Hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving and is recovering from all that turkey. For this writer and her friends, it’s back to work. Speaking of friends, I’d like to introduce to you Frank Zafiro who writes the River City police procedural series. If you like crime fiction as much as I do, you’ll find much to love in Frank’s novels. Please welcome Author Frank Zafiro to Help From My Friends Friday! ~ Donnell

Eating the Lucy Chocolates

Author Frank Zafiro

by Frank Zafiro

Law enforcement is a service profession, and one in which it is sometimes difficult to point to “success.” In the sports world, you win a championship. In the business world, you sell a lot of whatever it is you sell. In the art world, you are widely read, viewed, or appreciated. But defining success as a cop is a more nebulous proposition.

Part of the reason is simply the nature of the job. There will never come a day in which a cop shows up to work to find the chief of police locking up the station, turning to the cop and saying, “Oh, hi. We’re done. Crime is eradicated. Go home. Good luck in your next career.”

No, human behavior pretty much ensures this will never occur.

Instead, a far more accurate comparison regarding what it is like being a cop is the famous Lucille Ball skit, in which she and Ethel are working on a packaging line in a chocolate factory. The candies keep coming down the conveyor belt, faster and faster, as the two women frantically try to stuff them into the correct packages. It’s great physical comedy and an even better metaphor for law enforcement.

It is no different for fictional cops (or, at least, shouldn’t be). In my River City series, the core character throughout most of the books is Katie MacLeod. Beginning the series as a young patrol officer, she has risen to the role of homicide detective as of a couple of books ago. In All the Forgotten Yesterdays, she is working two very different cases. One involves a nighttime burglar who is targeting the homes of the elderly. The other is a cold missing person case. The first feels like a ticking time bomb and the second unearths shocking secrets.

This isn’t the first big event in Katie’s career. Each of the books has a large crime as the backdrop for the story. Katie and her compatriots have faced robbers, kidnappers, rapists, gangsters, school shootings, serial killers, human traffickers, and burglars, just to name a few. I’ve tried to vary the types of crimes the RCPD [ is challenged by. For instance, the next installment, Nor Shadowed Heart, will feature a radio host being stalked.

With sixteen books in the series, four of which are short story collections that include a slew of additional crimes, there’s no lack of variety when it comes to what Katie and her fellow officers face.

Or is there?

At this stage of the game, one could argue I’m entering repeat territory. For instance, in both Under a Raging Moon (#1, the series opener) and The Menace of the Years (#5), the villain(s) are robbers.  Dirty Little Town (#7) and Some Degree of Murder (#9) both involve serial killers. Sexual assault was the crime in Beneath a Weeping Sky (#3) and The Worst Kind of Truth (#11).

You get the point.

So am I running out of ideas?

You might think so. In fact, as evidence, you could point to the fact I put a poll out to my newsletter subscribers when I announced the release of the newest book, asking them what kinds of crimes they’d prefer to see RCPD tackle. “Murder” was the clear winner. I took this to mean that readers like high stakes.

Will I include some murders in future books? Probably, yes. Because they do occur. Not as often as TV and books would lead one to believe, but they do happen. But I’ll also continue to include those other crimes that police have to deal with on a daily basis, even at the risk of sometimes repeating myself.

Here’s the thing – even though the crime is the same, the details are very different. Going back to my earlier comparisons, the robber in #1 is hitting convenience stores. He’s a loner and a heroin addict. The robbers in #5 are white supremacists doing home invasions. The serial killer in #7 is intelligent and fixated on his particular victims, choosing them to fulfill a psychological compulsion. The serial killer in #9 is a disorganized thrill-seeker. The sex crimes in #3 are perpetrated by a single, unknown suspect, who puts the entire community into a state of fear. In #11, Detective MacLeod investigates an assault on a prostitute with an unknown suspect and a case of “date rape.”

So, even though each crime falls under the same umbrella in terms of classification, the actual details of the cases are radically different. This is because those “chocolates” keep coming down the conveyor belt. In other words, crimes keep happening, and while the details are different, the labels are the same.

That’s why the River City series will likely never end, at least as long as I’m around to write new installments. There will always be crime. The people doing and the people trying to solve it may change, the conveyor belt will keep turning, just like the Earth on its axis.

Now, there’s another, even more compelling, reason to keep coming back to theses stories, and that is the characters themselves. But that’s for another post.

About the Author:

Frank Zafiro writes gritty crime fiction from both sides of the badge. He has written more than forty novels in various genres, including his most recent River City police procedural, All the Forgotten Yesterdays. He was a police officer from 1993 to 2013, holding many different positions and ranks. He retired as a captain. You can learn more at http://www.frankzafiro.com.