Sara Paretsky and "Fallout"

cause or effect were shots give away the bodies are piling up around you today on k pr presents a popular detective vi wife's ask the causes cancer and j mcintyre and on today's programme sera borucki is the author of the best selling v i was just the detective series the latest in that series fallout has our chicago based detective traveled to the sunflower state welcome is pretty eyes great to be back and lawrence let's start with a quick plot overview vi takes on a missing persons case that starts in her suburban chicago jim it involves a young filmmaker and an elderly former actress and brings them to fort riley and then to lawrence no spoilers here but a kid you take it from there the reason that the book is set in cans is and this is this is not a spoiler because it it ends up not plano a serious role in the story about my dad is a cell biologist on the hill

and did that for the firm his entire professional career from nineteen fifty one deal he died really in two thousand and in the sixties and seventies during the cold war some of his research will really was on the fringes of biological warfare he worked with an organism that was similar to what the soviets were trying to weapon eyes they were trying to weapon eyes the organism that causes typhus and the one that he worked on causes rocky mountain spotted fever so he went to a big conference he had wanted to study dear strain of it of course they were never in a letter i'm an american scientists look at what they were doing but he went to a big conference in czechoslovakia in the sixties and he somehow persuaded one of the technicians in the czech by a weapons lab to inject him with the strain of the

year organism and he came back to ship to kansas city got off the plane with a fever of a hundred and four he didn't start antibiotics until his lab tech and come and taking a blood sample from him so that he could culture that i want to say that people on the twa flight that he was on were not at risk because it's transmitted by fleas it kicks not directly person to person so most a plane was filled with fleas and ticks everyone else was safe but and then that episode i never knew why he did it i don't know whether really the us army put pressure on him to try to bring it back whether it was just his certain stubborn determination to study airport he was and he was in many ways this is a very unusual person who had no use for authority in any form it may have just been that you wanted to prove that he could thumb his nose at the entire soviet military and police apparatus and

smuggle this thing out under their very noses so i am i'll never know but when i started thinking about a book that might have something to do with bio weapons which this book in some ways does but i do it had to be said in kansas because i couldn't imagine anything with that kind of work anywhere else i mean it could've taken place anywhere in the country i suppose but to me of that hits home was here in cannes is on the hill so i had to give the eye out of chicago ten and that led to the the missing actors who's an african american woman and heard late seventies maybe early eighties and that also gave me i hadn't started the story meaning to do that but they gave me a chance to explore my perspective on race relations in in lawrence which i didn't know much about when i was growing up and i learned more

about since moving away this is your eighteenth in the air were assessed the novel but the first in which he travels to kansas why did it take so long to get vi two year old stomping grounds i don't think i ever thought of her as operating in cans is an item i originally was imagining this book more as a stand alone novel without her i had done one stand alone bleeding cannes is that i published eighty nine years ago and i kind of wanted to write more about this part of the world just because i think as i get older i don't know that it's nostalgia necessarily but as you get old erin you look at the arc of your life's your earliest experiences begin to to take a certain shape and become that become more what you wanna look at it and study maybe but i couldn't persuade my

publishers are my agent that a standalone novel it would sell any copies and time i'm not a huge risk risk taker with my career i need to make a living and so unknown would give me a contract for for a standalone novel i decided i would figure out a way to give the i hearing you mention your previous book bleeding kansas waits i have a pleasure of interviewing him back into thousand eight about that but you know was it different for you writing about kansas for vi verses if it had been some other protagonist that's a really good question and k i think that in some ways it would it would have been harder and easier or harder because of the eye is is so much part of my own skin and bones so to speak that i will say this was an easy book to write an avid and twenty novels and only the fourth

was easy chair but but her voice and her her take on the world are are just second nature to me it's like putting on your most favorite pair of shoes that look nice but you can really walk around and i don't have that pair of shoes but i and ethically in my fantasy life that we all have that's where a sheriff in our in our imagination but it was it was harder also because i think of lawrence and i think of chicago in two very different ways in chicago it's been my home for fifty years but he adds fifty adult years lawrence was my home for my first twenty years my my coming of age years i went to call valley district ninety five a two room school i'm not sure what they're dealing with now for a while or some fancy prep school but something else now that i want to lawrence high and did my undergraduate degree ks so

