Smile! They're watching you

Sandra Parshall

Airports make me feel rushed and anxious and crabby. I’m always in a better mood on return flights, when I know I’ll be home again soon, but I’m still not a happy traveler, and that’s probably obvious to everyone around me. I’ll have to improve my attitude, though, if a proposed new security system called FAST becomes reality, or I’ll be in big trouble.

I’m okay with current airport security, although it’s a bloody nuisance. Where my right knee once was, I have a big chunk of surgical steel and space age plastic, and I’ve accepted that I will always be pulled aside for a full-body pat-down. The female security inspectors who do this are briskly impersonal, yet courteous and considerate, and I appreciate their professionalism. The baggage scans and searches – all necessary.

But FAST worries me.

The acronym stands for Future Attribute Screening Technique. Think about that for a minute. Especially the word Future. FAST is designed to identify people who haven’t actually done anything but might be on the verge of wreaking havoc. It works not by detecting weapons but by measuring changes in passengers’ heart and breathing rates, skin temperature, eye and body movements. If I ever walk through a FAST sensor array after a tardy shuttle driver has nearly made me miss a flight, I’m a goner.

FAST is a $20 million dollar federal project currently being tested by the Department of Homeland Security. We already have human evil intentions  detectors in our airports: 3,000 DHS officers spend their work hours walking around terminals watching passengers’ behavior, searching for suspicious movements and facial expressions. This program is called SPOT – Screening of Passengers by Observational Techniques. FAST is designed to pick up changes that can’t be seen by the naked eye.

Clinical psychologist Daniel Martin developed the theory behind FAST: a person who is about to commit a crime will exhibit certain physiological changes, and the intensity of those changes will vary with the seriousness of the planned crime. (Somebody who’s planning to blow up a plane full of people will sweat more, breathe harder, etc., than somebody who’s trying to smuggle marijuana through security.) In studies of more than 2,000 subjects, FAST had a 78% success rate at detecting those who had been instructed to do something “bad” at mock events. After receiving their instructions, the subjects passed through sensors capable of registering physical reactions from as far away as 20 feet.

The problem with this kind of trial study, of course, is that a test subject who has been instructed to go into a room and steal some small item is hardly the same as a terrorist who’s planning to commandeer an airliner and crash it into a skyscraper. No accurate way exists to test the technology. If it’s approved, real passengers in real airports will ultimately be the test subjects. Mistakes will be made. Harried travelers will find themselves in a lot of trouble because they were frowning and their hearts were racing, while coolly determined terrorists will sail through without arousing any suspicion.

Many experts in various scientific and technological fields are questioning the value of FAST. Data from test studies have been shown to some scientists but have not been released to and reviewed by the general scientific community. It won’t come to an airport near you anytime soon; years of further development and testing lie ahead. But DHS has invested so much money and time in it already that we can probably count on seeing some version of it in airports eventually.

When that day arrives, I might decide I’d prefer to take the train. What do you think?

If you want to read more about FAST, see the December issue of Discover magazine.

Exactly the Same, Only Different

Sharon Wildwind

I wonder if stories have a best before date? Hollywood certainly doesn’t think so. Trying the search term “The Return Of . . .” on the Internet Movie Data Base got so many hits that they couldn’t be displayed. And that search wouldn’t capture the metamorphosis of television shows like Mission: Impossible and The A-Team into full-length movies or the multiple-movies series like Harry Potter and Rocky.

I spent some time this past week taming data bases that had, like Topsy, just growed. I read a lot of mysteries. Big surprise, eh? Because I write, blog, and speak about the world of mysteries, it’s helpful if I can remember at least the basics of what I’ve read like name of author, name of book, or name of main character. Over the years I created several simple data bases to keep track of that minimal information. As I upgraded my computer system and found new programs, I try new formats.

Bottom line was that I’d ended up with five different data base formats that weren’t compatible or usable. So I spent a grey cold winter day doing a lot of copying and pasting, turning disparate formats into a consolidated whole.

Mostly what I read are samples, a book here, a book there in a series to get an idea of a wide range of writers, but each year I pick a couple of writers that I really like and read their entire series, in order. The size of some of those series stunned me: 11 books, 12, 17, 18, 32, and a whopping 47 in one case.

Here’s my confession. As a reader, I am a writer’s worst nightmare. I want my old favorites to be the same for each book. And I want each book to be different. Both. At the same time.

