James O. Born

First, the great Oline Cogdill reviewed Escape Clause in the Sun Sentinel

Also in the Sarasota Herald Tribune is a profile by Susan Rife.

Article written for Mystery Writers of America
by James O. Born

I am a career cop. Although I’ve had several jobs in the field, from DEA agent to my current position as an agent with the Florida Department of law Enforcement, the investigative arm of the state police, I consider myself a cop first. But I’ve always written too. Does that make me a writer first? Does one influence the other? We know cops advise writers all the time. I do it myself. But writers influencing cops? You bet.

I remember the first time I ever had to defuse a bomb. It was attached to the bottom of a school bus with kids inside. Noon in Miami during the summer and so hot I couldn’t see through my goggles because they fogged from my own body heat. My hands could hardly hold the wire cutters as I studied the colors and positions of the wires inside the device. Wait a minute. That never happened to me. In fact, aside from training, I’ve never even seen a bomb. I doubt I would take the opportunity to diffuse one if it was offered to me. I’d be too busy cleaning my underwear. But I like to read about cops and bombs and I’ve seen a couple of good movies about them. That must be where I developed this recovered memory.

Police work, even in a relatively interesting investigative agency, is not Hollywood’s conception of excitement. It’s a lot of interviews, reports, more interviews, research, surveillance and finally, interviews. When writers ask me about my years on a SWAT team they always seem disappointed that I never shot anyone. They’ve seen it in movies. But in real life the whole point of an organized and well-trained tactical team is to surprise and overwhelm suspects. I always thought it was a badge of honor that we never shot anyone in all the search warrant entries we performed.

Police work in books and on TV is a different animal. Those cops see a lot of action, get the chicks and live well on a civil servant’s salary. I prefer police work on TV. That’s the type of activity that attracted most cops to the business in the first place. I remember as a kid watching Hill Street Blues. How could life be any more exciting, gritty and real? I still reference the show in all of my novels. But not only was the police work unreal, the city itself didn’t exist. The show never identifies the town. Regardless of this fact, I still occasionally call suspects “dirtbags”, more than one cop has growled at someone thanks to Sergeant Belker, and Detective LaRue inspired a generation of cops to chew tooth picks and call people “babe”.

One of the first popular culture references to the term SWAT, meaning special weapons and tactics, was in Joseph Wambaugh’s groundbreaking, and still untouchable, Police Story. As a teenager I can recall seeing Jan Michael Vincent and his teammates confront the most dangerous of situations. Near the end of the episode, after an armed robber has taken hostages, Vincent sees a man with a shotgun come out with a “hostage” in front of him. Vincent, using his phenomenal police powers of observation, realizes that something is wrong and that the hostage has a pistol too. It’s a switch!. Vincent calls over the radio to the team sniper, “Shoot the hostage.” When the smoke clears, he was right. To give you an idea of writers influencing police I will confess that I have been to very few SWAT team practices where, at some point in the day, while we are in training scenarios, someone didn’t say over the radio, “Shoot the hostage.” Thanks Joe, it always brings back fond memories.

As a cop I have been trained, like all other cops, to hold a pistol in front of me and point it where I might need to shoot. On TV, to capture a camera shot, actors hold guns up so their face and the gun can be in the same frame. Visit a police training facility and you’ll see cop after cop do the same thing as they enter a room. They wait right next to the door with their pistol next to their mug pointing straight up in the air. We even nicknamed it a “Sabrina” as a tribute to female cops of the seventies. Thanks, writers.