it's it's in some ways my certain patriotic sense of places is really more incidents really kansas despite the many problems and issues that i know kansas and laurence in the university all face so that was hard to bring in an outsider from the big city and i it took me a number of months probably three or four months of working on the novel before i really felt that she belonged in this in this space anyway she comes to fort riley first because the hackers said she's looking for emerald fairing an old was born there her father was with the first infantry which is stationed at fort riley and he was shipped out died at the battle of the bulge she was born there while he was already dead so i i had i had the i stopped there to try to find information about her one

of the things that the flood of nineteen fifty one the great flood that anybody who's older my age or older remembers it i didn't realize until i was doing research it displaced a quarter of the kansas population is just staggering in a completely obliterated all of the barracks at fort riley says the quartet's was totally rebuilt from the ground up after the flood so it's mine i get obsessed with it for a while i was consulting old maps and trying to get information from the war college and fort leavenworth and so on i wanted to know whether the weather housing for african american soldiers had been segregated it didn't seem to me that it was although i sort of also couldn't believe that it wasn't but i never could could really get that information but did none of that exists anymore none of the housing that would've stood in the forties is there in fort riley anymore you just mentioned that

other you grow up in lawrence you've lived in chicago for fifty years if someone vs observations about kansas and lawrence reflect your own observations when you come back home from the big city one of the things it did the i notice is is that the ubiquitous gay heart and i just i put that in as a test as a marker just that just because that jay hart is everywhere but what i say i love the j hardt my brothers and i we were half joking when i when my dad died and he was very dedicated to kate you and i couldn't get the baby and say to come to his funeral and do but i do a few tricks and we decided the rest of the extended family might not find that is a cherished moment as we would but to some of i think

some of the way that the eye looks at lawrence is like the flipside of the way i look at chicago blues i came to chicago as an outsider and i saw things that people who grew up there don't really ever see and some of it's it's been out details like you ride the elevated trains in chicago and at any see wildlife dc fox is easy pheasants and i don't think people really look out the windows and like at the top it always startling to me or drugs to sleep on the roof that was all just and part of the urban experience that that natives are inured to and don't really notice in so the eye comes to lions and she notices the homeless people which actually i find very shocking here because that wasn't part of the town when when i was growing up and when i left but it definitely is now part of the lawrence landscape

but in the book is set in lawrence that you acknowledge in your introduction that you take some liberties with the town and its geography in what way does the eyes laurence look different than our lawrence i've created at home united church congregational presbyterian church on the banks of the cough and i've i've inserted that if you go down kentucky street too weird it bends and turns west i'd added some land bare of bomb on the bluff and it's it's the church i actually created it in leading cannes is aaron didn't really think through the geography when i created it from bleeding kansas this book i spend a lot of time just hiking around and my brother jonathan who still lives here we drove around there's a part in the book where a truck goes into the water as the river and a

google maps does not show you how that might be possible effect you think it might be impossible in and i wrote a whole bunch of chapters about that meant i came here and jonathan to meow meow actually hike down then i had to re write all that lenders gun every every detail wrong message there for writers who think they can do all their research arm i know when you were writing about the antarctic you must go to the antarctic because otherwise people who live and work there will tell you all the mistakes he made there was one thing and then i i ended a missile silo to douglas county the calm walk a missile silo and i put that in my family lived out east on fifteenth street we're actually in the eudora township were not far from panels and scot free market which many listeners i'm sure no so i've ever known about a quarter mile land in between the pendleton so in the next farm and then

stretched the distance a little bit to kate ten between old katie hannon uk ten and i've put this missile silo in there was another fascinating thing for me with the research firm that i did for this book was always be i mean we all knew we were expendable growing up in the fifties and sixties that they put the missile silos where there weren't a lot of people and can says along with the rest of them midwest is dotted with them and is like oh yeah you know they don't care if he got four for it and it happens because in all of us and we don't count and they're just always kind of jeannie groat feeling a little belligerent about how my value to the united states but and many of these silos after president reagan and end premiered gorbachev made their historic weapons

