Lucy Zahray, The Poison Lady who educates crime writers

We’re in merry old England this week, so this is a revised version of an earlier post.

Kate Flora: The reading community we write for is an informed and demanding one, so we all have to do research for our books. Because I write police procedurals and about real crime, some of my research tends to be quite dark. I was looking for a reference book on my shelf recently, and scanning the contents reminded me that a stranger, knowing little about me and what I do, might be taken aback by my collection. I’m the person who goes to a library book sale and is delighted to score a criminalistics textbook. I read an article in a recent New Yorker and immediately ordered a book about geographic profiling, only to find that I already have David Canter’s Mapping Murder on my shelf. Every book I write has research files, and I have a file of old New Yorker articles on fascinating subjects like using soil to track where a killer has been.

Tess Garritsen, Lea and Kate perform an “autopsy” on Jerry Healy

Sometimes these books are things I read out of curiosity; sometimes, they related to the actual work I’m doing. For example, when I was working with retired Portland, Maine deputy chief Joe Loughlin on a book about Amy St. Laurent’s murder, Finding Amy, there was trial testimony from a forensic entomologist about the fly larvae found with the buried body. I had recently read M. Lee Goff’s A Fly for the Prosecution, so I had a great reference for helping me illuminate the expert’s testimony. Also very helpful in writing the scenes about the forensic exhumation was an entire notebook about the process put together for me by a police detective down in Delaware. He created it for a fictional mystery that’s never been published, but it was waiting for me when I needed it for a real crime.

Other books on the shelves have come to me through conversations while I’m doing

Chris Roerden, whose book Don’t Murder Your Mystery, is a great one for writers

research. Sometimes I have a conversation with a detective, and order up a book he suggests. That happened when a detective in the Miramichi, New Brunswick police department was walking me through the slides he uses to teach interviewing technique at the police academy. Our conversation led me to Mark McClish’s book, I Know You Are Lying: Detecting Deception Through Statement Analysis. Listening to the small language choices the interviewee makes can be very illuminating, as in the moment when the suspected killer in my true crime, Death Dealer, speaks about his missing wife in the past tense.

Once, after a conversation with a Portland detective about interviewing technique, I ran into my local police chief. He asked what I was working on, and I told him about the detective and some of the things he’d told me. “It’s all flavor of the month,” he said. “I’ll send you a book.” A few hours later, a patrol car stopped and the officer handed me a wonderfully informal, and informative self-published book by a Rochester, NY detective, Lt. Albert Joseph, Jr, called We Get Confessions.

 After reading Gavin DeBecker’s The Gift of Fear, I found myself late one night sitting in a jail up in New Brunswick, waiting to do a ride-along, and discussing the book with another officer. It, and the companion book, Fearless, are great books about trusting instinct and learning to be safe and resilient.

Because I write with, and about cops, in my Joe Burgess police procedural series and in my nonfiction, I have an entire shelf about cops. One of the great books is Mark Baker’s Cops, another Adam Plantinga’s 400 Things Cops Know. Another, not for the faint of heart but worth getting from the library, is Practical Homicide Investigation. (A note about that: when I got it from interlibrary loan, a concerned librarian asked if I really wanted to read it before handing it over.) For anyone interested in police shootings in the cops’ own words, I co-wrote, with retired Deputy Chief Joseph Loughlin the book Shots Fired: The misunderstandings, misconceptions, and myths about police shootings.

There are books about the criminal mind, crime scene investigation, and methods of murder. Sometimes, I carry my enthusiasm too far. Once, while I was cooking for a dinner party, my husband suggested that having a book about plant poisons open on the counter when the guests arrived might not be a good idea. I did end up using poison in An Educated Death. Another time, invited by a library in New Hampshire to talk about “The Dark Side of Crime Writing,” I had happily embarked on a talk about dissection of the liver before I realized that readers might not really to need to know all that goes into making the sausage to enjoy it. I’d learned a lot about the liver during a walk on a Florida beach when we encountered a toxicologist. He was enthusiastic. I ended up using that conversation in my Joe Burgess book Redemption.

I never imagined myself sitting in a restaurant talking about dissection with a medical examiner, but yes, I’ve done that, too.

I wonder—are your bookshelves as dark as mine? What are your go-to books for crime writing? And what are your favorite research stories?

Maine native and recovering attorney Kate Clark Flora writes true crime, strong women, thrillers and suspense, short stories, and police procedurals. Her fascination with people’s bad behavior began in the Maine attorney general’s office chasing deadbeat dads and protecting battered children. In addition to her crime fiction, she’s written two true crimes and a memoir with a retired game warden. Most recently Shots Fired: The Misconceptions, Misunderstandings and Myths About Police-Involved Shootings, co-written with former Portland assistant chief Joseph Loughlin. Flora has been an Edgar, Derringer, Agatha and Anthony finalist and twice won the Maine literary award for crime fiction.

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