Well, actually, with the Readers Digest Condensed Books. Wikipedia tells me it was Volume 57, published in the spring of 1964. The last book in that volume was by an author I’d never encountered before.
His name was Dick Francis.
I devoured that book. And every single one since. Francis wrote over 40 novels. I love all of them. In addition to being wonderful, they are comfort reads, old reliables—rather like a bowl of chili on a cold rainy night. I can always count on Dick Francis and his steadfast, practical and courageous heroes. Especially Sid Halley, who appears in five books, the closest thing to a series Francis ever wrote.
All his books have something to do with horse racing, for Francis was a steeplechase jockey for many years. And a sportswriter for a decade and a half before turning his hand to fiction. In the early books, his protagonist is a jockey, such as up-and-comer Rob Finn in Nerve, his second novel. In his fourth, Odds Against, Sid Halley puts in his first appearance, as a jockey who has retired due to injuries and is now working as a private investigator. In later books, protagonists have other professions—glassblower, banker, photographer—but there’s always that connection to horse racing. Among my other favorites are his sportswriter hero James Tyrone in Forfeit and pilot Matt Shore in Rat Race.
Dick Francis and I share a birthday—Halloween. I was thrilled to meet him several times, at book signings and once at the Edgar Awards ceremony. That was in 1996, the year he was awarded Grand Master and won the Best Novel award for Come to Grief—a Sid Halley book.
By that time, I was writing mysteries myself. With eight books published featuring my longtime protagonist, Oakland private eye Jeri Howard, I decided I really wanted to write a horse racing novel. When I started the book, I quickly learned how much I didn’t know about horse racing. Books, the internet and Dick Francis will only take a writer so far. Write what you know is a commonly used catchphrase, but I use another one. If I don’t know, I go find out. So, Jeri and I went to the races.
An email message to an acquaintance led me to a friend of hers who knew a woman who trained racehorses. Which is how I wound up at a Bay Area racetrack at six in the morning. I spent the whole day following the trainer around from stables to grandstands, talking with trainers, a vet, even a horse player who tried to educate me on statistics, which are still a mystery to me. I even got a tour of the jockeys’ changing room. Of course, that scene had to go into the book. When I’m presented with such great material I have to use it. That’s why Jeri is in the changing room, bantering with a jockey dressed in nothing but a towel. It was all great fun and I hope the resulting novel was fairly accurate. That’s A Killing at the Track, by the way, which has Jeri investigating the murder of a trainer at a fictional racetrack. More bodies turn up and Jeri actually wins a few bucks playing the ponies.
I’ll close with another comment about the Readers Digest Condensed Books. I don’t know how long Mom subscribed to these, but I do know these abridged volumes introduced me to a lot of good books and authors. Abridged or no, the whole point was to get people reading. And I certainly did.
Earlier volumes included books by authors who later became favorites: Victoria Holt, Anya Seton, James Michener, Mary Stewart—and the redoubtable Agatha Christie. As for Volume 57 from 1964, the tome that introduced me to Dick Francis, it contained two other books I enjoyed and remember to this day. The first was nonfiction, written by Gene Smith, titled When the Cheering Stopped: The Last Years of Woodrow Wilson. The second was by English novelist Paul Gallico. It was called The Hand of Mary Constable, and it had seances, a ghostbuster and twists galore. Great fun.
Often you can tell when a writer’s research begins and ends with a keyboard search: telltale signs include incomplete knowledge and/or cliché-based assumptions, creating eye-roll moments in our readership—something it’s safe to say none of us wants to do. So when Professor Google falls down on the job, it’s time to fold up that laptop and do a different kind of investigating, one that involves people instead of pixels.
First, an example of what to avoid. Some years ago I was reading a novel with a scene set in MCI-Cedar Junction, a maximum-security prison in Massachusetts. Our protagonist steps inside and notes that the foyer smells like vomit, a sensory detail illustrating the degradation of the incarcerated.
Slight problem, however. I used to teach at that prison, and on precisely zero of the many occasions I’ve been there did the foyer smell like vomit. The only time it smelled of anything other than air was one day when an inmate was mopping the floor, at which point it smelled like Pine-Sol. That, combined with a variety of hilarious gaps in said author’s knowledge of prison security protocols, absolutely trumpeted the fact that he never bothered to visit the facility or even call. I have not picked up one of his books since.
I should add that he absolutely nailed his description of the exterior of the prison. In other words, he googled it, saw what the place looked like, and ended his investigation there.
