murder.booklocker.com

Several years ago when I took a class in Creative Writing at Oakton Community College, we needed to add a project component (for me) that would elevate it to honors status. I had already contacted the senior center and agreed to volunteer teach a writing class once a week. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, David Koenig, who was my instructor, didn’t feel this placed enough emphasis on my own writing. Instead we agreed that I should continue writing an allegory which I had begun over the Christmas break (in addition to teaching the class!)

The good news is that I wrote another zillion words of allegory. I hope at some point that it will become another book — if only I knew how it ended! The second piece of good news is that I made a lot of friends at the senior center. I wanted to give you a tiny peak at the ceramics room (where we meet), which is also the scene of one of the murders in PARK RIDGE, as well as a look at a few of the members of our class.

Standing is Renata Galissini. Then, from left to right: Arlene Faehnrich, Helen Kaslugas, Cheryl Hagedorn (me), Angela Scott, and Joan Yost.

About these folks: Renata inspires me with her dedication to the craft; Lee (Arlene) overwhelms me with the amount of material generated over the years, particularly biographical pieces about senior center members. Joan has an incredible sense of humor which comes through in all her work. Helen is a fairly new member to the group but inspired several short stories. I’ve also borrowed her last name for one of the characters in my second book. I borrowed Angela’s maiden name, Cusentino, for Teresa, my heroine, because as I say in my acknowledgments, “I want to be like Angela when I grow up.”

I got an email this morning from a Park Ridgian who has started reading the book and was thrilled with being able to recognize places.

I had wondered about that. I always seem to enjoy books more when I can say, “Aha! I’ve been there.” I don’t know how other authors handle fictitious towns, residences, workplaces. When I wrote about Park Ridge and the senior center, I had no trouble visualizing either of them. The center with the wall of windows in the rec are or the chill of the ceramics room are part of my experience — I have no difficulty calling them up. I think if I had “made up” the place that I would have had to draw myself a map!

As it was, I had to create separate character files to keep everybody straight. There were: four card-playing killers, five victims, one director, one detective, and the detective’s mother — that’s twelve, in case you weren’t counting. I was in and out of the files frequently. How does this person sound? What does this person like? After it was over, I could tell you what the Professor preferred for breakfast. Or that Teresa would rather go ballroom dancing with Stan than line-dancing (even if that doesn’t appear in the book).

I got to know these fictitious characters pretty well, maybe even intimately. It just might be that phony places are the same sort of thing.

A few weeks ago while waiting for my book to come out, I contacted the Mayor’s Office in Park Ridge (yes, it is a real place — in Illinois). I wanted to know if Mayor Frimark would consider reading it and giving me some quotes to use in promoting the book. 

So yesterday I dropped it off. Unfortunately, the person I had been communicating with was at lunch so I didn’t get to meet her.. I wrote this morning to make sure that she’d gotten. To my surprise, I learned that she had already started reading it last night! And even better, that someone else wanted it for the weekend!

I’m in hopes that the mayor will eventually get to read it! But for now, I’m exceedingly grateful for the enthusiasm over at City Hall.

Okay, I confess. I finally went searching for “murder by banana” — which is one of the ways one of my pinochle players does in someone at the senior center.

I found this article out of Massachusetts that says “In the age of DNA testing and high-tech investigations, it’s not often a murder case hinges on something as simple — and strange — as a banana.” The jury used some gloves (that the defendant had allegedly worn) to bruise a banana. They wanted to see if the “dot” pattern left by the gloves was similar to the dot pattern of blood on the guy’s coat.

“We can make a lot of jokes about bananas but the reality is that the jury was performing their own junk science,” attorney James Sultan said after a hearing Friday in Norfolk Superior Court. “It affected the outcome of the trial.”

If you’re curious, you can read it for yourself.

And no, this isn’t the first time that I’ve mentioned the banana murder. It’s in the press release, “Murder by Fruit Has No Ap-peel?”, for my book.

The following is a quote from PARK RIDGE (the detective and the senior center director are talking) which demonstrates the funny versus grim dilemma:

“And what? Somebody killed her with a banana?” she laughed.

He laughed with her. “I know it sounds ridiculous when you say the word ‘banana,’ but if she had been smothered with a pillow, we wouldn’t be laughing.”