Remember the pushmi-pullyu (pronounced "push-me—pull-you"), the gazelle-unicorn cross in the Dr. Doolittle books? Writers are the pull quality. Writers go farther, go deeper, go boldly (and try not to split infinitives as they go). If there are a limited number of plots, then the writer’s job is to make the old new and fresh.

The bottom line people are the push quality. Do what you’ve done before. Do what sells. Do what your readers expect. Do it just like you did before—or just like that other top-of-the-charts bestselling author did—only make it different.

As writers, we often have to keep doing what we’ve been doing. The contract demands it, at least for a certain number of books. But don’t let anyone talk you into the idea that what you are doing now is the only thing you should be doing forever. Contracts expire, the world changes, our own skills grow and mature. It always pays to have something different waiting in the wings.

I’m not talking about our occasional one-night stands, like writing haikus for amusement or helping Aunt Sophie whip the family history into shape. Those are fine things for a writer to do, but they don’t stretch you as a writer? A writer need at least two secret passions, projects that she works on every so often, projects that one day she just might bring to the foreground and work on seriously.

My two? The first is memories. I do a lot of journaling. I read a lot of women’s recollections of their lives. I believe that it is indescribably important that we, as women, document the everyday moments of our lives.

I also have a background in technical writing. I’ve been told I write good instructions. Once in a while I take a crack at trying to explain complicated things in a simple manner, just to see if I can still do it, just because one day it’s a skill that I might need again.

What are the two other kinds of writing that you have waiting in the wings?

--------
Quote for the week:
Always keep some of your creative energy for play. Today’s playground could well turn into future sales. ~Barbara Hambly, science fiction, mystery, fantasy writer, November 2008

An Icy Challenge

by Julia Buckley

These lovely pictures, captured in Versoix, Switzerland after an ice storm, are a stark reminder of the cold that is coming. It reminds me of Robert Frost's famous poem "Fire and Ice," in which the speaker surmises that either theory of destruction, an ice age or a heat wave, is an equally potent agent for destroying the world. But if we were to express what these photographs show us in poetic form, I think that the spare lines of a haiku might best capture this stark, frigid landscape.

My writing challenge to you today is to compose a haiku that captures your feelings about icy weather.

Here's mine:

Frigid Jupiter
Sends silver, wintry greeting
In layers of ice.

Share your harbingers of winter with the compressed language of this Japanese poetic style.

I look forward to reading your images--they'll prepare me for the winter holidays and the frigid days of the New Year!! Remember that the first day of Winter is December 22nd this year.

And, to borrow a sentence from the wildly popular GAME OF THRONES, "Winter is coming." :)

D.P.Lyle: The CSI Effect

We are pleased to have D. P. Lyle, MD as our guest today. He's the friend of mystery writers everywhere because he helps us murder our fictional victims with poisons, bludgeon them with blunt instruments, stab them, shoot them, or just find them in their different states of decomposition. He'll tell us what the body looks like when frozen in a lake, burnt in a building, or buried in a shallow grave.

He's also the Macavity Award winning and Edgar Award nominated author of the non-fiction books, MURDER & MAYHEM, FORENSICS FOR DUMMIES, FORENSICS & FICTION, FORENSICS & FICTION 2, and HOWDUNNIT: FORENSICS as well as the Samantha Cody thrillers DEVIL’S PLAYGROUND and DOUBLE BLIND, the Dub Walker Thrillers STRESS FRACTURE and HOT LIGHTS, COLD STEEL, and the media tie-in novels ROYAL PAINS: FIRST, DO NO HARM and ROYAL PAINS: SICK RICH based on the hit TV series. His essay on Jules Verne’s THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND appears in THRILLERS: 100 MUST READS.

He has worked with many novelists and with the writers of popular television shows such as Law & Order, CSI: Miami, Diagnosis Murder, Monk, Judging Amy, Peacemakers, Cold Case, House, Medium, Women’s Murder Club, 1-800-Missing, The Glades, and Pretty Little Liars. And here he is to tell us about the CSI Effect.

You’ve no doubt heard of the CSI Effect but what exactly is it? Does it actually exist? Both the definition and whether it is real or not are controversial with experts weighing in on both sides of the issue.

It derives from the many forensic science shows, both fictional and documentary-style, that populate/dominate the TV schedule. Many point to the CBS series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation as the beginning of the effect, which then expanded with the appearance of the “CSI clones” and shows such as Bones, NCIS, Cold Case, and Forensic Files. It’s impossible to flip on the TV without seeing some crime show and forensic science is invariably part of the story. The same goes for most mysteries and thrillers you read and virtually every real-life case you see presented on national or local news.

