Killer Nashville's Coming

By Beth Terrell


It's that time again. That time of year when Killer Nashville founder Clay Stafford and I survive on four hours of sleep a night as we chip our way through to-do lists longer than our legs (and Clay has very long legs). It's all worth it, though, because the final result is going to be...well...Killer.


Jeffery Deaver is our Guest of Honor, and I hear Jeff is not only a delightful speaker, but a pretty fair guitar player as well. We're hoping he can be persuaded to join us around the pool for music and conversation. Don Bruns (who won the Silver Falchion Award two years ago for Stuff to Die For) will be there will his guitar, as will Stacy Allen, who sang for us at last year's awards dinner.


Since the conference begins early on Friday, many attendees arrive at the hotel on Thursday night. In the past, there have been no Killer Nashville festivities that night, but this year, Greg and Mary Bruss of Mysteries & More independent bookstore, are hosting Mystery Team Trivia at 7:30. Greg asked me to be sure and emphasize that valuable prizes will be awarded.

On Friday morning, the fun begins with a presentation called "CSI Don't Think So," in which law enforcement consultant Lee Lofland discusses how television gets it right--and wrong. Lee will intersperse interesting forensic science tidbits throughout the presentation. There are five tracks this year, because we had too many wonderful authors coming to fit them into four. Attendees will hear from a Marine sniper/sniper trainer, forensic psychologists, TBI agents, private investigators, attorneys, and police officers, in addition to agents, editors, and a host of terrific authors, including our own Chester Campbell (who won last year's Silver Falchion) and our own Bente Gallagher (aka Jennie Bentley). Among those attending are Charles Todd (NYT bestseller), Steven Womack (Edgar winner), David J. Walker (Edgar winner), PJ Parrish (Shamus and Anthony winner) and Annie Solomon (Rita Award winnier). There are sessions on character, pacing, dialogue, YA, historical fiction, marketing and promotion, and many that are designed to appeal especially to readers. And, oh yes, there's the mock crime scene staged by TBI agents Dan Royse and Mike Breedlove and solved by attendees.

I could go on and on, but I'd be sure to leave out something important; there's a detailed schedule on the conference site. (Warning: it's a slow-loading site.) As you can see, you don't have to be a crime fiction writer--or even a writer at all--to have the time of your life at the Killer Nashville Crime Literature Conference.

Last year, on Sunday afternoon of the conference, one of my fellow conference organizers came to the registration table where I was sitting and said, "Beth, there are writers sleeping all over the lobby."

I knew we'd done our job.

Chase Your Scotch with Cyanide?

By Chester Campbell

In the book I'm currently laboring over, I have an attempted poisoning. I consulted two of Dr. Doug Lyle's books, Murder and Mayhem and Forensics for Dummies, which I keep on the shelf for just such occasions. I needed a quick-acting poison that would mix well with Scotch. I read the possibilities and concluded that cyanide, more specifically potassium cyanide, would provide just the tool I needed.

My next problem was I wanted the toxic ingredient to be discovered quickly. I knew enough about forensics to be aware that toxicological testing takes a good while. You frequently hear the police or the medical examiner saying the toxicology results will be available in a few weeks. Mystery plots don't have that long to wait.

So I queried the good doctor. If you haven't visited his website, The Writer's Medical and Forensics Lab, you've missed a great resource. It used to be you could email him a question and get a detailed answer shortly. Times have changed.

"Unfortunately, since we have far too many lawyers in this country and a legal system that is most often devoid of common sense," Doug says, he now requires your complete identification in a specific format before he can give you an answer. It's all to make sure you're a legitimate mystery writer and not interested in nefarious activities.

I pointed out that my plot makes the bottle highly suspect for being polluted with cyanide and asked if my homicide detective could get it checked by a simple test that wouldn't take too long. His reply:

"How long this would take depends upon the sophistication of his lab. If you are in a major city such as New York or Los Angeles where there are active and well-equipped crime labs this could take a day, particularly if this were a high profile case. On the other hand if you run a smaller jurisdiction he might have to send this to a reference lab, a state lab, or the FBI lab and this can take many weeks to get done. And anywhere in between. What this means is that you can set your story up to get the results in almost any time frame you want."

In my case, the Metro Nashville Police Department doesn't have a toxicology lab, so they would send the bottle to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation Forensics Division in a Nashville suburb. My detective has a good friend in the TBI toxicology lab who gets the job done expeditiously.

Dr. Lyle also has a daily blog, The Writer's Forensics Blog, that's full of interesting stuff. A couple of days ago he had an interview with a retired bioethics professor who has written a book titled The Arsenic Century with some intriguing info on the subject. I highly recommend both the blog and his website.

By the way, next time you take a nip of Scotch, you might want to sniff it for a bitter almond smell.

