Podcast Show Notes

On The Indy Author Podcast, we discuss the writing craft, the publishing voyage, and how we can navigate our way to the readers who will love our books. Click the links below for the show notes for episodes since 200, including summaries and transcripts.

Matty Dalrymple 8/6/24 Matty Dalrymple 8/6/24

Episode 250 - From Firearms to Fiction with Chris Grall

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Chris Grall discusses FROM FIREARMS TO FICTION, including his book TRIGGER GUARD: A WRITER'S GUIDE TO FIREARMS. Chris shares the challenges he faced in creating consistent and accurate illustrations for his book, with some valuable do’s and don’t’s for authors with books that include illustrations; the attitude he brought to receiving feedback from his target audiences; and the goal of his book: to enable writers to write gripping and accurate firearms scenes.

Chris Grall is a retired US Special Forces team sergeant with 26 years of service. In 2007, he served as a technical advisor for Scott Sigler's book CONTAGIOUS, and since then, he’s shared his knowledge of firearms with authors via his consulting business, TactiQuill, and at conferences.

Episode Links

https://trigger-guard.com/
https://chrisgrall.com/
https://www.facebook.com/chris.grall.9
https://x.com/dtn8or

Summary

This week on The Indy Author Podcast, Matty Dalrymple talks with Chris Grall about various facets of writing about firearms in fiction and the challenges he encountered while creating his book, "Trigger Guard." Chris shares his journey, from illustration and formatting struggles to gathering meaningful feedback for his work.

Matty Dalrymple, the host, sets the stage for an insightful conversation by detailing how she first met Chris, who has a unique background as a retired U.S. Special Forces Team Sergeant and a consultant on firearms for authors. Chris's journey culminated in the creation of "Trigger Guard," a comprehensive guide for writers on the usage and detailed aspects of firearms.

Illustration Challenges

Chris highlights how he tackled the illustrations for "Trigger Guard." He created the illustrations himself using PowerPoint, a process that turned out to be labor-intensive and time-consuming.

He explained, "It was painful. It would take me at least two or three hours just to do a single firearm, and I think there are a hundred and something drawings in there. It was horrible."

When Matty inquired whether Chris had considered using photographs instead, Chris clarified that maintaining consistency across all illustrations was crucial. He noted that stock images could have been expensive and inconsistent, thus justifying the choice to create his own graphics.

Choosing the Right Approach

Chris mentioned that with hindsight, he might have approached the process differently. Instead of illustrating sporadically, he would have initially examined all the firearms he planned to include to avoid unnecessary work.

"Through the editing process, that gun fell out of the book as a specific firearm I was going to talk about," Chris said, emphasizing the importance of forethought in the creative process.

Deadlines as Motivators

Chris attributed a significant part of his productivity to setting personal deadlines. His goal was to have "Trigger Guard" ready for purchase by ThrillerFest, a conference that he believed would be the ideal exhibition platform. He emphasized how having a deadline can enhance efficiency:

"There are points where you are a slave to the process and you have no control over how much time it takes for some things to happen."

DIY Publishing and Marketing Choices

The decision to indie publish "Trigger Guard" was influenced by Chris’s desire to get the book to the market quickly, especially considering its niche nature. Going the traditional publishing route could have delayed the book’s availability significantly, a luxury he couldn’t afford given the book’s specific audience.

“Trigger Guard is a very niche book. It’s not gonna be a New York Times bestseller... the faster I could get it out, the faster people could get access to it, use it, and hopefully not make mistakes.”

Content Creation and Layout

Chris provided a candid reflection on the initial decision to draft the entire book using PowerPoint, which made the editing process cumbersome. Illustrations and text elements would displace upon converting documents, causing significant headaches.

"The original sin of this book was to do the entire first draft in PowerPoint. It was a horror show."

Feedback and Iteration

Gathering feedback was another critical component of Chris's process. He sought insights from three distinct groups: authors, firearms experts, and general readers. This multifaceted feedback enabled him to fine-tune the book to serve various levels of firearms knowledge.

Balancing Detail and Readability

Matty and Chris also discussed the importance of balancing technical details with readability in fiction. Chris stressed that while writers need to possess detailed knowledge, they should be cautious about overwhelming readers with excessive technicalities.

"I like generic actions with specific firearms. You’re going to load a gun, you’re going to fire a gun, you’re going to aim the gun... That’s good enough for most scenes."

He recounted practical examples and mistakes, such as the common but incorrect portrayal of empty guns clicking, underscoring the importance of accuracy.

Inspirations for Fictional Gunfights

Chris shared case studies from real-life scenarios, such as the assassination attempt on Harry Truman, to illustrate the unpredictable and often chaotic nature of gunfights. These examples serve as valuable resources for authors aiming to depict realistic firearms scenes.

Conclusion

In summarizing the wealth of experience, Chris offers valuable advice for both writers and readers. Chris's approach to creating "Trigger Guard" and his candid reflections on the process provide strong takeaways for any author dealing with technical subjects in their writing.

"Trigger Guard is meant for anyone in the full array of firearms experience. You can use it as a resource or read it cover to cover."

Final Thoughts

Chris's journey exemplifies the intricate balance between technical accuracy and creative storytelling. His insights into the challenges of illustrative consistency, the importance of deadlines, and the necessity for diverse feedback make this podcast episode a must-listen for any author dealing with specialized topics.

For more, you can find Chris Grall and his work at ChrisGrall.com, Trigger-Guard.com, and his consulting venture Tactiquill.com.

Matty Dalrymple 6/18/24 Matty Dalrymple 6/18/24

Episode 243 - Mistakes Writers Make about Forensic Psychology with Katherine Ramsland

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Katherine Ramsland discusses MISTAKES WRITERS MAKE ABOUT FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGY, including these commons mistakes and how to avoid them: They are used as profilers because detectives can’t do this work; they visit crime scenes to advise on catching a killer; they profile a person; they interrogate suspects; they undertake hypnosis or therapy in the courtroom; they pronounce defendants to be sane or insane; and they can accurately predict long-range future violent behavior without standardized tools.

Dr. Katherine Ramsland teaches forensic psychology and behavioral criminology in the graduate program at DeSales University, where she is Professor Emerita. She has appeared as an expert on more than 200 crime documentaries and was an executive producer on "Murder House Flip" and A&E’s "Confession of a Serial killer: BTK." The author of 72 books, including "The Serial Killer’s Apprentice" and "How to Catch a Killer," she pens a regular blog for Psychology Today. She has also written a crime fiction series based on a female forensic psychologist, Annie Hunter, who consults on death investigations.

Episode Links

www.katherineramsland.net
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/shadow-boxing/202405/10-mistakes-fiction-writers-make-about-forensic-psychology

Summary

In this episode of "The Indy Author Podcast," host Matty Dalrymple interviews Dr. Katherine Ramsland, a prominent forensic psychologist. Ramsland, who teaches at DeSales University, is an accomplished author with 72 books to her credit, including "The Serial Killer's Apprentice" and "How to Catch a Killer." Her extensive experience as an expert on over 200 crime documentaries and her role on shows like "Murder House Flip" and "Confession of a Serial Killer: BTK" makes her a highly respected figure in the field.

Introduction to Forensic Psychology:
Ramsland explains that forensic psychology lies at the intersection of psychology and the legal system. Forensic psychologists typically analyze competency for courtroom cases, assess mental states at the time of offenses, and develop prison programs. They apply principles from social, clinical, and cognitive psychology to the legal system. Unlike criminologists who focus on trend analysis and crime prevention from a sociological perspective, forensic psychologists deal with individual behaviors and mental states related to crimes.

Common Misconceptions in Forensic Psychology:
Ramsland identifies several common mistakes that writers make when depicting forensic psychologists in fiction.

1. Profiling Misconception:
   Contrary to popular belief, forensic psychologists are not primarily profilers. Profiling involves analyzing crime scene behaviors to understand the type of person who might commit a crime, rather than displacing detectives in investigations. Ramsland highlights that detectives, with their extensive training and experience, do not necessarily rely on profilers, and the portrayal of forensic psychologists as superior to detectives in profiling is both inaccurate and insulting.

2. Crime Scene Involvement:
   Forensic psychologists typically do not visit crime scenes to catch killers. Their role is more consultative, often analyzing crime scene photos rather than being physically present at the scenes. Ramsland emphasizes the unrealistic nature of depictions where forensic psychologists are shown tramping through crime scenes or exhuming bodies.

