(23:55):
I was like, you know, I want to write this,
but it needs to be you know, some place that
makes sense. And the Try three sixteen universe was the
perfect location for it. So I brought you know, Calin
brought the idea for the first book and to me,
and that erupted into what it ended up being that
four book arc and the last two books in the series.
I brought him the idea, and so I guess I'm

(24:17):
paying him back a little bit for bringing me on board.
And so then we you know, I had I had
the idea, maybe the skeleton of the idea. Then together
he and I, you know, filled out the skeleton, added
the meat and the bones and the rest of the
bones and the you know, skin, cartilage and blood and

(24:39):
all the rest that made up the story.

Speaker 2 (24:42):
It really does make you think too, because you have
we don't necessarily think about an older person continuing these crimes.
And then it makes you think too, maybe the person
finally does retire, because this might be a good This
is a a question for you. I've heard that there's
some idea that people will reduce the amount of crime

(25:07):
that they do, like just their natural passions kind of
fade out when they get into their thirties and their forties.
So that's why there's even an extreme idea that somebody
who's maybe murdered when they are eighteen, you keep them
in prison until they're in their mid thirties, and then
they're much less likely to commit that crime again. But

(25:28):
so say the person does stop committing the crimes and
it's twenty or thirty or forty years later and they're
really really old, it's hard to at least for me
to think like, oh, we really do have to throw
this person who's in there and hospice essentially put them
through the rigmarole of the case. But I would have

(25:49):
felt very differently of them when they were thirty or
maybe forty or even fifty.

Speaker 3 (25:55):
Yeah, and you know, I have a friend who another
writer named James Latoel, who worked in the California penals system,
actually rose up to a pretty high position within that organization,
and he's written a number of really good books. He
doesn't actually write. He writes some short stories that take

(26:17):
place in prison, but he hasn't really written any prison books.
But he does talk about, you know, his experience and
his knowledge in a couple of different organizations that I'm
part of, and he's a good speaker. And one of
the things that he points out is that, you know,
when people go into prison, time kind of stops for them,
you know. I mean, if you remember The Sopranos, do

(26:39):
you remember that show? Right? Yeah, you remember when the
Steve Buscemi character came in season five, that Tony Blendento
Blendetto character gets out of prison and he'd been in
prison for like twenty years, you know, and when he
gets out, he comes out the clothes that he went
in on, and he's wearing like Miami Vice clothes. He

(27:01):
looks like a Don Johnson want to be right, and
those are still cool close to him, you know, at
least for until he gets out and looks around. And
I thought that was a really good detail because Jim
talks about how you know, they go in and whatever
was going on when they went in. That's the stuff
they talk about when they're inside mostly and they so
they're sort of arrested. And I mean that in the

(27:23):
terms of, like you know, in stasis, not slapping handcuffs
on in their development if you will while they're inside.
I mean, not everybody, and not completely, but it's a phenomenon.
And so you know, if you put somebody in when
they're thirty, I think they're pretty much going to be
a lot the same person when they get out when

(27:44):
they're fifty. Now, eighteen to thirty, maybe you know, most
of us change a lot in that time period. So
I don't know. I think a penologist or a sociologist
would be better equipped to answer that question. But the
point I was looking at, and the one that you make,
is that you know, what about the difference between fifty
and seventy. I mean, I don't I'm not saying people

(28:06):
don't change over those twenty years, but I think less
fundamentally than they might from eighteen to thirty. And certainly
if they were a killer, you know, who was a
sadistic killer that drew sexual pleasure from murdering people at fifty,
you know, and at thirty, at fifty, don't tell me

(28:28):
that they're still not going to have something of that
in their makeup at seventy and that they wouldn't be dangerous,
And so coul and I wanted to explore that, and
we do. You know, the case starts in fifty one
and it may still be going on in twenty twenty three,
with Detective Clint making some connections.

Speaker 2 (28:51):
One of the things that I really enjoyed is and
I think it does circle back to what you had
said about this, where people when they're in the recounting
something that happened, is a very different thing than what
actually happened. And I think that maybe Detective Clint is

(29:13):
because he wasn't there, He may not have even been
a cop at the time, I don't know, because of
twenty twenty three, or maybe he was just entering the
foreset about the time that the last bit of the
story played out in two thousand and three. He's been separate.
The separation between that is a very long time. A
lot of the people are long dead, and I've kind

(29:35):
of for got the feeling that he was taking what
they were what was written on the page as reality
and not maybe empathizing to what really happened or the
things that were under that were written in between the lines.
And the person who he was talking to, the former chief,

(29:55):
just kept trying to coax that out of him that
not everything that was written in the report is what
actually happened. Steve here with a quick word from our response,
there is Yeah. I mean, anybody who's familiar with the
first four books in the series, you know Wardell Clint
is some people's favorite character, and he's a little bit obsessive,

(30:19):
and he's a bit of a conspiracy weaver. He's a
very irascible I mean, his nickname is Honey Badger, so
I'll tell you how he gets along with everybody else.
But he also has his own blind spots and if
he gets his you know, his teeth into something, he's.