The CSI Effect could be defined as the impact of these shows, which reveal cool and clever forensic science techniques, on the public, criminals, law enforcement officials, juries, and courts. They have created a level of expectation that simply isn’t realistic. They portray crime labs as being fully equipped with very expensive instruments and staffed with brilliant minds that magically uncover the most esoteric evidence. They make the very rare seem almost commonplace. They suggest that all these wonderful tools are widely available and frequently employed in criminal cases. The truth is vastly different. DNA is involved in perhaps 1% of cases and it isn’t available in 20 minutes. Crime labs are severely underfunded and most have meager equipment, not the plasma screens and holographic generators seen on TV. The lab techs are indeed smart and dedicated individuals but they aren’t prescient. They can’t magically solve complex crimes by simply “seeing” the solution in a microscope or within their minds. It doesn’t work that way. At least not often.

So how does all this information---or is it misinformation?--effect the public, criminals, and the police and courts? Simply put, they teach criminals how to avoid leaving behind evidence and unrealistically raise public expectations.

Criminals watch these TV shows and then alter their behavior to avoid detection. They learn not to leave behind fingerprints and DNA, to hide from surveillance cameras, to avoid using cellphones and computers in the planning and execution of their crimes, and a host of other things. Fortunately, these shows are not always accurate and don’t cover all contingencies involved in a given criminal activity, proving the old adage that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. The criminal thinks he has thought of everything but while he focuses on one bit of evidence he ignores others. An example would be the thief who planned a breaking and entering home robbery. He knew that shoe prints could be left in the soft dirt of the planter beneath his entry point window so he took off his shoes. He then realized he had not brought gloves, so to prevent leaving fingerprints, he removed his socks and used them as hand covers. The crime was interrupted by the home owner, an altercation with blood shed followed, and the thief left a bloody footprint on a piece of broken window glass. This proved to be his undoing.

The public, and thus jury members, comes away from these shows believing that high-tech investigations are involved in every case and if the police or prosecutors fail to make DNA or blood analysis part of the case they must have done something wrong. Defense attorneys often latch on to this and use it to undermine the police investigation. During the famous Scott Peterson case, how many times did you hear news reports and pundits talk about the lack of DNA evidence as if this made the case weak? In truth, finding Laci’s blood or DNA on Scott or his clothing would be of little help. They were married, they lived together, there were a hundred innocent reasons for Laci’s DNA to be found. Scott’s conviction stemmed from his stupidity, and the fact that he was guilty, not from high-tech forensic techniques, underlining the fact that most cases are solved by good police work and not by cool science.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, juries wanted confessions and eyewitnesses, both of which we now know can be false and erroneous. Now, after the saturation of our psyche with forensic sciences, they expect DNA and other sophisticated evidence. This not only makes gaining a conviction more difficult but also gives prosecutors pause before filing charges in cases without such evidence.

So, it can be said that the CSI Effect alters the criminal justice system in many ways. It helps criminals avoid detection, creates unrealistic expectations in the public and in juries, and makes prosecution of some crimes problematic. But there are positive aspects in that this increased interest in forensic science has led to more people choosing this as a career and indeed the number of colleges offering forensic science curricula and degrees has mushroomed.

Thank you, Doug. See more about him at his website http://www.dplylemd.com/ and his blog: http://writersforensicsblog.wordpress.com/

Looking Backward, Looking Forward

by Sheila Connolly

Recently I've been asked to speak to two different organizations, one for writers, one for library mystery readers. The topics for each are very broad—something along the lines of, "how I became a writer." I'm more than happy to tell people about how (and why) I did it, but I'm becoming more and more aware that I and most of my writer friends are the last of the dinosaurs.

Many of the writers I know personally and online are my age—that is, not young. Many of us came late to writing, because we were busy with other things like marriage, families and earning a living. Most of us are thrilled to have finally arrived at a point in our lives where we have the time and the desire and the accumulated wisdom to write, and some have done quite well despite the late start.

