Laura Cardinal Series Archives

Ten Things You Don’t Know About The Laura Cardinal Novels

1. I lived in Bisbee. Why is that important? Because one day a lawyer friend who lived in the apartment next to us introduced us to another lawyer friend—her name was Laura Cardinal. The moment I met her, the first words out of my mouth were, “If I ever write a female detective, I’m calling her Laura Cardinal.” I had no idea at the time that the fictional Laura Cardinal would come to life in three novels, The Laura Cardinal Novels, and two novellas, Cry Wolf and Flight 12.

Laura Cardinal is now the presiding judge of Cochise County.

2. I had the help from some wonderful TPD and DPS guys. A dear friend, John Cheek, suggested I write about a very difficult subject: child depredation. It was important to let parents know how bad it was—how kids could be lured on the internet. And let me tell you, the idea of writing such a story scared the hell out of me. As the Wicked Witch of the West would say, it had to be done “delicately.”

3. I think I managed to reach that bar. The story is harrowing, but over the years, I’ve learned how to write with mercy. By that I mean, the dead at the beginning of a book are fair game. You just have to be very careful moving forward. Especially when it comes to children and animals. There are plenty of bad guys to kill.

Darkness On The Edge Of Town by Thriller Author J. Carson Black

Darkness on the Edge of Town is the first book in The Laura Cardinal Series.

4. Darkness on the Edge of Town was the book that made me the writer I am today. It was a personal best.

5. I spent a lot of time preparing for this Laura Cardinal book, the first in The Laura Cardinal Novels. I even dredged up some scary stuff from my childhood in Tucson. I learned a lot from the good people at the Department of Public Safety. I learned that a detective with the Department of Public Safety could assist on homicide investigations anywhere in the state—which would always cause problems. Laura Cardinal would be an outsider and treated as such. Without him, I don’t know if there would be The Laura Cardinal Novels. cover of The Laura Cardinal Novels

6. I tried to be fair and make the story real, but I did not GO THERE. I went close, but I DID NOT GO THERE. I came close to the edge, but there has to be some trust between the writer and the reader, and I did not break that trust. I got them as close as I could to the danger, but I did not cross that line.

7. But the story is harrowing. It even scares ME.

8. I drew on a few terrifying stories from my own past in my town. Tucson was predated upon by an evil home-grown killer, Charles Schmid. He killed three young girls.

A creepy car, 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air

9. Another time, I was chased by a guy in an old orange 1950s car. I was fourteen. I wrote it down, of course. That’s the way I roll. I found it when I was coming up with this book, that obviously has deep meaning to me. The guy was scary as hell and chased me for blocks, right out of a horror movie, coming up one street and down the other in his crappy old car. I was so scared, because even running up to one of the houses and knocking would have taken too much time. I was lucky that I knew the neighborhood, and one of my best friends happened to be outside watering when I reached their house. The bad guy drove away.

10. So yes, I have the imagination, but I keep a lid on it. I try to be truthful but not delve too deep. However, everyone has their own depth, everyone has their own fears, everyone has that line that they will not cross.

You can read all three novels of the Laura Cardinal series in The Laura Cardinal Novels, a 3-in-1 edition, now on sale for $0.99 through June 6, 2016 at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Apple.

Categories: Books Laura Cardinal The Laura Cardinal Novels

Ripped from the Headlines for The Devil’s Hour

In The Devil’s Hour, Laura Cardinal finds herself enmeshed in a cold case—a very cold case. A young girl went missing many years before, then surfaced as a young adult. She returned to her family, but she was a very different person from the child who disappeared.

Department of Public Safety detective, Laura Cardinal, meanwhile, was looking into a string of cold cases regarding missing and dead girls. Back at the time of Micaela Brashear’s disappearance, two other girls had gone missing and were found dead. Did the same killer take all of the girls? And if so, how did Micaela survive?
The Devil's Hour
Detective Laura Cardinal wondered how Micaela had survived such horrific circumstances.

Now, a similar story has turned up in real life. Richard Wayne Landers Jr. was only five years old when he disappeared. He turned up nineteen years later, living in Minnesota under another name. Cases like this inspired me to write The Devil’s Hour.

Did his grandparents spirit him away from his family? They were prosecuted on a felony charge of kidnapping, but the charge was dropped due to lack of evidence. Nineteen years later, Richard Wayne Landers was found in Long Prairie, Minnesota. How was he found? Through his Social Security number and matching birthdate.