3. Profiling Individuals:
   The notion of profiling individuals, as popularized by shows like "Criminal Minds," is misleading. Instead, forensic psychologists analyze behavioral clues from crime scenes to understand the type of person who could commit the crime. This approach focuses on crime scene analysis rather than reading or profiling individuals.

4. Interrogating Suspects:
   Forensic psychologists do not conduct suspect interrogations. Their role may involve consulting on behavioral strategies but not directly engaging in interrogation processes. Misrepresentations include the idea that psychologists have special insights into detecting deception, which is not supported by research.

5. Courtroom Therapy and Hypnosis:
   Depictions of forensic psychologists conducting therapy or hypnosis in courtrooms are highly inaccurate. Ramsland explains that their courtroom role is either to analyze and provide expert opinions or to clarify complex psychological concepts to the jury or judge. Hypnosis, once a common investigative tool, is now largely discredited due to its unreliability in producing accurate memories.

6. Sane or Insane Pronouncements:
   Forensic psychologists do not have the authority to declare a defendant sane or insane. Insanity is a legal term, and the decision is made by the trier of fact (judge or jury), not by mental health experts. Psychologists can provide insights into a defendant's state of mind but do not make legal determinations.

7. Predicting Future Violence:
   The ability of forensic psychologists to predict long-term violent behavior is limited and relies on standardized tools assessing various risk factors. Predictive accuracy diminishes with time, and changes in a person’s life circumstances can invalidate earlier predictions. Ramsland stresses the importance of adhering to best practice standards to avoid liability for future violent acts committed by released individuals.

Impact of Social Media on Forensic Psychology:
Ramsland discusses how social media has become a vital tool in forensic psychology, providing insights into individuals' behaviors and potential threats. Social media activity can be crucial in assessing imminent threats and preventing violent acts.

Conclusion:
The episode includes Ramsland sharing insights into her crime fiction series featuring Annie Hunter, a forensic psychologist. By integrating real-life forensic techniques and maintaining accuracy, Ramsland enhances the credibility and intrigue of her stories. The discussion provides valuable guidance for writers aiming to create authentic and engaging crime fiction, while also highlighting the complexities and ethical considerations inherent in forensic psychology.

Transcript

Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Katherine Ramsland. Hey, Katherine, how are you doing?

Katherine: I'm doing well, thank you. Thanks for having me.

Meet Katherine Ramsland

Matty: I am pleased to have you here and to give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you. Dr. Katherine Ramsland teaches forensic psychology and behavioral criminology in the graduate program at DeSales University, where she is Professor Emerita.

She's appeared as an expert on more than 200 crime documentaries and was an executive producer on "Murder House Flip" and A&E's "Confession of a Serial Killer: BTK." The author of 72 books, including "The Serial Killer's Apprentice" and "How to Catch a Killer," she pens a regular blog for Psychology Today.

She's also written a crime fiction series based on a female forensic psychologist, Annie Hunter, who consults on death investigations. I invited Katherine on the podcast because I ran into her at the Mechanicsburg Mystery Bookshop's I Scream for Mysteries event. As I had told her, I tried to go to one of her talks at a conference one year, and it was full. It was beyond standing room only when I showed up, so I was not able to hear her. I'm fascinated by what she does, and we're going to be talking about mistakes writers make about forensic psychology.

What is Forensic Psychology?

Matty: It's probably useful to provide a little more context and just talk a little bit about what a forensic psychologist is and what their role is before we dive into some of the things about what their role is not.

Katherine: Okay. Forensic psychology is where the court and investigative systems interact with psychology, and most forensic psychologists are clinical psychologists. They are there to analyze for competency for the courtroom or mental state at the time of the offense, or prison programs. Quite often, they're there to apply concepts from social, clinical, and cognitive psychology to the court system.

Criminologists, who are often confused with forensic psychologists, approach crime through a sociological frame. They're looking at trend analysis, trying to look at the factors that elicit crimes, cause crimes, and trying to contain or prevent crimes. Criminalists are people working with the physical evidence, and criminal psychologists, a subset of forensic psychology, study things like motive and offender behavior pre-crime, post-crime, and things like that. Forensic psychology itself is a broad, sweeping subject area with many different aspects to it.
Mistake #1: "Forensic psychologists are used as profilers because detectives can’t do this work."

Matty: So we're going to dive right in with the first one, which is they're used as profilers because detectives can't do this work.

Katherine: So, I want to put some context in this. When I was doing an MFA fairly recently, as one of my graduate degrees, I read a lot of crime fiction, specifically with female protagonists, British and American. Because there's a lot of forensic psychology that comes into these novels, I was very surprised to find out so many people thought that's about all they do is profiling.

And that really limits the range of things that a forensic psychologist can actually talk about or consult on. There was also this idea that they were better at it than detectives, and some of the crime shows do this as well, the fiction shows. The detectives have lots of experience, they often get training, and often they don't even think the idea of profiling is very helpful, because they're looking at investigative things that aren't really about personality issues and motivation. So, the idea that a forensic psychologist can come in as a profiler and in some way displace the detective is, first of all, insulting, and secondly, it just doesn't work that way. It just doesn't work that way.

Now, in England, they operate as, I think it's called behavioral investigative analysts. And they are consultants, but again, they don't displace detectives in any way.

Matty: Well, it is nice to hear that if someone's writing a book or a series with a detective protagonist, they don't have to shy away from this. Normally when we hear from experts, they say, you know, you really shouldn't be doing this, but here's a case where you're saying, here's an opportunity that people aren't really taking advantage of, because a detective can have a wider scope of responsibility than maybe people think.

Katherine: Yeah, and forensic psychologists have a much greater range of skills and abilities than they're given credit for in some of the crime fiction, in a lot of the crime fiction, most of it.

Mistake #2: "They visit crime scenes to advise on catching a killer."

Matty: I have the feeling we're going to be hitting what some of those are in our conversation, but another mistake that you would call out that writers make is they visit crime scenes to advise on catching a killer. Talk about that a little bit.

Katherine: So, they're not there to catch a killer, that's the work of investigators. They are there, and then they don't visit the crime scenes. They may look at crime scene photos. They might visit at some point, but they're not on the scene. We've seen in movies where they'll get into the grave. That's, that was the one I thought was just crazy. They'll go, they'll just tramp right in through, go right to the body. These are not things that they do. They will consult. They often will never even look at crime scene photos. That's not necessarily what they're there to do. And so that's not really the point for them. They're not there to help catch a killer.

Matty: I'm going to be curious as we work through these Mistakes Writers Make lists that, since you yourself are writing fiction with a forensic psychologist, how did you accommodate the needs of entertaining fiction along with the reality that you're aware of in how these things actually work?

Katherine: Well, that is why my forensic psychologist, Annie Hunter, operates in a PI agency. So she has a team, and that cuts through a lot of the... so she has a PI who goes to do the research. She has a data analyst. She has a range of consultants, as I have, doing the kind of work I do. She's a suicidologist, as I also am. I consult with coroners and medical examiners. I have trained police officers. So I give her the same things that I have as access to other professionals who come in and help cut through some of the timing aspects. I try to keep it pretty accurate. I don't have the same problems with having to wait on crime labs, you know, because we're doing psychology here. So if she's consulting, or sometimes she'll take on a case just because it's of interest to her, or she has something, you know, like in the second novel, she lost a childhood friend to a guy who abducted her right in front of her, and it was never found. So that's her own case. That's her own personal agenda. She uses her team for that, and she's not held back by timing issues.

So there are things that you can do with forensic psychology, but you have to bring in these adjunct people who can do things. Like, I have a forensic meteorologist who assists with reading the geology and the weather factors, so Annie doesn't have to do that. But the great thing about having a team is they can go do the research and report back, so you don't have a lot of painstaking, "I did this, I did this, I did this," and it is told from a first-person perspective because she is a lot like me. But when you use these adjunct experts, much of that work is taken care of so you can attend to the suspense and the plot.

Matty: That seems like another good opportunity for people, not something to hold them back, but something to take advantage of. Because if you do have this team of people, then it takes care of some of these situations where you have a solo practitioner, and they're doing these things, and sometimes they're these very labored ways that, like, it's the point of view character they're trying to... what they're learning with the reader. But if you have a team of people like you're describing, then it's very natural, it's just a natural part of their interaction that they're describing what they found out or what their theories are, what investigation they've done. And I think that feels more natural, but it's also fun for a reader to kind of eavesdrop on.