Shoot, Don't Shoot

By Beth Terrell

Last week, our FBI/TBI Citizen Academy met at the TBI headquarters in Madison. We got to tour the mobile command center, the mobile forensics unit, and the anti-drug display vehicle. Then we toured the fusion center and the crime lab and listened to a talk on crime scene investigation by Special Agent Dan Royse. It was full of good information for a writer, and even though my pen was racing on the page, I still didn't manage to get it all down. The talk ended too soon, but there was no time to be disappointed, because next we went to the mock crime scene he and Special Agent Mike Breedlove had staged in the mail room. I didn't participate in solving the crime, because it was almost the same scene they set up for us at Killer Nashville last August , so I got to help pass out record sheets and talk to Mike about some of his most memorable cases.

Next up, we chatted with the agents specializing in drug enforcement and cybercrimes, and finally we got to try our hands at the Shoot/Don't Shoot simulator. (Well, I wasn't brave enough to try it, but several of my classmates did.) Here's how it works. There's a big screen, about the size of my living room wall. About fifteen feet away is a square drawn on the floor. You stand in the square holding a laser gun; when you point the laser at the screen and pull the trigger, the program registers when and where your virtual bullet would have hit, and the person on the screen responds by either falling down dead or killing you. The object is to decide whether or not to fire your weapon and, if you do have to fire, to act quickly enough to save your own life and the lives of potential victims. (It's also probably not a good idea to shoot the victims by accident, but that didn't happen to anybody in our class.)

You also talk to the person being shown on the screen. The first scenario showed a traffic stop. The camera was set up to show the perspective of the officer approaching the car, a blue sedan with a middle-aged man behind the wheel. "Sir," the agent demonstrating the procedure said to the screen, "I need to see your license and registration." The man in the car attempts to engage the agent in conversation. Then we see a gun in his lap. His hand is touching the grip. The agent says, "Sir, move your hand away from the gun. Do not touch the gun in your lap." The driver continues to try to distract the agent, who continues to warn him not to touch the gun. Suddenly, the driver jerks the gun up and fires at the agent. The agent shoots his laser gun, and a message comes up saying that he has used lethal force; please secure his firearm and report to his superior for debriefing. Then the picture comes back up, but time, it shows little red Xs where the agent's bullets hit.

It was interesting to see the different scenarios and how the agent's decision to shoot or not shoot just a moment too late could have disastrous results (as when the perpetrator bludgeoned a woman to death before one of my fellow students could bring herself to pull the trigger). The need for constant vigilance was reinforced when a supposed victim grabbed the "dead" perpetrator's gun and turned it on the agent.

It was a fascinating experience and gave me a new appreciation for how quick-thinking our agents have to be. If they hesitate for even a moment, a life could be lost. If they overreact for even a moment, a life could be lost.

Many thanks to the agents and officers who risk their lives every day to keep the rest of us safe.

Plot Ideas: Where They Lead

Authors are fond of saying, in answer to the inevitable question, that ideas for stories can be found anywhere. In an interview here the other day, Michelle Gagnon said she got the inspiration for her book Boneyard while doing research on Ted Bundy. I came up with the idea for my first published mystery on a trip to the Holy Land.

True, the world is a cornfield of plot kernels, but what happens after we pick a few? As Bobby Burns put it so aptly many years ago, the best laid plans "gang aft agley." Or often go askew. My colleague here, Ben Small, started working on his latest mystery by setting it in southern Arizona near the Mexican border. But before he got too far along, he took a trip to the Dalmation Coast and changed gears.

What makes us choose one subject over another? For me, part of it is probably laziness. I normally do research as the story unfolds in the computer. When I got into Secret of the Scroll, I found myself doing a prodigious amount of research in libraries and bookstores, online and elsewhere. The second book in the series involved a high-rise condo, which required delving into construction techniques, as well as pursuing information relating to the murder.

By the third book, I looked for more familiar themes that wouldn't require so much digging. I chose to stay close to Nashville, where I had grown up, worked as a newspaper reporter, and spent most of my life. I chose a plot that blended a lot of my experiences, such as an involvement in rental properties and a military background. I used the Opryland Hotel for the murder scene since I had been there many times and my son had worked there and knew a lot of inside stuff.

A modest amount of research was still required, of course. I had to bone up on the Federal Reserve chairman (who I killed off in the book), and a brief interview with a restaurant manager provided all I needed to know about waiters handling dinner checks. A ride-along with a homicide detective filled in some blanks for a key character in the book.

For the fourth book, I chose a subject that was easily covered by a couple of visits to the restored Marathon Motor Works buildings just beyond downtown Nashville. Most of the other details came from my long experience in working around the city. One fun part was researching Trousdale County, a small county to the northeast, and visiting the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation headquarters in preparation for including a TBI agent in the story.

By the fifth book, I had pretty well honed my plot choice style and picked up a  ready-made story from a PI friend who told me about a case she had worked. It worked for me. Except for a couple of visits to a small town nearby, where a key element of the plot (a massive toxic chemical dump) was set, I did most of my research on the Internet. I practically Googled the book.

With number six, I'm pulling most of it out of my head. I've used the Internet a lot and pursued only one interview. Since the other books had occured in spring, summer, and fall, I wanted this one set around Christmas. I wasn't sure how to work that in, but it came along when I needed it.

To me, the fun part of writing is watching the story pour out with hardly any idea of where it's coming from. I guess I'll keep doing it as long as it remains fun to do.