Interview with crime writer Charles Kelly

I’m thrilled to have been able to do an email interview with Arizona-based crime writer Charles (”Chuck”) Kelly, whom I encountered via Crimespace on Ning.com and whose novel PAY HERE is due out later this year - and whose career as a crime reporter could itself be the stuff of hard-boiled fiction.

Chuck, 60, grew up on a farm in Nebraska, got journalism degrees from Creighton University and Northwestern University, and was a military policeman in the U.S. Army. A reporter since leaving college, first at the Omaha World-Herald and, from 1972, at The Arizona Republic, he’s been a true-crime buff for decades, and in recent years a fan of hard-boiled fiction. His musical tastes run to Irish, Scottish and English ballads. He plays basketball once or twice a week. His first novel, PAY HERE, is scheduled to be published by Point Blank Press.

YM: What is it like to be a crime reporter?

Chuck: I’m not a classic crime reporter, such as a police-beat reporter or a courts reporter. In recent years, I’ve covered military affairs, healthcare, and city affairs in the suburbs, among other things. In the past, I’ve played the role of a general-assignment reporter asked to cover big crime stories such as the 1976 bomb murder of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles, the 1991 AzScam affair involving a police sting operation that targeted corrupt officials, and the 1997 bank-fraud trial of former Arizona Gov. Fife Symington.

Any real life experiences/events that you’d care to share with my readers that would give them the flavour of what it’s like covering crime?

Sometimes crime reporting involves finding missing people. In 1981, I tracked down the missing heir to a $65,000 estate—a near-destitute cousin of novelist Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, author of THE YEARLING. Crime reporting often deals with death. I recall watching the autopsy of a fat man in which the medical examiner, bloody to the elbow, commented, “Fat people are the bane of our existence. How would you like to fish around for .22 caliber bullets in this?” Sometimes crime reporting involves creative eavesdropping. My newspaper once fronted me money to play poker in a casino to try to pick up gossip about employees suspected of embezzling money.

Have you used your experiences in your book PAY HERE?

I tried to capture the flavor of being a freewheeling investigative reporter, a creature who existed more in the past than now. References to records searches, hanging out at funerals to pick up information, dealing with editors—those ring true. However, reporter Michael Callan is a compromised reporter who doesn’t mind resorting to the fist or the gun. I, on the other hand, am just a mellow dude. I’ve trained with the combat handgun and shotgun, but I don’t pack heat. No violence, please.

I’m a great fan of CSI: Vegas. In your view, is it anything like real crime investigation in the U.S.?

I’ve only watched the CSI shows a couple of times. I’m much more a fan of reality shows that reconstruct actual murder cases and show how they were solved using scientific evidence. I get the impression that the CSI shows “push the envelope” to create constantly interesting story lines. Many murder convictions are achieved with just basic evidence gathering to supplement confessions. In a fair number of cases, however, evidence experts have done very clever scientific work to show who committed a crime, or to show that a supposed murder was actually a suicide.

Can you tell us more about the biography you are working on? What drew you to the subject matter?

I’m researching a biography of the hard-boiled thriller writer Dan J. Marlowe, who died in Los Angeles in 1986 at the age of 72. I’ve long been a fan of Marlowe, whose best-known book is THE NAME OF THE GAME IS DEATH, and I was fascinated by the fact that so little was known about him. I decided to research an article about him for novelist Allan Guthrie’s website Noir Originals, and quickly uncovered a treasure trove of documents, letters, and photos that brought into focus Marlowe’s amnesia, his spanking fetish, his relationship with convicted bank robber Al Nussbaum, his secret production of pornography, and his “shadow” collaboration with World War II combat pilot William Odell. I wrote the introduction to a re-issue of Marlowe’s novel THE VENGEANCE MAN, which will be published as part of a trilogy by Stark House Press in autumn 2007.

What’s the difference between writing fiction, journalism and biography for you?

For me, journalism is gathering facts and applying well-know writing formulas to them. Fiction is a much more challenging effort to view events through the eyes of characters, and to produce story lines that allow those characters to develop in an interesting way. Biography is an intense exploration of how real people’s lives developed, based on what you can find out about them. In journalism, reporting is primary. In fiction, point of view and character development are primary. In biography, reporting is used to explore both point of view and character development.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

You can find out more about Charles Kelly and also read an extract from his novel PAY HERE on his webpage at Crimespace on Ning.com.

Photo by Arizona Republic photographer Angela Cara Pancrazio.