Katherine: It is, and you put it into conversations, you can introduce new characters, unusual characters. You know, what are you doing with this drone? How does this work? How can we use a cadaver dog with that? So, and these are all based on things that I've done. Some of the characters are based on people I know, so that actually helps with the sense of reality. But at the same time, I understand you need the suspense, you need the build-up and whatnot. So I build in that. That is not something most forensic psychologists face, but because she runs a PI agency and it's called the Nutcrackers because they take on hard nuts to crack. So she always has really twisty cases, but they're based on real cases. That really are twisty in bizarre ways, and that's the fun of it.

Matty: Well, I have to ask a question that was not on your Mistakes Writers Make list, which is how much do you feel like you have to change the facts of an actual case for the purposes of your fiction work?

Katherine: The cases I use are not well known, so that helps. And then I change names. I'll change the nature of certain relationships. Place, dates, I'll shift that, but I'll keep the gist of the case pretty much intact, and that doesn't violate anything. It doesn't violate privacy. It doesn't, you know, I'm not... all I'm doing is taking a really bizarre case, because they always are strange, and putting it in a different context. And creating characters that grow organically from that context that can present the case, and then Annie gets into it. This is part of my MFA work because I had already had a number of other master's degrees. My MFA supervisors were able to do this with me, but what I presented was narrative non-fiction, but inject my fiction characters into it. So I used the exercises in the MFA program to put my characters in motion in real cases that I knew about or that I'd been involved in. So I kind of had that going for me when I was doing that work, not knowing that I was going to then make this into a fiction series. It was really more of an exercise for me and now, you know, it grew into something, but it always was based on actual cases. And I would typically change dates, names, and locations.

Matty: And did you say that these were less well known, these were just cases that you came across in the process of your professional life?

Katherine: Mostly, I mean, there is one that got national attention, but I changed the names and I injected people into it that hadn't been part of it. But mostly I will try to find cases that aren't well known. That's the nice thing about being in the forensic world in a professional context is that I find and I hear about cases that the general public just never will have, they'll never hear about it. And even if they try looking them up, they probably can't.

Matty: About forensic meteorology, I think is what you said, was interesting to me because I'm a big aviation nerd and I have to say that I watch an embarrassingly large number of aviation accident investigations on YouTube. And it's interesting because there is always this aspect like at the time of the accident, you know, there was a scattered cloud layer at 1,000 feet. I never thought of that as being like a specific sort of expertise area, which is, I'm assuming what you mean by forensic meteorology.

Katherine: It is an expertise area. I always have weather in my novels because I love weather, and I think weather is a great character. So the first one has a hurricane, the second one has a tornado, and the third one has a snowstorm. And of course, forensic meteorology will figure into when you find bodies in these weather situations, they bring in expertise for that. But in particular, in the second novel, there was a device that was invented recently for looking at, you know, with a drone, getting sensor readings from trees, and how they would have sucked up nutrients from the soil, and if there were a body buried, it would show up in different foliage colors. Typically, you need the sensor to see it. It's not that visible to the human eye, so she comes in with her drone, and what she needs is Annie Hunter's access to cadaver dogs to corroborate. So it became a really fun scene, introducing her story, and then having that all in motion for what they needed to do. And then the meteorologist ended up in the third book because she, at the end of the second one, she says, "Oh, I found this case of someone who was killed in a tornado, and it looks like it wasn't an accident." So the weather figures into that. And that sets me up for the third one.

Matty: That's very cool. Yeah. I can imagine that the nutrients from the body are reflected in the trees in some way. It could not only be good for crime fiction, but also there's kind of like a fantasy-esque aspect there. I think that people who write fantasy as well are going to be intrigued by that. Like, that's a pretty cool idea.

Katherine: Yeah. And it's complicated because animals die too in the woods. So, hence the cadaver dogs, because they're specialists in human scent.

Matty: Yeah. It's very interesting. The timing of this is nice because I just interviewed Kathleen Donnelly about mistakes writers make about working canines. And part of the conversation was about search and rescue dogs and exactly what you're saying, you know, how do you train a dog to alert on human remains, but not chipmunk remains, for example.

Katherine: Yeah, and I worked with someone who did that, and we did several... I was on an exhumation team, so we did several searches with human
Here is the corrected text with improved readability:

Mistake #3: They profile a person.

Matty: Yeah, that's very interesting. One of the other things that you had sent as a mistake people make, which I think really goes to kind of probably the heart of a lot of what forensic psychology addresses, is that a mistake is that they profile a person. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Katherine: Yeah, they're not there to profile a person. The notion of that is like reading behavior, and typically that's about trying to do threat assessment, something like that. They're not there to, that's not what profiling is. Profiling is about what are the behavioral clues at a crime scene or series of crime scenes that we can try to figure out the type of person who would do this.

So you're focused on crime investigation and crime scene analysis, not reading a person, or you don't form a profile like a blueprint. It's not a blueprint against which you measure people, but that's a common misunderstanding in crime fiction and in crime shows. They'll say things like, he doesn't fit the profile, like, there isn't a profile of this. There's no profile of a serial killer. It's profiling the crime scene to see the kind of person who would do this. It's a very different concept, but there is a confusion, and part of it I will blame the show "Criminal Minds" for, because they used to misuse that concept of, you know, one would come in all tired, "Don't profile me," like, that isn't, that is not what we're talking about, you know, looking at you and trying to figure you out, that's not it at all.

Matty: So, can you describe, just walk through a scenario where the forensic psychologist is looking at the data that's appropriate for their role to be looking at and what kind of information they would and would not be sharing with the investigative team?

Katherine: Okay, well, a suicidologist, like my person, is going to be looking at antecedent behavior. They're going to be specifically looking for state of mind evidence to support or refute the possibility that a death scene is a suicide, and that follows something called the Nash classification: natural, accident, suicide, or homicide.

And if you can't figure out one of those classifications because the circumstances are too ambiguous and they can go more than one way, the forensic psychologist can do a mental state analysis to see what is the probability, based on everything we know, that this person was suicidal. And they're also going to be looking for signals to a staged kind of death incident. So, somebody killed the person and wants to make it look like an accident or suicide. What are some of the indicators that this is, in fact, staged? So, that's what a forensic psychologist could do. They would do what's called a psychological autopsy. And if they don't find a good sense that this person clearly had suicidal intent, or suicidal background, or ideation, they're going to suggest this is an indication that you should be looking in a different direction.

Matty: And that's focused specifically on the individual as opposed to, like, the physical circumstances of the death?

Katherine: You're, no, you're certainly looking at the physical circumstances, because that's the start of it. You're looking, victimology is the collection of facts about the death incident. You're not calling it a crime because you don't know what it is, so where was the person found? You know, what disposition were they found in? How did they die? So, you want cause and effect and mechanism of death. The Nash classification is manner of death, and so you want as much information as possible, but the psychologist is trained to ask people questions specific to suicidal state of mind and to look for signals, because there's a lot of myths out there in society about suicidal people. The suicidologist knows those myths, knows what to look for, and knows when it looks like we might have a staged crime.

Matty: Are there common pitfalls that a killer falls into either in real life or in the fictional world where they're acting on what they think is going to be an effective way of making a death look like a suicide when in fact what they're doing is counter to what a suicidologist would know to be more likely?

Katherine: Yeah, suicide notes are a good giveaway. My character Annie Hunter talks a lot about this because I've done suicide note studies specific to authentic versus faked suicide notes, and there are signals in faked suicide notes. When a killer has written one, they typically follow one of the myths or make a mistake about the decedent and just do odd things. Like, one killer had typed the suicide note. The woman, the decedent, always handwrote everything. She had nothing in her home on which to type anything, and she kept handwritten journals and whatnot. Also, he says something in the note about her new love and she didn't have anybody in her life, and everybody who knew her knew that. So these are all signals and errors that he had made. He assumed that if he staged the body right, the suicide note was going to be helpful. But a lot of people think suicide notes are always there, and they're not. They're only in about 25 percent of suicides, and when they are, they often are nothing like what you expect them to be. They're not explanations for why I do this. They're often instructions or other kinds of things. But people who are faking a suicide note make the wrong assumptions. And those who have studied suicide note content and format can see these things almost very quickly.