Speaker 3 (30:37):
Like a dog with a bone. He's not gonna let go.
And sometimes that's an excellent trait for a detective. But
there are cases you just have to let go. I mean,
like you're not going to solve it. There's no more
you can't make, you can't manufacture evidence. If it's out there,
you can try to find it. But in some cases
it's been destroyed or no longer exists or or whatever.
And so, as you mentioned, time is is one of

(31:00):
the things that obscures this case to the modern investigator,
to Clint in this case. And yet one of the
things that I wanted to do was show that while
it was a long time ago, I mean nineteen fifty
one to the twenty twenty three, it's you know, seventy
two years. And yet you know, in the nineteen fifty

(31:25):
one time period, you have an older detective and a
younger detective. He's not a rookie, but he's a younger detective.
When you get to nineteen seventy four, the younger detective
from nineteen fifty one is now the veteran nearing retirement,
and you have a young officer who he's partnered with
due to some interesting circumstances that took place in nineteen

(31:47):
seventy four and spoken. And then when you get to
two thousand and five, that younger officer from nineteen seventy
four is now a lieutenant in charge of the detectives.
And so the two detectives who are investigating in two
thousand and five, they work for that lieutenant who was
the young officer in nineteen seventy four, and so you
can go from and then one of those two investigators,

(32:10):
one of those two detectives, eventually became the chief bomb Gartner.
So you have Clint interviewing Bombgartner, who worked for Salter,
who was the younger officer in seventy four, partnered with
Pierce who was the younger officer a detective rather in
nineteen fifty one, partnered with Amherst, And so there is
kind of a direct line back, like you know, you

(32:33):
can touch a very long time ago with only a
couple of you know, degrees of Kevin Bacon there, right,
And so we both wanted to convey how long the
time was and how much things had changed, both physically
the personnel that are involved, the landscape of the town,
the culture of the town, and yet still also convey

(32:57):
that it's a hop, skip and a jump if you
really think about who knew who in the zoo when
you know.

Speaker 2 (33:02):
It's really interesting too how certain time periods there's so
much changed so quickly. In nineteen fifty one, George Amherst,
they probably could have picked him up out of nineteen
fifty one and made him a cop in nineteen oh one,
and his life would have not been that big of
a very different and that whole idea of the culture

(33:23):
that it was outside of his entire imagination that a
cop wouldn't have been in the military and probably have
served in war like he would have not even considered
that that as being an option. Where you fast forward
fifteen years, twenty years to George or Pierce in nineteen

(33:47):
seventy one, seventy seventy two, or seventy four, That's what
I was going to say too at first in nineteen
seventy four, and the world has entirely changed. The way
they do the job has entirely changed, The culture has
entirely changed. And I think that that I want do
you think that that is something that happens, Well, it

(34:09):
certainly happens a lot faster. Now. Do you think that
everybody will just focus in on the police is going
to have to go through one of those time periods
in their career where everything changes.

Speaker 3 (34:23):
Yeah, I mean the only constant in life has changed.
I mean everything is changing constantly. That's the only thing
that stays the same, you know, as the joke, right,
and it just happens. Usually it's such an incremental fashion
that were like the frog in the water. We don't
notice it's boiling until the bubbles are popping up next

(34:45):
to us and the steam is rising. And I think
that can happen in a person's career. You come on
and then twenty years later you look back and you're like,
oh my gosh. I mean, like when I came on
the job, Just to give you a couple of examples,
when I came on the job, we drove of Crown
Victoria's Ford Crown Victoria's. I mean, some departments drove Chevy's

(35:06):
probably Caprices, but we drove Crown of X And the
model was the model that had a square back end,
so very square like Adam twelve looking car, Hill Street
Blues looking car. We're still driving those. In the early nineties,
we had a police radio but no computer. So if
you got a call, you had you had your report

(35:28):
writing notebook, had a log a call sheet on the
top of it, just basically aligned sheet and you'd put
the time that you got the call and the address
and the nature of the call when when they called you,
and then you'd go to the call and then you'd
write the disposition on there, and that's that was your
run sheet, your call sheet. They called it different things
in different errors, but that that was basically, you know,

(35:49):
your was a record of what you did on the
shift and you'd turn that in to your sergeant at
the end of the shift, along with any of the
reports that you wrote, and you wrote those reports on
pre printed forms with a pen, you know, by hand.
So by the end of my career, just twenty years later,
twenty thirteen, we were driving forward interceptors and SUVs. For

(36:15):
the most part, we'd gone from a blue and white
to a black and white configuration. Color wise, there was
police radio, but there was also a mobile data computer
in the car, and just the differences between policing with
an MDC in the car and not I could go
on for ten minutes and you'd be like, you know,

(36:37):
diametrically posed, how you're doing things, how you're getting information,
how you're reporting things, all that. But so instead of
getting a call on the radio, you might still if
it was a high emergency call height, you know, an
in progress call with that needs to be dispatched by voice.
But a routine call pop up on your computer and

(37:00):
you read it, and then you go to it. You know,
you tell you don't tell radio you're on scene. You
don't tell dispatch. You push a button and say you're
on scene. Record the disposition of the call in the computer,
and then later on you pull up your field reporting
software and you type in you know, it auto populates
when you pull the call in, you know, like what date, date, time, location,

(37:21):
people involved, all that kind of stuff. You double check that.
You write your narrative by typing it. You know, maybe
in the car, you know, most likely in the car,
maybe you get out and go into a substation and
do it. If it's going to be a long report,
and you hit said and it goes wirelessly. And this
was twenty thirteen. You know, it's even more you know,
sci fi than that. Now that you know, that's one

(37:43):
small sliver of the experience that's radically different. And I
think that that happens across every spectrum of our experience.
It happens in terms of culture, it happens in terms
of of the the way the public views you. I mean,
there's another example, like when I came on in ninety three,
our relationship with the public wasn't stellar. We had a

(38:05):
chief that had done a pretty good job. And then
you know, the Rodney King incident occurred in the riots
in LA and that had a trickle out effect across
the country and certainly up into the Pacific Northwest. So,
you know, it's three years later and people are telling me,
don't Rodney King me, you know, and I'm like, I
wasn't even a cop when that happened, but I'm getting
blamed for it. And that stayed that way for quite

