We are delighted to welcome author Bob Kroll to Omnimystery News today.
Bob's debut mystery, The Drop Zone (ECW Press; May 2015 trade paperback and ebook formats), introduces Halifax detective T.J. Peterson and we recently had the chance to catch up with Bob to talk more about it.
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Omnimystery News: Introduce us to the lead characters of The Drop Zone. What is it about them that appeals to you as a writer?
Photo provided courtesy of
Bob Kroll
Bob Kroll: Peterson is a police detective, haunted by the past, panicky at the present. Drinking three meals a day. He'd been on the job working the streets for twenty-three years. The crime, the violence, the shame, and the brutality of the street became his normal. The job became who he was. The street was like oxygen, and he's breathing it to stay alive. He's living with his nerves on the outside of his skin. And the intense sensations are a psychological torment. His home life no longer fits the man he has become. So he stopped going home. Lost his wife long before she died in a car accident, and his daughter before she became a junkie. He now lives for the chance to reach back and make it right, knowing damn well life does not have a rewind button.
Anna is a former nun. She's hungry for spiritual confirmation that life has meaning. She's a social do-gooder filling the empty spaces with other peoples' sorrows. She thinks of herself as Humpty Dumpty, spiritually and personally cracked. She's attracted to Peterson, but only because they experienced a traumatic event together, a girl bleeding to death in their arms. Without realizing it, Anna borrows on her love of God as a way of patching herself together again.
Like the rest of us, these characters are flawed. They are clinging to a world that is spinning to throw them off. Both are emotionally and psychologically scared. How they deal with the violence and brutality is what drives me as a writer of crime fiction. Writing about them is like peeling an onion, exposing more and more of their inner strengths and weaknesses as they face adversity. How do they rise above the shame and sinfulness of our society? How do they succumb to it? This is what fascinates me about these characters. This is why I write.
OMN: How do you expect these characters to develop over the course of the series?
BK: We live through traumatic events, as well as the subtle misgivings of the day to day. How do they affect our outlook, our behaviour, our personalities? As our lives unfold, we undergo change, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Fictional characters are no different: especially those who come face to face with human suffering and the vicious individuals in the criminal world. So yes, I expect my characters to change, and I try to write and arc for these characters into every book.
OMN: Into which fiction genre would you place your book?
BK: I consider The Drop Zone a mystery wrapped in a dark, hard-boiled narrative. It borders on Noir fiction, without the utter and absolute hopelessness. There is a seamy redemptive quality at its core, one that propels Peterson, the protagonist, to seek justice and resolution in what seems an unjust and irresolute society.
OMN: How much of your own personal or professional experience have you included in the book?
BK: Real events are the catalyst for my plot lines. These get shaped and reshaped as I write, as my characters, as I have defined and drawn them, interact with the city's shadowy underworld. There are times when I play off of personal experience, as well as off the peculiarities of people I know or have met. I don't think a writer or artist can help infusing their work with something of themselves. That's where the sentiment and deep feeling comes from.
OMN: Tell us a little more about your writing process.
BK: I'll write a general plot line then refine it with details that may get written as bullet points or short paragraphs. I'll also write a brief synopsis of the book, and word sketch principle characters. That being said, the process of writing often alters and sometimes tosses aside that preliminary work. But at least I started with a plan, which had a beginning, middle, and ending.
OMN: And where do you most often find yourself writing?
BK: I write only in the morning. I have been doing so for nearly forty years. I have a small office on the second floor of a modest house in the north end of Halifax, Nova Scotia. It looks out on a 12-acre park. My office is cluttered, and my wife wonders how I can find anything. What she doesn't understand is that while I'm moving this stack of papers or books to find what I'm looking for, I discover something unexpected. It's a lot like writing.
The other oddity in my office, according to friends, is that I built my desk so my computer and keyboard are much higher than usual. This allows me to stand while I work. It's good for the back, and frees me to pace.
OMN: How true are you to the setting of the story?
BK: I take liberties with my Halifax location. Sometimes I call up settings that have gone under the wrecking ball. As well, I use settings from other port cities in which I have lived (Saint John, New Brunswick; Montreal, P.Q.; New Haven, CT.). I like to relive my experiences at or within these places in order to capture a mood that surrounds my characters and the situations they find themselves in. Abandoned warehouses, seedy waterfront neighbourhoods, dingy pubs, after-hours clubs, trailer parks, crumbling tenements all play into my stories to help define an edgy city with a dark and risky aura that drapes over my principle character, Peterson.
OMN: What are some of your outside interests? And have any of these found their way into your writing?
BK: I build furniture as a hobby. I love working in oak, maple, and yellow birch. I build the old fashioned way with mortise and tenon joinery, and I use hand tools as much as possible. I don't use the hobby as a break from writing. It's just something I enjoy doing. I like the smell of lumber and the crisp edges and the solid feel of a piece of furniture made from hardwood. I love walking through a lumberyard and search through piles of boards looking for the right one: the one with the right accent to the grain, or the right figuring in the wood. What's right about it? That depends on the piece you are building; how the grain enhances the flow of the piece or provides a bookend appearance to panels in a door; how the flame figuring in a yellow birch board will accentuate the overall appearance of a finished piece.