Matty: If a fiction writer is concerned about getting this right, are there resources they can go to, to see examples of actual suicide notes?

Katherine: Sure. The study I did is in a book called "The Psychology of Death Investigation." I did that with a coroner where we studied the suicide notes that he had collected over several years. And then we went to a person, the only person in the world who has a database for looking at content in a digital manner. So we had used some of her work as well. So that's right there in that book. You can find them on the internet if you just look up "suicide note," but you're not going to necessarily know the fake ones in terms of what's the difference. You'd have to look at a study like mine to know that. And also there are whole books devoted strictly to the analysis of suicide notes. So they're out there, you just have to go find them.

Mistake #4: They interrogate suspects.

Matty: Another mistake that you had called out that writers often make is that they interrogate suspects. Can you talk a little bit about what you've seen and what the truth is there?

Katherine: This is the notion, I think, that psychologists have some special insight on deception detection. Unless they're really trained well and have done a lot of research on it, they're no better, and neither are detectives, any better than the average person in seeing if somebody's lying. So sometimes you'll see a psychologist being put in place because a detective has just come up short.

So now they need to have the psychologist come in and do the interrogation and get the confession. And that just wouldn't happen. That's fraught with ethical issues and concerns, privacy issues that psychologists don't do that. Now, they might consult on, "Here's the behavior we see. This might be the best approach to this person. Here are some ideas for a strategy." They might do that, but they're not going in there and taking over the interrogation.

Matty: It is interesting when you think about, you know, you hear these things like if people look up and to the left, it means they're lying and things like that.

Katherine: Don't get me started.

Matty: Oh, I'm here to get you started.

Katherine: Exactly where that came from, and that's just silly. And what we do know about deception, there's been some great research on it. Again, this is available, but typically you have to do a search on Google Scholar to get these because they are academic articles.

But we do know that there aren't any clear signals to when someone's lying. You have to first study them for baseline behavior and then look at deviations, behaviors that deviate from that. And that's not necessarily, again, about deception. But those are red flags to now follow further investigation. It's not as simple as it seems. People, I know that detectives are trained on simple formulas, I know that they are, but those are misleading and get them into trouble, actually.

Matty: Have you ever encountered in real life or addressed in your fiction the scenario where an investigator has a feeling about, "I just knew he was lying," and now you have to resolve this into like a viable legal procedure to pursue whether the person is lying or not?

Katherine: Well, I often hear detectives say, "I'm the best lie detector there is." I hear that a lot, but the research doesn't support it. There are two groups that are, in fact, good at deception detection. Secret Service officers, because they're vigilant about that at all times, and gamblers. They are much better than detectives, psychologists, or judges, or parents, for that matter.

Matty: Now, do you think the Secret Service is good because they're picked because they display that ability, or do you...

Katherine: There's certainly ability, but there's training. There is also training, and they do turn up better on the research than other groups, but detectives don't. And the unfortunate thing is if you're too confident of your ability to do that, you can develop tunnel vision, confirmation bias, you know, all the cognitive error pitfalls because you're so confident of your ability, and that can be a problem. But you can turn that clearly into a character trait. It's called high need for closure, and we know a lot about that in the field of psychology. The kind of person who needs that closure and believes in themselves too much can help lead the plot.

Matty: Yeah, I think an interesting companion episode to this conversation would be, I had a conversation with Tiffany Yates Martin, who's an editor, about the pitfalls of magical knowing, and we talked about this idea that our theory was that when fiction writers get themselves into a jam, they sometimes fall back on this, "I just knew it, I just knew that she was lying," or "I just knew that he was such and such," and that oftentimes if you can step back from it a little bit, you can see that there's a much more interesting way of addressing that than, "I just had a feeling," which is a little bit unsatisfying, I think, for a reader.

Katherine: Yeah, and an honest investigator is going to know they can be duped, they can be mistaken, and they are more vigilant to that, and that's more helpful to an investigation.

Mistake #5: They undertake hypnosis or therapy in the courtroom.

Matty: This one was a very interesting one. You said one of the mistakes that you see writers making is that the characters, the forensic psychologists, undertake hypnosis or therapy in the courtroom. Talk about where you see that and why that's a no-no. Which I can understand. Just on the surface of that, that seems suspicious.

Katherine: I saw that in a James Patterson novel. As soon as that happened, I went, oh my God, no, that would never happen. And, you know, his fallback is, it's fiction. You can make it up. Well, you can, and you can do all the things that I'm saying are errors. But I'm saying you can stay true to the way it's done and still write good fiction. You don't have to do something like that. But when a psychologist goes into the courtroom, they're there for typically one of two reasons. Either they have been called upon to analyze, so they are experts to criticize the defendant and provide an opinion on their behavior, mental state, etc. Or they're there as experts to explain difficult concepts to the trier of fact, the jury or judge, depending on what kind of trial you have. So, they're not there to be therapists, they're not there to be advocates for the defendant in any way. And they're not there to demonstrate a methodology on a defendant without anyone knowing what the potential outcome might be. That isn't the way our courtrooms operate. Yes, there's surprise factors, great, but anyone who knows how this is done would stop reading immediately. This is horrible. And especially with hypnosis, it's not even allowed in the courtroom in most of the states. In this country, it's not allowed as part of the case. It used to be, but they have found that hypnosis is highly unreliable, and it plants false memories. I think it's only in New Mexico right now that allows it in a limited context. But if somebody were to do that in the courtroom, for me, as a reader, it's over.

Matty: Yeah. I feel like I see the whole hypnosis thing in the last, I don't know, five years or something like that. I see it more often as something that happens in an unauthorized manner. And then suddenly the investigators are faced with a situation where what they thought was a reliable witness or reliable story has suddenly been called into question because a person, like on their own, went and sought hypnosis or something like that. And now the things that the investigators were relying on that person to testify to, they can't rely on them anymore because they've muddied the water with the hypnosis.

Katherine: Now, there was a training program for law enforcement during the 1980s into the 90s, and Texas was a leader in this, investigative hypnosis. They used it a lot. They trained police officers in it, they trained prison psychologists in it, believing that it was giving them the truth about someone's memory. And now we have a lot more research showing that it just isn't as reliable. And if you're going to use it, there is one case, I think it's Hurd v. New Jersey, that puts the safeguards, shows if you're going to do it, you have to do it in this particular way. And if you do it outside that, then everything that you bring to the case is now suspect.

Matty: You know, one thing. This is not on any of your lists, but it just struck me, because this is a question I wonder about. Right after something happens, when the police interview someone, you know, it's just happened, it's fresh in their minds, and they're going to give us a story about what happened, a true story, perhaps, about what happened from their perspective. And then, you know, maybe the police come back a week later and they ask them again, and a month later and they ask them again. Maybe the thing goes to trial a year later, and they're being asked to answer the question again. And I always thought that if I were in that position of being a witness, let's say, that I would believe that my memory of what happened right after the incident was going to be as fresh as it was going to be, as fresh and as accurate as it was going to be. And I would just keep saying that same story, not because I was trying to pull the wool over anybody's eyes, but because I would believe that I was being most accurate by just repeating what I originally said. But you don't see that like in real life and in fiction. You always see people's stories changing over time.

Katherine: You have so much faith in human memory, that what you are repeating, you think, is the same. But I think you would find out it likely has shifted a bit, especially if you've been told, "Oh, that's great, you're doing a good job." Because one of the best stories to demonstrate the problems of memory is the Jennifer Thompson-Ronald Cotton case, where she picked him out as her rapist. She was a young white woman; he was a black man. She was very articulate, she really wanted to do this right. The cops had already picked him out as their chief suspect. Terrible reasons. And they kept, you know, "Atta girl, you're doing great." The more they did that, the more confident she became in her memory. She kept telling the same story, but she became more confident, more confident, and then she picked him. He did look very much like the actual rapist, which she found out later. Ronald Cotton was convicted, went to prison for a lot of years, and then DNA exonerated him. She was horrified. Horrifying. They wrote a book called "Picking Cotton," which I thought was the greatest title for that, and they go around talking about this terrible mistake she made. A lot of it had to do with the way the police handled her, and the fact that they had made up their minds about him and didn't believe any of his alibi witnesses because they already had decided he was the guy, and they subtly manipulated her memory without her realizing over the course of preparation for trial. So that when she saw, and the most interesting part of this, when she found out who the real rapist was, her memory stuck with Ronald Cotton's face. Even though she knew it wasn't him, her memory stuck with him. And that's important. I think memory is such a malleable thing that people should educate themselves on the way memory works. You may really want to do the right thing, you may want to say the same thing over and over as you just said, but over the course of a year, maybe two years before it finally gets to trial, it's very likely you are not going to say the exact same thing you said on the day of the incident.