(38:29):
a while. And then September eleventh, two thousand and one, happens.
I was the furthest thing from at ground zero, right
on the other side of the country. I heard about
it on the radio and then on TV after. But
the outpouring of support for emergency service personnel, cops and

(38:50):
firefighters in particular post nine to eleven was huge, huge,
So then it was thank you for your service and
kind of buy your coffee. And I mean, you know,
you started to have to, you know, navigate how to
say no to certain things in a way that didn't
seem ungrateful because it was approaching what we would call
a graft and or or you know, be uh, you know,

(39:13):
inappropriate gifts, you know, and people wanted to buy your
lunch all the time. And I mean and and that
was great. The the the outpouring of affection and appreciation
and respect was wonderful. But that faded, you know, that
certainly faded, and then other events started to occur. And
then and then more recently I've been retired a number

(39:34):
of years when it happened. But the George Floyd incident
was every bit as much of a watershed moment as
the Rodney King incident in terms of police history, uh,
in America. And and then the opposite was true, Like
you know, people were not wanting to you know, sit
next to the cops or near the cops. And you know,
people immediately have evil, uh, they assume evil and and

(40:01):
this sort of thing. And so you know that's just
from two thousand and one, say, from two thousand and
one to twenty eighteen, that's less than twenty years, you
went from one extreme to the other in terms of
the general view of police that a lot of people
in the public have and how they interact with the police.
And so if you took somebody from two thousand and

(40:22):
three and PLoP them down in twenty eighteen, they they'd
be there'd be culture shock, you know, But because it
happens gradually, you adjust to it over time, you know.
But there's definitely a huge change that occurs, and we
wanted to reflect that. I mean, at its heart, this
is a murder mystery, right, I mean it's a police

(40:43):
procedural murder mystery. I mean Amherst and Pierce are assigned
a missing a missing female, a missing snout juvenile. She's
a young woman, she's eighteen, I think, and like initially
Amhurst is like, this case is beneath us. I mean,
some tarlote ran off to have fun with our friends,
and you know, we're being taken away from real place

(41:04):
work to look for and eventually to discover that maybe
this has got a little more meat on it and
we need to be looking into it, and it becomes
a murder mystery at some point. But around that core
of the murder mystery, we wanted to explore the ideas
of culture, the idea of the gray that exists in

(41:28):
people and their characters. We didn't want black and white characters.
We didn't want you know, this is the good guy
and this is the bad guy. I mean, with one
obvious exception, the person who's killing people. But you know,
nuance is something that we explored a lot in the
previous five books in the Chart three sixteen series. It

(41:48):
was something that Colin really wanted to get into with
that very first book. It was you know, it was
on the table from Jump City, and so we definitely
wanted to include that very heavily in this book and
talk and talk about the fact that, you know, we
as a country have changed, and you know, we're not

(42:08):
black and white. You know, the city has changed, the
department has changed, and the police officers, the individuals within it,
and then the people in the community they have all
changed too. And yet there are some things that are
human nature that don't necessarily change. And so this sort
of dichotomy was also something that we wanted to explore.

Speaker 2 (42:33):
I really thought that this book was a master's class
and character development. You had the characters. You could have
easily have painted George Amherst as just a run of
the mill nineteen fifties, you know, square jerk, but he
really was, at least initially, he was a full three

(42:55):
sixty degree jerk. He was a jerk in many different
areas of his life, and you can kind of see
where it not kind of so you could really see
where it came from. This guy would have, you know,
if you just use your imagination and some of the
little bit of exposition that you dropped in the way
he was in the Great War, therefore he would have
lived through the Depression. Therefore, you know, he being a

(43:20):
policeman nowadays is a pretty lucrative job. They're very solidly
middle class. Back then, any of these government jobs, like
a police you're very scraping by to be You're just
barely into the middle class at that point. This guy
lived a tough life, and he was a little bit

(43:42):
of a womanizer at his time, and he's getting past
that peak in his life where that's probably not going
to happen again. And he was the type of person who,
or the type of cop that if they were giving
away a free meal, he wasn't going to turn that down.
Or even that initial theme that carried through his shoes.
I don't think I'm giving away too much of that.

Speaker 3 (44:02):
One's not a spoiler.

Speaker 2 (44:04):
Yeah, he gets a free pair of shoes that the
shoemaker gave him, a bad pair of shoes that were,
you know, really uncomfortable, and that's he needed a new
pair of shoes, and getting a free pair of shoes
probably was a make or break financial decision for him
back then and to put him in that place in time.

(44:27):
But then he does change. He really does change as
a person, and we won't get into why he changed,
but you go read the book to find out where
he changed, and you can feel a real change had
come through to them. He didn't become a mother Teresa
after it, I'm.

Speaker 3 (44:46):
Sure, but he.

Speaker 2 (44:48):
His outlook on life and maybe something in that hard
and heart of his did genuinely change. Steve here with
a quick word from our sponsors.

