Posts
Elizabeth Zelvin
I’ve never been fond of doing research. I majored in English back in college because it meant I got to read novels. Decades later, when I went back to school for a master’s in social work, I always felt slightly over my head in the university library. The Internet made things easier. When I don’t know something, I google it. But the systematic hunt for facts still scares me. I’d much rather make it up.
As a mystery writer, I’ve learned that there are things I’m allowed to make up and things I’m not. It seems unfair that writers for television are apparently allowed to get everything wrong, while novelists get scolded via email by their readers for the smallest error in fact. But who said life was fair? I can—in fact, I must—make up my characters and the situations I put them in. I may make up the settings of my stories, if I choose. But forensics, police procedure, and any kind of technical detail had better be accurate.
I didn’t know this when I wrote the first draft of Death Will Get You Sober. But when I started sending the manuscript out and networking with other mystery writers and readers, I soon learned that I couldn’t afford to ignore this stuff. To some extent, I could bypass it. I chose as my setting a milieu I know well: the world of alcoholism treatment programs and recovery from addictions and codependency. As a professional, I had published in the field. I didn’t need to look much up, and writing quirky characters and snappy dialogue instead of clinical prose was fun. I also chose to make my protagonist an amateur sleuth. My recovering alcoholic and his two sidekicks get suspicious about a death that’s fallen through the cracks in the system and make their own investigation. The convention of the traditional whodunit—mine is too gritty to be called a cozy—allowed me to do this. If I’d tried to write a police procedural, a PI novel, or a technothriller, I’d have had to research it. So I didn’t.
The police crept into the next two manuscripts, Death Will Improve Your Relationship and Death Will Help You Leave Him, which will appear in due course provided the first book does well. I contrived to keep them more or less in the background. But now I’m working on the fourth, Death Will Extend Your Vacation, and the moment of truth has arrived. My amateur detectives take shares in a group house in the Hamptons and find a body on the beach. The problem is not so much a case of Cabot Cove Syndrome (How can Jessica Fletcher manage to find so many bodies in one small town?) as that there’s no way the group can go on with its summer without police involvement. One of their housemates is dead. Sure, my protagonist and his buddies can snoop. But trying to get the story going, I quickly found myself stuck. I needed to know what the police were doing. Hence: research.
So one morning I waltzed into the headquarters of the Town of East Hampton Police Department, introduced myself as a mystery writer, and said the magic words (courtesy of writer Robin Hathaway), “I want to get it right.” As she’d predicted, they were glad to help. In minutes, I was seated across the desk from a handsome young sergeant with a gold shield pinned to his blue uniform.
“How do I know you are who you say you are?” he asked.
“Here’s my card,” I said. “And my bookmark.” (Better than a passport, with my picture and bio on one side and my book title and blurb on the other.) I showed him the Malice Domestic pad I’d brought along to take notes. I also mentioned my former affiliation with POPPA as a clinician doing outreach to NYPD officers on the subject of post-traumatic stress.
“It’s set in an imaginary Hampton,” I began.
He grinned and gestured at the room around him.
“This is it,” he said. I can imagine that policing in the Hamptons must be stranger than fiction some of the time.
I proceeded to describe my scenario and ask what the police would be doing at every point along the way, especially where they would necessarily be interacting with my characters. The sergeant generously gave me an hour of his time. He not only answered all my questions, but told me a few facts I didn’t even know I didn’t know. For one thing, group houses are illegal anywhere in the Town of East Hampton (from Wainscott to Sag Harbor to Montauk). Oops. Luckily, it’ll be the landlord, not the renters, who get in trouble when the murder bring the house to the law’s attention. Best of all, in explaining why the police and the medical examiner must be called to the scene of any death, the sergeant uttered one line so good that I absolutely must use it in the book.
“It’s against the law to die in the State of New York.”
Showing posts with label police. Show all posts
Showing posts with label police. Show all posts
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Thursday, March 1, 2007
POPPA
Elizabeth Zelvin
When I set out to write Death Will Get You Sober, I chose an amateur sleuth as my detective because I knew next to nothing about cops. I had read plenty of police procedurals, but not for the police procedure. I followed fictional favorites like Reginald Hill’s Dalziel and Pascoe, Julie Smith’s Skip Langdon, and Donna Leon’s Commissario Brunetti for their personal lives—in other words, character development. But I had no sense of real life police officers as people.
That changed in 2003, when I was invited to take a part-time counseling job with a New York City outfit called Police Organization Providing Peer Assistance (POPPA). Founded in 1996 in response to a double-digit rash of suicides in NYPD as a resource by cops for cops, POPPA had just obtained funding to reach out to the thousands of officers affected by 911 and its aftermath. Active and retired police of all ranks had already been trained as peer counselors. They staffed a 24-hour hotline, known only by word of mouth, on a volunteer basis. Now they joined mental health professionals like me in teams that visited every command in the five boroughs to educate uniformed police about how emotional fallout from 911 might be affecting them 18 months later and to tell them how POPPA could help.
