Is Accuracy Overrated?

Filling in for me today is Mark Bergin, a retired police lieutenant, talented writer, and dear friend. Mark generously helped me with research for my short story, "Zebras." I am not the only writer who has benefited from his wisdom and experience. Mark has helped countless others with their stories. He truly embodies what it means to be a good literary citizen, supporting and encouraging us all. He is a remarkable human being, and I'm delighted he's joining us today.

— Stacy Woodson

Is Accuracy Overrated? 

by Mark Bergin

    I am the luckiest man in America. I have been saying that since 2013 after I survived two heart attacks that actually killed me, made me retire from the police force after twenty-eight years—a twist of fate that pushed me to write my first book, published in 2019. Now, I have a four-book contract. And one of the luckiest things about this new writer gig is, I get to talk with people about being a cop all the time.

      I am a big mouth, always have been. When I was a police officer, and a reporter before that, I was communicating with the public about safety and crime and baby seats and all kinds of stuff. Now, I am on panels at conferences, meet new friends, and give out dozens of business cards to writers who want to talk about police procedure—to get it right.

       And I wonder if that is important.

       After all, we are fiction writers. We lie and make up stuff for a living. There is no such person as my detective hero John Kelly (though he sounds a little like me) nor his foil, public defender girlfriend Rachel Cohen (though I married my public defender girlfriend Ruth, who hates the Rachel character).

    I strove hard to make my first book, APPREHENSION, accurate enough that a cop would read it and not find fault, that officers could give it to their families and say, “This is what it’s like out there.” It is about stress and suicide as much as police investigation and trial preparation. Maybe, too much. Maybe, I lost some readers’ interest by so densely packing police factoids— radio codes and case numbers and evidence procedures. I was a first-time author. Four years as a newspaper reporter means nothing in prose.

        But I was proud of my book’s accuracy until about two years after I wrote it, when I drove across a bridge from my Virginia home into Washington, DC. I remembered my description of a fictional pursuit and discovered I had misplaced the Jefferson Memorial, describing it at the end of the I-395 bridge, and not the real spot, a different bridge at Fourteenth Street. The Jefferson Memorial—it’s not little. And nobody ever caught it. Maybe because I had so few readers. 

          Despite that error, I remain committed to working with authors for the sake of their own authenticity. I talk with Sisters in Crime chapters and my local writers group (Royal Writers Secret Society, if you must know). A typical conversation might begin, “Would a police chief be involved in the interview of a murder suspect?” And my answer will start with, “Do you want him to be?” Because in the real world, no. Police chiefs approve budgets and hirings and firings and talk to politicians and kiss babies. They don’t do day-to-day police work. But you, clever writer you are, have a chief who is a main character in your book (instead of a distant loud sound bellowing from a high floor in the police station). So, let’s get him or her into that interrogation room. Is this in a small department where everyone does everything? Is there a blizzard, and she is the only brass available? Is the victim his sister-in-law (which presents its own conflict-of-interest-unlikeliness). But remember, IT’S FICTION. We’re making it up. Do it well enough, no one will question it. 

        Well, okay, maybe some will. 

    I just read a novel with an airplane mistake. (Note from Ed: Don’t make mistakes with airplanes, guns, or cars.) In the novel, a C-130 takes off to the sound of jet engines. No, it doesn’t, the C-130 is a turboprop, not a jet. Do I care?  I love this author, and I forgave him this one, but other times, a mistake like this can take me out of the story and weaken my faith in the storyteller. 

    We read to visit and inhabit new worlds or see ours from new angles with new facts. Mistakes make us doubt information in the story. I gave up on a spy novel recently in which agents playing husband and wife on a train are stopped at a border. “Wife” is taken away, “husband,” placidly, goes on to his destination and later, his headquarters where he reports, “Oh, they took her. I don’t know who.” NO! You’re a spy playing her husband. You fume and fight and make a scene because if you don’t, you’re suspect. Even I know what a real spy would do. So, the rest of this writer’s work became suspect. (Could we make this real? What if the train is in a violently repressive county where the agents are trained not to make waves. There. Done.)

        Would a detective investigate her sister’s murder? Do police encrypt their radios, or switch to cell phones for sensitive communications? Would they drive their own cars on the job? Do cops marry defense attorneys? I’ll answer anything, and very often, the answer becomes the start of a long, exciting back and forth on story and plot and character. I have made so many good friends this way, keeping contact after Left Coast Crime or Bouchercon or Creatures, Crime and Creativity. That’s the best. That’s why I am so lucky. (BTW, the answers to these questions are: no, yes, never, big-time yes.)

Unless that’s not what you want.

      There are some big, common mistakes in fictional police work: 

• Nobody does paperwork (unless you’re in a novel by Michael McGarrity, an ex-cop who gets it right). 

• Everybody loads their gun at the last minute, racking the slide to put a bullet in the chamber as they get out of the car or go through the door. NO. That gun was loaded the moment the cop woke up, maybe even loaded for weeks and locked in a personal safe at night. 

• Cops shoot somebody and go right back out. NO. NO. There is always an investigation during which the cop is on administrative leave, to give her a cooling off period and cover the department’s a—administration against claims of improper supervision. 

• Cops, well everybody, can tuck guns in their belt at the small of the back. NO. NO. NO. Try it. Come to my house. I’ll hand you an unloaded gun. You tuck it under your waistline. In five minutes, the gun is in your buttcrack. In ten, it has already slid down your pants and out your ankle. An easy fix? “Detective Callahan tucked the gun into the holster at the small of his back. There. Done. 

• A cop’s death makes your heroes mad, and they go out and solve things, and  then all is well. NO. NO. NO. NO. It’s so much more than that. It makes them furious, and they go out and rough people up. The death of an officer is a major blow to a department that lasts days and weeks and maybe forever. He or she was a friend and a coworker and a neighbor and a godparent and a boss, and their death reminds you, and your own family, how dangerous and capricious police work can be. Don’t get me wrong. It’s fun, too. Driving fast with lights and sirens, pointing guns at bad guys, making arrests, saving people. But it’s serious business, even if we don’t talk to the public or our kids about it. We should. 

      Writers research, ask questions, observe. Police departments let you go on ride-alongs and have public information officers. And you can always write to me (mbergin01@aol.com). Don’t let research be your enemy. Remember you are a fiction writer.  

      In APPREHENSION, a major scene keyed on the burial of an indigent jail prisoner. I needed that scene to go the way I envisioned—a small crane, a wet and muddy hole, gravediggers who left, cops who stood by. I didn’t know how the city or the sheriff’s office, who runs the jail, handled that, so I never asked. I made it up along reasonable lines of what I knew of city and law enforcement bureaucracies. Did I get it wrong? In six years, I still don’t know.

       Just write. Write it how you want. If your fans nitpick, do it better next time. At least now you know they’re reading you.

***

Mark Bergin spent four years as a newspaper reporter, winning the Virginia Press Association Award for news reporting, before joining the Alexandria, Virginia, Police Department. Twice named Police Officer of the Year for narcotics and robbery investigations, he served in most of the posts described in APPREHENSION, his debut novel. APPREHENSION is being reprinted by Level Best Books as the first in a four-book series called The John Kelly Cases. Book two in the series, SAINT MICHAEL’S DAY will be published this year and was a finalist for the Killer Nashville Claymore Award. His short stories appear in three Anthony Award-nominated anthologies: PARANOIA BLUES, LAND OF 10,000 THRILLS, and SCATTERED, SMOTHERED, COVERED AND CHUNKED. He lives in Alexandria, Virginia and Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.