The Dark Side of Ideas

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Am I seeing a theme emerge? I am always so intrigued when our topics seem to–coincidentally–verge in the same direction. I know we rarely talk about how the JRW sausage is made, but  you should know that when we schedule guest authors, we have NO idea what they’ll write about. That’s part of the fun!

So this week turned out to be a little…dark. GOOD dark, we like dark, but it’s so odd. First, Hannah Mary McKinnon and her bad guy main character in NEVER COMING HOME. Then Susan Furlong’s creepy dolls. (Sorry, dolls, nothing personal.) And coming up later...well, you’ll see.

And today, Annette Dashofy, a dear and treasured friend of the Reds, is talking about darkness, too. In a completely different way.

The Dark Side of Story Ideas

 by Annette Dashofy

As writers, we’re always asked where we get our story ideas. In the case of Fatal Reunion, it’s a plot that has simmered in the dark recesses of my brain for over four decades.

I’ve lived in Washington County, Pennsylvania, all my life. While largely rural, the area isn’t immune to crime. But back in the mid-seventies, it was a pretty safe place to live. Then came November of 1976.

For the sake of those readers who don’t wish to hear the gory details regarding a string of brutal homicides involving young women, I won’t share the incidents here. I did a blog about it on Writing Stiffs back in 2007 if you want to check it out. A more recent and thorough post on the still-open cases can be found on The Murder Squad.

Suffice it to say the Washington County Strangler has haunted me all this time. Some say the cases aren’t linked, and it’s probably true that a few of the young women died at the hands of someone else. There are also some who believe the real killer was a public figure of the time who took his own life. The killings may or may not have ended after that event.

It was around that time in my life that I wrote my first crime fiction novel. Inspired by the real-life unsolved mysteries, I created two women cops, the female versions of Starsky and Hutch. (Shortly afterwards, a new hit TV show premiered. You may remember Cagney and Lacey. I guess I was a little ahead of my time.) Looking back, the book was pretty awful. But in that novel, my fictional cops solved the string of murders.

Fast forward to 2020. I had parted company with my old publisher, who frequently steered me toward the cozier end of the mystery spectrum. I wanted to tackle this story again, and since I no longer had the cozy restraints, I decided Zoe Chambers was the perfect character to reflect my fears and help solve a fictionalized version of the case. Thankfully, my agent found a publisher willing to take it on as well.

Fatal Reunion is a complete work of fiction. I made up suspects and victims, as I always do. The only nonfiction aspect is within Zoe’s heart. I piled my own emotions and fears into her and ran with it.

Once again, my cops solve the crime.

The string of murders back in the 1970s left me rattled. A young woman suddenly aware her rural home wasn’t the safe haven she’d previously believed. But it also sparked my interest in crime writing. In our fiction, we have control over the outcome. Our heroes find the clues, connect the dots. The bad guys are caught. Justice is served. There’s a strange sense of fulfillment in making things turn out “right” in the end. Forty-five years later, there is still no satisfactory ending to the stories of Susan Rush, Mary Gency, or Brenda Ritter.

So, Reds, do any of you have a real story from your past that you have yet to address in your fiction, but want to? And readers, are you fascinated by true crime stories or do you prefer total fiction in your reading material?

HANK: Oh, great question. For fiction, total fiction is fine, or true crime disguised, also fine. But I am very annoyed when true crime writers take liberties. Just tell me the REAL story. If you don’t know everything, fine. This is especially frustrating in TV shows. If something is real, I don’t want my brain clogged with speculation or dramatization. End of rant.

What do you think, Reds and readers?

Fatal Reunion
The 11th in the Zoe Chambers Mystery Series:

As Monongahela County’s new coroner Zoe Chambers-Adams gears up for a third day searching for a missing woman, she receives the news she’s been dreading: a body has been found. What she discovers at the scene leaves no doubt—the missing woman was violently murdered. Worse, the manner of death mirrors the Monongahela Strangler case that terrorized the county when Zoe was in high school. Those murders stopped, but the case was never satisfactorily solved. And with people arriving in town for Zoe’s twentieth high school reunion, the memories of those scary days return with a vengeance.

But Zoe’s new husband, Vance Township Police Chief Pete Adams, sees the murder differently. His investigation reveals two feuding families and a forbidden relationship between their children. The homicide appears to be a crime of passion, until Pete’s relentless digging unearths a link between his prime suspect and Zoe’s serial-killer. Suddenly, with the predator threatening to strike someone near and dear to both Zoe and Pete, they must race to uncover the truth and catch a madman before another innocent victim is brutally murdered.

Annette Dashofy is the USA Today best-selling author of twelve novels including the Zoe Chambers mystery series about a paramedic turned county coroner in rural Pennsylvania’s tight-knit Vance Township. The eleventh book in the series, Fatal Reunion, is available now in digital and is coming soon in paperback. Annette and her husband live on ten acres of what was her grandfather’s dairy farm in Washington County, PA, with their very spoiled cat, Kensi.