disarmament agreement in numb now i can remember the year but in the eighties many of these missiles to the word the commission the nuclear warheads were taken out and and taken apart and taken down to their components and hopefully stored someplace safe but the empty silos now many of them have turned into meth labs and that's one of the things that people wonder if that's happening in the calm walk outside of them have plunked in douglas county but some of them have been turned into the survivalist condos it's just it just leaves me scratching my head like you can buy for about a million and a half to two million dollars you can buy a condo underground that will supposedly i mean i guess it would get you through a nuclear attack because the silos were built to withstand an incoming an incoming missile from the soviet side but oh man who wants to be their underground that they featured imported granite

countertops made in germany you get a five year freeze supply of freeze dried food with beards with your purchase of this commando and the part that just leaves me really scratching my head are actually did find is that there's guaranteed why fine i'm thinking right after armageddon the internet will still be up and running who really who really believes that that i guess the person who wants to spend a minimum have an underground condo i'm so there's a good business to go into i guess is buying old missile silos from the government really going cheap and turning them into expensive survivalist condoms you can keep that in mind as it is this book thing doesn't work out for like it might know other that they're so many local references in fall out you mentioned the big flood of nineteen fifty one the filming of the movie the day after here

in lawrence in nineteen eighty three street names and local landmark there's even a clever nod to lawrence high school in the name of a fictitious downtown bar oh you lie lie thank you i did mimic for la to us how it's fun to write a story set up in the town where you grew up where there was a lot of fun to put it in those those little vocal flourishes and then and i love really good espresso and lawrence has an amazing number of good coffee bars and my personal favorite is the bourgeois pig but i decided i was tall early in my career never to use the name of a real place if you were setting action there because you may think that you're writing favorably about them but they may not think that's so i created my own place called the decadent hit oil which has there and they sell t shirts that shows a big pink hippos sitting in a

cappuccino mind or cup and that's where the eye goes for her morning coffee and then she goes there at night to drink whiskey and this is something where she she travels down here with her golden retriever pepe her lover jake the bass player he is not happy with her because he he's just tired of being in love with someone who's always putting yourself at such high physical riskin he's gone off to switzerland with his music group and he wants the idea coming once rooted take a break in america tried to change your life do something to do something more fun more adventures and she's always aim she says no she's insulted and heard that he doesn't think her work is worthwhile but he's always making these snide remarks under bratton out why could be in basil switzerland right now eating hand it's chocolates but

my publisher didn't want handed chocolates but it's the only way i think to the only word that describes your obsession with perfect local authorities and organic song someone is sitting there just carefully hand at noon all anyway so the cs again here with her dog pepe and the hippo she says we do believe that she was an emotional support animal then they say oh sure it's november it's chilly it's spitting rain half the time what does bringing the dog along your furby i that she couldn't do on our own i'm not sure why in the beginning i had her bring the diet just seemed too long lead to need to be coming here on her own mr kim shares her downstairs neighbor who's in his nineties he's gone off to the virgin islands with with i think it's a nice maybe it's a cousin is that terrible and i can remember now what i myself thought it was a nice anyway yeah yeah his wife's nice and so the

eyes feeling what she doesn't need to stay there like after i'm jake has gone to switzerland she's just really long way and pepe will bring her some warmth and comfort but then as i was working on the book i'm not someone who who does our whining or plots in advance i know where i want to be but i don't know how to get there and so there's a lot of writing describing writing describing and there is this famous line from checkups that if you have a gun on them mandolin act one it has to be used in act three so heavily for about well pepys here that means that she has to play a role and so i never play a very dramatic role that i'm not going to describe because it really is a spoiler i think also the presents the dog grounds be it in giving her she's you know she's off solving a crime but she also has this being that she needs to attend to and it's kind of this reminder that over i can just go