Matty: Yeah, if I were putting together a list of book ideas, if I needed that, I'd already have like six or seven from our conversation.

Mistake #6: Forensic psychologists pronounce defendants to be sane or insane.

Matty: Another mistake that you called out that writers make is that forensic psychologists pronounce defendants to be sane or insane.

Katherine: Yeah, people really confuse the idea of psychosis and insanity. During the 19th century, medical insanity was psychosis, different forms of psychosis, delusional disorders, schizophrenia, things like that. Over the course of it coming into the courtrooms, it has become a legal term, and it's very specific, and different states have different insanity standards.

But it is specific to whether the person has a disease or defect that prevents them from understanding that what they did was wrong. It gets complicated, but at any rate, it is for the trier of fact to decide if the person is sane or insane, not guilty by reason of insanity. It is not for the mental health expert to say it. They can talk about state of mind, psychotic features, diagnoses, but they're not there to pronounce the legal rendering. Insanity is a legal term. They're not supposed to address the ultimate issue for the courtroom.

Mistake #7: Forensic psychologists can accurately predict long-range future violent behavior without standardized tools.

Matty: And I think that the last question I wanted to ask about was the mistake writers make which is forensic psychologists can accurately predict long-range future violent behavior without standardized tools. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Katherine: Yeah. We try, and everyone seems to think that psychologists have a special insight into whether someone would be violent in the future. And they don't, but there are tools to assist. For prediction, to a certain extent, as long as all the factors in that person's life stay the same, any change is going to throw that whole prediction off. So they use different domains: the person's past history of violence, substance abuse, their association with violent peers, their role models, you know, there's a number of things that they look at, but they need to do it with standardized instruments that have already been proven to give reliable results.

And because if they don't, they could be liable if the person is allowed to leave prison or go on parole, whatever, they could be liable for behavior that that person did if they don't follow best practice standards. But they can only predict so far in like maybe 72 hours from once they leave the clinic or the prison. Anything, there's so many different things that could happen in their lives, that we really can't go very far with this. So, that's their limitation, and they do try to convey that to judges and police officers and whatnot. If somebody's going to be released and that person becomes violent, does something terrible, it's really not on them. They did everything they could within best practice standards. Now, if they didn't do that, like, just sort of, my feeling about this guy is that a woman is that they're gonna, they're gonna be fine and they use their gut clinical instinct. That's, you know, something from the 1960s. And, and wrong quite often. Standardized instruments assist with making careful decisions and taking a lot of factors into account, not just your gut instinct about a person. So it's not just about clinical instinct. It is about using the best tools we have and knowing what the limitations are, and it's very difficult to do. It's probably the most difficult thing a forensic psychologist is called on to do.

Matty: Is the forensic psychologist usually a consultant that an investigative arm like the police department brings in, or are there circumstances where a police department would employ a forensic psychologist? What is the organizational relationship there?

Katherine: Usually it's only in very large departments that have the funds to be able to hire someone like that. What they will do is fitness for duty exams, post-incident stress disorders. I mean, they have a specific set of duties. They're not profilers. That's not what they're there for. They are there specific to the mental condition of the officers and the staff. They're a staff person, essentially, or they might work in a prison, something like that. They, however, might be called in by attorneys to do assessments. So that's how they might get into a case, and that's an entrepreneurial thing. It's not a job for them, but they might get into a case for that. So now they're clinical forensic psychologists. They might be called in as consultants, but not very often, because the FBI does offer services for free from their profiling program, and not many departments have the funds to pay someone. Now, I have done consulting as a quid pro quo. I get case details I can teach in my classes in exchange for consulting on some of the suicide cases that I've done.

So it really has a lot to do with what resources do they have? What is their need? I remember one officer called me and said, "Our chief wants us to call the FBI profilers, but give me your opinion, what would they really say about this case that we're working on?" I wouldn't be able to say very much about it because there's not much behavior there at this point. So that's what I thought. And, you know, so his instinct was right about it. The profilers aren't, you know, magical, larger-than-life geniuses who can come in and offer the most amazing opinions on a case. They have to always work with behavior. So a psychologist will typically develop relationships with the local police officers, but they're probably not going to be called in very often on cases because, you know, they don't really need... you know, you're not going to get these thorny cases that often. Now, what you may get are people who are out in the community, and they're not well cared for by our system. They might be homeless, or they might, you know, we, we at this point don't hold people who might become dangerous unless they're imminently a threat, like imminently a threat. Not just maybe they're a threat or they're voicing threats. They have to be an imminent danger to self or others in order to be held for observation for a certain period of time, usually two or three days.

So those people might blow up all... you know, have a fight with their family members. We had one guy who killed both of his parents and then went down to the police department, and they knew he was potentially violent, but they could not do anything because it wasn't imminently violent. It was an explosive incident that couldn't have been predicted. So in a case like that, a psychologist might be asked to give advice. How do you, how do we deal with this? Because our hands are tied in terms of bringing them in and enforcing them into an observation situation. We, we can't, we used to be able to do that, and many mistakes were made holding people against their will, and they weren't in danger of being violent. So, I'm teaching like two weeks' worth of class here in five minutes, but it's a very complex and thorny issue, and I think for writers it can, the potential is there for a lot of great plot points and character points.

Matty: I'm just curious as to how the role, how the job has changed with social media, because now there is so much more potential fodder for documentation of a person's behavior that wasn't there 10, 15, 20 years ago. Is examining somebody's social media persona considered a valid part of forensic psychology?

Katherine: Yes, it definitely is. Any behavior, any layer of behavior. Now, you're going to run into privacy issues, so they are going to have to be working with somebody with a warrant or, you know, some good reason why the social media is being examined, but any of that would be useful, certainly.

Matty: So if someone is putting something out, you know, videos on Facebook or whatever, is there a legal, like, "I need to get a search warrant" kind of thing about that? Or if it's put out there publicly, can any investigator take advantage of it?

Katherine: It's still that same imminent threat, imminent danger. Just because somebody's venting, or even showing themselves with guns or whatever, doesn't mean they're going to do something, and you can't just go in and stop them. But we have risk levels, like low, medium, high risk. If they have a date and they name the Columbine killers and they have a location and they start giving details about how they've prepared for it, their risk of acting out rises. And yes, the police can go and bring them in because now they are an imminent threat to someone: the school system, the workplace, their family, whatever. But they've demonstrated with sufficient detail that they are planning, and they're putting a plan into motion, and they have the means to do it, and they have the mental set to do it. And there have been a number of these mass shooters stopped because of their social media kinds of things. And we also have examples of some who could have been stopped had the police looked at their social media. Because it was right there, what they were going to do, and how they were going to do it. And we need police to be more trained in cyber investigation.

Matty: Yeah, I can imagine that that's a whole thorny issue that if you are looking with 20/20 hindsight at someone who's done something horrible and you look at their social media feed and you see them making threats, then it seems very obvious. But then if you look at the other 99 percent of the people who said exactly the same thing, made exactly the same threats, made exactly the same kind of video, that didn't do anything.

Katherine: It didn't, right? And that's the problem. And it takes a certain critical mass before you can act and justify your actions as warranted. And if somebody's calling the police saying, "Hey, I saw this guy posting on social media, he's got a grudge list, you know, I'm named on the grudge list, he's got guns, I've seen them," they can go in and do something about that. But just because someone's venting, and which we have a lot of now with our political situation, just because someone's venting and showing themselves trying to look powerful and whatnot, you know, there's not a lot they can do, and that's our laws that keep them from doing that. The civil rights of the people come, to some extent, before safety. You know, it's just, what's the balance? Public safety versus people's rights, individual rights. It's unclear. There is no formula for knowing when it's the right thing to do to go in and try to intervene.