Tucked away in this article from October, 1987, are some tidbits for anyone writing about crime committed BY senior citizens, not against them. For instance:

Tax reductions, rent control, subsidized senior citizen housing and recreational centers, increased public advocacy, Medicare, pension guarantees and increasing Social Security benefits–all have helped bring the elderly back into the mainstream with a vengeance. They are more physically able to get what they believe they deserve, and more seem willing to use force to get it. Figures on admissions to state prisons, for example, show that, compared to younger people, a much higher percentage of older people are being incarcerated for murder and manslaughter.

Other statistics confirm that older people are committing more serious crimes than in the past. From 1976 to 1985, the arrest rate for rape committed by men over 65 increased 155 percent. For men 60 to 64, the increase was 112 percent. During the same 10 years, the rate of arrests among the same two groups increased 39 percent and 60 percent for all sex offenses, and 30 percent and 33 percent for larceny-theft.

The elderly woman with the butcher’s knife that is on the cover of my book seems to be an image that may come back to haunt us.

Another quote:

Even these figures only hint at the real increase in crime by the elderly. I believe the facts are obscured by a double standard of law enforcement toward older men and women. Except for the most serious crimes, such as murder, police and prosecutors are inclined to overlook offenses by the elderly, especially women. They often don’t make arrests, or if they do, the charges are dismissed. There are probably no more than a thousand women over 65 in U.S. prisons.

This one reminds me of a short story I wrote where no one will believe a woman who practically confesses to several crimes, simply because she is older! When the police finally arrest her, she tells the detective that no jury will convict her.

The first question on the Study Guide came up during the writing of the novel as I was typing. I confess it wasn’t deliberate, maybe it was Freudian. But the word “center” is used in many ways:

1. to represent a physical building — “the Park District crowd had overflowed in the Center’s lot”;

2. to represent a community — “Stella Nevins was a stunning woman in her early sixties, one of the younger members of the Center”; and

3. to represent a psychological core — “After Ben’s death had been ruled a murder, people were frightened to be at the Center as well as drawn to be there.”

Maddy Hunter (Passport to Peril mysteries) was another author I looked at when considering “competition.” She, like Peter Abresch, also writes about senior citizens, although her Iowans go on trips to Europe and Peter’s take classes across the U.S.

Hunter’s sleuth is the granddaughter of one of the seniors. Grandma reminds me a lot of Stephanie Plum’s grandmother in Janet Evanovich’s books.

Hunter is probably best known for her delightful sense of humor - a chuckle on every page. So far, I’ve read Alpine for You, Top O’ the Mournin’, Pasta Imperfect, and Hula Done it.

In the memoir class I took with Professor Michele Morano, one of our assignments was to research the competition to our “slice of life.” That particular exercise came back to me when PARK RIDGE was published. “Who,” I asked myself, “was my competition?”

Foremost on my list were Peter Abresch’s books, the Elderhostel series. I have since read all of them, but find that they are not competitive. True, they deal with groups of senior citizens and murder, but that’s where the similarity ends.

Abresch’s books are fairly light (not a bad thing) while PARK RIDGE is pretty dark (not a bad thing).

PARK RIDGE to me is more than a murder mystery novel because it has an issue at the heart of it. In thinking about that issue — how we define “passive” — I spent quite a bit of time researching. Two sites that I found particularly helpful were the National Council on Aging (NCOA), and it’s subsection, the National Institute of Senior Centers (NISC).

There is a little history of senior centers in one article which I found informative, but I was more interested in a study that was referenced.

“In contrast, a recent survey of more than 400 senior centers (Krout, 1990) found that 10% of the participants were over age 85, and nearly 60% of centers surveyed reported an increase in the number of frail participants.”

First some observations: One, there must be a more recent study. In sixteen years something must have changed. Two, “frail” might have implications for card playing.When I mentioned to my father that my book could have been called “The Revenge of the Card Players,” he assured me that the senior center he goes to couldn’t keep its doors open without the folks that play cards and that maybe I was on to something.

The NISC was factor in my third novel about the Des Plaines Senior Center (I think ) since they are attempting to become nationally accredited.

Warning! Consider this your “spoiler notice.” The Study Guide mentions several things a reader may NOT want to know before they read the book — like the ending!

I’m proposing to take a look at several of the topics and questions raised by the novel.