I also walk a lot, at least an hour every day, usually more. And I hike. I recently was hiking in the Grand Canyon. Walking helps me think.
Neither of these activities finds its way into my writing.
OMN: What is the best advice — and harshest criticism — you've received as an author?
BK: A dear friend and writer, now dead, B.J. Grant once told me if I want to be a writer I have to anchor my ass to a chair and write. Though I stand to write, that was pretty good advice. The easy thing to do is hem and haw about the process, about what to write about, about the location you have to write in, about the nice weather outside, about the loneliness of writing, about anything that keeps you from doing it. A blank screen or clean sheet of paper is terrifying to a writer, at least to me. B.J. also said, when you face that blank screen or clean paper and can't think of what to write, write your name over and over. Sooner or later you'll start writing something else.
B.J. also gave me my harshest criticism. Nearly forty years ago I sent him a short story. He sent it back with the first page covered in blue ink. At the bottom was the comment: "If the rest is as bad as this beginning, I'm glad I didn't read it." Hard to believe we remained friends until his death. But we did.
He also gave me another piece of advice. "You don't have to be as smart as everyone else and you don't have to be as talented, but you can out work them."
Another incident that influenced me as a writer was the time, many years ago, when I wrote a drama for voices for the Canadian Broadcasting Company. The drama went into production. During the read through, minutes before opening mics and recording, the producer looked up from her stop watch, turned to me, and said: "Cut ten minutes." In that instant, I realized my words weren't as precious as I thought they were. The story was the most important thing, and the producer was telling me to sacrifice some of my words for the sake of the story.
OMN: How did you come up with the title for The Drop Zone? And were you involved in the cover design?
BK: My working title for The Drop Zone was The Broken Promise. This is a country bar in which a pivotal event in the novel takes place. Then someone in ECW's marketing department pointed out the similarity of this title to that of several other novels. We dropped it, and I went on the hunt for another title. I wrote down a dozen or so new titles, and then it hit me. The Drop Zone, a refuge for runaway teens, was more pivotal to the story than the Broken Promise. Sometimes it takes a while before the light goes on. I'm thankful to the marketing department for flicking the switch by encouraging me to make the change.
As for cover design, I had some involvement. ECW was gave me a lot of say in the process. I held back. I'm not a graphic designer. I learned long ago to let professionals do what they do best. I had to give my final okay, but that was easy. The design team came up with a great cover design.
OMN: What kinds of books did you read when you were young? And do you think any of these influenced your choice of writing genre?
BK: I grew up in a blue-collar family. My parents didn't read much, but my older sister did. She used to take me to the library, from which I borrowed the usual kids books. When I got older my dad brought home books from work for me to read. He was a fireman and engineer on the railroad. When the train reached its final destination, he would walk through the empty passenger cars and gather books left behind. Most of these were potboilers and crime novels. Mickey Spillane was top of the list. Whether these books influenced what I write today, I cannot say. I think my neighbourhood, with its high degree of low-level crime had as much influence on me as the books I read.
OMN: What do you read today for pleasure?
BK: I'll read anything, so long as it is well written. But I particularly enjoy reading poetry, history, and theology, a bit odd for a crime novelist. There is magic to poetry that captures my mind and stimulates my imagination. Seamus Heaney, Robert Frost, and Rainer Maria Rilke are my favourites. As for history, I studied it in university and have written a few local history books. Theology is personal. The complexities of religion fascinate me. What people believe and why they believe it goes to the heart of being human. I don't think I could create the characters I do without coming to terms with the depth of the human spirit.
As for fiction, I admire Hemingway, Borges, and Singer for short stories. Hemingway's "The Killers" is still one of the best crime stories, to my mind. In the area of crime novels, I'm reading what most others are. George V. Higgins' The Friends of Eddie Coyle is a stand out.
OMN: What's next for you?
BK: I'm working on a sequel to The Drop Zone and researching a third. What's next personally? I'm toying with hiking The Chilkoot Pass in the Yukon, the trail the miners took during the Gold Rush.
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Bob Kroll has been writing professionally for more than thirty-five years. His work includes books, stage plays, radio dramas, T.V. documentaries, historical docu-dramas for Canadian and American museums. He lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
For more information about the author, please visit his website at BobKroll.ca and his author page on Goodreads.
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The Drop Zone by Bob Kroll
A T.J. Peterson Mystery
Publisher: ECW Press
Detective T.J. Peterson has a problem, and it's not just how much he's drinking or the daily, silent, tormenting video calls from his estranged daughter. A Catholic priest has been bludgeoned to death in church, apparently by a symbol of his faith, and an unidentified woman's body had been found. He's barely holding it together.
When a deranged teenager, a possible witness, crosses his path, he is propelled into a sleazy, violent world of underage prostitution, sexual abuse, and human trafficking as he pursues a merciless killer.
— The Drop Zone by Bob Kroll