The question that intrigues me most: how was the path taken different from the path that young man walked as a child? How did that bear on the personality of the man he had become?

Regarding the return of Michaela Brashear—and the other girls who were killed around the time she disappeared–you’ll just have to read The Devil’s Hour to find out how it ends. A story ripped from the headlines.

Categories: Laura Cardinal The Devil's Hour

La Posta Quemada Home of DPS Det. Laura Cardinal

Years ago when I was in between books (in fact, I think I’d given up on fiction for a time and spent my days writing magazine articles for actual money), I was sent by Tucson Guide Quarterly to Colossal Cave and La Posta Quemada in the desert east of Tucson.

La Posta Quemada used to be a stage stop and postal station back in late 1800s. Sadly, it acquired the name after the daughter of the station master died in a fire. La Posta Quemada in Spanish means “Burnt Post.”

The area’s past ostensibly includes a gold robbery. Legend has it the robbers cached their stash of gold in a cave. The cave itself was discovered (sans gold?) by Solomon Lick in 1879.

I can vouch for the fact that the cave is really cool beans—and the Civilian Conservation Corps in the thirties fixed it up and helped make it a wonderful tourist attraction. Now Colossal Cave Mountain Park is under the aegis of Pima County. It is also a home to bats, a very good thing for the area.

Laura’s Cardinal’s home at La Posta Quemada

I fell in love with the ranch, and realized that Laura Cardinal would just have to live there. This required research—-of sorts. I spent time just soaking up the ambience that spring, down in the shallow mesquite-canopied valley, which was green with six-weeks grass, swapping stories on the porch with the women who ran the shop. I knew I’d found Laura Cardinal’s house, the first and most important piece of the puzzle. And so I put her in the house and gave her a home. I even blew up some stuff there (fictionally).

So my time off from book writing led me to Colossal Cave, which in turn led me to the ranch, just at the time I was ready to write another book.

So, thank you, Colossal Cave and La Posta Quemada. You will always have a special place in my heart.

Categories: Laura Cardinal Writing

A Tragedy in My Town

When I wrote Darkness on the Edge of Town, I incorporated some of my own childhood and young adulthood years in the story. I tapped into the memory of the somnolent farms along the Rillito River. (Now gone, replaced by a complex of medical buildings, banks, and shops.)

Speedway Boulevard, Tucson Arizona. The Ugliest Street in America.

Speedway Boulevard in Tucson–“The Ugliest Street in America”–as featured in Life magazine, 1970.

I tapped into another time and brought it into the present.

I also resurrected a homegrown loser named Charles Schmid—the boogeyman of Tucson.

Schmid might as well have been born with the word LOSER stamped on his forehead. He thought he was hell with the ladies, but he was insecure, too. He slipped smashed-flat beer cans into his caballero boots to make him seem taller.

Schmid decided he wanted to kill girls to see what it was like. And stupid is as stupid does: he targeted girls he knew.

He killed three teenaged girls.

A few years later, I met the surviving family of two of the victims and their youngest girl. This was at Cottonwood Farm where we both had riding lessons. And there they were, this family that had lost two daughters, carrying on, moving forward, loving and appreciating the daughter they had.

Charles Schmid

My mother wrote. She kept clippings on Schmid’s tragic crime spree and prepared to write about it, but ultimately, she couldn’t. I remember the chill it gave all parents, who kept their kids indoors or watched us with an eagle eye in the aftermath of the murders.

As I was preparing to write Darkness on the Edge of Town, I took a look at my mom’s clippings—and another puzzle piece clicked in to the story I was writing.

Old stories, unearthed and dusted off. And changed.

I was, and still am, haunted by the yellowed clippings about Charles Schmid, the preening loser who managed to destroy the lives of good people. I have always felt that homicide cops—the good ones—try to make some sense of the death if they can for the families. People are meaning-making machines and they need something to hang their hat on, no matter how tenuous. Some comfort, no matter how inadequate, for the stunned and bleeding families.

Like DPS detective Laura Cardinal in Darkness on the Edge of Town, they can’t fix the insult to injury, the deep injury. All they can do is catch the guy—

And make him pay.

Categories: Darkness on the Edge of Town Laura Cardinal Writing

Creepy Story: Budding Writer, Nightmare Car

One day when I was fourteen, two of my friends and I walked to a riding stable. On the way back, we got into a fight. I huffed off and shall we say, “went in another direction.” Literally. A friend of mine lived in a housing division near the desert along lonely Pima Street. Walking by myself, I didn’t notice the creepy old car until I heard it pull up on the side of the road behind me.

