Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Why I Write About Cops and Cops' Families

With #9 in my Rocky Bluff P.D. series coming out, it's probably time for me to once again explain why I have the audacity to write about police officers and their families since I've never been in law enforcement nor did I grow up in a law enforcement family.

What I do have is many relatives and friends who were or are police officers.

My uncle was in the LAPD, a motorcycle cop for a long while, then a detective. When I was growing up, a neighbor was a police officer and I babysat his children.

Our first house was in a neighborhood filled with policemen and their families. We partied with them, I had coffee on a regular basis with their wives, and our kids played together.

My youngest daughter married a policeman. He loved to tell me about his adventures and he took me on my first ride-along. My granddaughter married a deputy. A grandson is a police officer in Aspen.

Several  years ago I joined the Public Safety Writers Association. Most of the members are in some form of law enforcement and I've become friends with many of them.

I liked to read police procedurals, though most of the policemen I read about didn't have much resemblance to the police officers that I knew. I decided I'd like to write mysteries about police officers and their families, showing the kind of men and women that I knew. I wanted to show how what happened on the job affected the families and what happened with the families affected the job.

Like all writers, I'm an observer and a listener. I've used what I've seen and what I've heard in my Rocky Bluff P.D. series along with a generous dose of imagination.

In my latest, Dangerous Impulses,
an attractive new-hire captivates Officer Gordon Butler, Officer Felix Zachary’s wife Wendy is befuddled by her new baby, Ryan and Barbara Strickland receive unsettling news about her pregnancy, while the bloody murder of a mother and her son and an unidentified drug that sickens teenaged partiers jolts the Rocky Bluff P.D.






Buy link: http://tinyurl.com/byxomtk

Marilyn aka F. M. Meredith

5 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  2. I've enjoyed both of your series, and since I've spent time in the clerical end of law enforcement, I can see you're doing a terrific job.
    Marja McGraw

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  3. I think you've done a remarkable job with your series. I'm thinking of attending the Public Safety Writers Association conference in Las Vegas this summer. I know you are involved with that.

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    1. I'm the program chair of the PSWA conference. It would be great if you could attend. It's smaller than most conferences, so you can really interact with people and not feel lost in the crowd.

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