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Here's Bruce with more:
In Appreciation
My debut mystery novel, The Bitter Past (Minotaur Books), has been out for two weeks, and it’s been a whirlwind. I’ve done six author events and book signings already, from Houston to L.A., and the travel and hand cramping continues until the end of September. It’s a good problem to have. But tonight I’m home, and I’m driving just a short distance to take a copy of my book to a special person.
I grew up in the harsh sunlight of the Nevada desert not long after and
not far from where the U.S. Government once tested its growing arsenal of
atomic bombs. In the 1950s the prospect of nuclear Armageddon had school
children hiding under their desks in Duck and Cover drills and their parents
digging fallout shelters. These warheads were detonated above the parched,
cracked ground of sand and tumbleweeds, lighting up the sky for hundreds of
miles and sending shockwaves that would shake buildings and break windows in
the small but booming city of Las Vegas only 75 miles to the south.
When I began outlining this novel in 2019, I wondered how I might tie that
tumultuous history to the present. I wanted to capture the shadowy world of
Cold War espionage while envisioning how the possible consequences of those
real events might play out more than half a century later, providing readers
all the emotionally-charged elements they love in dual timeline stories. Out of
those musings comes Sheriff Porter Beck, a retired military spy with a
quick-draw sense of humor, trying to solve a peculiar and gruesome murder in
sparsely populated Lincoln County, just downwind of where that radiation
eventually settled to the ground, poisoning everything and everyone it touched.
Novel writing is a mostly solitary
activity. You lock yourself away in a room for long periods, hoping to walk out
with something other people will want to read. But even before you go into the
room, there are plenty of folks who have lent you their expertise and
experience so that your characters are believable and the places and things you
describe in your story ring true. You find these people along the way,
sometimes by painstaking effort, sometimes by pure happenstance, and they make
up your research team.
The man I’m seeing tonight is the
recently retired sheriff of Lincoln County, Nevada, where my book takes place.
Without him, my protagonist would have lacked the knowledge to manage the crime
scene of a brutal murder or how to best utilize his tiny staff of officers to
hunt an assassin and look for a missing woman at the same time.
It’s a novel, so my sheriff is not
real, and he’s not very similar to my new friend. But he’s built around the
real challenges of a rural law enforcement officer. He knows what he can
and can’t do in any given situation. When I asked how long one of his deputies
might have to wait for backup in a dangerous situation, he remarked “your
backup is generally the other weapons you have in your vehicle.” Lincoln
County, as it turns out, is the size of the state of Maryland. I didn’t have
that insight when I created the character. I needed to find someone who did.
There is a reason books have a section
called Acknowledgments. By definition it means to accept knowledge, to admit it.
The individuals listed therein comprise the group that eventually got you over
the goal line, that give the story its heft and credibility. Without them,
you’re writing in a vacuum, and unless you’re creating some manifesto, that’s
not a good place to be.
I had many of these experts on The
Bitter Past, as I had on my first two novels. Military men, a female crime
scene analyst, academicians and museum curators. There were the survivors, too,
the people who lived through the era of aboveground nuclear tests that occurred
during the 1950s in the Nevada desert. Some of them are still alive, whereas
others had left their voices behind, recordings captured over the years and
preserved as a part of our history.
If you’re writing a novel, you can’t
be bashful about approaching those you need for research purposes. The good
sheriff I called out of the blue one day, long before the book was written and
long before there was any chance of it finding a publisher. I explained what I
was doing, and there was an uncomfortable silence for a few moments. Then, as is
his fashion, he said he would be happy to help. And that’s typically how it
goes. People like to help. As the author, I’m ever grateful for it.
Bruce Borgos lives and writes from the Nevada desert where he works hard every day to prove his high school guidance counselor had good instincts when he said “You’ll never be an astronaut.” He has a degree in political science from the University of Nevada-Reno, which taught him that political and science are words that should never be used in the same sentence and otherwise discouraged him about the future of humanity. He has had a lifelong obsession with words and stories as well as a fascination with how telephones work. His crowning achievement in life is that he married Pam, whom he met in the second grade and secretly dated through elementary school. This year is their 40th wedding anniversary.
Visit his website at: bruceborgos.com or on any social media channels by
typing his name in the search box since there is only person with that name…in
the universe.
It's Claire again—you can order The Bitter Past on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or best of all, at an independent bookstore via IndieBound.
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