The Line Up (6 page)

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A few years later, my family had moved from Highland Avenue in suburban Philadelphia to Twenty-sixth Avenue in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, as my father chased a series of jobs in the sun. The Vietnam War was the backdrop to life then. I was in high school and not a good student, so I paid attention to Vietnam because I thought it could be my destiny. I remember the principal on the loudspeaker in the classroom calling for a moment of silence and prayer in memory of a former student who had been killed over there. William Fennel. I didn’t know him, but years later I would look his name up on the wall of the memorial in Washington, DC.

One summer I remember my father talking about a man he worked with in a real-estate office. He said the man had to wear a full beard to cover facial scarring from wounds he’d received while he was a soldier in Vietnam. He told my father he had been something they called a tunnel rat. His job was to go into the underground labyrinths where the enemy hid and waited.

The man refused to tell my father all the details, but my teenage imagination filled in the story and was possibly more powerful than the truth. It seemed to me that no war assignment could be more frightening or dangerous than being a tunnel rat. And that summer, after so many years, the dream came back to me. Once more I dreamed of being in the mouth of the underground monster.

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Soon after high school I knew I wanted to be a writer. I loved reading detective stories, and those were what I wanted to write. I went to journalism school in college and hoped that a job at a newspaper would teach me the craft of writing while at the same time giving me entrée into the world I wanted to write about: the police department. For several years after college I lived and worked in Florida and tried to write a couple of detective novels on the side. They didn’t work. They are about men who specialize in finding runaways but who themselves have run away from things in their own lives. Sure, I learned more about writing and the form of the detective novel as I moved from one draft to the next, but the manuscripts never got past the bottom drawer of my desk. I remain the only one who has ever read them.

At thirty years old, I knew I had it in me to take one more shot at a novel. But I gave myself an ultimatum. If the book didn’t work and was not published, I would shelve my aspirations and rededicate myself to my career as a journalist. In preparation for taking final aim at my goal, I decided to shake everything up in my life. I sent out résumés to California, three thousand miles away, the land of my literary heroes—Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, and Joseph Wambaugh. It was my conviction that I had to start this novel and stage this part of my journey in Los Angeles.

On the day I interviewed for a job as a police reporter at the Los Angeles Times, the editor handed me the Metro section and pointed to a story bannered across the top. He gave me fifteen minutes to read it and tell him how I would follow up the story. It was a test. He wanted to see how well and how fast I could think on my feet.

The story was about a bold bank heist. Thieves had cleverly used the city’s labyrinthine storm water tunnel system to move under downtown and into close proximity of the target bank. They then drilled through the wall of the city tunnel and dug their own line to a position directly beneath the bank’s safe-deposit vault. They went up and in and spent a night in the vault drilling open boxes and bagging their contents. Then they got away.

Whatever I told the editor must have impressed him. I got the job and moved to Los Angeles. Soon after starting on the police beat, I was allowed to sit in on a detective squad briefing on the unsolved tunnel caper. The case investigators showed photographs that depicted the thieves’ route through the tunnels. It was a dark and shadowy netherworld and eerily reminiscent of the mysterious tunnel I had dreamed of when I was a kid.

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My plan had been to spend a year or two getting to know Los Angeles before daring to write about this huge, sprawling, and intriguing place my heroes had trodden and known so well. But that night after the police briefing, I went into the spare bedroom of the apartment I shared with my wife by the 101 freeway and started writing. I’d had an epiphany: I would write about a detective who has a recurring dream of tunnels, who has experience in those tunnels, and whose past informs his present. Now the tendrils of my life were coming together, and I felt that at last I had the true baseline for a character and story that could travel the distance and be published, and live on in readers’ imaginations.

I called him Pierce. I had read something, somewhere, in which Raymond Chandler had described the fictional detective as someone who must be willing and able to pierce all veils and layers of society. My detective would be such a man, and so I called him Pierce.

I wrote with the window open most of the time and wanted to play music that would filter out the disruptive noise of the nearby freeway. I grew up on rock and roll, but as a writer I found that music with lyrics could intrude upon the writing process in its own way. I was going to write about a detective who was alone in the world, so I gravitated toward music that invoked loneliness in me. Jazz. More to the point, the sound of the jazz saxophone. I started with the essentials—John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Wayne Shorter—and branched out from there. Along the way I read a piece in Time magazine about a musician named Frank Morgan, a protégé of Charlie Parker’s who had overcome heroin addiction and imprisonment to record again after thirty years. It was in Frank Morgan’s alto sax that I found the soundtrack of my detective. In his sad but uplifting ballad “Lullaby,” written by pianist George Cables, I discovered my detective’s anthem. For many years I played that song at the start of each writing day.

My detective, like Frank Morgan, was to be a survivor, a man who overcomes his past to ensure his present—and his future. So I chose his music carefully. Pierce would listen to music created by artists who had overcome great obstacles in order to make it. Whether it was beating drug addiction, fighting racism, surmounting poverty, or rising above medical disability, the jazz musicians I drew inspiration from were survivors. And I gave the whole playlist to Detective Pierce.

By day I was a news reporter on the crime beat. By night and weekend I was an amateur novelist trying to finally make it happen. I viewed my day job as research for the night shift. It was as if I were dropping into a gold mine, down a tunnel where I could look for whatever glittered. The sights and sounds of police stations and jails, the cop slang, the internal politics. I would come out each day and bury the gold in my book that night.