Speaker 3 (45:01):
Yeah, Amhurst is a character that's very polarizing because like
early readers like, uh, you know, we we both employ uh, well,
we don't employ them. We both use volunteers who are
our beta readers, and they are you know, just they're
super readers. They're people who would would buy the book

(45:21):
if if if they weren't a beta reader, right they
they're they're fans, but they're friends. Uh and they're and
and they are very critical, but but they're on your
side right there, and they're they're pretty important to making
the end result be as good as it can possibly be.
And I got to tell you, Beta readers, especially women,

(45:42):
hated Amhurst. Oh they hated him. I mean, they hated
him so much that we actually, uh, we actually softened
him a little bit from the first draft. He was uh,
he was worse in the first draft than he is
and that actual book and and uh, but we didn't
softened him to the point of making him likable. We

(46:03):
just made him salvageable because he does go through his
character arc. He does go through a little bit of
a of a positive change before the end of the book,
and I don't think that's too much of a spoiler.
But he was just despised by by readers. And I
mean one of the earliest drafts that we shared with anybody,

(46:23):
I shared with my wife and she told me, if
I wasn't reading this for you, I would have put
this down. That's how much I hate George Amherst, which
is what convinced us, convinced us to to soften him
up a little bit so that nobody would feel like,
I can't continue to read this. But we're okay with
them hating him. They should hate him or at least
not like him, you know, because he's entitled. He feels entitled, right,

(46:45):
he he went through all the things. See like you're
you're more sympathetic to him than a lot of readers
have been because I think you know, you're a history guy,
and so you know, you know why he's the way
he is. You can you can see the reasons why
he's the way he is with the war, the depression
and starting policing in a time where there was no
question that you know, you you know, the reason you're

(47:06):
getting a free meal is because you can't really afford
to go buy one. So it's either you don't get
lunch while you're on duty, or some Boddy decides they're
going to take care of the local cop. And you know,
Frank's place will feed him on lunch on Wednesday, and
Steve's place will feed him lunch on Thursday. And it
was a community support sort of thing, and then it
eventually evolved into something a little more insidious or a

(47:29):
little more nefarious and such. But he came up in
that sort of an environment, so he felt entitled to
those shoes even though he needed them, because he probably
you know, if he bought shoes, that meant he wasn't
going to buy something else. I mean, he was living
close enough to the dollar that that was the case,
but he felt entitled. He feels entitled to the free meals,
he feels entitled to the free drinks. Whereas Pierce, you know,

(47:53):
who's a generation later in placing. You know, he he's
not going to rock the boat necessarily, but it doesn't
mean he has to take part in the paddling and
so the rowing and so he you know, he doesn't
take some of the graft. That is just standard operating procedure.

(48:16):
And it's a point of contention between the two of them.
But it also shows that, you know, policing is changing.
You know, it's starting to a little bit you know,
it's it's no longer you know, they're getting paid a
little bit more now in nineteen fifty one, and they
can own a home and so forth, and so they
don't need the free meals necessarily, but it's part of

(48:38):
the culture and so they expect it, at least Amherst does. So, Yeah,
I had I enjoyed Amherst the whole the shoes thing.
That was all Collin's idea.

Speaker 2 (48:50):
It just.

Speaker 3 (48:52):
You know, we have a process where we outline by
by chapter or and even sometimes by scene, and it's
a narrative outline we just kind of have that we
both have access to, and we know, like, okay, I'm
going to write these three scenes and then I'll send
it to you and stuff. And you know, those scenes
might have included the fact that they get the case

(49:13):
and that they go invest they go meet the parents
of the missing girl, and they go check out the
first location that they think she might be or that
somebody who might know something is at. You know, it's
a very straightforward outline in that regard. And so he
started that and he sent because I wrote the initial
Pierce or correction, sorry, the Wardel Clint Bombgartner first tent

(49:35):
Pole scene, you know, the first mortal thoughts moment, you know.
And so when I get that back from him, that
first chapter with Amherst, it's got this stuff in here
about the shoes and him being ticked off about the
shoes or too tight this this this cobbler gave me,
you know, bad shoes, and he probably did it on purpose.
He's got a German surname, and you know, he's got

(49:56):
two wars worth of reasons for hating the Germans. Even
though he didn't go to ar in World War Two.
He certainly, you know, doesn't like the Germans as a
result of this, and so there's a very not very
casual racism going on there, or certainly nationalism. And I
thought it was awesome, Like I mean, that's the fun

(50:17):
thing about writing with somebody else's They throw these ideas
in that support the idea that you came up with
in the structure that you've put in place, but now
it's additional details that you didn't discuss that are just
a pleasant surprise. And so this whole shoe thing came up,
and it was a really great way to show rather
than tell, you know, what kind of character Amherst was

(50:39):
the fact that he had this, you know, sense of
entitlement and the abrasive way that he deals with it,
and everything tells us a lot about him, shows us
rather than tells us. And so I'm glad you picked
up on that. It was very purposeful and certainly a
lot of fun to work on that character and to
eventually redeem him. Which is another piece that I wanted

(51:01):
to throw out, and that is this happens in police work,
and I bring it in. It bring it up a
lot in the leadership courses that I teach, but I
think it's true in just in human nature across professions,
and that is, we like to put people in a
nice little box, a nice little cubicle, a nice little

(51:23):
you know. I like to put a jacket on him
and say that's who they are. And sometimes they earn that,
you know. I mean there are people that I knew
who came on the job and in their early career
they were kind of buffoons. You know, They're kind of
a little bit idiots, you know, and they got a
reputation for that, and so they got a jacket. I
can think of one person in particular who was kind

(51:46):
of a goof and then he got promoted to sergeant
and we're like, oh my god, this is gonna be horrible,
you know this guy, you know, and it turns out
he was a pretty good sergeant. You know, that was
a job he was good at and he took care
of his people, he knew his stuff, and you know,
all of the goof stuff that we had, this jacket
that we gave him, you know, never really panned out

(52:08):
quite as much in that role. And so my point
is just that, you know, you we don't want to
allow people the opportunity to evolve. I want to decide
that Steve's an egg head bee keeper, and that's what
I want to think forever. And I don't want to
go I don't even want to allow for the fact
that we'll wait a minute. He's been the producer of
this podcast for you know, in another podcast and then

(52:30):
another podcast for like ten years now, and he's got
these this creative and aspect to him, and and you know,
he's a talented interviewer or whatever. None of that I
don't want to look at. I don't want to think
about any about that because I got my jacket on you.
You're the egghead bee keeper. That's what you are, and
and we didn't want that to be the case with
any of these characters. And so even Amherst, who is

(52:51):
a royal jerk for a good portion of that first segment,
he's capable of change, because we all are, and we
might not all elect to change drastically, we're all capable
of it. And if Amherst can actually change even just
a little bit, even just the degrees that you saw,
then anybody can.