Matty: Well, I'd say if any fiction writer was looking for crime fiction-related topics to address and we haven't given them about a dozen possible ideas for stories, then they're just not paying attention. So, Katherine, thank you so much. This was so interesting. I appreciate you talking about this so much, and please let everyone know where they can go to find out more about you and everything you do online.

Katherine: Okay, well, actually, my website is devoted to the crime fiction series that I'm writing, the Annie Hunter series. I set up a website specific to that. That's KatherineRamsland.net. My other books are more true crime and real forensics related, but you can find everything on Amazon pretty much. And actually, I have book number 73 done this week, and that's a book for my horse.
Matty: Well, that's fantastic. Congratulations on that because that is an astounding number, and to add another one, another book to that number, is very impressive.

Katherine: Thank you.

Matty: Thanks so much.

Matty Dalrymple 6/4/24 Matty Dalrymple 6/4/24

Episode 241 - Mistakes Writers Make About Working K-9s and How to Avoid Them with Kathleen Donnelly

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Kathleen Donnelly discusses MISTAKES WRITERS MAKE ABOUT WORKING K-9s AND HOW TO AVOID THEM, including whether a dog can track across water or track a person in a car; whether one scent can be disguised with another; what makes it difficult for a dog to track and how to evade tracking dogs (maybe); training rescue and human remains dogs; training the alert signal; identifying candidate dogs; when training starts; the role of the handler; what happens if a dog flunks out; the caveat that every agency is different; and how to get more information.

Award-winning author Kathleen Donnelly has been a handler for Sherlock Hounds Detection Canines—a Colorado-based narcotics K-9 company—since 2005. Her debut novel, CHASING JUSTICE, won the American Book Fest Best Book Award and a PenCraft Award, and it was a 2023 Silver Falchion finalist in the Suspense category and Readers’ Choice Award. She lives near the Colorado foothills with her husband and four-legged coworkers.

Episode Links

https://kathleendonnelly.com/
https://www.facebook.com/AuthorKathleenDonnelly
https://www.instagram.com/authorkathleendonnelly/
https://twitter.com/KatK9writer

Summary

Kathleen Donnelly, an award-winning author and experienced canine handler for Sherlock Hounds Detection Canines, shared her expertise on The Indy Author Podcast, discussing the intricacies of working with narcotics detection dogs and the common misconceptions about them in literature. This discussion was part of a series focusing on crime fiction writing, where experts talk about realistic portrayals of various professional fields.

Key Themes and Discussions:
1. Canine Training Variability: Donnelly emphasized the differences in training techniques across agencies, highlighting that while her dogs are play trained (rewarded with toys), others, like ATF dogs, might be food trained. This underscores the importance for writers to research specific agency practices to enhance the authenticity of their narratives.

2. Myths about Canine Tracking Abilities: She debunked popular myths about canine tracking, particularly the Hollywood portrayal of dogs losing scent trails in water. Contrary to this, Donnelly illustrated with examples that dogs can effectively track through water and even follow a scent after the tracked individual has taken a vehicle, a skill dependent on advanced training and the dog's capabilities.

3. Challenges in Canine Tracking: Tracking accuracy can be affected by environmental factors such as wind and urban settings, where scents can be dispersed unpredictably. Donnelly also discussed how heavy foot traffic can complicate tracking, but trained dogs can often handle these challenges.

4. Types of Work for Different Dog Breeds: The conversation touched on choosing appropriate breeds for different types of jobs. For instance, labs and beagles are often used in non-intimidating roles like bomb detection or searching for food at airports due to their friendly appearance, whereas breeds like German Shepherds or Malinois might be chosen for more aggressive roles.

5. Operational and Ethical Training Considerations: She covered the ethical considerations and legal boundaries of using detection dogs, especially in sensitive environments like schools, underlining the need to respect privacy and legal limits. Donnelly also mentioned that the Supreme Court rulings influence how and where dogs can be used, especially concerning personal searches.

Significant Data or Findings:
- Canines possess an extraordinary sense of smell, capable of distinguishing individual components within a complex scent profile, such as identifying drugs hidden among other strong odors like coffee, a fact that dispels another common myth.
- Advanced training techniques have evolved to meet operational needs, such as teaching dogs to continue tracking even after a subject enters a vehicle, which historically would end the trail.

Overall Implications and Conclusions:
The discussion highlighted the complexity and depth of training and deploying detection dogs, pointing out the need for rigorous training regimes tailored to specific operational goals. For writers, this translates into a necessity for detailed research to portray these animals realistically in crime fiction. Donnelly’s insights serve as a crucial resource for understanding the nuances of canine behavior and training, providing rich material for enhancing narrative authenticity.

Notable Quote:
Kathleen Donnelly pointed out, "If you really want the dog to miss something, you need to pay off the handler," humorously hinting at the dogs' infallible nature unless human error—or manipulation—intervenes. This reflects the high level of reliability in trained canines, making them invaluable in law enforcement and search and rescue operations.

Transcript

Matty: Hello and welcome to the Indie Author Podcast today. My guest is Kathleen Donnelly. Hey Kathleen, how are you doing?

Kathleen: Hey, I'm doing well. Thanks for having me today.

Meet Kathleen Donnelly

Matty: It is my pleasure. To give our listeners and viewers a bit of background on you, award-winning author Kathleen Donnelly has been a handler for Sherlock Hounds Detection Canines, a Colorado-based narcotics canine company, since 2005. Her debut novel "Chasing Justice" won the American Book Fest Best Book Award and a PenCraft Award. It was also the 2023 Silver Faus finalist in the suspense category and won a Reader's Choice Award. She lives near the Colorado foothills with her husband and four-legged coworkers. I recently interviewed Kathleen for my video series, "What I Learned," where she shared some of the lessons from her novel, "Killer Secrets," that she'd like to share with her fellow readers and writers.

Matty: As we talked, I realized Kathleen would be a perfect addition to my informal mini-series for everyone who reads or writes crime fiction, mistakes writers make, and how to avoid them. In the past, I've chatted with experts about firearms, police procedure, coroners, first responders, the FBI, PIs, forensic psychiatry, police roles, bladed weapons, and firefighters.

Matty: Kathleen is going to add to that list by talking about mistakes writers make about canines and how to avoid them. Any conversation about canines is good with me, so I think this is going to be super fun. Kathleen, you and I were chatting a bit before we started recording, and you mentioned there was a caveat you wanted to add to what we were going to discuss. Did you want to share that?

Every agency is different

Kathleen: Sure, I'll kick off with that because I've realized over the years as I've talked to writers about canines, who are trying to research and get it right, is that every agency is a little different. For example, I play train my dogs, which means they get a toy as a reward, whereas the ATF food trains. That's just one example of many where, if you're researching for your book and you want to expand on it, you should reach out to each individual agency you want to use. If you're going to use the ATF, reach out to them and find out how they train their dogs and just things like that. This will be a great way to give you some starting points and some great questions to be able to reach out to those agencies and find out.

Matty: And within an agency like the ATF, is that the standard, like, if you're writing something about ATF, can you assume that's the approach you take, or would different branches of the ATF perhaps use different procedures?

Kathleen: You know, that's a great question. And that's a great example of where I'm not a hundred percent certain because the bomb dogs are the ones that are for sure food trained, but I believe the ATF also has some dual-purpose dogs, meaning those dogs have more than one job. So usually that includes apprehension. For a bomb dog, it could involve tracking.

And so those dogs might actually be trained differently. Usually, the apprehension dogs are trained based on their prey drive and that sort of thing. So that's a great example of figuring out what you want your dog to do, and then reaching out and seeing if you can connect with someone.

Matty: So, you had kindly sent me a list of some of the mistakes writers make that we're going to be talking about.

Can a dog track across water?

Matty: And the first one was a question I had asked you about during our conversation for "What I Learned," and that was: Can a fugitive cross a creek and have the dog not be able to follow them because the water masks the scent?

Kathleen: Yes, this is a good one. I'm going to pick on Hollywood because you see this all the time in movies where a fugitive runs down a creek bed and the dogs can't find them. That's absolutely not true. Dogs can track amazingly well through water. Our trainer once told me about a bloodhound he had in training. They were running a practice track and he instructed the person to run straight down the creek bed for maybe an eighth of a mile. It wasn't a huge distance, but it was significant. Then the person exited on the other side, and the dog followed the track perfectly.