off hunting for you know these missing people i need to walk the dog or i need to figure out what do the dogs that i spent in the car too long and it's kind of this constant grounding her in the real world of responsibilities they're about more personal nature and also gives or someone to talk to see that he had intense conversations as i do with my dog but that strikes you that way or he's wary that it's just a little bit too much dog and my goats with a fair price but i do have a couple of friends you don't like dog tyson is to believe that i personally have printed ona my dogs they were so happy when when one bullet wadi doesn't do they want the dogs around and down makes them to stay out of her apartment and they were cheering when wadi and friendly drew a line against dog present unc i wear safety have been companions for thirty five years now how it changed over the

years and is it hard to keep her friends one of the things that has changed with iran there've been a number of changes but when i started this series i had the idea that she should age in real time because here she is is really a product of the social justice movements of the sixties and seventies and also and she isn't shaped by her mother's experience of being a refugee or an immigrant and back before we had so many legal hair splitting ideas of what a refugee was your mother fled from the race laws in mussolini's italy and ended up in chicago and then also had a profound effect on who the i was but as time has passed on that you know honestly when i started the series or in my early thirties and i couldn't imagine i can imagine that i'd be the age i am now i am and i couldn't

imagine what my body would feel like and i don't do a quarter i don't have five percent of the things of my body the i does with hers but if she's much more robust than i am physically that's for sure but even so i decided for her to stay active at the level that i want her to be her aging has slowed way down so i was thirty four when i started in nineteen sixty nine now the i was thirteen when i started and she's fifty now so she's better than i am and so many ways including not needing to age as quickly as i do i think one of the things that i have i cannot seem to get a handle on is that she was a lot more insouciant when i started this series and i'm someone who is hyper responsible and i don't like being hyper responsible but i am and you're constantly worrying about this prison's welfare and needing to take care of that cause or

program and i think my worrying has bled over into the eye in a way that i don't know i don't like what it is especially because it's a first person narrative it's really hard for me to draw a line and make her more carefree thumbing your nose kind of person is she more like what you would like to be seen more like what i would like to be i feel that there are risks that i am hoping i will take before i get too decrepit to keep writing and that there are risks of my writing that i don't take and she really will jump off that high dive there are many aspects of her life and i dont admirer or wish to emulate that i am but that's no one that i think is that's my eight does or does it

her art and the thing that i was was true for me well my favorite scenes in fall out is one in which she's describing i'm just going about her day and how much of the day that she's spending changing clothes is in she's in jeans and a turtleneck and then she put on her you know her professional suit and then see you throw them a sweatshirt got over run an end once i noticed that i really started noticing vs slaughter time changing clothes and fortunately visit twenty first century clothes i read a memoir about a lot of it was a book that came out about a decade ago a memoir that this man wrote about his family in in austria before the second world war he they collected in its city limits like and say it right but the tiny japanese carvings and that was all that was left of their sort of enormous personal fortune in our collection after the nineties ruth ruin them but he describes his maternal grandmother used

data changing clothes and she had affairs and these clothes he needed a maid to button undone but everything's a really took hours and then she was going and so she would keep a duplicate outfit where she was having the affair just so that scene didn't have to spend so much time now i can remember why i do pronounce that would cut time from the dressing and never mind that at least with the eye and people like me a can take you under five minutes that throw it all off and throw it on again and which is what i did before i came down in the steelhead look at myself in the marriage that i know this is radio but i can't look quite so much like i just crawled out of a dumpster you mix match and if you're just joining us today and kbr presents its syrup or actually she is the author of the

popular diy show ask the detective series the latest in that series fallout brings the chicago based detective to kansas i'm j mcintyre you're listening to kbr prisons on kansas public radio when you're going about to or like the sun for your book fall out what their challenges for you on the road as you were pitching in your book to people who i mean who have followed your career for decades as well as people who maybe newcomers to the egg lean on the road beyond to word it i love doing events that i wished that you can do it so that you're doing one of them a week instead of seven events in six days that the travel is just extraordinarily challenging and i mean i'm now at the point where i can't find things in my luggage it like this morning i couldn't find my hairbrush in that so that an extra half hour of pat canan and hanging inside

