Mike Carson, is a disgraced New York journalist, who returns to his Texas hometown to settle his uncle’s estate. He finds himself drawn to investigating the death of Adam Polley, a newspaper delivery driver, whose car crash reveals bullet holes in his body.
Carson is exactly the kind of man who can’t let this sort of thing go. What starts as one murky case quickly opens into something much bigger, with drugs, power, greed, and civic corruption all swirling beneath the surface.
Carson’s personal ruin now mirrors the rot in the town around him. This gives Bullets in the Water a strong engine: a flawed, damaged man trying to recover his instincts, his courage, and some fragment of self-respect.
The book has a solid sense of place and purpose. Not a standard mystery built around twists, there’s a deeper thread about control and the ways communities can be manipulated by the people who profit in the dark.
Fast pacing, strong atmosphere, plenty of tension, and characters who feel like they belong to this world. There’s a gritty, lived-in quality to the Bullets in the Water that makes the danger feel real.
The Interview: Conor McAnally
You’ve written extensively for TV, how has writing a novel been different.
There are a number of differences. The first is that writing for television or radio means writing for the ear rather than the eye. There’s a clarity and simplicity of language and sentence structure required for the ear. The words you use have to be readily understood. Writing for TV or radio is monologue. My professional TV life was also based in facts whether in reporting, current affairs presentation, even entertainment and music programs. What I was writing was factual and not created out of my imagination.
What have you found most fun about writing a novel?
I absolutely love writing dialogue. I love the way it can zip a story along, illustrate character and intent, plant trails, leave things hinted at but sometimes unsaid. Finding voices for characters through dialogue is great fun. How people speak, the little vocal tics they have, can give them a distinct voice and give the reader a clue to their upbringing, education, social status etc. I notice those little repeated phrases certain people use and pop them into a notebook. It’s also been great to be able to go inside the mind of characters, examine how they think, what they think, what moves them, what holds them back.
What have you found challenging?
I suppose the most challenging thing, having been a facts guy, is creating stuff from pure imagination. I’m much more comfortable writing fiction around things I’ve experienced, felt or seen. Things that have actually happened. Making things up from scratch is more difficult for me but very satisfying. The two murders in this book are similar to actual tragedies that happened close to where I used to live in Bastrop, Texas.
An unfortunate young mother was shot dead while delivering newspapers early one morning about a mile and a half from our house. Some drug dealers who had ripped off their opposition mistook her for one of their rivals. The murder has never been solved although, according to my sources, the police know who did it but cannot find enough evidence to charge. And there was another unfortunate woman shot dead in an empty mall lot, a few miles from Bastrop. Both of these stuck with me at the time. The parking lot was such an innocuous place to die. And who’d have thought delivering newspapers could end up being so dangerous. The murders in the book are nothing like what happened in reality but the reality gave me the starting point for the fiction woven around it.
The other thing I found challenging was how much to leave to the reader’s imagination. How much could I omit without losing the thread of the story. They say you have to kill your darlings and after the third draft of this novel it still was not right, so I had to chop away the first three or four chapters to make it zing along at the right pace.
You come from Ireland. Did you find Texas hard to write about?
The first photograph of me that is still extant (other than the ugly baby photo) is me sitting on a tricycle, wearing a cowboy hat, my trusty plastic six gun on my hip and toy Winchester rifle in my hands, ready to hunt down the bad guys. I always yearned for the West, wore cowboy boots in my teens and fell in love with the place when I finally got there. And the funny thing — all small towns are basically the same. There are universal stories there of power and influence, double-dealing and intrigue, the haves and the have-nots. That’s what makes it fun.
~ June Lorraine Roberts
Murder in Common is in the Top 20 of the Feedspot Top 80 Crime Novel Websites
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