But the experience will never be the same again, and I'm not even sure it's worth telling people about. Here's how far back my writing experience goes:

• I learned to type on a manual typewriter in summer school. I graduated to my family's chugging electric typewriter (with a fabric ribbon), which saw me through college. When I started working, it was a treat to have a machine that could correct what I typed—no more Wite-Out or trying to erase without digging a hole in the paper (and does anyone remember carbon paper?).
• The first computer I ever saw was on a high school field trip to Bell Labs in New Jersey. It took up a small room. In my senior year I took the first computer science class my high school offered. We had to go to a local university to use a computer, and we lined up to make our punch cards and then to take our turn on the refrigerator-sized computer, which lived in an air-conditioned room. I still have the plastic template for making Fortran diagrams.
• We used to send things by mail, now relabeled snail-mail, using paper and stamps. Then we had to wait days or weeks for responses, and could never be sure the letter even got where it was going.
• We used to go to a library to find books to read. I'm happy that my grandmother loved to visit bookstores, treating a trip to one as entertainment, and she always came home with a book, which she would then pass on to my mother. So I grew up with books all around me, and a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica (remember that?) for research.

When I began to write seriously, barely a decade ago, it was on a computer (the kind with a bulky monitor that took up half the desktop, with a tower blocking my feet underneath the desk). When I finished a manuscript, I would write a query letter on paper and mail it to agents and editors, along with a synopsis and maybe some sample pages, with an enclosed Self Addressed Stamped Envelope. Then for weeks I'd approach my mailbox with fear and trembling, dreading the sight of that wrinkled white #10 envelope, which usually held a rejection—far too often, a photocopy with some variation of "sorry, not for me." If by some wonderful chance someone wanted to see more of what I'd written, I'd send them a paper copy and hope it didn't get chewed up or lost by the postal system.

Fast forward to the present. We're still writing on computers (although they've gotten much smaller and thinner), but now we can do all the research we want online, for both the book and about the agent/publisher we're submitting to, and send the submission as an email attachment. We can verify that it arrived—and we can get a rejection in minutes (especially if it's another "sorry, not for me"). We can read about other writers' experience on blogs and loops dedicated to writing. And if we're lucky enough to find someone who loves our work and wants to publish it, we can edit it electronically, and then sell it the same way.

All this has happened in the last ten years. Publishing as we knew it is in the midst of dramatic and rapid changes, and the long-established print publishers are scrabbling to keep up. Writers now have the option of bypassing the old paths and selling their books themselves online. But we dinosaurs still yearn to hold a physical book in our hands. We're the last of our kind.

So what do I tell the groups who invited me to talk? I have one foot in the past, one in the present. And by the time of the first scheduled talk next month, it all may have changed again.

Are things better or worse today?

When Music Is A Lot Like Writing

Elizabeth Zelvin

I’ve been working for about a year on a project that’s been a dream of mine for a very long time: making an album of songs I’ve written over the past thirty years. The album title is Outrageous Older Woman, and when it’s finished, it will be available in CD and download form. Recording and co-producing the album in my co-producer and sound engineer’s studio has challenged me to learn and apply quite a number of new skills. I’ve also been able to draw on everything I’ve learned in my years of writing and getting my work published.

1. It takes time and patience. I’ve wanted to be a writer since the age of 7, and my first novel came out when I was 64. I’ve been playing guitar since I was 13, writing songs that were “keepers” since I was 20, and if things go well, the album may come out before I turn 68.

2. It takes talent, persistence, and luck. I’m certainly not a pro as a musician, the way I am as a writer, but I’m proud of my songs, and they’re sounding better and better as I add the talents of backup musicians and vocalists to my own vocal and guitar tracks—just as my writing gets better and better as I allow critique partners and editors to enhance it with their own skills. Persistence? See time and patience, above. Since I’m self-producing, as many acoustic singer/songwriters do, I don’t need a record deal and may or may not try to interest radio DJs in my songs. But one huge stroke of luck I’ve had is my co-producer’s generosity in giving me studio time at far less than the going rate, without which I couldn’t possibly afford the many, many hours it’s taking. And even bigger luck, this friend of thirty years has turned out to be a dream collaborator. I’ve always been impressed by writing duos who can work together successfully and have never achieved such a collaboration myself. In the complex and demanding process or putting an album of recorded music together, we’ve been working together seamlessly and having a helluva lotta fun.

