We are delighted to welcome reporter and novelist Marty Graham to Omnimystery News.
Marty is the author of a new mystery, Uncontestable (Marty Graham, May 2012 ebook), introducing San Diego private investigator Emm Zinko.
Today she tells us how remarkable turns in otherwise unremarkable news stories can become the foundation for fictional storylines.
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"You can't make this stuff up." Reporters really do say that to each other, usually in a hushed tone as we slink away from a story that took a remarkable turn. If we're smart, we write it down for future use.
Photo provided courtesy of
Marty Graham
Sometimes those remarkable left turns become the news story though, usually, they are more trivia than central to the story. But my collection of these vignettes grew, I realized the only way they'd get written is in a novel where the protagonist is a reporter.
For example, one night in Houston a few years back, I was part of a group of reporters at an impromptu press conference in front of an oil refinery that sure seemed to be burning out of control. People in the homes nearby had called the news media when parts of the structure started blasting off.
An impossibly calm spokesman for the oil refinery stood in front of the blazing chemical plant, and with cameras rolling, explained how this was a routine maintenance event. As he said it, a van-sized chunk blasted off the top of the refinery and landed 50 yards behind him. The TV crews and photographers ran to one side to try to get the spokesman positioned facing the cameras in front of the burning chunk and the spokesman skittered out of their line of sight, shouting "A routine maintenance event." Then he ran for the refinery entrance as more explosions followed.
I don't expect I'll ever get to write that story into a novel, but it remains in my vignette file, one of nearly a hundred sketches of singularly incredible things I've gotten to see as a reporter.
My first novel, Uncontestable, and my half-finished second novel draw long and hard on the file I've stuffed full of those peculiar sidelights. The four-wheeling Jeep driver who zipped around a firefighter trying to keep him out of a flood, drove right into the water and then needed to be rescued by that same fireman, for example, came out of the vignette file.
Those kinds of moments make reporters love the job as much — if not more than — the serious, often heart-breaking stories we cover every day. And they enrich and forever change the mindset of the people who witness them, whether they're real reporters or Emm Zinko, the fictional character at the center of Uncontestable.
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Marty Graham is a reporter with more than a decade of experience in online, print and video media. She earned a masters degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and has worked as a reporter in Chicago, New York, Washington D.C., the San Francisco Bay area and Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, and many other great places.
She won the Associated Press Public Service award at the Peninsula Times Tribune in Palo Alto, California and has been recognized for her work by the Society of Professional Journalists, the San Diego Press Club and other groups.
Before she went to journalism school, she was a private investigator licensed in Wisconsin and Illinois. She worked on cases ranging from insurance fraud to murder, had a motorcycle gang as a long-term client and worked on several investigations that brought down corrupt cops and public officials.
Born in Milwaukee, where she was a photographer and partner in a fanzine that covered the local music scene in the mid-1980s, she's since lived in a dozen different cities chasing her journalism career.
She currently lives in a pink house in San Diego, a base for mischief that includes silversmithing, sailing, hiking, playing in the ocean and working up the courage for that last big felony.
You can learn more about Marty and her books by visiting her website at MartyGraham-Writer.com.
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About Uncontestable:
On the mend from a couple of very difficult years marked by the recession, the death of her beloved father and the complete collapse of her profession, award-winning journalist Emm Zinko is trying out a new profession, as a private investigator.
Unfortunately, her first clients — victims of what may be a swindle — turn up dead and someone is trying to kill her. The man hunting her leaves a trail of carnage after he shoots at her and misses. Her home is invaded, and her dog is stolen as the prime suspect, a federally protected money launderer goes missing.
Complications swirl — a damaged homicide detective forms a strange attachment to her dog, her marijuana crop matures and she discovers her stepmother didn't set up the trust for Emm and her brothers the way she'd promised.
Set against the backdrop of San Diego, from gorgeous beaches to a mid-city neighborhood wrapped around a canyon, to inches from Mexico — the farms and Border Patrol hunting grounds of the Tijuana River Valley.
Her superpower lies in who she knows — the neighbors who look out for her, the hackers, cops, and experts she's befriended at work, and the networks she can tap. But will that be enough to save her when no one can figure out why Emm is a target?
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