Is the Perfect, Untraceable Murder Possible?

I believe I created a perfect murder for my newly reissued novel STALKING THE SKY.  And not just the murder of one person, but of over three hundred.  And I did it twice.

STALKING THE SKY is the story of America's leading airline in crisis.  As a ruthless corporate raider is moving to seize it from its legendary founder, one of its 747s explodes in mid-air, killing everyone on board.  Then a second airliner goes down.  Sabotage is suspected.  Will Nye, the airline's general counsel who lost his best friend in the second disaster, is working closely with the FBI to track down the killer.

Obviously a bomb of some sort had to be employed with the killer able to escape after placing it, but how to accomplish that and how does one place it in the absolutely precise place to disable a giant aircraft built to survive a multitude of in-air mishaps?  I devised a scheme, but needed to be sure my scheme would work.  On a vacation trip with my wife, I entered the jetliner's lavatory and nervously went through enough of the steps my murderer would be taking to place the bomb until I was sure that I—and he—could get away with the crime.  Fearing arrest at any moment, I returned, sweating, to my seat.  Yet, like the murderer, I safely got off the plane at my destination.

A perfect mass murder?  I think it would have been.  I'll leave for my book's readers the details of how one gets a bomb on board and still makes a safe getaway.  But I'm sure that if Will hadn't found and tracked down a tiny clue I planted, STALKING THE SKY would have had a very different ending: The killer dancing all the way to a happy and very wealthy retirement.

So, I definitely think a smart, thorough thriller/mystery writer could devise a perfect plan to get away with murder.  The question is: How many novelists pecking out their daydreamed plots possess a killer's nerve?

Instilling Jeopardy in My Novels

In the TV quiz show Jeopardy, the stakes get doubled part way through the show and are raised again at the end in Final Jeopardy. For that last difficult question, the contestants can risk up to whatever they have won so far in the hope of correctly answering it and doubling what they've put at risk. Perhaps more important, the top money winner gets to return to compete for more prize money in the next game.

In my courtroom thriller, A QUESTION OF PROOF, the protagonist, Dan Lazar, a renowned criminal-defense lawyer, is divorced and badly misses his son. Moreover, burned-out and disillusioned by his success at winning acquittals for people he knows are guilty of horrendous crimes, he is ready to call it quits. He falls in love with Susan Boelter, the estranged wife of an autocratic newspaper publisher, who is seeking to take everything from her in divorce proceedings, including custody of their daughter. Susan's happiness and consequently Dan's as well are at risk. Suddenly, Peter is found dead, and Susan is charged with his murder, raising the stakes again for Susan and Dan. He yields to her entreaty that he defend her at the murder trial, an unorthodox and personally wrenching arrangement that puts more at risk for Dan. The stakes are raised even higher by Dan's urgent inner need to use his lawyering skill to save at least one person he can truly believe is innocent. In this case that person is also the woman he loves. But is she innocent or merely using him/  Events put his certainty in doubt.  Ultimately at stake is virtually everything Dan's considers worth living for.  The outcome turns on a question of proof.
STALKING THE SKY is my latest thriller to be published on Kindle and simultaneously in print on Amazon with new material and  new Introduction. Its protagonist Will Nye, the general counsel for America's leading airline, is feverishly seeking to uncover the identity of the saboteur who planted a bomb on one of the airline's 747s. To raise the stakes, one of the pilots who went down with the plane was his best friend, who saved his life in Vietnam. Nye's quest becomes an obsession. When he finally learns that yet a third airliner has been targeted and the woman he loves is one of that plane's flight attendants, the stakes--and the suspense--soar as high as the sky that plane is flying through.

Jeopardy is not just a game, it's at the heart of a thriller.

How I'm Using New Media to Reach Readers

Nearly all authors in the pre-Internet age experienced the galling frustration of having a publisher put little or no marketing effort into a book we may have spent years writing. The new media, primarily social media, provide emancipation from that netherworld; we can personally market our books in so many ways that were never before available. In days of yore, we hoped the people reviewing books for newspapers would pick ours to write about or maybe someone would write an article or even that we’d be interviewed on a phone-in radio show. Today, we can reach potential readers with what we hope are intriguing pitches for our books on Twitter, the major resource for my marketing, Facebook, blogs, and web sites like 
Goodreads, where readers gather and exchange opinions on what they've read. I created a website, JosephAmiel.com, which  features all my books and additional material about me and them. 

Everyone with access to a computer can be a reviewer in this new age, and thousands of people with only a love of books as a qualification are conveying their opinions on Amazon book pages and blogs and Facebook pages and Twitter. They are also communicating directly with writers and each other on websites and in online book forums. And just as they can be stimulated to see a movie through trailers, they can be motivated to buy books by watching promotional video trailers online.

