Genre: Crime

Published by: Stark House Press

Publication Date: September 26, 2014

Number of Pages: 389 – the “book” contains 2 novels

ISBN: 978-1933586472

 

More: This is a set of two books featuring Crime.
These include strong language.

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Synopsis:

Remember those old Ace paperbacks, with two actioners in one volume? Stark House is reviving them, with the current offering holding all the slam-bang anyone might want.

In Turnabout, ex-cop Frankie O’Neil is skeptical when a friend’s death is ruled a suicide. He uncovers a crime unknown to the Ace masters: computer theft. These crooks have friends with guns, and halfway along the novel becomes a series of cliffhangers that hit another memory: movie serials. Will Frankie escape in time? Find out in the next chapter. You won’t stop until you know.

Shallow Secrets moves slower, with a subtext: the power of chance to provoke horrors, then avenge them. Cop James Robinson doesn’t just know the accused killer. They’re roommates. The coincidence ruins his career. Then there are fresh killings, and Robinson is “a person of interest.” Near the end, Robinson almost tells a woman that “there wasn’t anything they could do to make the world safe” from murders. But coincidence can bring them down, as when someone sees something he’s not supposed to.

– from Don Crinklaw

 

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Author Bio:

Rick Ollerman made his first dollar from writing when a crossword magazine printed a question he’d sent.

Later he went on to hold world records for various large skydives, appear in photo spreads in LIFE magazine and The National Enquirer, can be seen on an inspirational poster during the opening credits of a popular TV show, and has been interviewed on CNN. He also had a full-screen shot as an extra in the film Purple Rain.

His writing has appeared in technical and sporting magazines and he has edited and proofread many books, and written introductions for a dozen more. Notably in 2014 he sold a short story and an essay to Noir Riot and his first two books, Turnabout and Shallow Secrets, were published by Stark House Press in September.

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Your Ideas Come From… Where?  

Generally being a risk-taker, I’d like to say a few words about that question that Neil Gaiman says “should never be asked”: Where do you get your ideas from? Seems like a logical thing to ask.  

After all, most writers, as they’re growing up, have a gnawing sense of wanting to write yet at the same time having no earthly idea what they could possibly know worth writing about. Years go by, and hopefully, for the blessed few, something happens and suddenly you have the ability to finish what you start.

Still, though, you need something to write about, especially a fiction writer, who isn’t trekking across sub-Saharan Africa trying to retrace the steps of H. M. Stanley with a journal.  

 

Where does your idea come from?  

 

First, you have to have the instincts of a writer: you have to be a keen observer, you have to have a talent for the language and for stringing words together, and above all, you need to be interesting. I don’t mean interesting in that you dress funny at parties, but that the words you set to paper make people want to keep reading. But that’s a topic for another time.  

You have the tools, you’re ready to write, you just need something to write about. Hence the question about “your ideas” and no, Harlan Ellison doesn’t really send money to a company in Schenectady every week in exchange for story ideas. The real answer is actually pretty simple: become adept at asking the “what if” question.  

I write crime fiction so my examples will tend to be a bit dark, but stay with me. The FBI says the only real predictor we have of murder is stalking. The observer in me, the writer, jots that down.

Now we look at what stalking behaviors actually are, and what happens to the parties involved. A small kindness, an overlooked gesture, is made to the stalker himself. This leads to the idea of a “relationship” building in the stalker’s head. He begins to leave little gifts–croissants, a flower, a birthday card–on his target’s desk. She thinks nothing of it. Then, when she starts bumping into the stalker in odd places, perhaps driving down her own street, she begins to be alarmed. She asks him to leave her alone. Surely she doesn’t mean it, he thinks. Someone must be making her say that, or else she just doesn’t realize yet how much he’s done for her, how important she really is…. What does the victim do?  

She can go to the police but without an actual threat what they can do is not only limited, it often escalates the stalker’s activity. Ah, the writer in you says, it also brings you to the attention of the police. All this may be interesting but it still isn’t a story. We need to think like a writer now.

Where would the story come from?  

What if you are a man married to a woman. You have whatever expertise to recognize the stalking activities and know that there’s no easy way to stop them. You know if you go to the police, you’re simply putting yourself on their radar. And why is that a bad thing?  

Because you have the specialized knowledge to see where this can end up, tragically, and you can either sit back and watch it play out in an ineffective legal system–or take matters into your own hands.

Which means you don’t want to make yourself known to the cops. Here’s your basic what if that helps to set up your plot, or at least one of them (I like to have several going in my books).  

This basic plot, or what-if scenario, helps to define my characters. My lead character has to not only know about stalking and what it can lead to, he needs to have someone he wants to protect no matter what. He knows that dong the right thing, going to the police, will not only likely make the stalking worse, but make himself know should he decide he has to take matters into his own hands. And can he do that? Is he capable?  

So I make the person who is being stalked his wife. To increase the intensity, she has a daughter by a previous marriage so there’s even more at stake. What kind of person would have all this knowledge?

He’d have to be a police officer, someone who’s seen this play out before. And he has to be someone who can make an impossible decision. What if he decides he has to make the stalker disappear? Can he do that? Can he convince himself being proactive isn’t much different from taking him out if he breaks into the family home?

  And if the stalker does disappear, someone’s going to look. Other people, co-workers of the wife, are going to know there was something not right about the relationship between her and her stalker. How exactly would you make someone disappear without causing undue curiosity.  

This leads you to another plot point, a puzzle the protagonist must work out, assuming he can actually bring himself to make that decision. That what-if question of what do you do if someone you love more than anything is being stalked by someone who shows all the known signs of possibly not being able to stop gives us a large portion of a plot setup. It also gives us a starting cast of characters: a cop, desperately in love, a person who can’t stand by and watch his wife be carried into more and more dangerous waters.  

There’s her daughter, his adopted girl: she’s already lost one dad, can she stand to lose another? There’s the wife herself–what kind of person is she? She needs to have a certain amount of dependency on her second husband, maybe enough so that it’s not quite healthy.

  And the villain? The character that is often more interesting than the hero? Well, this guy not only has to have a facet to his character that can seem harmless to his victim, at least at first, but he has to be unsympathetic enough to the reader so that if the protagonist decides he has to make the impossible choice, that the reader can stay in sympathy with that choice.  

Then we add more what-ifs: what if the stalker were the woman’s first husband, fresh out of jail? What if the wife takes her daughter and leaves after the stalking issue is “resolved”? What if she leaves a message for her husband that she had to leave, had to take their daughter, because even though she doesn’t know what happened, every time she looks at her husband she has to wonder what happened to the father of her daughter?  

These are real examples that I’ve used to write my forthcoming book, Truth Always Kills. When you look back at my first two novels, Turnaround and Shallow Secrets, you can find the same sort of questions: what if laundering money took place over the internet, where the evidence is gone as soon as a terminal is powered off? Or, what if a murderer left evidence in the house of the cop who was investigating him back when they were friends?  

What if? What if?    

Giveaway:

This is a giveaway hosted by Partners In Crime Virtual Book Tours for Rick Ollerman. There will be three winners of 3 sets of – 1) Signed book plus a 2) signed, limited chapbook of two essays on paperback original writers that served as introductions to other books. The giveaway begins on Feb 28th, 2015 and runs through April 3rd, 2015. a Rafflecopter giveaway

 

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