The aspects of character continued to fall into place as I wrote the first draft of a novel that would feature Pierce investigating the murder of a man who had been a fellow tunnel rat and who might have been involved in the tunnel heist of a Los Angeles bank.
The real tunnel heist I based the story on took place in 1987, the year I came to Los Angeles. The year is also notable because it was when the novel The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy was published. Although the book impressed me, I was more taken at the time with the author’s history, which I’d read about in a profile in a local magazine. Ellroy’s mother was murdered when he was a boy. He struggled to overcome that life-altering crime, and many other personal demons, enough to write The Black Dahlia and several other novels before it.
I thought the psychology was intriguing. In my amateur analysis it looked to me that Ellroy was working out whatever damage had been visited upon him by his mother’s murder by writing stories about detectives who avenge victims and solve murders-especially of women.
I decided to apply the same psychology to Pierce. I gave him a history similar to Ellroy’s. When Pierce is a boy, his mother is murdered. Since he doesn’t know his father, the crime not only takes away his one loving parent, but also relegates the boy to the world of foster homes and state youth facilities. The boy survives his upbringing and becomes a man in Vietnam, where his job is to go into the tunnels to seek the enemy. From there he comes home to one more flawed institution: the police department. The soldier becomes a detective who repeatedly avenges his mother’s death by solving murders-especially of women.
It is the cornerstone of the character. The trauma of his youth becomes the driving force behind the detective. It is the aspect that will allow every case he takes on to become personal.
I did not know Ellroy when I borrowed from his past for my fictional detective. Years later, though, when I prepared to write a novel in which my detective would investigate his mother’s long-unsolved murder, I sent the author a letter. I explained my story idea to him. I knew that Ellroy had a plan to write a nonfiction account of his mother’s unsolved murder. I asked if he thought my novel would be too much of an encroachment. His response came by way of a late-night phone call several weeks later. “Unfortunately, I don’t have a franchise on murdered mothers,” he said. “Good luck with your book.”
My plan for Pierce was simple. I wanted to acknowledge my mentors and use what they had taught me to mold something that was my own. Chandler, Macdonald, Wambaugh, also James Lee Burke, Lawrence Block, and Thomas Harris. I wanted to combine elements of the characters who were outsiders with the traits of those characters who were on the inside. Pierce would be an outsider with an insider’s job. He’d face political and bureaucratic obstacles at every turn. He’d be good at his job but flawed in the way he carried it out. At times he’d be his own worst enemy. He’d feel as though he were always on a solitary mission-alone in the tunnel-even though he might have a partner and be part of an organization that was thousands strong. He’d be a seeker of true justice, not just closure on a case.
Detective Pierce would be built to be as relentless as a bullet, a self-reliant loner who stood alone, who could not be gotten to. Nothing would come between him and his mission, and nothing short of death could stop him from getting the job done.
My goal was to create a character whom readers would find impossible to love on all levels, who in fact was capable of doing things that the readers might find objectionable. But, at the end of the day, my guy would be the kind of detective whom readers would want on the case if it was ever them or a loved one lying on the stainless steel table in the morgue.
I put none of this down on paper. I just carried it in the pockets of my imagination, and when I was ready I set to work on the story. From early on I titled it The Black Echo. Abstract and mysterious, the phrase also conjured up some of the fear I remembered from the fateful passage through the tunnel beneath Highland Avenue.
I caught a lucky break while I was writing The Black Echo. I came across a book called The Tunnels of Cu Chi. Written by Tom Mangold and John Penycate, the book is a harrowing account of the real experiences of the tunnel rats of the Vietnam War. It was only after I read this book that Pierce’s background as a tunnel rat and his recurring dreams fully took shape. That book stayed on my desk as I wrote The Black Echo. And, almost twenty years later, it is still within reach of where I write today. It is easily as scary and claustrophobia inducing as a Stephen King novel. But Cu Chi is true. It makes a ten-year-old’s anxieties about crawling through a forty-foot drainage tunnel seem like, well, child’s play.
When I went to college at the University of Florida, my intention was to major in building-construction sciences. I wanted to be a builder, like my father. But I wasn’t there long before I realized that I wanted to build stories instead of houses. While shifting to journalism and creative writing, I took a good number of art history and humanities classes as well. In one of those classes, the professor had the students examine the work of the fifteenth-century Flemish painter Hieronymus Bosch.
Bosch’s work was unfamiliar to me until I saw it in that class. Simply put, it is the stuff of nightmares, an exploration of the wages of sin and of a world gone wrong. The paintings, full of dark, hellish landscapes of torture and debauchery, are about chaos and its consequences. Fires burn out of control in a dark underworld. Birdlike monsters torture and maim the sinners of society. Horned owls sit and judge from the mouths of damp tunnels. Man is depicted again and again as embracing evil, as being the instigator of his own downfall.
Bosch’s masterpiece triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights, shows Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden in the first panel. In the second is the chaos that ensues from their choosing corporeal temptation over spiritual life. And in the third panel are the tortures of a wildly punishing hell.
Anyone who has taken the time to study the Bosch paintings comes away with an indelible imprint of the work on his or her mind. The mark of a true artist, I believe, is to create something that lives on in another’s imagination. Hieronymus Bosch certainly accomplished this. His work has lived in my imagination from the moment I saw it. After all, I could clearly see a kinship between some of Bosch’s monsters and the behemoth of my own dream.
It was while working on the second draft of The Black Echo that I was reminded of the painter I had studied in college fifteen years before. I can’t remember today what prompted the connection. But some reference to the painter made me remember the class and the paintings. And I was struck by another revelation. After all, what was a murder scene but a world gone wrong? What was a homicide investigation about but chaos and its consequences? In a moment I knew I must change the name of my detective. Whether readers were familiar with the painter Hieronymus Bosch did not matter to me. I was writing about a man who every day ventured into the human abyss, whose job took him across landscapes of chaos and its consequences. I was writing the story of a man who confronted horrific evil among men and who all the while wrestled with his own dark currents. From that day on he became Detective Hieronymus Bosch.