3. You need computer skills. I started out as a confirmed computerphobe, and I couldn’t have done all I have as a writer without overcoming my fears and developing skills to which I’m still adding today. Today’s recording is all about the computer. We’re using a program capable of digitizing the live performances, in this case, of four singers, three guitars (four if you count the bass, which provides those thumps that you hear when you’re trying to sleep and the neighbors are throwing a party), keyboard (programmed to sound at different times like a Steinway concert grand, honky tonk piano, harp, accordion, organ, concertina, fife, tuba, and sitar), flute, penny whistle, banjo, cello, fiddle (playing three different parts on one song), clarinet, drums, and assorted percussion. It then fine-tunes every track and mixes them so they’re balanced just right to sound as good as they possibly can. The human ear and mind makes all the decisions about how every note and breath should sound, separately and together—that’s a big part of producing. But it’s also some awesome technology. As sound engineer, my friend knows what every light and button on the gigantic sound board is for and what every menu item in the program does (more than I know about MS Word after using it for ten years). That’s all beyond me, but I’ve learned how to read the screen—for example, to look at a blob and say, “Let’s lower the volume on that note two decibels,” or at a tiny speck and say, “That dot is a breath—let’s delete it.” Yep, in a digital music program you cut, copy, paste, and delete, just the way you do in Word.

4. You have to kill your darlings. I heard that crucial piece of wisdom as soon as I joined Sisters in Crime and connected with other writers. But it took me years to steel myself to apply it to my work. It’s just the same with music as it is with words. Say, I finally hit the high note on the second verse of my hardest song. We did two takes, and I did it twice. Both takes are gorgeous—but I’ve got to throw one out, because that note appears in only one place in the song. Sometimes the darlings aren’t even my darlings, but those of my backup dream team, who play so much better than I do. For example, I’m crazy about what the fiddle, the banjo, the lead guitar, and the honky tonk piano all did on the solo (the instrumental passage that breaks up the flow of words) on my most fully orchestrated song. But only one instrument at a time can take the lead. If I use them all, even as background, the solo will sound cluttered, even muddy. It would be like leaving in all the adjectives—or more than a bare sprinkling of adverbs.

If you’d like to be notified when Outrageous Older Woman comes out, you can send me your email address at lizatlizzelvin.com. (Use the symbol, not the word “at.”)

My 2012 Wish List

by Sandra Parshall

I’m long past the point when I viewed each new year as an exciting opportunity for a fresh start, extraordinary good luck, and amazing turning points. Now what I hope for is that my husband, our two cats, and I will all still be here this time next year, looking ahead to 2013. But I’m not beyond making a wish list, even if I have little expectation that my wishes will be granted.

Here’s my list for 2012:

1. I wish politicians would come to their senses (I did say that I have low expectations...) and realize that libraries are necessities, not luxuries, in a modern, literate society.

2. I wish major traditional publishers would come to their senses (see above re: low expectations) and realize that talented writers are worth publishing, even if they don’t regularly produce books that top the national bestsellers charts for a month.

3. I wish more readers would venture outside their ruts and their comfort zones and give the work of newer, lesser-known authors a look.

4. I wish every man who avoids books written by women would try one, just one, and monitor himself closely for adverse reactions. If he survives, maybe he’ll try another.

5. I wish the remaining bookstore chains would better serve their customers by offering greater diversity and by giving readers a chance to discover small press books on the store shelves.

6. I wish Barnes & Noble would stop trying to make the Nook competitive with the Kindle — an effort that’s driving the company into the red — and concentrate on staying alive as a brick-and-mortar bookseller.

7. I wish publishers would halt the upward creep of book prices before they alienate all their customers. Hardcovers are perilously close to costing $30 each. Is it really surprising that more and more people prefer e-books?

8. I wish we could eliminate the defensiveness and outright hostility that frequently erupts in the debate over traditional publishing vs self-publishing. Some writers are publishing both ways and see the merits of each. Others have planted their feet firmly on one side of the fence and regard their colleagues on the opposite side with contempt. The world is changing. We have to change with it. We are all in this together.

9. I wish publishers would stop putting the thriller label on every book that has a crime in it, however quiet and lacking in thrills it may be. What’s next? Knitting thrillers? Pastry shop thrillers?

10. In whatever form they prefer – printed, electronic, audio – I wish more people would turn to books rather than TV for entertainment and information. 

What's on your wish list for the coming year?

The Slow Season

Sharon Wildwind
Who has taken the hand-made pledge, and this week extends that pledge to her blog.

Stocking Stuffers for Mystery Lovers

by Julia Buckley

The Season of Giving is in full swing. While I'm not one of those who will join the throngs at malls or elbow my way to sales on "Black Friday," I do enjoy perusing the Net in the silence of my home to find unexpected joy gifts for those on my list. Perhaps you'll enjoy some of my finds enough to purchase them for your mystery-loving friends and family.