The way we operated was counterintuitive for us clinicians. We didn’t make the groups we addressed sit in a circle and share about their post-traumatic stress. We had five or ten minutes—right after roll call, when the cops had received their day’s assignment and were eager to get out on the streets—to say our piece and invite anyone who wanted to call the hotline, anonymously if they wished, and talk further with a cop who understood and was not affiliated with the Department. At the beginning, even the clinically savvy POPPA administration hardly let us open our mouths, so sure were they that only cops knew how to talk to cops. Gradually, the counseling cops we worked with came to trust us. And for me, the human beings inside the blue uniform—at least a thousand of them in the nine months the job lasted—came into focus.
The courage of these dedicated men and women was profound and deeply poignant, as was their pain. In a profession where toughness and fortitude are prized, many of these officers were carrying a heavy emotional load in silence. Later on, when we were allowed to spend a more extended period—30 or 40 minutes—with groups of cops assembled for inservice training—we were able to distribute an anonymous questionnaire, a PTSD checklist. In every group, at least one person suffered from one or more major symptoms: intrusive thoughts, nightmares, rage or irritability, inability to concentrate, avoidance of or panic response to stressful situations, increased alcohol use, marital conflict, feelings of despair and hopelessness. Yet these officers were still working, dealing with 12-hour shifts, cancelled weekends and vacations, and such duties as patrolling the subway tunnels with inadequate protection against possible dangers such as biological weapons. They also faced the hostility or indifference of a civilian population that had long since ended the love affair with the city’s police that had bloomed for a few months after 911 itself. All were required to attend training in counterterrorism measures. All believed terrorists would strike at New York again sooner or later.
In mystery fiction, we meet mostly detectives. Too often, we ignore the uniformed officers who risk their lives as first responders to a crisis, whether it’s a case of domestic violence, rape or murder, or the unimaginable, like the toppling of the World Trade towers. Let’s not forget the ordinary cops, young and scared but not allowed to admit it even to themselves, who run toward danger when the rest of us are running away.
When I set out to write Death Will Get You Sober, I chose an amateur sleuth as my detective because I knew next to nothing about cops. I had read plenty of police procedurals, but not for the police procedure. I followed fictional favorites like Reginald Hill’s Dalziel and Pascoe, Julie Smith’s Skip Langdon, and Donna Leon’s Commissario Brunetti for their personal lives—in other words, character development. But I had no sense of real life police officers as people.
That changed in 2003, when I was invited to take a part-time counseling job with a New York City outfit called Police Organization Providing Peer Assistance (POPPA). Founded in 1996 in response to a double-digit rash of suicides in NYPD as a resource by cops for cops, POPPA had just obtained funding to reach out to the thousands of officers affected by 911 and its aftermath. Active and retired police of all ranks had already been trained as peer counselors. They staffed a 24-hour hotline, known only by word of mouth, on a volunteer basis. Now they joined mental health professionals like me in teams that visited every command in the five boroughs to educate uniformed police about how emotional fallout from 911 might be affecting them 18 months later and to tell them how POPPA could help.
The way we operated was counterintuitive for us clinicians. We didn’t make the groups we addressed sit in a circle and share about their post-traumatic stress. We had five or ten minutes—right after roll call, when the cops had received their day’s assignment and were eager to get out on the streets—to say our piece and invite anyone who wanted to call the hotline, anonymously if they wished, and talk further with a cop who understood and was not affiliated with the Department. At the beginning, even the clinically savvy POPPA administration hardly let us open our mouths, so sure were they that only cops knew how to talk to cops. Gradually, the counseling cops we worked with came to trust us. And for me, the human beings inside the blue uniform—at least a thousand of them in the nine months the job lasted—came into focus.
The courage of these dedicated men and women was profound and deeply poignant, as was their pain. In a profession where toughness and fortitude are prized, many of these officers were carrying a heavy emotional load in silence. Later on, when we were allowed to spend a more extended period—30 or 40 minutes—with groups of cops assembled for inservice training—we were able to distribute an anonymous questionnaire, a PTSD checklist. In every group, at least one person suffered from one or more major symptoms: intrusive thoughts, nightmares, rage or irritability, inability to concentrate, avoidance of or panic response to stressful situations, increased alcohol use, marital conflict, feelings of despair and hopelessness. Yet these officers were still working, dealing with 12-hour shifts, cancelled weekends and vacations, and such duties as patrolling the subway tunnels with inadequate protection against possible dangers such as biological weapons. They also faced the hostility or indifference of a civilian population that had long since ended the love affair with the city’s police that had bloomed for a few months after 911 itself. All were required to attend training in counterterrorism measures. All believed terrorists would strike at New York again sooner or later.
In mystery fiction, we meet mostly detectives. Too often, we ignore the uniformed officers who risk their lives as first responders to a crisis, whether it’s a case of domestic violence, rape or murder, or the unimaginable, like the toppling of the World Trade towers. Let’s not forget the ordinary cops, young and scared but not allowed to admit it even to themselves, who run toward danger when the rest of us are running away.
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