JONATHAN
MOORE is an attorney with the Honolulu firm of Kobayashi, Sugita & Goda.
Before completing law school in New Orleans, he was an English teacher, the
owner of Taiwan’s first Mexican restaurant, and an investigator for a criminal
defense attorney in Washington D.C. He is the author of three previous novels, Close Reach and Redheads, which was short-listed for the
Bram Stoker Award and The Poison Artist. His
latest novel is The Dark Room which is the second book in a trilogy of San Francisco noir. Here he talks about doing research for his novels.
Last August, I skipped out of work and went to
a funeral home on the back edge of Honolulu’s Chinatown. I was there to pick
out a casket. It was an awkward shopping trip: I had specific requirements for
my casket, but I couldn’t explain them to the saleswoman. It needed to be big
enough to hold two people—a man and a woman. The man would be appropriately
dead and embalmed, but the woman would be alive when she went inside. So it
would also need a good lock. The lid would get quite a lot of pounding from
below. I didn’t mind if the silk liner got clawed to shreds, but the structure
would need to hold up. On a related note, this casket would have to withstand
thirty years under the ground. If it broke apart before then, its secrets would
be lost.
Fortunately,
the showroom had a wide selection. The casket I chose was gray, with a white
satin liner, and bronze fittings. It probably cost as much as my car. I took
some pictures and said I’d think about it, but of course I never went back. I
didn’t have to buy it, because I already had what I needed.
One
of the pleasures of writing crime fiction is the opportunity to imagine how
real people, places, and objects might behave during events that could happen,
but which never should. It’s a reorganization that highlights how flexible the
lines are. For the most part, we live in an ordered society. But chaos is our
next-door neighbour, and sometimes its dogs get loose and its trash spills over
into our yard.
Which
means that writing crime fiction requires a walk around the fences to see where
the holes are. I’ve had some good guides along the way. For my most recent
book, I met regularly with a private investigator, a retired cop, a current
federal prosecutor, and a working surgeon. Those are just the people who knew
what I was up to. Then there were the bartenders, and cabdrivers, and coffin
saleswomen and San Francisco skid row motel clerks. They helped but didn’t know
it.
If
one of the benefits of reading and writing crime fiction is that it engenders a
sense of paranoia about the way things might go wrong, it has also has the
complementary but paradoxical effect of encouraging empathy. If you think about
it, fiction is the perfect mechanism for this. The price of admission is the
requirement that you spend some time inside other people’s heads. And in a
crime story, that can mean all different kinds of people, with all their
attendant baggage and motivations and destinations.
But,
getting back to my casket. It’s seven feet long, counting the handles. It
weighs a couple of hundred pounds, and is made of Honduran mahogany. My sales
agent assures me that it will resist rot. After all, it’s the same wood they
use to build boats. To open it, you use a casket key that looks like the engine
crank on an old Ford Model-T. Turn it until it’s tight, and the lid locks down
in six separate places. As final resting places go, it looks…secure. I can
think of a lot of things to do with an object like this. Most of them shouldn’t
ever happen, but that’s not the point. The point is that they could.
The Dark Room by Jonathan Moore is out now by Orion.
Homicide
inspector Gavin Cain is standing by a grave when he gets the call. Cain knows
there's something terrible in the coffin they're about to exhume. He and his
team have received a dying man's confession and it has led them here. Cain is
summoned by Mayor Castelli, who has been sent sinister photographs of a woman
that he claims he doesn't know and a note threatening that worse are on their
way. As Cain tries to identify the woman in the pictures, and looks into the
mayor's past, he finds himself being drawn towards a situation as horrifying
and as full of secrets as the grave itself.
You can find more information about the author on his website. You can also follow hm on Twitter @JonMooreFiction and find him on Facebook.
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