Speaker 2 (53:12):
It gets into that corruption that we've talked about in
the past. In the past episodes, and I think it
really plays int to hear that Amherst. He's the type
of we have to develop these systems. Like you had
said that about when you were on the ship that
they were there was a neighborhood gas station that would
give coffee to cop so that they would write their

(53:33):
papers there and then it or write your reports there.
But then that could lead to a corruption, even though
it was back then a quarter or a fifty cent
cup of coffee. But then this is something because I'm
a pretty i would say down the line, a pretty
strict person with like corruption and that sort of thing.
But there was also a community aspect to that that

(53:56):
you want to support the cop. You want to give
a cop a free meal or a discounted meal. And
even like nowadays, my daughter works at a restaurant and
they have a law enforcement discount and there's a cop
and he doesn't even take it because they don't want
to look like they're supporting that. But obviously we want
to support the police. But then there's also this thing

(54:19):
that you have the George Amherst, who might hit that
one restaurant up every you know, three or four days
and they don't want to support you that much. Or
you have that cop who goes through the Starbucks maybe
to get his free coffee, and instead of getting his
one coffee, maybe every uh, you know, every week, he
goes through that line three or four times a night.

(54:42):
It's almost like people ruin what we're trying to. We
can't have nice things. Yeah, people want to people want
to be supportive. They don't want to support you, you know.

Speaker 3 (54:51):
Yeah. And the reality is is that most most law
enforcement officers are paid a pretty decent salary. I mean,
it varies across the country, and some are are higher
than others. For sure, there's a lot of disparity from
from even within you know, a single state, you know,
from agency to agency. But but you know, we're not

(55:13):
at the times that Antmherst saw where you know, I
mean he was wondering what dinner was going to be
that night, if if he could, you know, he had
to figure that out because there wasn't anything in the cupboard.
You know that that just isn't happening as much in
most places in the country. Not that there aren't some
places that are severely underpaid and understaffed and under equipped.

(55:35):
That's certainly true. But you know, it comes down to
the it's a big question of ethics, right, I mean,
and if it's a gift that's given, that's not a
very substantial gift, and it's merely to express support, you're
probably not going to enter into any sort of ethical
quandary there. But the expectation of a quid pro quo

(55:56):
is where you definitely are. And and but it can
it can develop. You know, we've talked before about noble
cause corruption. It can develop from very small things. I mean,
the place that offers twenty five cent coffee for cops
to stay awake on the road. That was part of
the part of the motivation. They don't want people crashing.
And they gave it to the ambulance drivers and the

(56:18):
bread drivers and the taxi drivers too, anybody who's driving
at night, But it was mostly targeting the cops. And hey,
if you come in and get your twenty five cent
a cup of coffee and you knock out a couple
of reports and you're there for thirty minutes on a
break slash working break, odds of somebody walking in and
sticking the place up while you're sitting there are exceedingly low,

(56:40):
and so there is a benefit that there's a quid
pro quote that's occurring there a little bit. Is that unethical?
I mean I don't think so, but you could make
that argument, and certainly it's something that we have discussed
in leadership classes when we get to the ethics pro
portion of the course. But now imagine that you you know,
the owner comes in every moe warning and says, hey, guys,

(57:01):
how's it going, And then he goes in the back
and he does his books or whatever, and so they
know who the owner is of this place, and now
he gets stopped for a DUI. You know, does he
expect that you're going to give him a break? Do
you want to give him a break because he's a
good guy and you know, and he's treated you well.
I mean the human response is yes. But is that ethical?

(57:23):
Even just stepping back to the previous scenario. I'm in
there for half an hour writing my reports, and I'm
there every night for half an hour writing my reports,
and so they're getting half an hour of coverage essentially,
of protection, and the Texaco half a mile away is
getting zero. Is that fair? Is that ethical? I mean,

(57:46):
I'm not saying it is unfair, And I'm not saying
it is unethical. I'm saying those are questions that if
you examine it from an objective viewpoint, you have to ask.
But it's all happening in the human arena, right, and
so you know it's not We're not robots, and neither
is the public, and so the answer isn't always clear cut. Now,

(58:08):
somebody giving you, you know, honor bucks to not book
them into jail, that's a different story, right, I mean
that's you know, uh, you know, or cops shaking people
down for protection money or something. I mean, that's there's
that that's obviously not good, that's obviously criminal, that's obviously
an ethics violation or whatever. Those are the easy ones,

(58:30):
you know, the deep water is very easy to spot.
But it's it's when you're in the shallow end of
the ethics pool that you have to, you know, ask yourself,
is this ethical or isn't it? And different people in
different areas of the country will differ. I mean, I've
taught the ethics lesson and the leadership course all over
the US and Canada, you know, from coast to coast

(58:53):
and from north to south, and I will tell you
that that where the threshold is for behavior when it
comes to what you know, a cops should feel comfortable
accepting without the expectation of quid pro quot differs greatly,
you know, based on the culture of the area and

(59:14):
so and I think it's changed over time, which is
what we try to capture in this book. We try
to capture that. You know, nobody was batting an eye
at Amherst taking free meals in nineteen fifty one, but
the way he was being a jerk about it, sometimes
people gave a little sight eye and that's so that's
where it's at. By the time we get to nineteen

(59:34):
seventy four, you know, Pierce has a very different view
of it that he passes on to his young rookie.
And you have to remember, by the time he gets
to nineteen seventy four, this is post CIRCUCO, right, this
is post NAP Commission stuff that you're very familiar with.
And so it's definitely that the culture at large has
changed in how they view these things.