1. Just a few dollars will get you this fun bookmark from the Sherlock Holmes Museum Shop in London.

This fun site has all sorts of neat Holmes-related items that might please the Classical Mystery lover in your home (and of course there's no harm in getting the occasional stocking-stuffer for yourself, is there?).

The quotation is a classic Holmes paradox--something for Watson to ponder while Holmes's brain works overtime. And what a fun way to mark your non-Kindle reading of THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES!

2. If you're willing to spend more money, ZAZZLE has fun gifts for mystery lovers, like this Marple-inspired tee:

You can find the link here for this fun tee-shirt.

3. If you're a fan of the classics, how about this homage to Dostoevsky and his great work CRIME AND PUNISHMENT?

Click on the link to see all of the text behind the little Dostoevsky figure.

4. Jane Hornung's book THE MYSTERY LOVER'S BOOK OF QUOTATIONS was published in 1989 (and I bought it then), but it's still a nice gift for a mystery lover.

It has many terrific quotes by mystery authors and mystery characters. You can read a sampling of the quotations in Neal Pollack's review on Amazon.

5. Check out the Edward Gorey store for some of his mysterious art. You can stuff a stocking with one of his castle notepads for only seven dollars!

I have so many happy memories of PBS Mystery and the wonderful Gorey art in the opening credits that I feel happy every time I look at some of this man's great creations.

6. How about a classic mystery DVD? On Amazon, you can get Hitchcock's DIAL M FOR MURDER for as low as 9 dollars!

That seems like a steal for such a well-crafted mystery--a cinematic Christmas feast.

Even if you don't like these gifts, you might enjoy browsing the sites to which I sent you. Shopping online has many advantages for a crowd-avoiding shopper like me--but aside from the lack of crowds, there is so much more shelf space in the virtual world, and that's why you might find treasures that they can't carry in a store.

Happy Shopping, and happy mysteries.

Dangerous Medicine: An Interview with Larry Karp

by Sandra Parshall
 

As a physician, Larry Karp worked in the field of reproductive genetics and specialized in complicated pregnancy care, founding the Prenatal Diagnosis Center at the University of Washington, and Swedish Medical Center's Department of Perinatal Medicine.  During that time, he authored three nonfiction books and wrote newspaper and magazine articles, as well as a monthly column of commentary for the American Journal of Medical Genetics. In 1995, Larry left medicine to write mystery novels full-time. He has published three Music Box Mysteries, a standalone, and three Ragtime Mysteries.

For his new novel, A Perilous Conception, Larry returns to an area of medicine he knows well to craft a suspense novel set in the days when a storm of controversy raged over “test tube babies” and the doctors who performed in vitro fertilization. The book was published this week by Poisoned Pen Press. Recently Larry talked to us about it and about the various turns his professional life has taken.

Q. Tell us a bit about A Perilous Conception.

A. It's 1976. Despite fierce international controversy over whether in vitro fertilization should ever be performed in humans, doctors around the world race to be first to produce a baby by this procedure.

Dr. Colin Sanford, a brilliant, ambitious obstetrician in Emerald, Washington has a plan. He recruits Dr. Giselle Hearn, an experienced laboratory geneticist-embryologist at the University who's frustrated by the ultra-conservative policies of her department chairman. Drs. Sanford and Hearn, working secretly, set out to put their names in history books.

Unfortunately, a secret that big is hard to keep. Dr. Hearn's lab supervisor catches on and demands a blackmail payment. Several months later, one of Dr. Sanford's patients gives birth to a healthy boy, and Sanford prepares to make an announcement at a press conference. But before that can come about, the baby's father kills Dr. Hearn and then himself.

Police Detective Bernie Baumgartner's investigation is hampered by pressure from influential people at the University who want to control sensationalism that might harm the institution. But dogged, tenacious Baumgartner suspects that Sanford and Hearn were in fact doing IVF, that they succeeded with the Kennetts, and that murder, suicide, and other crimes were the fallout. A double cat-and-mouse game develops between doctor and detective, and as stakes escalate, truth becomes an increasingly-evasive commodity.

