Book of the Month #2: The Vig

Here are some of my thoughts on a major breakthrough that occurred during the process of writing THE VIG.

In all of my books previous to The Vig, I basically made up everything to do with crime and investigating. I didn’t have much of an idea how anything in the criminal justice system worked, and it hadn’t mattered either in the Holmes’ books (Son of Holmes & Rasputin’s Revenge) or even in Dead Irish, where Dismas Hardy was, at best, an amateur sleuth, and Glitsky’s role was more Hardy’s pal/sidekick than active policeman working a case. All that changed when I started thinking about the story that would become The Vig, and the way it happened has influenced every book since.

I asked my friend Al Giannini, at the time a San Francisco assistant district attorney prosecuting homicides, if I might get come by his office and get some sense of the way things really worked. When I came in, Al suggested that I accompany him out to the Holly Park project in San Francisco, where he was going to be interviewing a witness to an actual homicide. Well, the vision of life that I encountered when we got to our destination was one about which I, a middle-class guy from the suburbs, had been totally ignorant. In the first place, there was a palpable sense of mortal danger. The woman we were visiting had locked herself in her house and covered the windows of the place with black plastic – she was afraid that the person she’d be testifying against would kill her. Literally, kill her. Adding to this sense of real, true, non-fiction danger were the two district attorney investigators that were assigned to accompany us. These were armed police officers, and they walked with us on full alert from Al’s car to our witness’s door. Then, there was the actual interview itself, where I got a look at Al’s technique – putting the witness at ease, extracting information, calming her fears, telling her what she could expect at the trial. When we finally left, I breathed a deep sigh of relief – glad to have escaped with my life. Dramatic, but true.

What I took away from that scary day was a realization that if I wanted to write reality-based crime fiction – and I did – then I had better from that day forward get my facts and details right. This is probably the single most important writing decision I made in my entire career.

The Vig – Purchase on Amazon
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