To take only one instance of how I'm attempting to use the new media, I’ve always felt that my legal thriller A Question of Proof, a book I loved that received gratifying pre-publication reviews and endorsements (one person called it "a masterpiece of suspense"), was not marketed effectively or vigorously by the publisher and could have reached many more readers. The presence of the new media with its potential to communicate my enthusiasm and belief in my book directly to thousands of potential readers induced me to launch a new edition it in digital and also print form. I updated it so that it takes place in the present and added new material and a personal Introduction to make it as pleasurable for new readers as I believed it was originally. Being an experienced film-maker, I created a video book trailer, which is available both on GoodReads and on my website (and even appeared in it). As I write this A QUESTION OF PROOF is selling prodigiously on Kindle, as well in its new print edition, both with new covers, and it's garnering great reviews, which gives me enormous, if delated gratification.

A similar effort to reach readers via Twitter is expended on my other books now also available in new Kindle and print editions at Amazon: the just-published STALKING THE SKY (formerly "Hawks"), a thriller about America's leading air carrier under siege both from a saboteur destroying its 747s in flight and a corporate raider seeking to seize it; my 3-generation mystery romance DEEDS; my beloved woman's novel BIRTHRIGHT about a strong woman fighting for success in a man's world; and STAR TIME, an TV insider's novel. 

In short the new media is the best tool authors and readers have ever had to find each other.  Please contact me at Joe@JosephAmiel.com and let me know what you think.  And if you enjoy the books, please leave reviews for them here and on their Amazon pages.

Writing the Science-based Thriller

Nearly all of us work in some business and the better part of our waking hours is often spent engaged in that work, so placing my novels in an industry has always felt to me to be a natural extension of life.  The industry in STAR TIME (coming out this Wednesday) is network television.  In my legal thriller A QUESTION OF PROOF, the victim is a newspaper publisher.  BIRTHRIGHT (being published soon) is the saga of an investment banking family.  The amount of research that I had to master to be able to write knowledgeably about those industries was often daunting.  If one is not a scientist and, more specifically, a scientist in the specific discipline in which a novel is to be set, the research can be even more daunting.  Exposure to the science can be fascinating to readers, but that will prove inconsequential to creating a compelling novel if the characters and their concerns do not fascinate as well. 

Years ago, I conceived of a science-based thriller.  The science was cutting edge and, I thought, would be a revelation to the general public: immortality that might just be scientifically possible.  First I had to find the few texts that mentioned the new discovery.  Then I had to look up nearly every word in the texts, but I kept doggedly at it because the stakes were high: First, I wanted to write a compelling science-based thriller and, second, I wanted to live forever.  My agent eventually dissuaded me from pursuing the book any further because the characters and their concerns did not seem anywhere near so gripping to him as the science.  But now that I think about it – and he is no longer among those of us who can still benefit from that area's advances – I wonder if perhaps he had a prejudice against science-based thrillers.  The science is still cutting edge and still not that widely known.  Maybe if I went back and plumbed those characters and concerns anew, maybe, just maybe . . . 

How Do You Recreate the Legal Thriller?

Having just published A QUESTION OF PROOF, a legal thriller with twists and turns not resolved until the very last sentence, I’ve had some experience with the genre.  And being a lawyer by training, I probably have a leg up on legal intricacies.  But I would suggest that the legal thriller is only effective if it is a story about the people involved, with the legal system, say a murder trial, being the inexorable peril they confronting them.  Peril is the essential ingredient for any thriller, and an all-powerful legal system is a fearsome form of peril with some form of loss at stake for the defendant and, at its most intriguing, those around the defendant.  The threat can run from the loss of something the defendant holds dear to, at its most fearsome, death by a jury’s decree. 

In A QUESTION OF PROOF, Susan Boelter is charged with murdering her newspaper-publisher husband, who was divorcing her and appeared to be on the brink of taking everything from her, including custody of their thirteen-year-old daughter.  She asks Dan Lazar, a renowned criminal defense attorney, to defend her.  But he faces two obstacles to taking on her defense: He is about to lose his license to practice law due to trumped-up charges of witness tampering; and, more important, he and Susan are lovers.  The legal system has provided the hurdles and dangers, but they are only the means for exploring the acts, motives and relationships of the people trapped within it.  I say the story remains unresolved until the very last sentence, but that sentence relates to Susan and Dan and their relationship, not to a legal outcome.  If readers care about their story, they will be engrossed in discovering their fate until the very last word.

The Most Extreme Thing I've Done in the Name of Research

Well before 9/11, I had an interesting reason why someone who was not a terrorist would blow up airliners and thought it might make a good mystery at the heart of thriller about an airline in crisis.   On the basis of three chapters containing the fuzziest research, my agent managed to sell my first novel Hawks to a publisher.  