Fights in books and the movies are often elegant ballets of feet and fists where shaking your head often clears the cobwebs and extends the fight. Real fights, especially ones featuring middle-aged, overweight cops are not quite the artistic display of martial ability. Think lots of panting, sweat, vomit and sore backs. I know form personal experience that there is little as psychologically devastating as chasing someone and then having to fight them and your blows seem to have little or no effect. Watch a video of a police fight. It often affects a cop more psychologically than physically when all is said and done. The movies like to focus on big guys as the threat. For me, and many cops I’ve spoken to, there is one class of low-life who strikes fear in us all: The rail thin, wiry, toothless redneck. They’re fast, bony and don’t care. My parents spent a lot of money on oral health. I am one of only nine native Floridians with all my original teeth. I worry about getting punched in the mouth. It may not be life threatening but I scares the crap out of me. A redneck who already gums his Slim Jims only wants to strike where as a cop wants to not get hit as well as strike. But still we focus on muscle heads. Our attention is diverted to the large, lumbering, bulldozers and we view the F-15 of street fighters as practice. That’s Hollywood.

Do you think cops don’t watch TV? When I was a recruit going through the DEA academy, which, back in the eighties was housed in the same facility as the FBI, we would watch Miami Vice on Friday nights in the communal TV rooms on the first floor. There would be a group of twenty DEA guys cheering Crockett and Tubbs most Friday nights. Never an FBI face to be found. Then, after a week of NBC teasers about a “DEA agent goes bad” you couldn’t find a seat due to the crowds of young FBI agents eager for the show.

Now, as a more mature, or we call it, “veteran cop”, my reading habits have progressed to the more realistic and intelligent literary police work of John Sandford and Michael Connelly. I notice a lot of cops reading them. If these two titans of the crime fiction world were to start having cops call their vehicles “tooters” (no double entendre, no reference) it wouldn’t be long before we heard real cops saying, “I gotta get a new set of tires on my tooter.“

Watch what you write, you don’t know whom you’ll influence.

for Crime Spree Magazine
by James O. Born

The past twelve months have been good ones for me. The crowning event was a contract with a New York publishing house. That’s what makes the development of a negative emotional reaction to another Florida based author so sad. This is not the deep-seated hatred I feel for, say, Osama Bin Laden or Steve Spurrier, but a feeling I believe is based entirely on experience and rational deliberation. At least as rationally as any superficial emotion based on limited exposure and exploited for no apparent reason.

Like any aspiring writer, I’ve read a lot over the past fifteen years as I attempted to have something published. My reading experience was deep as well as broad. From W.E.B. Griffin’s heart-stopping stories of the U.S. Marines in World War Two to the details of horse racing in books by Dick Francis, I devoured everything. As a cop, my idol was Joseph Wambaugh, a former Los Angeles police officer who wrote compelling non-fiction like Fire Lover as well as entertaining fiction such as the Golden Orange. As a Floridian, who wanted to be a writer, I found a model in a Florida International University professor named James W. Hall. He captured the essence of the Florida Keys through a character that seemed human and interesting. From early books like, Under Cover of Daylight to his fourteenth book, coming out in January, Forrest of the Night, Hall has maintained a level of excellence difficult to match. Here is a writer to emulate, these are books to appreciate. Then what could have gone so terribly wrong? What could turn a Floridian such as myself against one of Florida’s literary treasures? It’s a long and circuitous path to the darker emotions, but I believe I can document my journey without resorting to cheap theatrics or name-calling.

It actually started in January 2004 when I met Mr. Hall in person for the first time. We were both at Coral Gables’ famed independent bookstore, Books and Books. We were there to see our mutual friend and Godfather of modern crime fiction, Elmore Leonard, deliver one of his famous readings in which one must marvel at the dignified form of a seventy-eight year-old man using the F word in such an eloquent manner. I was introduced to Mr. Hall and promptly determined him to be, in fact, a very nice guy. He was friendly and, after finding out about the impending release of my first book, encouraging. He never talked down to me and by any standard was exactly what I had heard from others: A really good guy. It made the transition to hating him that much more surprising.

Over the next few months I continued to write and worry over the release of my book. I would read a review of any book and try to relate it to mine. Had I been too verbose? Was my theme too erudite? Although I was uncertain of the exact meaning of erudite, I felt comfortable I had managed to avoid the obvious pitfall of being too much of it. At least in my first book. One way I believe I avoided it was by not really thinking about theme at all. During this time I also joined the Florida chapter of the Mystery Writers of America. After the first meeting I was certain that being exposed to local writers such as Barbara Parker, Elaine Viets and Jonothan King would serve to help me cope with the coming changes of becoming a published author. This, in addition to my meeting of James Hall, would all result in a smashing debut. At least that was the hope.