Speaker 2 (59:55):
One of the things that I was thinking about as
I read it is I don't really know anything about
spoke can and if you could give somebody a little
I started to do a little research on it, and
I don't know if this is accurate or not, but
I kind of got the sense that by nineteen seventy four,
Spokane was like full into even though it's not in
the rust Belt, I kind of got a little bit

(01:00:16):
of a rust belt feeling from it that it had
seen better days. But it also was a college town,
so it had a really rich element to it, but
it maybe had an element that was on the downward declinic.
I'm from Buffalo, New York originally, and I kind of
got a little bit of a Buffalo feeling from it.

Speaker 3 (01:00:35):
Is that accurate?

Speaker 2 (01:00:37):
Also with the there was the World's Fair that was
going on in nineteen seventy four, which was the backdrop
to that set of scenes. All that the World's Fair
felt a little kind of sad to me, like they
were trying to capture something of an excitement to this

(01:00:57):
town that wasn't quite happening anymore. Is any of that
accurate at all? Steve here again with a quick word
from our sponsors.

Speaker 3 (01:01:10):
Well, I mean I was six years old in nineteen
seventy four, so my view of what was going on
in nineteen seventy four is obviously full of cartoons and
breakfast cereal. So I have to look at it historically,
just like you have to look at it from a distance.
So I will say that, you know, spoken is an
interesting city in that it does it's not a city

(01:01:33):
that has often had a singular driving industry like Detroit
had the auto industry, like Seattle has Boeing or Microsoft.
You know, Pittsburgh had the steel industry. This kind of thing.
I don't know what was it in Buffalo. I'm sure
there was something in Buffalo, So there wasn't anything big

(01:01:59):
like that, and so it was always kind of struggling
a little bit financially. I think it was trying to
kind of make make make it work with the sum
of parts rather than the whole being the driving force.
I mean, there was there was an aluminum plant when
I when I was younger in the eighties and nineties,

(01:02:19):
Kaiser Aluminum that employed a goodly number of people, but
it was still wasn't to the degree of something like
what we're talking about, and so it's it's always been
a lower kind of to my thinking, it's always been
kind of a lower middle class city. I mean, not
that there aren't people in that are wealthy, and there's
that there's not people in the upper middle class. But

(01:02:40):
it always felt like the mean or the median income
was kind of lower middle class, kind of rough and tumble,
uh in a lot of the town, many parts of
the town, and and and so that was kind of
the culture of the of the town. And then the
World's Fair was sort of I always viewed it as,

(01:03:02):
you know, the town trying to take the next step,
you know, to being maybe a little bit you know,
the next run on the ladder in terms of, you know,
city status. And that was a big deal to host
the Worldfare, and it had a huge impact on the city.
I mean, they built the Riverfront Park to accommodate it.
The pavilion is that they built for it is still there.

(01:03:26):
They hired a ton of cops to deal with the
influx of people, and to the degree that those folks
that were hired after the fair ended, a lot of
them were laid off. And then the police department basically
didn't hire anybody for a couple of years. They just
brought people in back from the layoff list. And when

(01:03:50):
I came on in ninety three, a lot of those
seventy four Hires were getting ready to retire, and so
it was a little bit of the changing of the
guards starting to happen. But the other thing about Spokane,
and I write about this in the River City series
as well, is it's very patchwork. I mean, you could
have a neighborhood and in a lot of places in

(01:04:12):
the town where you know, one or two blocks might
be really solidly middle class, really nice yards, people own
their homes, you know, neighborhoods very integrated with each other.
You know, people know their neighbors and all that. And
then you could go over a couple of blocks and
it you know, you're going to have some beat up

(01:04:32):
yards and broken fences and peeling paint coming off of
rental houses, and people maybe aren't quite as communal or
as much of a community there, you know, within four
or five blocks of each other. It's not like in
some cities where it's like, you know, hey, when you
cross the street, you're now in this neighborhood and this

(01:04:52):
is the fabric of that neighborhood for the most part.
You know, it's much more pocketed and segmented in this
small little patchwork like a quilt, almost across large swaths
of the of the city, especially the north side is
that way, but even the south side, which you know,
in you know, historically is was where a lot of

(01:05:14):
the wealth resided. You know, the neighborhoods nearer to downtown
were still a little more lower lower middle class too,
so even had some patchwork to it, but it was
most So it's an interesting dynamic because you know, you
can't just say, well, I work Northwest, and then that

(01:05:34):
means you're dealing with this, you know, segment of people
in terms of socioeconomic status or racial makeup or both.
You know, it doesn't matter you're working the northwest part
of town. Okay, you might get sent into the west
central neighborhood where it's kind of kind of poor and

(01:05:55):
a lot of rentals, and then you know, drive eight
blocks and you're into some pretty luxurious houses that were
you know, turn of the century mansions, you know, and
people living there making six figures. Just so it's kind
of weird in that regard. I don't know if that's
I've not seen that very common across the country. It
seems to be fairly unique to Spokane, and so it's

(01:06:19):
part of the character of the city.