Most of the real detectives I knew were veterans of military service, about half of them Vietnam vets. A lot of them smoked, a symptom of the addictive personality I had come to believe was a necessary dimension of a good detective. I remember once sitting at a detective’s desk while he smoked a cigarette, the No Smoking sign hanging on the wall right behind his head. Though I had never smoked myself, I made Pierce a smoker. Though I had escaped going to Vietnam, because the war ended as I turned eighteen, I made Pierce a Vietnam vet. I made him a tunnel rat who still dreamed of the tunnel and was always searching for that light at its end.

The aspects of character continued to fall into place as I wrote the first draft of a novel that would feature Pierce investigating the murder of a man who had been a fellow tunnel rat and who might have been involved in the tunnel heist of a Los Angeles bank.

The real tunnel heist I based the story on took place in 1987, the year I came to Los Angeles. The year is also notable because it was when the novel The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy was published. Although the book impressed me, I was more taken at the time with the author’s history, which I’d read about in a profile in a local magazine. Ellroy’s mother was murdered when he was a boy. He struggled to overcome that life-altering crime, and many other personal demons, enough to write The Black Dahlia and several other novels before it.

I thought the psychology was intriguing. In my amateur analysis it looked to me that Ellroy was working out whatever damage had been visited upon him by his mother’s murder by writing stories about detectives who avenge victims and solve murders—especially of women.

I decided to apply the same psychology to Pierce. I gave him a history similar to Ellroy’s. When Pierce is a boy, his mother is murdered. Since he doesn’t know his father, the crime not only takes away his one loving parent, but also relegates the boy to the world of foster homes and state youth facilities. The boy survives his upbringing and becomes a man in Vietnam, where his job is to go into the tunnels to seek the enemy. From there he comes home to one more flawed institution: the police department. The soldier becomes a detective who repeatedly avenges his mother’s death by solving murders—especially of women.

It is the cornerstone of the character. The trauma of his youth becomes the driving force behind the detective. It is the aspect that will allow every case he takes on to become personal.

I did not know Ellroy when I borrowed from his past for my fictional detective. Years later, though, when I prepared to write a novel in which my detective would investigate his mother’s long-unsolved murder, I sent the author a letter. I explained my story idea to him. I knew that Ellroy had a plan to write a nonfiction account of his mother’s unsolved murder. I asked if he thought my novel would be too much of an encroachment. His response came by way of a late-night phone call several weeks later. “Unfortunately, I don’t have a franchise on murdered mothers,” he said. “Good luck with your book.”

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My plan for Pierce was simple. I wanted to acknowledge my mentors and use what they had taught me to mold something that was my own. Chandler, Macdonald, Wambaugh, also James Lee Burke, Lawrence Block, and Thomas Harris. I wanted to combine elements of the characters who were outsiders with the traits of those characters who were on the inside. Pierce would be an outsider with an insider’s job. He’d face political and bureaucratic obstacles at every turn. He’d be good at his job but flawed in the way he carried it out. At times he’d be his own worst enemy. He’d feel as though he were always on a solitary mission—alone in the tunnel—even though he might have a partner and be part of an organization that was thousands strong. He’d be a seeker of true justice, not just closure on a case.

Detective Pierce would be built to be as relentless as a bullet, a self-reliant loner who stood alone, who could not be gotten to. Nothing would come between him and his mission, and nothing short of death could stop him from getting the job done.

My goal was to create a character whom readers would find impossible to love on all levels, who in fact was capable of doing things that the readers might find objectionable. But, at the end of the day, my guy would be the kind of detective whom readers would want on the case if it was ever them or a loved one lying on the stainless steel table in the morgue.

I put none of this down on paper. I just carried it in the pockets of my imagination, and when I was ready I set to work on the story. From early on I titled it The Black Echo. Abstract and mysterious, the phrase also conjured up some of the fear I remembered from the fateful passage through the tunnel beneath Highland Avenue.

I caught a lucky break while I was writing The Black Echo. I came across a book called The Tunnels of Cu Chi. Written by Tom Mangold and John Penycate, the book is a harrowing account of the real experiences of the tunnel rats of the Vietnam War. It was only after I read this book that Pierce’s background as a tunnel rat and his recurring dreams fully took shape. That book stayed on my desk as I wrote The Black Echo. And, almost twenty years later, it is still within reach of where I write today. It is easily as scary and claustrophobia inducing as a Stephen King novel. But Cu Chi is true. It makes a ten-year-old’s anxieties about crawling through a forty-foot drainage tunnel seem like, well, child’s play.

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When I went to college at the University of Florida, my intention was to major in building-construction sciences. I wanted to be a builder, like my father. But I wasn’t there long before I realized that I wanted to build stories instead of houses. While shifting to journalism and creative writing, I took a good number of art history and humanities classes as well. In one of those classes, the professor had the students examine the work of the fifteenth-century Flemish painter Hieronymus Bosch.

Bosch’s work was unfamiliar to me until I saw it in that class. Simply put, it is the stuff of nightmares, an exploration of the wages of sin and of a world gone wrong. The paintings, full of dark, hellish landscapes of torture and debauchery, are about chaos and its consequences. Fires burn out of control in a dark underworld. Birdlike monsters torture and maim the sinners of society. Horned owls sit and judge from the mouths of damp tunnels. Man is depicted again and again as embracing evil, as being the instigator of his own downfall.

Bosch’s masterpiece triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights, shows Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden in the first panel. In the second is the chaos that ensues from their choosing corporeal temptation over spiritual life. And in the third panel are the tortures of a wildly punishing hell.

Anyone who has taken the time to study the Bosch paintings comes away with an indelible imprint of the work on his or her mind. The mark of a true artist, I believe, is to create something that lives on in another’s imagination. Hieronymus Bosch certainly accomplished this. His work has lived in my imagination from the moment I saw it. After all, I could clearly see a kinship between some of Bosch’s monsters and the behemoth of my own dream.