Then came my first real interview. It was early April as I recall. I was into my usual routine of running early in the morning, going to my regular police job during the day and writing at night. It was daunting and tiring but fulfilling in a way I had never known. Everything was going well at work and at home, an accomplishment not normally achieved by humans in this day and age. I got a call from the local PBS radio station asking if I would be interested in appearing live, on-air, during a pledge drive and offer an advanced reader’s copy of my book, Walking Money. I agree immediately, all the while trying to sound uninterested and detached as any cool writer might sound. Several days later I arrived at the station freshly bathed and wearing my best Dockers. The interview started off with a bang as my head swelled to the repeated compliments of my book. In my mind I saw my name climbing the New York Times best seller list as all the smart, I-don’t-have-time-for-TV people, listened to public radio and counted down the days until they could purchase their own copy of Walking Money.

Then it happened. Without warning or reason. The interviewer, an intelligent, well-read woman, after calling me by name for the first eight-minute section of the interview, started referring to me as Jim Hall instead of Jim Born. Can you believe it? I wait my whole adult life for someone to ask me about a book I had written and they call be by the wrong name. And it continued. On live radio. She would repeat, “I have Jim Hall in the studio,” or, “Mystery writer Jim Hall is with us.” I was panic-stricken. What should I do on a live broadcast? Correct her? Just stare at her? Then she holds up a copy of my book. Now I breathe a sigh of relief. My name is on it in bold letters, James O. Born. She had caught herself. Instead she says, on the air, to her book-reading audience, “I’m here with James W. Hall, Florida author.” This was a real Hall fan. Everything went black. I thought I had suffered a stroke. Then the blood started to flow back into my brain and I realized I had, unfortunately, survived the humiliating incident. At the break I pointed out that while my name was, indeed, “Jim”, my family name was “Born” not “Hall”. The interviewer corrected her mistake after the break and apologized appropriately. My psyche had been taught a cosmic lesson. I was nobody.

To make matters worse, I e-mailed Mr. Hall with this tale and he found it amusing. Funny. He even went on to be supportive and, dare I say it, nice. I recovered. At least temporarily.

My book launched in late June and I was off on my tour. It was proving to be all I had ever hoped. That is until I visited a lovely bookstore in Sarasota, Florida named Circle Books. Located across the John Ringling causeway, Circle Books is known as a store that is very supportive of Florida writers. This became apparent when I arrived on a sunny Saturday afternoon and found a pretty good crowd for a first-time author. I spoke to the assembled patrons for a few minutes about the hardships of publishing and the dangers of police work (for the record I have suffered neither) and then sat down to sign their books. The second person in line, a pleasant looking woman about sixty with a warm smile and typical, reader-like intelligence, placed a copy of Walking Money on the table before me. I looked up and she gave a slight giggle. I had to inquire, what was so funny? She said, “I misread the newsletter and thought James Hall was signing today. My mistake. I’ll buy your book anyway.” I managed to get through the encounter and sign the book. Although I must confess I almost signed it James W. Hall. Once again my nemesis had struck through one of his surrogates. That’s right, I‘m no idiot, I saw the movie Signs and I now know there are no such thing as coincidences. That means Mr. Hall, evil genius that he is, had engineered these incidents to destroy my sense of worth and prove he is the master.

I learned the lesson but have not forgotten the feelings. That is why I hate James W. Hall.

The outstanding Mystery reviewer for the Ft. Lauderdale Sun Sentinel, Oline H.Cogdill, picked Walking Money as one of the best debuts of 2004. She should be recognized for her good taste. Oh yeah, she is all the time. See the paper’s online edition for December 19, 2004. Sun-Sentinel

The important part of this great interview is that he picked Walking Money as one of his all-time favorite summer reads. Take a look Griffin interview