Here’s what I wrote:

“I was walking down Pima after turning off Wilmot. An orange (dull reddish orange) and white 1955 Ford pulled off the road directly behind me. Being in a venomous state of mind and rather nervous, I started running, because I didn’t care for the look of the occupant of the vehicle. I took to the desert, which I thought would give me more of a chance than the roadside, dodging brush, scrambling through gullies. I was very sure-footed when I needed to be.”

Note the English syntax. My mother came from England, and I must have adopted that somewhere along the line. I went on, “My heart collapsed.” “I’d thought I’d seen the last of the car…” “I starting running again, a wild animal in the desert.”

What happened: the car followed me as I ran into the subdivision. Every street I hit, the guy would turn the corner and I could see the front of the ugly old car creeping toward me. No one was outside. I didn’t have time to run up to the houses to ring doorbells. The car kept dogging me. The creepy guy looking… really creepy. I headed for a friend’s house in the neighborhood, and luckily, my friend and her mom were out front watering.

The car sped off.

A creepy car, 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air

Fast-forward to the more recent past. When I started writing Darkness on the Edge of Town (having lost the English accent by then), the car came back, now a 1955 orange-over-white Chevy Bel Air. This was because I hadn’t yet found the creepy little story I’d written all those years ago, and that’s what I thought it was. And this time, the victim in the story wasn’t so lucky.

Here’s a short little bit of a small newspaper article I put in the story:

CAR USED IN ABDUCTION OF LOCAL GIRL FOUND

“A hiker named Jerry Lee noticed an old car that had rolled down an embankment into the brush and cactus. He bushwhacked down to the car, a 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air, and was shocked by what he found. The backseat of the old car was covered with blood.”

What’s good about personal experience if you can’t use it?

(Photo: Flickr – DVS1mn – “55 Chevrolet Bel Air (19)” by Greg Gjerdingen from Willmar, USA – 55 Chevrolet Bel Air. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons)

Categories: Darkness on the Edge of Town Writing

Darkness on the Edge of Town

In 2002, I’d sold a bunch of books, ranging from a ghost story (Darkscope, my first book) to suspense books to historical romance.

But I was starting to read the authors who did so much more with their books, and these books were in crime fiction and police procedural.

Their excellent work encouraged me to raise my game. I knew that I wanted to write books like that, and decided to write a police procedural. I called a friend of mine, former Tucson Police Department officer John Cheek—one of the smartest people I know. John introduced me to a friend of his who was on a TPD task force focused on Internet predators.

Darkness on the Edge of Town is the first book in The Laura Cardinal Series.

They sat me down and told me how important they thought it was that I could spread the word about the danger to kids on the Internet. I felt a bit queasy—it was not a subject I wanted to think about. Now this was 2002, and the Internet was very different thing from the way it is now. Now, it’s probably ten to fifteen times as dangerous for kids.

I thought about it. A story started to form. Maybe this would raise my game. They would give me all the help I’d need. It was important to them. And then it became important to me.

I started the book in one of my favorite places: Bisbee, Arizona. I looked and looked for a title and then one day I heard a passing reference to Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town. It was the perfect title for this book.

And so I worked my way through it. I needed a detective, which was how I found my character Laura Cardinal. My friends suggested I put her not with the TPD, but make her a detective with the Arizona Department of Public Safety—the state police. One reason for this: she would have to deal with more adversity. The DPS can send their detectives anywhere in the state to “assist” local authorities who don’t have the resources themselves. And so Laura Cardinal hotfooted it down to Bisbee, Arizona.

A dead girl had been found propped up in the city park bandshell, dressed like a little girl instead of the teenager she was. And Laura had to find the killer before he killed again.

Darkness on the Edge of Town bandshell in Bisbee

City Park bandshell in Bisbee, Arizona

It was a hard book to write. I knew I had to walk a line. I had to stick to the truth and to the danger of these terrible things, but at the same time, I did not want to write such a horrible story people would be turned off—and rightfully so.

I think I was able to thread that needle. In 2004, Darkness on the Edge of Town was nominated for the Daphne Du Maurier Award.

That book changed a lot for me. I became a much better writer as I wrote it. Books are like children. You write them at a certain time in your life, and whatever is going on goes into the Salad Shooter that is a writer’s brain. You love all your children, but you relate to some more than others. I definitely played favorites. Darkness on the Edge of Town was my first big favorite. I believe it is because it moved me up as a writer. And because, despite the difficulties, it was a joy to write.