caf i don't know why is the two are progress is it becomes harder to keep track of the vessels of paleontologists having being a bit of a traveler my selfies leave you know a couple weeks in you don't know where anything and say it made i think you just sort of disintegrate is you're further and further from your home base but i am you know a people's response to vi is something that means an enormous amount to me and i am i am this tune in particular i was in columbia missouri as today with the start of my program it i reveal that my brother johnson's first complete sense actually his second complete sense was beaten his youth at that i told him this and he said oh no way to try to grow your sales says thank you remember why i revealed that particular candidate all right i was

doing a program on non them visit campus but there is a what was originally a women's college admission is it called steven's of college and they they have this wonderful unbound literary festival this is a second year and it's just it's i don't know where the they get the money because i mean it's all volunteer because they had salman rushdie is their keynote speaker and then they brought about twenty of us in to do panels and programs but i met so many young people who actually were reading my books and responding to them then and it was there was and as this sounds vein a narcissistic but actually because i am older now and i'm i just wonder sometimes whether what i am just writing for people my age and i was just really heartening to know that even though the i is his older than probably than their moms at this point of that that there's still something in the books that

can speak to young prince and so it means that i feel like i have a real responsibility to always do my best job both as a writer and when i'm in public so that i don't disappoint the people who've been gracious enough to support me when you started the character of shiite did you mean for her to be this groundbreaking detective that was so unlike that other female characters we saw in literature i mean i very much started wanting to create a woman did not view the who turned a lot of the existing stereotypes on their head so especially in crime fiction wire fiction we women who were sexually active were by definition wicked tom tolbert wrote a book called coda in the opening sentences the trouble began in bed and you know from that opening sense that the woman is the villain you don't have to

rebuild and then if a woman was sexually chase she couldn't tires shoes without adult supervision so i wanted someone who was just an ordinary person in the sense that yet it is sex life that it didn't determine or moral character and she could solve problems as men and women both half to do unless you know unless they're in some extraordinary circumstance where they can call on the bottler to solve the problem for them and she could hold your own in in the street fire which meant she was not a karate expert admitted she had grown up in a rough and tumble neighborhood learned to use your elbows to get advantage so those were all things that either were in me or that i observed from the neighborhood that i was living in chicago and i very much wanted her to be that person and i guess i am i guess i didn't

realize quite how old novel she was until time passes and the readership grew and i started hearing from people about that one of the other things that it might wear my other takeaways from yesterday in colombia was with the students was also painful as sins in their a lot of the books that they're reading now that women were telling me they just fell hadn't changed that much the books by men where the only role for women was to be sexually available or to be you know to be there when some particular service either settle or meaning some other physical needs he came along and one young woman had been a judge for best thriller of the year at the lyric for the international thrillers association she said every book even by very highly reviewed and touted male writers reduced women still to this kind of

subservient role and i don't know how just how that really gets me down that all the work that we've been doing over the last forty five years trying to change make women more equal at the table aren't even in president obama's west wing and i am a huge fan of president obama but nonetheless the women would have to get together before a meeting and agree that they would all reinforce what each other said just so that someone would pay attention to their point of view i don't know i think that maybe thats what we have to do we have to get on board for each other but it's just really frustrating that we're still in that place that even though we're on the supreme court or for police officers or university professors that it still as one of my nieces he's a physician said it hasn't been said until man says that and

that is just disheartening has the fact that there are more women writers of detective novels has that changed at least those characters that they're writing i think for many of them it has for some it has and there's a real trend over the last five ten years for quite violent sadistic pornography and i'm thinking of writers like mo hayder and england no he has as she is a serial killer who's skinny women in turning their pledge and apartment writing messages on it i'm saying in you know maybe ten maybe you're trying to make a statement about female empowerment eating right this but to me it feels hills pretty violating in boundary crossing but i think what has changed first of all there are quite a few male writers creating wonderful empathic women characters that didn't exist to

always existed but not nearly to a degree it does now and we haven't really grown the audience for fur mysteries so when i help get sisters in crime going one of the first things that we did to try to get more attention paid to books by women was we had our own books in print that we would take to libraries and bookstores and they would start having caring are books which they didn't know about it they were getting reviewed in the same way that meant books where we did we did a study we found that a crime novel by a man was seven times more likely to get a review international publications crime novel by a woman so we started just financing that situation going directly to tim byers and two librarians and over the years we have heard from so many women saying that they never read mysteries until they started