Circumventing such blunders consists of several steps. First, find an expert. Second, contact them and politely ask for a few minutes of their time. If you are on the shy side, Step Three is, in the immortal words of Douglas Adams, “Don’t Panic.” The words “I’m a writer” convey more gravitas than you might expect, and the phrase “I’m writing a book with a character like you, and I want to be sure I get it right” is usually greeted with enthusiasm. Most people are delighted to share their expertise, especially if they belong to a profession or culture that is frequently misrepresented in popular media. On behalf of my books, I have interviewed prison guards, FBI agents, a Marine who served in Afghanistan, a parole officer, a rabbi, and more; and in almost every case, the interview went over time because we were enjoying ourselves so much.
My most recent book, Stealing Time (co-authored with Norman Birnbach), is set largely in 1980. While we wrote it, we had the very great pleasure of plumbing the expertise of John Barelli, former head of security at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; and Jonathan Campbell, a Boston-based architect. In both cases, our question was this: how can our bad guys rob a museum—in 1980? We needed specific information about rooftops, scaffolding, and museum security in that era, and the internet was tired of our questions.
I discovered Mr. Barelli via his memoir, Stealing the Show: A History of Art and Crime in Six Thefts. It describes his tenure at the Met from 1978 to 2016, years that neatly overlapped the era of our book. I emailed him to ask for an interview. He replied in the affirmative, and he and Norman and I spent a delightful evening chatting about security arcana of the late twentieth century. Since my partner and I needed to insert one of our baddies into the museum, we asked how long it would have taken for someone to be hired as a security guard at that time. Were there extensive background checks? What about fingerprinting? Mr. Barelli laughed. “Back then, we had a saying,” he told us. “‘If it breathes, put a uniform on it.’”
Thus reassured, we wrote a scene in which our criminal is quickly hired to guard a hall full of precious gemstones. Our editor later urged us to change it, since he was confident the guards’ union would have prohibited such slipshod operations. But we had done our homework with an unimpeachable source, and were able to allay our editor’s concerns. The scene stayed put in all its scintillating historical accuracy.
The second expert, Jonathan Campbell, was easier to find because I went to high school with him. Once again, I needed very specific information for our baddies, whose plan involved climbing scaffolding in order to break into the museum; and once again, the internet failed to answer some basic questions, such as,
Is this possible?
How?
What will our degenerates find on the way up?
During a delightful February afternoon, Jonathan led me cantering about the rooftops of Boston in search of verisimilitude. I learned that,
Yes, it’s possible.
But dangerous. Anyone seeking to climb scaffolding needs to adhere to the “three points of contact rule,” meaning that at all times one must have at least two hands and one foot, or two feet and one hand, in contact with the structure; unless, of course, one wants a very brief flying lesson.
Roofs are messy. Based on my experience, our band of reprobates might reasonably be expected to find pigeon poop; ductwork for HVAC; plastic buckets full of rainwater and chains; and stray tools left behind by construction workers. All of this makes such areas difficult to navigate, which was bad for our baddies but good for us.
Factuality is not meant to set a reader’s pulse a-twitter; for that we have finely etched characters, snappy dialogue, and wicked plot twists. Instead, it is a load-bearing wall: we may not be aware of its function, but it holds our disbelief aloft. Unconventional kinds of research can be fantastically rewarding, and they give our work both solidity and sparkle that come from no place else.
STEALING TIME
Good news for everyone who loved Back to the Future, The Time Traveler’s Wife, and Time and Again: the newest page-turner is Stealing Time, a smart, funny caper that will steal your heart.
When there’s no time left, you have to steal it!
New York, 2020. Tori’s world is falling apart. Between the pandemic and her parents’ divorce, what else could go wrong?
Plenty! Like discovering that a jewelry heist forty years ago sent her grandfather to jail and destroyed her family.
New York, 1980. Bobby’s life is pretty great—until a strange girl shows up in his apartment claiming to be a visitor from the future. Specifically, his future, which apparently stinks. Oh, and did she mention she’s his daughter?
Soon Bobby and Tori have joined forces to save the mystical gemstone at the heart of all their troubles. But a gang of thugs wants it too, and they’re not about to let a couple of teenagers get in their way.
This time-travel jewelry heist will keep you guessing till the end!
Tilia Klebenov Jacobs is a bestselling novelist and short story writer. She is vice president of Mystery Writers of America-New England, and is proud to say that HarperCollins calls her one of “crime fiction’s top authors.” Tilia has taught middle school, high school, and college, as well as classes for inmates in Massachusetts state prisons. She lives near Boston with her husband, two children, and pleasantly neurotic standard poodle.
Norman Birnbach is an award-winning writer who has published over a hundred short stories and articles. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Wall St. Journal, Chicago Tribune, Miami Herald, San Francisco Chronicle, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, New York Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Militant Grammarian. He has also studied gemology at the Gemological Institute of America. Stealing Time is his debut novel. A native New Yorker, he lives outside Boston with his wife, three children, and dog, Taxi.
Ladies of Mystery 
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