How’s That Alley Smell — Let’s Go See, Shall We? Welcome Back Tracy Clark!

Tracy Clark’s Detective Harriet Foster is one of my favorite fictional law enforcement officers. The third book in the series, Echo, releases on December 3rd and I can’t wait! I’m delighted to welcome Tracy back to the blog and yikes, Tracy, that is some intense research!

Tracy: Picture it. Four figures in dark robes watching a fraternity house in the dead of night. There’s a raucous party going on inside. College kids. But someone inside won’t make it to sunrise. (Insert evil cackle here.)

That’s how my next book Echo starts, and funnily, that’s where it started in my head too. It’s weird how stories begin, isn’t it, especially for writers like me who approach a book like a harried commuter sprinting for the 8:05 morning train … and it’s 8:04 and 45 seconds.

I saw the robed figures first, their hoods up, obscuring their evil face. I saw the house next. Big. Gothic. Looming over the landscape. I added a big empty field next to it, and then an elite college campus abutting Lake Michigan in the near distance. Close, but not that close. The body came next. Rich frat boy. Then I tossed in all kinds of complications, followed by some world-weary cops, and I was off to the races. (More cackles here.)

I really do admire writers who have a detailed outlines and know exactly how their stories will unfold, where they’ll put the thrills and chills, how their characters will meet every challenge. They’re the smart ones. Truly, my hat goes off to them.

Then there’s me and my brethren, who make it up as we go along. Picture us sitting there in our Birks and sweats staring off into the distance, eyes wide, minds engaged – with nothin’ until something comes to us. Eventually we get where the outliners get, I mean, we’re no slouches, but we get there stressed and exhausted, our brains working a different way. We claw our way to THE END like we’ve just survived some end-of-the-world battle with an army of Orcs, or something just as gnarly. It’s not pretty how we non-outliners get to a satisfying denouement, believe me, but finished is finished. We’ll take the win.

Still, it’s interesting how stories build this way. You think you’ve got a through line, until you get to the starting point and discover that nope, that’s not going to work. You backtrack. You take another path. That one looks OK until, bam, there’s a dead-end straight ahead. This is when the writer who can’t write an outline closes the laptop in disgust and goes to get a snack from the kitchen. You envy the outliner at this point. You’ll envy the outliner a lot before you slay those icky Orcs.

Sometimes a drive works. I live in Chicago. Something’s always happening in Chicago. I get my best body dump ideas by walking or driving around the city. In my book Hide, I got the idea to hide bodies along the city’s impressive Riverwalk after walking it every day during my lunch hour when I still worked downtown. By walking it, I knew that there was a gap in the fencing separating the glitzy restaurants and bike rental kiosks from the dirty, ratty, gritty Lower Lower Wacker. No one goes to Lower Lower Wacker except workers driving through, cop cars patrolling the area, those up to dastardly deeds and crime writers looking for a place to hide a murder victim. It’s dark down there, isolated, grimy, and eerie at night. Perfect for Hide.

Chicago has a lot of creepy places like that. In Echo, which takes place in the middle of February, which is brutal in Chicago, I found a really spooky looking cemetery to play around in. I changed the name of it, of course (I don’t need any lawsuits), but the place is real. I walked have walked amongst the graves … during the day. Who walks a cemetery at night, except those who probably shouldn’t be walking a cemetery at night? And I didn’t go too far in, or stay too long, I’m no hero. Chicken, you say. Whatever, I say. I just needed to hear the place, see the place, feel the place and smell the place so I could write about the place.

Of course, you can write about a thing without actually getting out there, but your writing is much deeper, much clearer, much more tactile when you do get out there. Just saying.

I know how Lower Lower Wacker smells. It smells like oil and grit, sour milk and live things that scurry in the shadows. I also know not to park my car at night in the lot across from Harold Washington Library because once the sun goes down, a cadre of bold and entitled city rats, who do not fear man nor beast, will hit those alley Dumpsters like a horde of drunken losers setting upon the 2 a.m. buffet at the Harrah’s casino in Joliet.

Experience goes a long way.

That college campus in Echo? The one that sits right on Lake Michigan, up north, right off Lake Shore Drive? I named it Belverton College. The real place is sitting there right now full of students going about their business. They don’t know I put a (fictional) body there.

Where will I strike next? Who knows. I’m looking out my window at my neighbor’s house across the street as I write this. Their garage looks pretty interesting. I wonder why I never noticed that before? No windows. A busted light over the garage door. Something truly wicked could happen in a spot like that. See what I did there, Wickeds? Writing crime fiction is a lot of fun. I highly recommend it to any writer out there. So, lace up your shoes, grab your keys and hit the streets! You never know what you’ll run into, or what you might dig up, or think about burying under a layer of February frost.

Oops, there’s that witchy cackle again. And just in time for Halloween, too. Boy, am I good.

Readers: How far are you willing to go to research something you’re passionate about?

Bio:

Tracy Clark, multi-nominated Anthony, International Thriller Writers, Shamus, Edgar, Macavity, and Lefty Award finalist. She is the winner of the 2020 and 2022 G.P Putnam’s Sons Sue Grafton Memorial Award for the Cass Raines Chicago Mystery Series, the 2022 Sara Paretsky Award and the 2024 Lefty Award for Best Mystery Novel. She is also the author of the Det. Harriet Foster series, which debuted in January 2023 with the first entry, HIDE.

http://www.tracyclarkbooks.com

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