Q. Is this a stand-alone or the start of a new series?


A. Right now, I'd say a standalone, which is the way I've imagined the book all along. Barbara Peters, my editor at Poisoned Pen, felt the story was Dr. Sanford's, and encouraged me to focus on him, keeping Baumgartner in the role of a sideman. Still, some early readers have commented that the detective is an interesting character, and they hope to see more of him. I can't quite picture the good Doctor Sanford in another mystery novel - but I guess one never knows. Some day, Baumgartner, with or without Sanford, might just grab a plot thread and start running with it.
   
In any case, my next book will be another standalone.

Q. What kind of person is your detective, Bernie Baumgartner? What qualities make him a good detective to investigate this particular crime?

A. Often, our major personality characteristics are both our strong and our weak points, and such is the case with Bernie. Think of a pit bull bred for OCD. In the search for a murderer, this guy won't be deterred or intimidated by anyone, not influential community members, not the Chief of Police, not a very clever and knowledgeable doctor. But his thirty years of dedication to his work have alienated his wife, who's ready for him to retire to a life of leisure with her. He'd rather drink sulfuric acid.
   
The detective is haunted by the fact that his cop-father was killed on the job before Bernie was ever born, which intensifies his determination to get to the bottom of a case where the father of a newborn baby possibly produced by in vitro fertilization has committed murder, then suicide.
   
Bernie's also a decent man who takes people as they come, sympathizing with their struggles with problems often of their own making. This increases his effectiveness in getting information out of interviewees who don't want certain things to ever come to light.

Q. How did your personal experience as a doctor contribute to, or inspire, the story?

A. In the 1970s, I did a research fellowship in Reproductive Genetics, fertilizing mouse (and occasionally human) eggs in the laboratory. Then, in 1983, I set up the Reproductive Genetics Facility at Seattle's Swedish Medical Center, and served as its Medical Director. In 1985, this laboratory produced the first IVF baby in the Pacific Northwest, and I delivered that baby.
 
Q. Your career as a doctor would seem to make medical thrillers a perfect choice for you as a writer. Why did you write the Music Box Mysteries and the Ragtime Mysteries instead?
 
A. When I changed careers, after 30 years in high-intensity medical work, I wanted to make a clean break.
   
I'd been collecting and restoring antique music boxes, as a way of getting a little time here and there away from medicine, so I set my first mysteries in the antiques subculture. My amateur detective, Thomas Purdue, was a neurologist and a music box aficionado. Through three books, you never saw him treating a patient, but he did use his specialized medical knowledge to help solve murder cases. That went down all right with me. Just to keep doctors out of my books altogether didn't seem worth the time it would've taken for me to learn the ins and outs of what electricians, philosophy professors, or nuclear physicists know and do.
   
As for the ragtime mysteries, the history of the genre is fascinating, having nearly as much to do with racial prejudice as with music. Ragtime history is full of intriguing unanswered questions. In 1899, no unknown young black composer could realistically have hoped to receive royalties for his or her work - so how did Scott Joplin come to sign a royalties contract for the breakthrough ragtime hit, "Maple Leaf Rag"? Did Irving Berlin really steal music, as Joplin claimed he did, from Joplin's opera Treemonisha, to write his own breakthrough hit, "Alexander's Ragtime Band"? Also, ragtime history is populated with the most wonderful characters, just begging to hop from history into fiction, and fill in some of those historical blanks. Parenthetically, one of them, Walter Overstreet, the mayor of Sedalia, MO in 1899, was also a practicing doctor, and though he was not the protagonist, his medical work set him up to be a prime mover of the plot.

Q. What has brought you back to medicine as a topic in A Perilous Conception? Is this a story you’ve thought about for a long time, or did something happen recently to inspire you to write it?

A. During the race to produce the world's first IVF baby, before Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe crossed the finish line on July 25, 1978, there was a great deal of ill feeling and heavy-duty sniping among workers in the field. Accusations were made that some investigators had withheld important information from research papers, such as minute but critical details of the composition of tissue culture media.
   
In 1973, an obstetrician in New York with much-questioned scientific credentials claimed to have fertilized an egg with sperm from the woman's husband, but before he could replace the embryo into the woman's uterus, his department chairman learned of his clandestine operation, and disposed of the contents of the test tube. The upshot was a lengthy, acrimonious, highly-publicized trial in 1978, chockablock with painfully intense emotions, claims, and counterclaims. Ironically, just at the time of that trial, Lesley Brown, in England, gave birth to the world's first IVF baby.
   
Before Swedish's Reproductive Genetics Facility produced their IVF baby, there was a two-year competition with the University of Washington's facility that I'll call spirited.
   
