Read Street: Alafair Burke on asking "what if?" - A blog for a community of readers, in Baltimore and beyond.

Alafair Burke, author of Angel's Tip, has seen crime from a prosecutor's vantage point. Saturday at Bouchercon, she'll be on a panel called Murder What Fun: Why we love writing crime fiction. Her take: For me, the fun of writing crime fiction comes from a sick collision between my childhood in Wichita, Kansas, under the shadow of a serial killer, and my years as a prosecutor in Portland, Oregon.

My parents moved our family to Wichita in the late 1970's. The moving boxes had just been unpacked when police announced a connection among seven unsolved murders of women and even children. The man who claimed responsibility called himself BTK, a gruesome acronym, short for "Bind, Torture, Kill." Our home fell squarely within the serial killer's stalking territory. Like other Wichita children of that era, I learned some pretty dark lessons: check the phone line to be sure the wires aren’t cut, keep the basement door locked at all times, barricade yourself in the bathroom with the phone if you have to call 911.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I suddenly started reading mysteries after moving into a world where the killer could be anyone, and where an arrest appeared hopeless. My mother, a school librarian, would take me each week to the public library for a new stack of books. I moved from the Encyclopedia Brown series to Nancy Drew to Agatha Christie and eventually to Sue Grafton. In the books, as opposed to Wichita, smart sleuthing always paid off, and order was always restored.

I was still an avid reader of crime fiction years later when the First Assistant called me – at that time a rookie Deputy District Attorney in Portland, Oregon -- into his office for a special project. Police in Washington had just arrested a man for killing his girlfriend. In the course of confessing to the crime, the man also confessed to several other murders, including the strangling death of a Portland woman five years earlier. The problem was, two other people had already been convicted of that crime.

Naturally, Portland police and our office were skeptical. But then the man led detectives out to the Columbia Gorge, pointed to five years’ growth of blackberry bushes, and said, "I threw her purse over there." Sure enough, beneath the dense tangles of knotted vines, police found a weathered and battered purse. The victim’s identification was still inside.

The man’s self-incrimination didn’t stop there. He also claimed to be the author of a series of confessional letters that had been mailed to and published by a local investigative reporter, all signed with a Happy Face. I’d read the articles about those letters with the same fear and gruesome fascination I’d experienced so many years earlier in Wichita. And now I was working on an actual case: My job was to draft the documents that would explain to a judge why we needed to release the two defendants who’d already served five years in prison for a crime they didn’t commit.

Halfway into a long weekend of work, I found my imagination wandering. How do we know, I asked, that the so-called Happy Face Killer doesn’t know the two original defendants? Couldn’t the three of them have acted in concert? We eventually discarded the theory, but the idea stuck with me: What if?

As years passed, I continued to ask, and answer for myself, the question of "What if?" By the time I left the District Attorney’s Office, I had fictionalized that case in so many ways that I had the plot for a crime novel about a Portland prosecutor named Samantha Kincaid. That manuscript became my first novel, Judgment Calls.

Since then, I have continued to re-imagine actual cases by asking myself, But what if this, and what if that? In my most recent novel, Angel’s Tip, Indiana college student Chelsea Hart is murdered on the last night of spring break after telling her friends she wants to stay behind for one last drink in the VIP lounge of a Manhattan club. The case is caught by NYPD Detective Ellie Hatcher, who, by the way, was raised by a Wichita detective who spent his career hunting a serial killer who was never captured.

The fun for me in crime fiction is that I can create as much chaos as my mind -- and my willing readers -- can handle. Twists and turns abound. The unexpected always manages to occur. The likely suspect is never so likely after all. By page 250, it’s enough of a mess to create one serious mind explosion. But in the end? Wow. In the end, the story always comes together. The crime is always solved. The clues always add up. And the bad guys always get their due.

There’s a neatness and order to crime fiction that’s often missing in real life. It was missing for me as a child in Wichita. It was missing too often in my cases as a Deputy District Attorney. But it’s always there for me in crime fiction, both as a writer and as a reader. And while some of the fun in crime fiction is actually a funny kind of fun -- the practical jokes played among cops, the X-rated banter, the pop culture allusions that I love so much -- the real fun for me is the unraveling of a mystery.

The Bouchercon panel Murder What Fun: Why we love writing crime fiction, starts at 11:30 a.m. Saturday with moderator Rhys Bowen and fellow panelists, John Billheimer, Chris Grabenstein, and Tom Schreck.

For all Bouchercon author posts, click here.

October 9, 2008

Alafair Burke on asking "what if?"

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