with John F. Dobbyn
We are delighted to welcome novelist John F. Dobbyn to Omnimystery News today.
John's fourth thriller to feature legal investigators Michael Knight and Lex Devlin is Deadly Diamonds (Oceanview Publishing; September 2013 hardcover and ebook formats).
Today John writes about the backstory to the novel in a post he titles "Truly Deadly Diamonds".
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Photo provided courtesy of
John F. Dobbyn
My starting point in writing each of the four novels in the Michael Knight/Lex Devlin series has been the same. I know that the leading characters will be my two fictional lawyers, Michael and Lex, since by now we know each other so well that I know what they're going to say before they even say it. The question then is — how will I mess up their lives this time?
In writing the recently released Deadly Diamonds, I hit on a subject that for me had instant appeal. Diamonds. With every passing anniversary, birthday, or Christmas that my wife and I share, I head to one of my favorite "toy stores", such as Milanj, Caldwell's, or Tiffany's. I started the research, therefore, knowing intimately one side of those precious gems — the romantic side.
On the other hand, as my research into the source of those glitzy stones intensified, I sank deeper than I could have imagined into a world of greed-spawned violence to the point of utter inhumanity. I found a country on the picturesque eastern coastline of Africa, Sierra Leone, that presented the ultimate contradiction.
Picture a country that could set the standard for the world in the opulent well-being of its people. Sierra Leone is so uniquely endowed with diamonds of world-class quality, as well as other gems, oil, and gold, that by every measure of living standard from health-care to education to technology, food, housing, anything you can name, no country on earth should be able to compete. The word, "poverty", should not even appear in their dictionary.
That's the potential. Here's the reality. Introduce a culture of humanity into the source-chain of those same diamonds, and that aura of romance that surrounds those gleaming gems in the jeweler's case devolves into a climate of pure self-destructive greed. The result is this. A commission of the United Nations ranked one hundred and seventy nations on the scale of poverty. Sierra Leone was ranked one hundred and seventieth — the most impoverished people on earth.
How is that possible? I found two distinct causes, and each is traceable to those simple, innocent gems lying on or just under the surface of Sierra Leone earth.
The first was a government, to stretch the meaning of the word, whose sole identifying characteristic appeared to be graft, corruption, and personal greed for the profit the country's diamonds could bring to its members personally. That alone had been enough to strangle any possibility that the natural wealth would flow to anyone but the inner circle.
The second cause actually began as the potential solution to the problem. In the early nineteen nineties, a band of young rebels formed the Revolutionary United Front (RUF). The motivation was the overthrow of the corrupt government for the betterment of the nation.
This RUF was composed of children in their early to mid-teens. Unfortunately, their early militaristic training fell into the hands of the thuggish army of one of Africa's most vicious despots — Charles Taylor of Liberia. The children were well schooled in the most inhuman arts of terrorism.
Once trained, the RUF crossed the easy Liberian border into eastern Sierra Leone and took the first steps toward conquest. Their first goal was the obvious one — seize control of the rich diamond pits in the jungle areas of that region.
Once they had a foothold, and had tapped into an almost unlimited source of profit in the diamonds, two things happened. The first was the adoption of techniques of terrorism that should strain human tolerance to the extreme in order to hold and extend their diamond empire. Jeeps with sawed-off tops carrying teen-age soldiers with AK-47 rifles would roar through peaceful villages spraying death in every direction. Those villagers who remained alive were visited with terroristic horrors that I would not describe here or in the novel.
Children from the villages down to the age of eight were recruited into the ranks of the RUF. They were filled with conscience –numbing drugs, blindfolded, and told to fire the rifles they were handed. When the blindfolds came off, these children found they had murdered friends or even family. They were now owned by the RUF.
Other villagers were set to slave labor in the knee-deep fetid water of the diamond pits to pan for diamonds much like panning for gold in the Klondike. These "rough diamonds" were then smuggled across the easy Liberian border to be traded with the waiting "diamond merchants" for more drugs and AK-47s. And the cycle continued uninterrupted.
The second thing that happened almost immediately was that the motivation of the RUF shifted from rebellion for the good of the country to simple lustful greed for the diamonds and what they could buy.
When those two forces combined — a totally corrupt government and the terroristic RUF - personal greed for those stones for which the world would pay a high price kept every benefit of natural wealth well out of the reach of the people. It explains the existence of regions of the country, for example, where even hospitals exist without either electricity or running water, and where the level of disease exceeds anything we in this country can comprehend.
After a two year disarmament period, in 2002, the RUF ceased its militaristic operations and focused unsuccessfully for a time on gaining political power. The open question is what became of that generation of children that were the perpetrators or the victims of conscienceless terrorism. Is illicit diamond trafficing still a fact of life? Different opinions have been expressed on both sides. One report, for example, indicates that the government has simply ceded certain diamond pits to the former RUF soldiers out of sheer fear of what the ex-terrorists might do otherwise. Unfortunately, we may find out what they would do when those diamond pits are exhausted of stones.
When the research for the novel that is now born and titled Deadly Diamonds opened up the depth of unimaginable human trajedy in the recent past of those innocent looking diamonds in my favorite jewelers' windows, I took on two goals in writing the book. The first and overriding goal was, as always, to write a novel that would grip and entertain a reader as a legal thriller should. The second, not to impinge on the first, but rather to give the reader a hidden dividend, was to bring to light in some palatable but still understandable way, the stunning past that might lay hidden in the brilliant glare of those showcase diamonds.
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John F. Dobbyn was born and raised in Boston. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Boston College Law School. Prior to entering law school, Dobbyn served in the Air Force as a radio and radar director of aircraft in the Air Defense Command. After practicing law for several years as a trial lawyer, he obtained a Master of Law degree from Harvard Law School and subsequently accepted a position as Professor of Law at Villanova Law School. He and his wife Lois live in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.
For more information about the author and his work, please visit his website at JohnDobbyn.com or find him on Facebook.
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Deadly Diamonds
John F. Dobbyn
A Devlin/Knight Thriller
What do Boston, Dublin, and Sierra Leone have in common? The movement of blood diamonds at enormous profit but grave human expense: mafia killings in Boston and Ireland and child enslavement and murder in Sierra Leone.
And who is ensnared in the middle of all of this? Michael Knight and Lex Devlin. Can they stop the enormously profitable trade of these tainted jewels?
They must come between the Italian mafia in North Boston and the Irish mafia in South Boston including some remnants of the IRA in Ireland. They must also pit themselves against the enslaved and deadly child-army in Sierra Leone, who smuggle these diamonds into the mainstream for cash to buy weapons and drugs. At great personal risk, Knight and Devlin struggle to find a solution that satisfies this disparate combination of characters and, hopefully, dampens the diamond flow.
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