Categories: Darkness on the Edge of Town

Thriller writer journey a long and winding road

I wrote stories all my life, but my two college degrees were in operatic voice. Which is funny, because as a kid from sunny Arizona, I wasn’t big on late nights, crowds of people, and big cities. Plus, even though my pipes were pretty good, I suffered off and on from stage fright all my musical life. I guess I got into singing by taking the path of least resistance. Everyone said I had such a good voice. I had some success (between bouts of terror) and talked myself into being an opera singer way longer than I should have.

After a summer in Austria, I finally realized it wasn’t for me. I wanted to be what I always was in my heart: a writer. At that point, I had no idea I was to become a thriller writer. I was going to write a book—a novel. Since I loved Stephen King, I wrote a ghost story. It took me three years to find an agent and sell it. I thought I would make millions (I’d bought the whole famous wealthy author story), but my first book garnered me 2500 bucks with Zebra Books, which I had to split with my agent.

So the book came out in mass market paperback. The cover was of a terrified woman with film tied around her neck. There was no “advertising budget.” But I got to do book signings in town and sold two more books to Zebra. A few more books followed, sporadically—as I went through five agents, one of whom died, and another who didn’t use email and sort of wandered away. But as I wrote, I got better. In between books, I received a ton of rejection. Every time I started a book, I tried to improve on the last one. I read the best in my genre, and studied a handful of authors who inspired me.

And I did get better. I was on my way to be a thriller writer.

Darkness on the Edge of Town was a huge step up, the first book in the Laura Cardinal series, and my agent sold that book for mid-five figures. Again, I thought: “This is It!” Made in the shade. The publisher bought the second book, Dark Side of the Moon.

The publisher declined more books.

Then Amazon came along. My husband got the rights back to all my books, and just in time. We put Darkness on the Edge of Town up on Amazon, and sold maybe one a month for five or six months. And then, one day, it exploded! The number of Kindle owners reached the tipping point. Just like that, I was selling ten thousand, then fifty thousand, then a hundred thousand books.

It was The Great Ebook Boom of 2011, and made a lot of authors household names. It made a lot of authors rich. People were filling their Kindles, and they went after the books that somehow rose above the babble. After that I sold five books to Thomas & Mercer, the publishing arm of Amazon.

They (who’s “they?”) always say “never give up.” The life of a writer–thriller writer, romance writer, science fiction writer, etc.–has a lot of ups and downs, but never count yourself out. Hone your craft and write a lot, and you WILL get better. And opportunities WILL come along. If you have a modicum of talent, if you write because you love writing, if you write because you can not NOT write, if you write a lot so you get better and better and better, if you find a genre you love, and keep at it consistently, you’re living in the best possible time to be successful.

Categories: Books Darkness on the Edge of Town The Writing Life

New York Times Best-Selling Author J. Carson Black’s Insight to the Laura Cardinal Series

Laura Cardinal is a criminal investigator with the Arizona Department of Public Safety. Her job- to investigate and bring justice to murder victims and their killers in small towns with limited resources. J. Carson Black reveals answers on the plot and character development of the Laura Cardinal Series.

Q: Where did your inspiration for Laura’s character come from?

A: I have always been intrigued by people whose lives change, usually through tragedy. I’m fascinated by those whose lives become bigger than they were before. John Walsh is a perfect example of this. His son is murdered, and his whole life changes. He has been responsible for the capture of hundreds of criminals, and in the process, become larger than himself. I grew up with a friend whose life was altered by tragedy. Like Laura, she was middle-class, went to college, and she was artistic. But after the tragedy (a result of gun violence) she became something else: a black-belt, multiple-Rottweiler-owning, gun-toting cop. Perhaps this person always resided inside her, but the transformation was incredible and complete. She has become an urban legend among the cops at TPD; some of them think she uses her hallway for a shooting range. I’ve been in her hallway, and there’s no way.

Q: Why did you decide to go the route of a series as opposed to stand-alone type novels?

A: I think of a series as building equity. With every book you write, whoever comes late to the party realizes you have a book before that and a book before that, and they buy those, too, which is good for your backlist. So many stand-alone books are just plain lost. Now, with amazon, if someone really wants to buy your first three or four books in a series, they usually can. But the main thing for me is continuity. I want someone I can depend on and grow with.

j.-carson-black-laura-cardinal-series copy

Q: Where do you get your plot ideas?