Speaker 2 (01:06:21):
There's a great quote that I'd like to share, and
I think it really summarizes the whole book. I think
for me, at least, it was what I took as
the big theme of the book. And I think that
this is a good way to wrap up, and maybe
you can tell us a little bit of what you
and collins perspective is on this quote. It was in
one of the Ten Poles scenes between the Wardell Clint

(01:06:45):
and the former Chief bomb Gartner where Wardell Clint says
people in power don't get to make the truth be
what they want it to be, and then Chief bomb
Gartner replies, they do it all the time. It's called history.
And I thought that that was absolutely brilliant on so
many levels, because there's so many people historians who think

(01:07:07):
that they're dealing in a science, that there's an objective truth,
and there we just see it in this one little
thing of there is really the truth is told. Yeah,
there are certain things that are objective facts. But when
you're telling a story, you get a story through a
person's perspective, and that person has a whole laundry list

(01:07:30):
of incentives to tell the story in a certain way,
and then that story gets reinterpreted through a whole set
of incentives. And I just I'd love to hear what
the two of you were thinking when you develop that
theme and that idea that got so perfectly encapsulated in
just two lines.

Speaker 3 (01:07:50):
Yeah, we were thinking about it a lot. It goes
back to that idea of nuance and having there be
shades of gray rather than black and white. And I mean,
this is a story, you know, about a search for
a killer over three generations of cops for if you
want to count Clint's who's pulling it strings in twenty

(01:08:11):
twenty three, and the mistakes that can occur, and the
social pressures that force people to handle things a certain way,
and and and it's a mystery they're trying to figure out,
you know, is this the same guy? Is this a
different guy? Is it? You know, is this guy that guy?

(01:08:32):
You know? In a different you know he is he
wearing the disguise essentially? You know? Is he? I mean
there's all these mysterious questions going on, and yet uh,
you know, those tent pole scenes make it clear that
this is Bombgartner telling Clint a story. I mean, you
get it in the in in narrative form and we cheat,

(01:08:55):
you know, you get to get inside the head of Amherst.
I mean, Bombgardner doesn't know what Amherst was thinking about
his shoes, you know, and this kind of stuff. I mean,
it's it's a storytelling mechanism. But but if you get
to the end of the book and you look back
and go, Okay, this is what happened, you have to realize, well, no,
not entirely. This is what Amherst told Pierce, who told Salter,

(01:09:19):
who told Bombgartner, who also experienced some of it, who's
now telling Clint, who's interpreting it. And and as you mentioned,
every one of those tellings, you know, is told through
the filters of bias, and both implicit and explicit, and

(01:09:39):
and and so it's a big game of telephone to
a degree too. And certainly because we tell it the
way we tell it, because we do get into the
heads of the characters, we don't limit ourselves to just
what Bombgartner could have known. You know, we get around
that a little bit. But you know, at the end
of it all, that's what you've got, and the idea
that you know that that the police sometimes are faced

(01:10:02):
with hard decisions about what to release to the public
and what to tell the public and what's best for
the public good versus what's ethical to share, you know,
And when is the truth more harmful than than than
then a comfortable lie? When is a lie dangerous? And
when is a lie? Uh, you know, a a gift?

(01:10:26):
You know. I mean, we don't go through this entire
world without telling a falsehood, None of us do. And
sometimes we tell what they what they term white lies,
you know, or lies of a mission to spare people's feelings.
But we're making a decision when we do that. We
make we make a choice when we do that, right,
I mean, whether we tell the truth or not, or

(01:10:49):
don't you know, let something out, you know, lie of
a mission. I remember a friend of mine one time
told the story of a relative of his and uncle
I think it was, who had had an affair like
about five or six years into the marriage, and like
twenty five twenty six years go by, and they stayed married,

(01:11:11):
and he felt guilty about it. And so after all
those years of feeling guilty, he finally told his wife
about the affair. And I remember my friend was mad
at him. He was like, you should have told her
right away or not at all. That was his opinion,
and of course other people would probably argue that, you know,
he should tell her the truth, and that's for you

(01:11:34):
to decide as an individual where you fall on that.
But it's kind of a similar sort of thing. I mean,
do you tell the public you know what really happened?
Or do you do you let them live with a
comfortable truth or a comfortable lie that you know isn't
going to hurt them probably, you know, And how do

(01:11:56):
you decide? And who gets to decide? What gives you
the authority to decide? Are you merely getting a chance
to decide by virtue of your position? Nobody said that
was something that you get to do, But the circumstances
are such that now you do, and so that you
have to decide if you even have the right to
make that decision. And there's disagreement within the book from
different people as to the answers to those questions, and

(01:12:20):
you know, all comes to a head a couple of times, actually,
and I think that those kinds of questions are interesting
and it's fun to have, you know, circling back to
your true crime versus fiction question from earlier in the episode,
it's fun to be able to have characters who feel
differently about it and can voice both sides or you know,

(01:12:42):
more than both sides, multiple sides of that question, and
explore it more deeply. And then ultimately it's the reader
to you know, they get to decide at the end,
is you know, who was right? And then what the
cops eventually did, was that right or was it for
the best? Or was it corruption or was it was
it a noble act or you know or what? And

(01:13:05):
you know, as a writer, those are fun things. I mean,
I get in trouble sometimes because I do that a
little more frequently than some writers. And people like hard
and fast answers, like the good guy won, the bad
guy lost, you know, and and that that this is
what happened. And I'll write stories or books sometimes where
I don't know who you would say the good guy

(01:13:26):
is and who the bad guy is here, like sure,
surely the killer is the bad guy. But besides that,
you know, it's a little bit more nuanced. And I'll
write stories sometimes where I don't entirely tell you what happened.
I lead you to believe what probably did, but there's
room for interpretation, and I'll get I'll get notes from readers,
for sure, people like things a little more clear cut,

(01:13:46):
but you know, too bad. That's also learned the stories
I always want to tell, And I don't think you
can tell a story like this that is this nuanced
in terms of, you know, across all this time period
and all the changes that took place, And I mean,
it's just not a black and white story, and so
you can't tell it that way exactly.