discovering books by women or by then who you kind of were willing to create women who were people not just objects an in publishing which like so much of the rest of print life in american journalism and so on your book sales are down and so on and so forth but the crime novel continues to be very buoyant and when you like it the new york times bestseller list you'll find that crime fiction is occupied only half of the ten top spot any given week and a lot of that is really due to women readers come lean back to the form and healing that that their personalities are now being reflected their experience is now being reflected who are you reading now i mean that's what a swedish writer who is new to me named hell ain't tristan i'm sure i'm not pronouncing that

correctly she has an aide a police detective police inspector in the swedish town of hit a bird flu it is a lot like galileo owns inspectors in that her family life is a really significant part of the story she's married she has twin daughters and so trying to keep a workin family responsibility balance and it's not something that i ever tried to do with the iphone doesn't get a few weeks after dr that's not nearly as challenging as having twin daughters he may have maybe getting involved with bad boys or doing who knows what shape coming home was shaved heads of thing come home one day and one book just to cope with that so i find that a really interesting series i also reading more general fiction than i used to in the book

it's just really gripped me lately that it said the invisible bridge by julie our intern came out about a decade ago it won a ton of awards and monkey would have won the pulitzer for fiction that year i'd put it off and put it off because it's a bit of a croissant its icloud family story that she's fictionalized about her own family's experience in hungary during the second world war but the writing is just gorgeous and loving them most people know of your work as the author of your worst husky and perhaps they're familiar with some of the other stories you've written but a lot of our listeners might might not be familiar with the nonfiction work you do talk to me about that did eight years ago now i guess that i published a collection of essays called riding in an age of silence and it's a it's a sort of a memoir is it i

don't really have any hobbies which is i think a true feeling because it means that i'm you know looking after my household and my husband his health is a bit frail or the dog who refuses to for walks of anyone but me and she's a brat your eyes dart is so much more responds well the hill you know i hurt so i'm always working either of you know and then i'm politically active which i don't really enjoy just feel compelled to do you think i feel i come when i was ten might they can sell it was much too intense and that i needed to see what dire fade awaited girls who were too intense and so they gave me mark twain's prison all caught recollections of joan of arc to read thinking that scene her burned at the state could make me think oh i should just be lighten up a little right and

instead it kind of left me with his lifelong feeling that number one i needed a big mission and number two i needed to be immolated so i'm running away and i'm running facebook page now called sarah kristi and friends act for justice and i'm thinking maybe it's gonna move me a little bit closer to that pile of dry wood in the market square on that the memoir is a sort of interplay between some of the things that i've really struggled with finding a writer's voice finding the courage to have a public presence and my personal history in the way that my personal history intertwined with events like the civil rights movement like second wave feminism and dumb that people had asked for in your essays that i don't feel right now that i'm ready to write them i think i need to think more about them my experiences or

think about them in a different way than they really have time to do right now i did a phd in american history at the university of chicago now is forty years ago and suddenly last year for whatever reason they decided they wanted to publish my dissertation which was on alum was an intellectual history of change an intellectual kind of mindsets underlying intellectual theories of the universe really that took place in new england in the eighteenth thirties and forties says geology and fell on she upended longstanding ideas about the age of the earth and the and the dom way the bible came to be written and that that topic i think it is more relevant to day even then it was when i wrote it because

of the way in which i'm bible based christianity has come to play such a significant role in american public life i did not have the time to a data research serve ice fell a little oh embarrassed that they publish it as is because it it really should be fleshed out more in it's been forty years of new work done on this in lot of different ways of thinking about it and a lot of family history that i didn't know at the time that would have played into it i learned long after i had finished the dissertation that the wives of some of the men that i was studying had actually been hebrew scholars in a dome water the translating work that they were never credited with it when the susan family correspondence that i came on so there were a lot of ways in which i wish that i had had the time to upgrade the time that i knew that just wasn't realistic getting back to your latest book fallout

