I’m not quite sure I’ve ever gotten completely finished with puberty. Or it with me. All the social awkwardness, the self-consciousness, the insecurity and constant search for personal identity …it’s all pretty much ongoing even as I lurch shrieking into my mid-life crisis. Strange, that. I’m 45 now so technically I should’ve been long done with that predicament as well, but all the regrets and fears of missed opportunities, the burning sentiment and treacly mawkishness, the deathly clutch of the grim reaper’s bony paw steadily tightening around my heart…oh baby, it’s all still there too.
What fodder for crime fiction, eh? The life gamble, the circumspect terror, the dashed hopes and darkening horizon, fear of the known and the unknown, dreams of the open road and an empty sheet of paper where all my possibilities work. Prisons of our making and doghouse doldrums. A plethora of anxieties, a gamut of distress and apprehension.
Without analyzing my own work too closely (or at all), I think perhaps that’s how I tumbled to the basic themes and emotional resonance that have been inflicted upon the dual protagonists in The Cold Spot and The Coldest Mile. Chase is a young thief with a good heart and a few bad scores to settle. And Jonah is his stone cold killer grandfather who knows of only one way to pursue the score: find it and then run down anyone between you and the money and the money and your escape. He’s not muddled by all these insecurities and questions and confusions. He’s got one thing in mind: get the job done, and then get clear.
In a way, it’s a good life lesson for a writer to learn. Or anyone for that matter. Put your focus where it has to be, make it as pure as possible. Then finish the job and move on. Always rise to the occasion, always hold the wheel with both hands, especially when you’re taking the rough curves. The lives of Chase and Jonah aren’t so different from mine, in that regard. We’re all struggling to get by, to keep our independence and freedom, to protect what’s ours and to earn our way through a hard world any way we can. (See what I did there?…I made my boring life sitting at a desk sound really frickin’ cool for a second, didn’t I?)
Where do you find crime? You don’t need to read the newspapers or the evening news. Your phone bill is enough to get you started. Dealing with your mortgage broker, your car mechanic, your plumber, your high school ex-girlfriends on Facebook, your dream dates gone awry. It all makes it to the page in some form or another, and what better reason to miss the prom than because I was in the middle of a diamond heist? Or was I plucking gray hairs out of my eyebrows while planning a prison crashout?
Tom Piccirilli is the author of twenty novels including Shadow Season, The Cold Spot, The Coldest Mile, and A Choir of Ill Children. He’s won two International Thriller Awards and four Bram Stoker Awards, as well as having been nominated for the Edgar, the World Fantasy Award, the Macavity, and Le Grand Prix de L’imagination.
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