In the mid-nineties, while I was working on the second Joanna Brady book, I was invited to take part in a writers\u2019 conference in Portland. The book I was working on didn\u2019t yet have a name, so I said yes to attending the conference and walked away from the writing.<\/p>\n
When I\u2019m doing panels, I try to read the latest books from my fellow panelists before appearing with them.\u00a0 One of panelists that time was Pierce Brooks, a former LAPD patrol officer and homicide detective. The book of his that was available at the conference was \u201cofficer down: code three\u2026\u201d Naturally I picked up a copy and read it late into the wee hours on the night before our appearance together. It\u2019s an accounting of the ten fatal errors that police officers make. The book may have been new to me, but it turns out that book has been used as standard textbook material in police training academies for decades.<\/p>\n
Of the ten fatal errors, the one that struck home to me was \u201cTombstone Courage\u201d\u2014failure to wait for backup. Reading through that section, my legs were covered with goosebumps, because that\u2019s exactly what Joanna Brady had done in the scene I had written just before Bill and I left home. While chasing after a bad guy, she had gone up a mine-tailings dump in Bisbee without calling for backup. Fortunately she didn\u2019t die of it. (That would have made for a very short two-book series!) But it did get her attention, and that\u2019s why, in the next book, Joanna Brady number three\u2014Shoot\/Don\u2019t Shoot, she sends herself to Phoenix for an official stint of police academy training.<\/p>\n
By the time Bill and I drove back home from Portland, the second Joanna Brady book had a title\u2014Tombstone Courage. Since the Joanna Brady books set in southeastern Arizona, I\u2019m sure a lot of people expected the book to be all about Tombstone. Boy were they wrong!<\/p>\n
All that is to say that, when I\u2019m writing a book, things that happen in the world outside my computer do tend to impact my story. Occasionally, however, it\u2019s the other way around and it seems as if what I\u2019m writing has an impact on the outside world. I wrote Dismissed with Prejudice in the late eighties. The murder weapon in the story turns out to be a Samurai sword brought to the States as a kind of trophy in the aftermath of World War II. Two weeks after the publication of that book I learned from the local newspaper that a pair of Japanese businessmen had set up shop in the lobby of what was then Bellevue\u2019s Red Lion. They were there in hopes of buying back some of those trophy Samurai swords.<\/p>\n
Today, I awakened to similar issue. Don\u2019t you just love it when something you\u2019ve known about for decades is suddenly headline news? And that\u2019s what showed up on my Internet newsfeed this morning:<\/p>\n
FBI releases names of 170 missing Indigenous people in New Mexico and on the Navajo Nation<\/em><\/p>\n Excuse me, this isn\u2019t exactly news. As it happens those are the named individuals missing from only ONE reservation! There are lots more and lots missing people. In terms of human trafficking, I was already well aware that young Native American women are the most frequently victimized. One of the reasons those cases go unsolved is the bureaucratic tangle of law enforcement agencies involved\u2014federal, county, municipal, and tribal\u2014and they all too often simply pass the buck and make it someone else\u2019s problem. I\u2019m pretty sure I mentioned this issue several years ago in a book called Sins of the Fathers.<\/p>\n As it happens, I\u2019m taking another crack at it in the book I\u2019m writing now\u2014Blessing of the Lost Girls. You\u2019ll be happy to know that I\u2019ve figured out a way to deal with that messy bureaucracy problem. I\u2019ve taken the liberty of creating a brand new federal agency\u2014a fictional one. It\u2019s called MMIV\u2014Murdered and Missing Indigenous Victims, an investigative agency operating under the aegis of the Department of the Interior. You\u2019ll also be happy to know that field officers working for them are able to cut through all the countervailing red tape and get to the heart of the problem which is this\u2014someone has to PAY ATTENTION! Someone needs to CARE.<\/p>\n I didn\u2019t bother reading the article that came after the headline. The FBI has at least gone to the trouble of acknowledging the problem. Now let\u2019s see what, if anything, they\u2019re prepared to do about it.<\/p>\n In the meantime, my MMIV field officers will be out there working away.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the mid-nineties, while I was working on the second Joanna Brady book, I was invited to take part in a writers\u2019 conference in Portland. The book I was working on didn\u2019t yet have a name, so I said yes to attending the conference and walked away from the writing. When I\u2019m doing panels, I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-writing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-Gd","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2617","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2617"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2617\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2618,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2617\/revisions\/2618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}