Please Welcome Back Crime Writer Martin Preib

with Martin Preib

We are delighted to welcome back crime writer Martin Preib to Omnimystery News.

Last month we featured an excerpt from Martin's second collection of connected essays, Crooked City, and we asked him to give us his personal backstory to how he came to write these books. He titles his guest post for us today "Unaccountable Sources".

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Photo provided courtesy of
Martin Preib

My favorite writer is the poet Walt Whitman. I read a passage from one of his essays when I was younger that electrified me:

"Also it must be carefully remembered that first-class literature does not shine by any luminosity of its own … They grow out of circumstances, and are evolutionary. The actual living light is always curiously from elsewhere — follows unaccountable sources and is lunar and relative at the best."

This passage captured the truth that one never knows where the writing will come from. I loved Whitman's phrase "unaccountable sources."

I thought I decided to become a police officer because I was tired of the life of a starving artist. I had worked hotel jobs, mostly as a doorman, for years, writing in the mornings and door manning at night.

Other members of my police academy class said the job would be a great source of material. But I waved this off. I already had other ideas simmering in mind before I got on the job and I thought I would stay with them. This was a foolish response on my part.

When I got out of the academy I was assigned to the wagon on the north side. One of our tasks was hauling dead bodies to the morgue, called removals, including victims of murders. In the first few days working the wagon, I was assigned to the removal of a maintenance man in an apartment building who had been bludgeoned to death during a robbery.

We had to wait a few hours until the detectives were done before taking the body away. It was a heart-wrenching scene. We had to tell the man's wife. She collapsed. While we waited, I watched the detectives investigate the scene. I read the reports and gathered as many facts about the case as I could get. Later, when we were done, I went up and down the street looking for any buildings that might have cameras.

That week was the beginning of several months of hauling bodies. I hated the job. Everyone does. But I found myself digging deep into the stories of these people. I read the case reports, listened to the detectives. It seemed that every time we came upon a body to haul, it was turned into the ground or in the lowest part of a building.

Then one day we were called to haul the body of a Russian man who died in the basement of his building. He had created a little recreation room down there where he could watch TV and drink alone, away from his family. One day he drank too much, fell and hit is head. His head was just under the couch, his body on the floor.

It was sunny, brutally cold winter day when we hauled him out to the wagon. He was large and heavy. We had to rest a lot. I kept thinking about him being in the basement, under the couch a bit, how all the bodies we had discovered seem as if they were burrowing into the ground when we saw them.

I got in the wagon and grabbed a piece of paper and wrote this:

"The dead seek the lowest places in Chicago."

Right then I felt I had found something new and worthwhile. That sentence became the central line of my first book.

I didn't know it then, but death played an important part in whatever I wrote about. The first book was just a collection of essays, loosely connected. It was organized more around theme than plot or characters.

At the same time I was writing this, a collection of detectives from the early 80's were being accused of torturing suspects in murder cases. A commander on the south side, Jon Burge, was accused of being a ringleaders in the most brutal assaults on suspects. I had my doubts about these accusations after reviewing many of the cases.

One case from this era caught my attention more than any other. It was a young man in the projects who strangled a family of four, including a three-year-old boy, whom he raped first. He confessed, was tried convicted and sentenced to four life sentences. The appeals court tossed his conviction saying his rights had been violated. I began researching the case and could not see what the detectives had done wrong.

The man was eventually released from prison, and, of course, killed again. I began digging into his history and the murders he committed.

This story wouldn't leave me alone, so I took it up, this time confronted with writing more narrative, more characters and calling for an immense amount of research.

I wonder if there wasn't another motive operating in my decision to become a cop apart from getting a decent job with a pension. I wonder if it wasn't the fact that it led me to murder scenes.

As Whitman said, unaccountable sources.

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Martin Preib is an officer in the Chicago Police Department.

For more information about the author, please visit his website at or find him on Facebook and Twitter.

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Crooked City
Martin Preib
A Collection of Connected Essays

Chicago cop Martin Preib takes on seemingly unrelated murder cases, all dating from one year, 1982, including some in which offenders were released as part of the wrongful conviction movement.

This book shatters reader assumptions — about the workings of justice, the objectivity of the media, and the role of the police in the city of Chicago, even calling into question allegations of police torture in the notorious cases against Jon Burge. Told in the gripping tension of a crime novel, Preib strives for the highest language as he wanders these brutal, controversial killings.