Knowing little more than the average traveler about airliners, airlines, plane crashes, and explosives, I spent several months learning everything I could.  Fortunately for me, a Congressional committee had recently published volumes of testimony delving deeply into the industry and how it operated; and radicals and others were publishing pamphlets on how to make bombs.  To get a sense of what it was like to be in the pilot's seat thousands of feet above solid ground, I took a flying lesson.  But once I had done all of that research and more, had created the characters and plot, I had to be sure that, at least in principle, one could actually plant a bomb in that part of the jetliner I had chosen for the book.  Making certain of that led to the most extreme thing I've ever done in the name of research.

           

While on a commercial jet flying to a vacation, I locked myself in a lavatory and using only a coin, as I recall, unscrewed a ceiling panel.  There in plain sight, in the area known as the plenum or plenum chamber, running the length of the fuselage above the cabin from cockpit to the stabilizers on the tail, were the hydraulic and other cables essential to flying that plane.  Today, smuggling the constituents for the kind of bomb my villain employed would be somewhat more difficult, but looking at those cables, I became assured that the bomb could destroy them and consequently the plane in flight while he was safely gone.  I had found the plane's Achilles heel.  It felt weird and frightening.  If a writer could figure it out, couldn't someone with single-minded evil intent figure it out as well?  For the briefest moment I debated the morality of revealing the method in print.  But then I realized that I wasn't revealing top-secret information because anyone could figure it out as I had and, to be practical, how many potential bombers are wide-ranging readers.

At that moment, my trepidation at having removed the ceiling panel turned into near panic as it occurred to me how guilty I would look to an airline official: WRITER CAUGHT IN ACT OF DESTROYING PLANE AND PASSENGERS. One of those passengers was my wife, which turned into a sub-headline: DEVIOUSLY AVOIDS COMPLICATIONS OF DIVORCE.  And a third: BOMBER'S OWN BODY NEVER FOUND (okay, survival is a primal instinct).  I'm exaggerating somewhat here, but the fear of being apprehended, with only a flimsy lavatory lock for protection was vividly real.

Heart pounding, I hurriedly replaced the screws, afraid I would drop and lose them.  Then I pocketed my coin and slipped out of the lavatory, too frazzled to remember to use the cubicle for its intended purpose and worried that if I slipped back in to relieve myself, a wary flight attendant would become suspicious: "Only bombers go back into lavatories so quickly!" 

Because of all my research, my publicity campaign centered on my expertise in air crashes.  For years, I was called upon to appear on TV and radio news shows to pontificate about possible causes of the latest crash, while I plugged my book.  Larry King and I spent hours chatting on his late-night radio show.  He wanted the company, and I wanted all the publicity my book could get.  However, my guru status led to my closest call in the talking-head trade.  I flew up to Boston for a TV show and, as we landed at Logan Airport, could see beside the runway the wrecked plane that had prompted my upcoming appearance.  When I arrived at the TV studio, I was surprised to learn that my "counterpoint" would be an airline pilot who was the pilot union's expert on plane crashes. 

For most of the hour, his smug technical assertions were giving him the best of it.   I desperately eyed the achingly slow minute hand on the studio clock.   Miraculously, his final assertion dealt with a crash over Paris with which I was familiar.  To prove that an incompetent foreign ground employee and not American airline expertise was at fault, he said the cause of the crash was the French door handler’s inability to read the directions on the door and close it properly because he was illiterate.  From some hidden synapse in my brain, a small fact wiggled its way into my consciousness.  I responded, "Actually, the door handler spoke four languages and read seven.  The plane took off from Paris.  Why weren't the directions on the door also written in other languages, one of them certainly being French?"  At that moment, the moderator intervened: "Time's up.  We'll have to leave it at that."  And I was out of there, my credibility intact and possessed of the realization that the research we writers insert in our books to make it appear we know what of we speak can sometimes save our asses.

Writing about Hawks has amped my excitement about re-issuing it in a new and updated edition later in the year.  But right now, my attention is focused on my legal thriller A Question of Proof, being launched this week in both digital and print at Amazon (tinyurl.com/c2z5ynk) and, soon after, wherever books are sold online.  But that's a whole other story.

Do thrillers always need to play on a large canvas, or can an intimate story thrill?

            What matters isn't the size of the canvas, but the quality of the story.  That's as true in a novel as it is in a painting.  In the end it all comes down to how much we care about the fate of the participants, and that's always personal, whether we're talking about War and Peace or one individual's personal story.

            I think my courtroom thriller A QUESTION OF PROOF is a good example of a very personal story that grips the reader.  One reviewer, in fact, called it a masterpiece of suspense, yet the fate of all mankind does not rest on the outcome, only the fate of one woman and the happiness of one man.  It's the story of a disillusioned, burned-out lawyer and the woman he defends against the charge that she murdered her husband, a powerful newspaper publisher.  Not only is the lawyer in love with the woman, but he desperately wants to know that he is finally defending one person at least that he can truly believe is innocent -- his happiness depends on both answers.  But is she innocent?  What really happened? 

The lives of the people at the center of the novel are what make for a great story – and how much we care about them.