Today's guest blogger is Roger Johns, a former corporate lawyer and retired college professor who's the author of the Baton Rouge-set Wallace Hartman Mysteries from Macmillan/St. Martin’s Press.
Who is Wallace Hartman and How Did She Get Here?
by Roger Johns
It all started as I was hustling across campus to teach a class on international business transactions, way back in 2006. This weird thought popped into my head and wouldn’t go away. To this day, I have no idea why I started thinking about the similarities between legitimate business enterprises and the South American cocaine cartels. Like their lawful counterparts, they have to acquire raw materials, manufacture a product, and deal with issues such as quality control, packaging, distribution, competition, employee compensation, and dispute resolution.
Despite these similarities, however, there are some very important differences. Possession, distribution, and use of the product is unlawful, and cartel managerial methods can be rather brutal. You never hear of one cartel filing a lawsuit against another cartel over trade secret appropriation or breach of contract––and you never will. To the best of my knowledge, the Medellin cartel has never filed a court action against the Cali cartel to complain about anti-competitive business practices. Nor have I ever heard of rank and file cartel workers going on strike for better wages and working conditions. Likewise, I am unaware of union organizers demanding access to a cartel’s workforce for the purpose of forming a collective bargaining unit. And, it’s the same with small-time matters like inventory shrinkage and cooperating with law enforcement. The cartels, like most criminal enterprises, settle these matters with their own brand of justice. A common criticism of the slow pace at which the legitimate criminal justice system grinds on––justice delayed is justice denied––does not apply to the dispute resolution mechanisms used by the cartels, where suspicion suffices as proof beyond a shadow of a doubt, due process arrives with the velocity of a speeding bullet, and all appeals are denied, ahead of time, with extreme prejudice.
Given these stark differences, we generally tend not to think of the cartels and their challenges in the same terms we think of legitimate companies. Nevertheless, for some reason, that day, on the way to class, I did exactly that. Specifically, my thinking came to bear on how they could solve one of their biggest, costliest problems––product distribution. Their supply chains are absurdly long and tortuous and subject to frequent disruption by competitors and the police. There had to be a better way. I just knew there was. In fact, I could picture it so perfectly. So why had this safer, faster, cheaper method never been adopted?
Well . . . there was a reason––a really good reason. I should have realized that if it could’ve been done it would’ve been done. It took a fair amount of research to find out that, although many had tried, what I was thinking of simply could not be accomplished. On that matter, I’ll say no more except to note that, upon discovering this impossibility, instead of abandoning the idea another weird thought popped into my head. A question: “But, what if . . .” What if it could be done? How would that look on the street to a law enforcement officer who encounters the arrival of this epic disruption in cartel methods as a series of bizarre and unexplainable murders?
The arrival of these questions gave birth to the idea of writing a story about the what-if possibilities, and (eventually, after many false starts) the story idea gave rise to the main character: Wallace Hartman––a woman in her mid-30s, a homicide detective in Baton Rouge, the bearer of a cross of guilt so heavy she was caught off guard when an unexpected chance at redemption materialized under the most dangerous and stressful conditions imaginable.
Once this character arrived, unbidden, amidst my thoughts, she proved to have many stories to tell, all of them taking place in and around her home town of Baton Rouge. In "Dark River Rising," her first outing, she had to deal with the aforementioned disruption in the illicit cocaine trade. In "River of Secrets," her second go-around, Wallace comes face to face with a disruption in the political and social fabric of Baton Rouge, when a social justice activist is accused of the racially motivated murder of a white politician. In both books, the plot is fast-moving, but the stories are Wallace’s to tell. She is the axis around which these tales revolve. They would not exist apart from her, and they would not work very well set outside Baton Rouge and its surrounding area.
The difficulties Wallace confronts challenge her mentally, physically, and emotionally, and she is changed by these encounters. The themes addressed in both books are common to all people and all places, but the stories themselves are rooted in the Deep South, in general, and in southeast Louisiana, in specific. With each passing book, the Wallace comes into sharper focus, but she maintains her ability to surprise me and she is seldom far from my thoughts. I am working hard on the next leg of her journey.
And, if you’re wondering about how these books came to be, here’s my secret formula:
1 writing teacher who taught us the basics during an 8-week class
3 critique groups (in 3 different towns)
5 writers’ conferences
7 major rewrites (plus uncountable drafts)
37 agent/editor queries over a 19-month period
36 rejections (some of which arrived even after I had withdrawn the manuscript from consideration)
Simmer in a broth of self-doubt for about 9 years, over the low steady flame of florid anxiety
Toss in 1 publication contract
Bake for 20 months in my publisher’s magic oven, and voilà:
"Dark River Rising" emerges into the world.
Roger Johns is a former corporate lawyer and retired college professor, and the author of the Wallace Hartman Mysteries from Macmillan/St. Martin’s Press: "Dark River Rising" (2017) and "River of Secrets" (2018). He is the 2018 Georgia Author of the Year (Detective·Mystery Category), a 2018 Killer Nashville Readers’ Choice Award nominee, a finalist for the 2018 Silver Falchion Award for best police procedural, and the 2019 JKS Communications Author-in-Residence. His articles and interviews about writing and the writing life have appeared in Career Author, Criminal Element, Southern Literary Review, and Killer Nashville Articles. Roger belongs to the Atlanta Writers Club, Sisters in Crime, International Thriller Writers, and Mystery Writers of America. Along with four other crime fiction writers, he co-authors the MurderBooks blog at www.murderbooks.com. Please visit him at www.rogerjohnsbooks.com.
Where to buy “Dark River Rising”
Where to buy “River of Secrets”
Apple
Louisiana Book News is written by award-winning author Chere Dastugue Coen, who writes Louisiana romances and mysteries under the pen name of Cherie Claire. Her first book in each series is FREE to download as an ebook, including "Emilie," book one of The Cajun Series, "Ticket to Paradise," book one of The Cajun Embassy series and "A Ghost of a Chance," the first Viola Valentine mystery.
Louisiana Book News is written by award-winning author Chere Dastugue Coen, who writes Louisiana romances and mysteries under the pen name of Cherie Claire. Her first book in each series is FREE to download as an ebook, including "Emilie," book one of The Cajun Series, "Ticket to Paradise," book one of The Cajun Embassy series and "A Ghost of a Chance," the first Viola Valentine mystery.
No comments:
Post a Comment