One question I get asked frequently as a mystery author is whether I spend a great deal of time doing research before writing my novels.
The answer is yes.
I’ve done a heckuva lot of research for my books.
Just not the kind you might think.
I’m a longtime New York City journalist (New York Post, New York Daily News, Star magazine and NBC News), and I’ve spent much of my life working with reporters and covering big stories in newsrooms. I write about reporters and big stories and newsrooms in my fiction too, like my new book – Yesterday’s News. Many of the characters in this and my other novels are inspired by people I’ve met over the years in those newsrooms. So that’s pretty much how I’ve done my research: just going to work every day.
The truth is I hate doing research. It’s one of the reasons I love writing fiction now. As a journalist, I spent much of my time checking facts and making sure everything we did was accurate. As a mystery author, I get to make stuff up. Sure, I know there are novelists who talk about how they spend months doing extensive research for their books before ever starting to write them. I really don’t understand that.
Me, I just write about what I know. The newsroom stuff is the easiest, of course. I figure that no matter what other factual errors someone might find in my books, they can’t say I don’t know what I’m talking about describing life in a big city newsroom. Hey, I’ve lived it!
But I do the same thing when it comes to writing about people and places outside the newsroom.
Yesterday’s News is about a TV journalist looking for answers to the baffling disappearance of a little girl off the streets of Manhattan 15 years earlier. I set the scene of the crime, not coincidentally, in the same Gramercy Park neighborhood where I live. So all the key elements I tell in the story – the street where the girl lived, description of the area around, even the shops and restaurants nearby – are all 100 per cent accurate because I know them first-hand from real-life experience. That’s really the best kind of research, right?
Same with locations outside the city. I usually write about places that I’ve been to – and know a lot about them.
In Yesterday’s News, my TV journalist – whose name is Clare Carlson – travels to a rural area of New Hampshire to follow a news tip about the missing girl. I used an area where I’d spent considerable time in the past myself so that I could be sure to describe the scene accurately. Ohio and Pennsylvania show up a lot in my books too, because I’m from Ohio and familiar with Pennsylvania from driving through it numerous times to get from New York to Ohio. And whenever I go on vacation or to an interesting spot for a mystery convention – Martha’s Vineyard, New Orleans, Nashville, etc. – these places usually wind up in my mystery novels sooner or later too.
I try to never write about any location where I haven’t actually visited or spend considerable time. Sure, you can Google plenty of information about a place. But there’s always a danger you’re going to miss something or get something wrong that way. If you Google New York City, for instance, it might not tell you Houston Street is pronounced differently than the city in Texas; whether people say Sixth Avenue or Avenue of the Americas; or some of the other subtle nuances of the multitude of neighborhoods in the city.
The only exception when I broke that rule – and it was a big exception – came when I wrote The Kennedy Connection, my mystery about a reporter who goes back to Dallas to try to get answers about the JFK assassination a half century earlier in order to solve a present-day murder in NYC. I didn’t go to Dealey Plaza or visit the Texas Book Depository location or any of the rest of it before I wrote that book. But I’d read, seen and heard so much about what happened in Dallas that tragic day and afterward that I was pretty sure I knew all the facts about this story without having to see the place first-hand.
Fortunately, when I finally did visit Dealey Plaza after my novel came out, I was happy to find out that I’d nailed it all accurately.
But, like I said, that time was the exception to the rule.
Mostly, I still try to just write about what I know – people, places and things that I’ve already done my research on.
Sure, writing about what you know is an old adage, maybe a cliché, for some authors around today.
But it sure works for me.
R.G. Belsky is a journalist and crime fiction author. He has been a top editor at the New York Post, New York Daily News, Star magazine and NBC News. His most recent mystery is Yesterday’s News, published on May 1.
Good instructions, Dick. I enjoy your characters and your settings have always felt authentic (to those I knew personally). So the next question is: What is your next book going to cover?