could i have you read an excerpt shown time does vary a little bit the ideas of the heirs discovered a dead body in an old farmhouse not unlike the house that i used to live in and at a location not dissimilar to where my family home still called the gilmore house with a family that lived there before we bought it and she is back in lawrence with the share of his name is does born and he is named for the sheriff of nottingham whose name was guys mourn and he's talking to are heard so this is not based on any real douglas county sheriff so please do not be offended that this sheriff is a little bit confrontational with my heroine everyone is commentator oliver says she's confrontational places guinness a week before we get safe feeling to safer voice dishes about a

bit tipsy as well as to take that marilyn stasio reviewed fall of the new york times a couple of weeks ago and she said and not the i bet that i was fierce with a chip on my shoulder and i thought well marilyn you probably right thing and that's probably why the eyes half years to the chip on her shoulder so she's found this dead woman in my family home she's found the daughter of like a family member who's living on the streets passed out under eyer and stairwell at the lions pride bar at eighteen rhode island and down local rio's local law enforcement officers are just starting to wonder if the local once police officer that she worries who is names ever art says it cause or effect were shots give away the bodies are piling up around you so a

dog persuaded enter the sheriff said when we were back in town and you turned on the lights even at the risk of tampering with the crime scene i had my temper on a lead as tight as the one i kept on pepe read about as big as your size their team's reasonable nibbling on the victim's knows it seemed disrespectful to keep the lights on not to let the vermin do any more damage than they already had sheriff kept asking questions but they were time markers just to show that he was in charge by was eyeing kansas why had i gone to them a cannon farm why had i gone into the house none of that was relevant that is more and wanted to know why was i who had found sonia kiel what i'd said to randy mark sets a graph feels the group home where sonia lived sheriff i interrupted a buick enclave has been showing up around me often on today what it knew had been to see mr marks so i thought

perhaps you were following me i'm not but maybe i should the way you're stirring the waters his parents said marks called me in a small town now warshaw ski not the big city we all know each other yeah look out for each other you may think you're moving around stealthily but everyone knows where you are and what you eat for breakfast what's good if you decide to lock me up you know just what to bring me i'd forgotten i wasn't going to beat him since you're on me like my underwear you know i was at the hospital did you know that neither of sonia kills pants has been to see their near dead daughter that's just what i'm english asking does win said heavily you know squat about these people sonia forfeited her right to parental regard a long time ago i nodded slowly as if he'd said something to keep having meaningful before she passed out sonia said she'd seen emerald fairing in the place we

met testing lies buried where is that is one's eyes darted around the interrogation room as if a good answer might be posted on one of the walls extended don't spit or smoking hear signs of those friends of yours are staying out of doors like humans farm you need to get them in here to answer questions about her murder sheriff i said gently number one i've never met them they're not my friends i'm hearing your county looking for them number two this means you've identified the body and the means of death already which is massively impressive i'm going to get the cook county medical examiner define your path follow just so he can find out how you did this in three hours i'll put it out on my twitter feed that is not for public consumption his phone rang spain is both further escalation he picked it up snapped his name into the mouthpiece put it against his chest and he told me not to leave his jurisdiction must not be the

sheriff must not be the sheriff and chanted to myself or i wouldn't dream of what sherriff i'm having way too much fun here that's their prince key reading from a fall out it's hurt the team leo were suskind of all they're thank you so much for coming in today oh thank you gave your interest i really appreciated them about a variety of applied for supporting your local radio station and go hi there's a separate ski i live in chicago now but i grew up in lawrence i am a donor to kansas public radio and i hope you will be too you heard it hear pledge your support for kansas public radio and programs like a pr presents at our website k pr that k u dot edu i'm kate mcintyre you're listening to play pierre presents on kansas public radio for the rest of this hour either say or perhaps the talks about her only other books set in kansas bleeding kansas was published

in two thousand eight borucki gave it talk about the book and her life as a writer at the lawrence arts center this excerpt was originally broadcast on k pr presents on august thirty first two thousand eight well i've been on the road around the country with leading kansas since january second and my tour winds down and finally returning to the scene of the crime there in the months that i've been and said amazing cities is houston phoenix and madison wisconsin i've had email messages from any number of lorenz eons past and present who say that they've seen themselves or da vern miller or sheriff rex johnson and the characters of the laying low then there are any shape an area even ironies perfect read every nasty i know that its futile for me to say that all of these characters are figments of my