He went in right where the person entered, followed down the creek bed, and interestingly, the dog dipped his nose into the water, scenting down in there before coming back up and exiting the creek right where the person did. So that was really amazing. It's definitely a myth that dogs can't track through water. In fact, there are cadaver dogs, or as I call them, human remains dogs, which we discussed a bit in "Killer Secrets." Some of these dogs are certified for water recovery. If there is a victim who has drowned, the dog will go out on a boat, lean over the side, and alert when they detect the person's scent. Divers then know roughly where to dive and recover the remains. It's amazing that dogs can detect scents through water and even from deep in a lake. So, that's definitely a myth.

Can a dog track a person in a car?

Matty: Yeah, the other thing that reminds me of, which makes sense to me, but I'm curious about your perspective on, is whether a dog can follow a scent to a certain point where it then disappears because the person got in a car and drove away. Is that true? In that case, would a scent trail just end suddenly or would it kind of peter out? How does that work?

Kathleen: That is another great question because I actually asked our trainer about that. You do hear about cases where the dog tracked to a point, then the person got in a vehicle, they left, and the track was over. Our trainer, who also worked as a deputy and a canine handler, told me that for a long time they just never trained the dogs to keep following that track.

So the dog would think, "Okay, this is what I'm trained to do. I get to the end of the track. There's the end." They're starting to realize they need to actually add into the training that the dog should continue following the track from a vehicle. So, it's not that they can't do it; it's more a matter of training. Bloodhounds, for example, would receive more of this type of training. They track for miles and miles. Their big floppy ears, when they put their nose down, help push the scent up into their noses, and their wrinkles hold the scent, allowing them to track for miles. I once read about a bloodhound that tracked for 130 miles following a kidnapping victim who had been picked up and driven away. They're certainly very capable of doing it. It's just a matter of ensuring the training supports it, and I believe that has changed. You're going to see more of that where dogs do follow tracks.

Matty: It does seem as if, at least, it would make sense to me, from a completely novice point of view, that the dog would reach the point where the person got into a vehicle, and then at least somehow indicate what direction the vehicle went in. You can imagine there would be all sorts of interesting tension to be built up on that. Now the investigator knows they headed west afterwards, and whether that's true or not true, knowing that's a possibility opens up some fun options.

What makes it difficult for a dog to track?

Kathleen: It does. It definitely does. Environmental factors, mostly wind, can make it hard for a dog to maintain a track. For instance, if a person is walking along a road, the scent might be blown onto the shoulder, making it harder for the dog to track accurately.

Another challenge is tracking in urban environments with heavy traffic. The airflow from vehicles can swirl around, scattering the scent and making it difficult for the dog to maintain the track. However, a good trainer will train dogs in these tough conditions so that they learn to sort through these challenges. They really are amazing. I've worked my dogs in windy conditions around vehicles to see if there's narcotics, and despite concerns about the wind direction, the dogs have always been spot on because we train in those situations. As a handler, you learn how to work through these challenges.

Another reason dogs might lose a track is if a lot of people walk over it, especially if the dogs are trained to find the hottest scent. For example, if someone unknown robbed a store and fled, the dog could track the most recent scent. As long as there isn’t a lot of foot traffic over the scent, the dog can successfully track it. I've heard stories of dogs tracking right to criminals' front doors.

Matty: So, that's what's fun about it when it comes to our books. We can add in as much conflict or make it as easy as we want, depending on what we need to happen in the story.

Kathleen: Exactly.

Matty: The whole idea that people are shown presenting some kind of article of clothing or something that belonged to the person they're trying to track, is that in fact how it works?

Kathleen: Yes, that's another method of tracking, called using a scent article. If, for example, someone was hiking in the mountains and didn't return, a jacket from their car might be used as a scent article to guide the dogs. You can keep having the dogs smell the scent article, and they can continue tracking it. There are essentially two different methods of tracking. In my books, I chose to make my fictional dog capable of both methods. In real life, most police agencies will have the dogs track the hottest scent, while most search and rescue teams will use a scent article. But for fiction and book purposes, I liked incorporating both methods. I even consulted a canine trainer from one of our local agencies, and he mentioned that he has used both methods with his law enforcement dogs, depending on the dog.

Training Rescue and Human Remains Dogs

Matty: It's interesting you were talking earlier about human remains dogs. I've always been curious about whether these dogs, if they were sent to an earthquake zone or a similar disaster area and it was assumed to be a recovery effort, would respond if they encountered a person still alive. Do the dogs react to that at all?

Kathleen: That's a great question. I believe they would. Many of those dogs, such as FEMA dogs, are trained to detect both live scents—people who are still alive—and deceased individuals. They train the dogs this way because the goal is to find everyone, and certainly, finding someone who's still alive is an amazing outcome.

A lot of the true cadaver dogs, or human remains dogs, vary depending on the agency. I was discussing this with my friend who helps me with "Killer Secrets," and she mentioned that it also depends on whether they are being used for law enforcement purposes, where you might have to testify in court. In those cases, they try to keep the dogs primarily trained to find just human remains.

That being said, I think the dogs know what they are tracking and what they are trying to find. It's certainly a possibility that they could detect live humans as well during their searches. I wouldn't rule it out. But definitely, the rescue recovery dogs—those working in situations like 9/11 or any FEMA operation—are trained to detect both live people and deceased remains.

Matty: And do you know how they train cadaver dogs?

Kathleen: I do. It varies. Our trainer in Oklahoma told me about his experiences. He used to go to the local hospital, where they knew he was a dog trainer. He would tell them what he needed, and they would give him items like bloody gauze or even some fingers and other things like that.

He mentioned once driving home, thinking about everything he had in his trunk, and realizing he would have a lot of explaining to do if he got pulled over.

Matty: That right there is a story. If anyone's searching for a story to write, there you go.

Kathleen: It is. It's part of what prompted "Killer Secrets," that story. But nowadays, things are different. He was probably training around 15-20 years ago when hospitals weren't so regulated.

Now, my understanding is you have to put in a special request. There are labs where you can get human remains like bone, tissue, blood—anything you're trying to teach the dog to find. When we pass away, our scent changes, so the remains will smell different whether we're alive or deceased. They need tissue from someone who is deceased, bones from someone who is deceased. You can apply for a special permit or regulation, get the materials, and then, you apparently need a separate freezer. Of course, you would want a separate freezer; you don't want that with your other stuff, but it's locked and marked specifically.

Matty: Yeah, and I realize it's not really like you could use roadkill or something like that, because you don't want to train the dog to find every dead chipmunk that happens to be in the bushes to the side of the path; it has to be very specific.

Kathleen: It does, and those would have a different odor. So, yes, you want to be sure they test. I would think when they certify, they're going to put out the human remains that the dog should be finding, and then maybe some things like roadkill, to make sure the dog is alerting on the correct thing. You could be affecting a case, a search and rescue operation, or a recovery operation.

So, those dogs really do have to be spot on.

Training the Alert Signal

Matty: When a dog alerts, is it the case that the trainer trains the dog to do a certain thing, or is it the trainer watching for a signal that's specific to that dog and just recognizing that that's the dog's way of alerting?

Kathleen: Great question. When the dogs are trying to find something, let's say drugs, their body language will change as they start catching an odor. This is true whether they're tracking a criminal, a human remains dog, or any other type of dog. We say they're "in odor." Their body language changes; they become more tense, their tails go up. It's something you have to get to know with each dog, but I can tell when my dogs are sniffing another dog or when they've found the scent of marijuana.

From there, once the dog is trained, you teach them how you want them to indicate. There are two types of alerts: passive and active. A passive alert could be the dog sitting or laying down. An active alert is where the dog will scratch. More and more, I don't see as many agencies using active alert dogs because it destroys evidence. We had some active alert dogs that left scratches on vehicles. Most of the time we found something, and it was like, "Well, you shouldn't have had marijuana at school, so you have to live with the scratches." But there was one time we didn't find anything, and we ended up paying for that car to be buffed out and repainted because the little dog who did that was quite an intense little lab and left quite a few scratches.

So, most of the time, my dogs are all passive alert now, especially in law enforcement, to make sure they're not scratching and messing up evidence. One of our trainers, who worked for the Colorado County Department and was a deputy, had her dog lay down to indicate he found evidence and sit to indicate he found narcotics. I thought that was just so amazing, so I stole that and put it in my book. The credit goes to her and her training because that was something I didn't know she did. I should ask her sometime.