A: From everywhere and anywhere. I’ll be honest and tell you I had a leg up on the first book in the series. Cops, again. Two of them approached me and asked if I had a premise for the first book in my series. They were seriously worried about internet predation on children and wanted to get the message out to parents. They thought fiction was a good way to do it. They even had a scenario which impressed the heck out of me. (These guys could have been screenwriters!) The premise was open-ended and could lead anywhere: what would happen if cops in a small town took things in their own hands and lured a sexual predator to their town—and it all went bad? And so I wrote DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN. The second book, DARK SIDE OF THE MOON, started with one idea (the dark side of love) but I realized that it needed another component. I read something on the truckloads of nuclear waste traversing our highways, going through the heart of two major cities: Flagstaff and Albuquerque. I wondered what would happen if someone got control of one of those trucks.

DARK SIDE OF THE MOON, at its heart, is about how we see ourselves, and how we want other people to see us. It’s about what happens when that image of self breaks down.

THE DEVIL’S HOUR is about a sociopath. I don’t want to give away the story line, but this, too, was inspired by an undercover detective who told me about that strangest case he had ever been involved with. (Another cop. Are you beginning to see a theme here?) And then one day I was sitting at a light and there was a purple PT Cruiser behind me. The man driving it was somewhere between forty and fifty, and he had a salt-and-pepper beard, wire-rimmed glasses, and hair parted in the middle that fell to his shoulders. Later that week I was finishing the last rewrite of DARK SIDE OF THE MOON in a cabin in the woods, throwing pages of hardcopy on the floor when I was done with them, when I suddenly thought of this guy. Now he had a name, a real white-bread monicker: Steve Lawson. And he had a dog, a black Labrador named Jake. The next morning I awoke at four in the morning and wrote what would happen to Steve Lawson and why. And what his connection to Laura Cardinal was.

Q: Do you usually know where your book is going and where it will all end when you start, or are you the type who makes it up as you go along?

A: With police procedural/thrillers, I think it’s good to know who the killer is. Although I’m sure there are some writers who don’t even know that. I try to outline some, and I try to just write my way in, too. It’s different with every book. I just sort of muddle through. Although with DARK SIDE OF THE MOON, I was asked for a detailed synopsis halfway through. If I didn’t deliver it, I wouldn’t get my next paycheck. So I ended up writing about 20 pages of outline, which is pretty detailed. I followed it, too, although there were plenty of differences. I believe the real changes and the real writing come in the second draft. The first draft–for me, anyway–is just somehow getting it down, even if it’s complete and utter crap

Q: Does any of your own personal background go into Laura’s stories? If so, how about some examples.

A: Laura grew up where I grew up, in the El Fuerte area of Tucson, Arizona. El Fuerte means “fort”. Fort Lowell was a cavalry fort outside Tucson in the late 1800s, and a neighborhood later grew up around the ruins. When I was growing up, there were lots of farms and ranches along the riverbed. And a little desert cemetery that gave me nightmares.

The orange and white 1955 Chevy Bel Air that was used in the murder of Julie Marr was the same car that chased me when I was fourteen. I had been walking down a road after getting into a fight with my friends and splitting up with them. Recently, I found a three-page description I wrote of the chase for English class. It was over-written; heavy on the heart-pounding, throat-closing, knees-shaking, but a nice effort nonetheless.

Laura had a horse, and so did I. When I was seventeen years old, I spent a goodly number of nights sitting on the ground waiting for a mare to foal; she never did—not until I had gone home to sleep. So I used this for an important event in DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN.

Categories: Laura Cardinal

Cover Story – How We Came up with The Laura Cardinal Series Covers

When my publisher Glenn McCreedy at Breakaway Media and I decided to put up my three Laura Cardinal crime fiction thrillers, the first thing we thought about was cover art.

Readers of crime fiction and thrillers would be our primary audience. So we asked ourselves these questions.

What should a thriller look like?

Should the books be unified in some way?

Should they have the traditional look of a big publishing house? And if we chose to go that route, what kind of product did we envision? (more…)

Categories: The Writing Life

Posts Tagged: Laura Cardinal Series

Ten Things You Don’t Know About The Laura Cardinal Novels

Ripped from the Headlines for The Devil’s Hour

La Posta Quemada Home of DPS Det. Laura Cardinal

A Tragedy in My Town

Creepy Story: Budding Writer, Nightmare Car

Darkness on the Edge of Town

Thriller writer journey a long and winding road

New York Times Best-Selling Author J. Carson Black’s Insight to the Laura Cardinal Series

Cover Story – How We Came up with The Laura Cardinal Series Covers

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