Speaker 2 (01:14:06):
There was even if they did tell the entire truth,
what is the entire truth? Yeah, there is one thing
that happened, but there was a whole web of other
things that it happened all around it that were connected
that weren't connected. And does your average person a need
to know all that? And then do they really care

(01:14:27):
about all of that? And then you're what is actually
putting out all this information? Even really mean what it
is there going to be a story in the newspaper?
Is there going to be a report or a commission
on this sort of thing? It almost it's the feeling
that there has to always be this absolute truth, like

(01:14:50):
there's a book of truth out there that we can
just inscribe in there. This is what this is the
story of what really happened. It just isn't that black
and white.

Speaker 3 (01:15:00):
And you have a different need or desire based on
who you are. I mean, there are people in the
community who are like, look, I don't care. I just
want to know one thing. Is it safe for my
kids to walk to school today? Are bad guys getting
put in jail without their rights being you know, mauled?
And and are my kids safe? Is my house going
to get broken into tonight? And if the answer is yes,

(01:15:20):
they're safe and no it won't be, then that's that's
really all I care about. Now. If you go crazy
and you start like, you know, kicking indoors and robbing
drug dealers and stuff, that's not what we're talking about here.
But if you're an investigative journalist at the local newspaper,
I think you have a different answer to that equation.
And you know, and so that's kind of what we
wanted to explore, you know. I mean, obviously it's fun

(01:15:40):
to try to solve the mystery. And how things went
with that changed as that story developed, as we wrote
and rewrote it, and we had a lot of discussions
about about resolution, particularly deeper into the book, and how
to handle it and stuff. It was a lot of
conversations and kicking things around and trying to stay true

(01:16:02):
to the characters and true to the times, and true
to the questions that we're asking. And that that was
a wonderful experience, maddening at times, frustrating at times, but
in a good way. I have a really good relationship
with Colin, and we can have really hard conversations without
hard feelings, and that's that's a good friendship and a
good partnership when you can do that. But in addition

(01:16:24):
to telling a story and solving a mystery, you know,
we wanted to explore these other this other gray area
that you're talking about. And I think if people read
the book, you can read it as a murder mystery,
as a police procedural, and it stands up. I mean,
it's it has to. That's its primary function. And if
you don't want to get into the noise of the

(01:16:45):
other questions, then you know you can you read through
them and make up your mind and move on. But
if you're also one of those folks who likes to
really think about the books that you read, there's there's
plenty of meat on the bone for that kind of reader. Too.

Speaker 2 (01:16:58):
Yeah, that's a I had to leave the people with.
The thought is that if you love a who done it,
there's that element there everything you want, there's red herrings,
there's following the evidence, there's every bit of that. But
I think that layer on top that connects it and
also connects it through to the Even though you don't

(01:17:22):
have to read the other books in the series, and
I haven't read them yet, I have them on my
kindle and it's ready to go, but there's all these
little easter eggs that you might call them, that you
know you're getting connected into a bigger story. And I
think that that added a lot of texture to the story,
and it probably would be I'd guarantee it would be
a lot better if you read the other books. I've

(01:17:44):
read a ton of series, and I love that where
they're dropping in little hints and clues towards other parts
of the story. But in this case, you don't have
to read them to have it. Head read them to
get that texture that this is a part of a
bigger universe. It's not just this flat thing that exists
in this this book alone.

Speaker 3 (01:18:06):
Yeah, you're absolutely right. Anybody who's read the first five
books will see a ton of connections. Certainly, characters that
that are in the in those first books show up
at the appropriate place in their career at the appropriate
times in this book. But it is, you know, the
Silence of the Dead can be read as a complete

(01:18:26):
standalone as well, And in fact I originally conceived it
as that, and then once I got to thinking about it,
I realized it would it would mesh really well with
the Troy through sixteen universe and should be part of it.
And and then that's why I took it to call
in and we and we fleshed it out in that way.
But but yeah, and I'm glad Steve that you you

(01:18:48):
keyed on that particular quote about people making the truth
what they needed to be and and how that that's history.
You know that that comeback, because you know, that's a
piece that really resonated for us as well. People deciding

(01:19:14):
what things are going to mean and then acting upon that,
and who gets to decide and what powers push it
that direction and so forth. We use a lot of
quotes at the beginning of sections in these books, and
some of them are are real, and then in some
of the books, some of the quotes actually come from

(01:19:34):
characters from within the series, so we play fast and
loose with that a little bit. But I can tell
you that this particular quote, if we write any more
Chart three sixteen books, if it's ever relevant, it'll be
a quote we'll pull out and use again because it
is a thematically important one.

Speaker 2 (01:19:53):
Yeah, so I'll just leave it today that I highly
recommend people go read the book and listen to this
conversation as well, because I think it would definitely spur
you to think a little bit more. And if you
have thoughts about the book or what we talked about
the book, definitely come and join the conversation. Links to
how to buy Frank's books will be all in the

(01:20:15):
show notes, and reach out if you have questions or comments,
and we'll definitely talk to you next time.

Speaker 3 (01:20:22):
Thanks a lot for having me stive. This has been
a lot of fun. This book has been close to
my heart for over a decade, so having that be
out in the world and getting the chance to talk
with you about it has been very satisfying.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

Dateline NBC

Stuff You Should Know

My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}A Glimpse into the Silence of the Dead with Author Frank Zafiro

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}Dateline NBC

Stuff You Should Know

My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark

All Episodes

A Glimpse into the Silence of the Dead with Author Frank Zafiro

Dateline NBC