Mark Pryor Talks Rubbish--Literally

DEBORAH CROMBIE: It is always a treat to have my friend Mark Pryor as a guest here on JRW, and he's here today to talk about (at least partly!) his new Hugo Marston novel, THE FRENCH WIDOW. I have been a huge fan of this series from the very first book, THE BOOKSELLER. Mark is an Englishman who lives in Texas, where he's a prosecutor, and his protagonist, Hugo Marston, a former FBI profiler, is a Texan who lives in Paris and works for the U.S. Embassy as head of security. It's a great international combination!

MARK PRYOR: I would like to begin with a nugget of wisdom that I’ve been sharing as widely as I can these past few months. It comes from a wise young woman aged just fifteen, and arose from our nightly chat about life, the world, and whatever else. We were talking about talking. About who we feel able to talk to, share our problems with. It was a winding, random chat that I couldn’t possibly recreate but I do know we agreed that there’s really only one person we both felt we could tell our trouble to, tell him absolutely anything, whatever was in our heart or our mind.

Now, Natalie, my daughter, isn’t just a philosopher she’s a budding artist, so for my birthday a few weeks after that chat she depicted our shared conclusion on a square of canvas, and I’m delighted to share it with you today. Feel free to use it, no charge whatsoever.

Can you argue with that? No, I didn’t think so….

Now, I should say something about writing, and I’m delighted to be able to do so on this wonderful blog. I thought I might write about Covid-19 and how I’ve been coping, but then I thought, No, we all need a break from that darned virus. So, other than the previous sentence, Covid-19 will not be mentioned. Oh, that sentence too… anyway, onward.

I know, let’s talk rubbish. Literally.

As a criminal prosecutor and a crime writer, one of the questions I get asked the most is: Do you take cases from your day job and use them in your fiction?

It’s a good question, because having prosecuted multiple murderers, robbers, thieves, rapists, and burglars, you’d think my bucket of ideas would be regularly topped up. But here’s the thing about real crime—it’s usually one of two things, either grotesquely mundane or too ridiculous to be believable. And yes, I have an example.

Imagine this: you’re working at a recycling center, a large warehouse of a space, and you’re at the far end of the conveyor belt, which is lined with people in heavy gloves sorting through the recycled items moving slowly toward you. You’re pulling off glass and cardboard, plastic and metal, throwing each piece in the right bin. Suddenly, the person next to you raises his voice over the hum of the belt and the clatter of goods hitting their respective containers, and he says, “Who the heck would recycle a mannequin?”

You look down the line to see what he’s talking about, and you see people pointing in horror. Someone hits the red button to stop the conveyor belt and everyone steps back, because it’s not a mannequin at all. It’s the crumpled body of a man in his fifties, broken and bloodied and partly covered with whatever else had traveled in the recycling can with him.

This happened, right here in Austin, and it was a murder case I prosecuted. Now, I will grant you, so far it sounds like a great start to a novel, right? And it gets better (for a while)….

The homicide detective responded to the scene and was smart. Brilliant even. Once the Crime Scene Unit had taken photos the CSU tech wanted to move the debris off the body to see if they could determine a cause of death. The detective told them not to.

Instead, she started looking closely at the papers on and around the body. Why? She wanted to find pieces of mail in the hopes they’d have an address on them. After all, if they were on the body they’d likely have been in the same can, and that could pinpoint the murder location.

Genius, because it did. Mail on top of the body led them to a barely-used little church, where they found a recycling can with blood on it. That blood was a match for the victim. Nearby video cameras caught several people, including the victim, hanging out there the previous day—a man and a woman. They were identified, and the man confessed to the murder.

Great story, yes? But here’s the thing, the nugget of reality that explodes this wee tale into too many pieces, the kernel of fact that would render this apparently clever tale into a disaster of crime fiction. Remember, they cleverly found the recycling can, right? Now can you guess what they found right next to the recycling can?

Yep. A trash can. You see, it’s very common knowledge here that if you put something (or someone!) in a trash can, it gets picked up by the automated arm on the trash truck, compacted inside it, and then dumped into a giant pit in the middle of nowhere. You put something of value in the trash can by mistake, that’s tough luck because you’ll never see it again. Gone for good.

So imagine the story I’m telling, with a murderer standing there in the night. He has a dead body over his shoulder, and he’s looking back and forth between a trash can and a recycling can. Why in heaven’s name would he choose the recycling can? Any half-skeptical reader would throw the book across the room if he did that in fiction. Quite rightly.

But this gentleman, in real life, did exactly that. I don’t know why, he just did.

Thereby both creating, and ruining, a jolly good crime story.

  

Mark Pryor is a former newspaper reporter from England, and now a prosecutor with the Travis County District Attorney's Office, in Austin, Texas. He is the author of the Hugo Marston mystery series, set in Paris, London, and Barcelona. The first in the series, THE BOOKSELLER, was a Library Journal Debut of the Month, and called "unputdownable" by Oprah.com, and the series has been featured in the New York Times and was recently optioned for film/TV. Mark is also the author of the psychological thrillers, HOLLOW MAN, and its sequel, DOMINIC.  As a prosecutor, he has appeared on CBS News's 48 Hours and Discovery Channel's Discovery ID: Cold Blood. He lives in Austin, Texas.

Here's Mark in Monmartre. Does that look like the perfect place to write???

More about THE FRENCH WIDOW
A young American woman is attacked at a historic Paris chateau and four paintings are stolen the same night, drawing Hugo Marston into a case where everyone seems like a suspect. To solve this mystery Hugo must crack the secrets of the icy and arrogant Lambourd family, who seem more interested in protecting their good name than future victims. Just as Hugo thinks he’s close, some of the paintings mysteriously reappear, at the very same time that one of his suspects goes missing.

DEBS: I can't wait to dive into this one! REDS and readers, just how much reality do you want in your fictional crimes? As Mark points out, most murders in real life are not very clever--but would we want to read about them?