Throughout my medical career, I accumulated ideas for the novels I'd write once I'd gotten sufficient time, and the leeway to focus on a fictional world. Considering the rewards, financial and ego-related, that would accrue to the winner, and the major moral, ethical, and emotional ructions that roiled around reproductive engineering in the 1970s, it occurred to me that someone just might end up murdered. Then, when I'd finished my ragtime-based mysteries, Dr. Sanford came forward in my mind and began to develop a plot for such a story.

Q. The appetite of readers for medical thrillers – stories about everything that could possibly go wrong in the hands of medical professionals – seems endless. Do you have any thoughts on why people love these books?

  A. Hmm. Probably for the same basic reasons there's a huge audience for science-fiction thrillers. There's a good deal of genre overlap between actual and speculative science.
   
When I was a kid, our family doctor, a man with near-supernatural powers of diagnosis, came across as a shaman, someone with magical powers to ward off evil influences. There was absolutely nothing of the charlatan about him, but when he walked into a sickroom, opened his huge black bag, full of mysterious instruments and vials, and turned his eye onto the patient, that patient knew he or she was going to get better. Knew it. The doctor seemed to have power over life and death, and it was because of his unintentional influence on a young boy that I went into medicine myself.
   
So in medical thrilllers, there's someone with special powers, pitted against a major source of evil. Can the shaman use his arcane knowledge to safeguard the patient, the city, or maybe the entire human race? How much higher could stakes go? And if the medical specialist fails, what would this imply about the security we look for and wish for every time we visit a doctor's office?

Q. Each of your series has been a trilogy. Do you believe most series should be short? Do you think you might return to either or both of your series sometime in the future?
A. I don't think of the Music Box Series as a trilogy, a set of three closely-related books that develop a single theme. And with the different protagonists, different locations, and a time spread of more than fifty years, I don't think of the Ragtime Trilogy as a series.
   
Okay, got that out of my system.
   
I felt as if the overall narrative of my trilogy, which told the story of the birth, death, and revival of ragtime music in America, was finished at the end of The Ragtime Fool. Anything else I might've written would have seemed anticlimactic, a pale add-on. But I suppose I might one day write a different story, probably a standalone, with ragtime as background. (One of the early ragtime figures was a very colorful doctor, but he hasn't stepped up with a story...yet).
   
As to the Music Box Series, I wouldn't mind writing one more book, since I had to leave one of the principal characters hanging between life and death at the end of the third book. I intended to resolve the matter in Book Four, but my publisher went out of business, and my new publisher does not pick up series in progress. And I love Poisoned Pen Press more than I want to write another Music Box Mystery.
   
Also, I've gotten to prefer writing standalones. My books are strongly character-driven, and starting fresh each time gives me more leeway to different kinks and twists in human minds.

Abe Lincoln is supposed to have remarked that a man's legs (well, a woman's too, but this was the 1860s, so let's cut him a little slack) should be long enough to reach the ground. That's the way I feel about how long a series should be. In the end, it's got to be the author's prerogative. The story about Conan Doyle's forced resuscitation of Holmes to the contrary, if the author has tired of a series, I think readers will shortly follow suit.

Q. What fiction writers do you most enjoy reading? What have you learned about writing from reading their books?

A. I read about half mystery novels, half literary. To name a few of the writers I enjoy and learn from:
   
Three of my fellow Poisoned Pen authors are high on my list. Donis Casey shows me ways of constructing ultra-believable human characters. From John Daniel and Mike Hayes, I pick up hints on how to integrate humor into a mystery without having it be disruptive; Mike is also a master at generating irresistible page-turning impulses.
   
Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse series was also very helpful with lessons on creation of multidimensional characters.
   
In the work of Charles Todd, P.D. James, and Patricia Highsmith, I find avenues for effectively presenting the ins and outs of human behavior, and lessons on how to generate sympathy for characters (in the case of the last-named author, whether or not that sympathy is deserved, a very useful skill, and one I tried to apply in A Perilous Conception).
   
Among literary authors, I admire the prose of John Cheever, who always seemed able to move his stories along without effort and strain. As they said about Joe DiMaggio, he made the hard ones look easy. And Stanley Elkin is unmatched for producing verbal pyrotechnics, lines I read over and over, aloud, just for the auditory pleasure of it.

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Visit Larry’s website at http://www/larrykarp.com and his blog at http://www.larrykarp.blogspot.com.