imagination and the only real prison any of them is based on is me because they represent different aspects of my own personality as my brother jonathan explain to me yesterday we are all of us as readers bring our own lives and experiences to what we read so that in a very real way we're always present in someone else's novel i do understand that sort of anyway but really everyone inbreeding can says is made up of course some of the things in the novel are reality based including the old free mantle peretz the gilmore house i also benefited greatly from john in camp pendleton his willingness to open their farm to me whether i got very many details right about farming is certainly open to question but i came away from my time when then much impressed by not just a constant round of work but the amount of creative thinking that has to go into successful farming

thanks today karen i am a proud honorary member of the meadowlark chapter of four h ide baseball of largo years for each project somewhat i saw this very impressive bunch of kids doing for the fair i couldn't make a desk i couldn't identify the three thousand beatles of northeastern kansas i couldn't build a raft out of orleans among discarded plastic water bottles but those are just a few of the things that my fellow chapter meets have been doing michigan's in the grille year is that true farm families who make up the heart of my story occupy an extra half mile of land that i added between lawrence a new door now i didn't want my publishers to include a map of douglas county in the end over leave but they refused to add to the expense of printing a book by doing a detail car tires especially since it would've meant

freehand drawing in the extra half mile now they're done and the ground here is my sort of main family my hero family there the new crops but michigan's a dairy farmers and i did spend a very small amount of time on an organic dairy farm near to keep the arms when i was eleven i read dracula this book completely terrified me i did and so i think that was the start of mine lifelong hobby of insomnia many many many nights before i slept i kept up controlling the house looking outside for vampires and as you may know vampires can take the form of walls and then they'll jump the window break the glass and then they'll turn back into vampires or ones night around two in the morning as i was

patrolling the perimeter i looked out and there they were wolves in the back door and i scream really loudly and we'll both parents and four brothers who all came running and looked out and they were actually cow's at the famous vampire cows a dentist served in the navy scouts and not go over the fence and the reading my mother's cooking i have to confess that someone cannot tell the difference between a wolf and a cow is probably not ideal you quit to write about a dairy farm i gave it my best shot all of these points raise a question of what is the crossover between experience and fiction what's real what's imagined and how can you possibly distinguish between the two so that's what i'm going to sort of discuss tonight or try to discuss

every story has its roots in the life of the writer you do your best most sincere work when you mine your own experience and then detach yourself from that and turned it to a story what makes stephen king's horror novels so compelling and so convincing that's what's really going on inside his head and while i envy him his success i am very glad i don't have his nightmares i believe we all turn our experiences and the stories as we try to make sense of them whether we're writing them down the way i do where whether we're telling them to a friend or a partner or when they were just reciting an endlessly in our head in the dark we use stories to understand life howard reiter works what time we get to use a computer can't sell all those nuts and bolts in different free each person is no right

way mechanically physically to write this is the way that works for you but we only do we writers what everyone is doing turned life into stories and then turn stories into a way of understanding life when i was four my dad found a job here at the university of kansas my older brother and i didn't want to move from our friends with whom we acted out the recently ended second world war and the drainage ditch the truth behind our house and especially we didn't want to leave the good humor truck which brought his friend circles and summer nights i guess the search for chocolate has been one of the enduring constant some of my life experiences you know when you read about it in the biographies of the really great writers faulkner chandler they weren't terrible drunks there's a wonderful story about

faulkner and and hammett blame their way into a dinner party and it serves an unbowed and passing out the scene is across the threshold they could revive faulkner in line after problem other the table but haven't they had been bound and into a taxi in sendai to his apartment edgar allan poe was a substance abuser wolf and plath were teetering over the edge of mental stability you just never hear about a really great writer who was found head first in a bucket of hop fans the police they feel that i am actually completely cut your way out of that one that's their breath the author of the popular movie i was just the detective series k pr has a copy of her latest book fallout if you like a chance to win a copy leave a comment on k pr as facebook

page and j mcintyre kay pierre presents as a production of kansas public radio at the university of kansas