Matty: How do you go about training the dog to recognize what you want them to be alerting on? For example, for drugs, are canines just trained for drugs generally or for a specific type of drug? I would think early on they would be excited about almost everything.

Kathleen: Yes, when you start training a young dog, there's always a phase where they get excited about everything and want their toys. They think, "Oh, I'll just alert here and maybe I'll get it."

Identifying Candidate Dogs

Kathleen: But to back up, we look for certain characteristics before we even start training. Those characteristics are extremely high energy. I always laugh when I test dogs that are supposed to be high energy, and I'm like, no, your dog is not high energy. Fetching the ball twice isn't good enough. We need a dog who will fetch it 20 times, or just hold the ball and catch their breath before you throw it for them again. That's the kind of dog we're looking for. They have to be comfortable with different floor surfaces and willing to get up on things like couches or tables. I'm sure when I tested different rescues, the people working there didn't like it because I'd be asking, "Are you willing to get up on this couch? Will you put your paws up on the table?" But we need them to be comfortable with that.

Once I know they will pass all those tests, I see if they have a high retrieve drive, if they are obsessed with their toy, and then I start teaching them that finding a specific odor means their toy will be there. For example, I might take some marijuana because it's a stinky odor and easy for them to start with. I associate the toy with the odor, making it easy at first: "Hey, go find it. Oh, there’s your toy right there." Then I gradually make it more challenging. They have to track the scent up high, down low, in grass, and in the wind—different environments until they learn to use their nose effectively.

Once they get that part down, then I start teaching them the indication, like they have to sit before getting their toy. I laugh because my older yellow lab, Willow, throughout her career, would act as if she was saying, "I know where it is. Just give me my toy." Legally, we need them to sit and indicate, which I always had to work on with her. At school, she’d sniff, look at me, and roll her eyes as if to say, "Fine, I’ll sit."

Matty: Be that way.

Kathleen: Exactly, she was the only one over the years who ever really thought that process through. It was really interesting. I even had her hips checked to make sure she wasn't sore, but no, she just knew she found it and should get her toy.

Matty: She was negotiating.

Kathleen: She was very much a negotiator. So that's an overview of the training process. There are a lot of different things involved, but that's the gist of it.

When Does Training Start?

Matty: And how old is a dog normally? Like, when would you start training a dog? And at what point would you feel like now, yes, this is a dog who can operate productively in a real-life scenario?

Kathleen: Yeah, so we always looked for them when they were about a year old, because by then their personalities and behavior are pretty much in place. If they have a high retrieve drive, they're probably always going to have a high retrieve drive. I went to a lot of rescues, because I always felt like those dogs ended up in a rescue because they're very difficult to live with.

So I'm laughing because I'm like, yeah, we have rules in our house because they are not easy to live with. But I have heard, for example, Boulder County Sheriff received a bloodhound puppy as a donation and they started him young. He just certified, I think he's a year and a half old now, and he just finished his certification. It sounds like his handler did lots of little games with him through puppyhood, but you don't always know if they're going to keep the characteristics you need. Some of them actually lose that retrieve drive. They calm down. You know, you always hear people say, "Oh, he's still acting like a puppy, but now he calmed down." Well, we don't want ours to calm down.

Matty: So do you not want them to calm down because they might be in a situation where they're going to need to keep going for a long time? Or is the fact of them being that energetic indicative of some deeper characteristic that's desirable for dogs doing this work?

Kathleen: Yeah, it's a little bit of both. It's the drive. It's when they're that energetic, they have really good drive. They have that prey drive. They just want to go out there and work, work, work, and do something. It is also indicative of how long they're going to be able to work. Now, that being said, even the most high-energy dogs are going to need a break. As their handler, you get to know them and you have to respect their limitations. But, I had a dog named Gracie, and she would just be working for an hour. I'd be like, "You need a break." And she'd look at me like, "No, I don’t." I'd make her take a 10-minute break.

And then she was right back out there like, "Okay." Most dogs aren't quite like that; she was a bit of an exception to the rule. Most of the dogs, you know, need breaks after 20, 30 minutes, at least for what we do, but yeah, you want that high prey drive.

Can One Scent Be Disguised with Another?

Matty: And, this is sort of looping back to an earlier point you made about using marijuana because it has a very distinctive odor. There's also this trope of packing drugs in coffee beans or something like that. Can you talk about that a bit? Is that a mistake writers make, or is it true?

Kathleen: You know, it is not true that you can hide it in coffee beans or anything like that. I always say, if you really want the dog to miss something, you need to pay off the handler. Because if you're writing a mystery and you want your dog to miss something, maybe the handler's not on the up and up, because we can mess up and pull them off a scent.

But dogs have an amazing olfactory system. When they smell, I always use the analogy: we walk into a pizza parlor, and we're like, "Oh, it smells like pizza." The dogs would walk in and be like, "Oh, I smell dough, flour, yeast," they smell all the ingredients in the dough individually. "I smell the sauce, I smell the cheese, I smell the pepperoni." So when you hide drugs in coffee, they would come up, smell the coffee, and be like, "I smell coffee. I smell meth. I'm going to alert." There's no way to cover up that odor. So that is a common myth.

It was really funny. We subscribed for years to a magazine called "High Times." There was an ad in there, and the reason we subscribed is we try to keep up on different stash containers because the dogs might alert and it's the human who misses it.

Kathleen: There are stash containers. "High Times" is an interesting magazine, and they had a lot of advertisements for different ways to stash drugs. We saw an ad once that said, "canine proof plastic bags." We thought, well, we got to order these. We have to see what's canine proof. So we ordered them and they came and my business partner and I were like, "This kind of just looks like Ziploc baggies, but let's see how canine proof they are."

We hid something in them and the dogs found it instantly. So, I hate to break it to anyone who bought those baggies and no, sorry "High Times," but they were not canine proof.

Matty: The distribution lists you must be on.

Kathleen: I know, I was like, I'm probably on some watch list. My husband always jokes that he hates going to the airport with me because I'm probably on some watch list.

Matty: Yeah,

Kathleen: Between the book research and the drug dogs, you know, he's certain.

How to Evade Tracking Dogs (Maybe)

Matty: Well, these questions about what can and can't throw a dog off a scent are interesting because I live in Chester County, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia, and a while ago there was a guy who escaped from a person in the area. He evaded the police for, I think, like two weeks. They would catch him on trail cams and things like that. He was spending some time in Longwood Gardens, which is a huge botanical garden in the area, and they did have dogs trying to track him. I thought, "Oh well, the dogs are on the case now, like how long is he going to be out there?" but he was still out there for a really long time, and I never heard anything about what the explanation was for how that happened, but if someone is a fugitive and they're trying to avoid the tracking dogs, do you have any tips for them on how they can do that?

Kathleen: I would say I wouldn't go in a straight line. I would be weaving around a lot. Try to make that dog really work, having to keep up with you. Maybe going over fences and back over, and it's not that the dogs can't track it, but you're just making them work harder. If you go in a straight line, that's much easier. They're just like, "Oh yeah, I got you. I'll be on it." You could, I have to think about how to say this, so you could even go up in a tree or something like that. Now the dogs will still find you. Your scent molecules will drop down. You shed skin cells; those are going to drop down. But if you stayed there and then left again before the dogs came, your scent pool might just be there. And they might think, "Oh, they're up here." So I need to stop here. And then that handler needs to cast the dog out again and get back on the track. Sometimes as a handler, I can tell you, it's just trying to figure out where to start.

So if they didn't know exactly where he was, the trail cams probably helped. My guess is if they caught him on the trail cam, they would be like, "Okay, let's at least take the dog there. See what we have going." And my other question would be, not knowing the case or the dogs or anything like that, is if it's in an area, again, with a lot of foot traffic, that can mess things up, but maybe it wasn't.

Matty: Yeah, not in this case. I really hope that somebody writes a book about it because it was fascinating. They even had video of him, you know, in retrospect, when they realized he was gone, they looked back at the video. His name was Cavalcante. I can't remember his first name, but they had video of him.

He climbed up, there was a brick wall, and he put his hands on one wall and his feet on the other, and he kind of Spider-Man'd up between the walls and then got on the roof and somehow from the roof got over the fence. It cracked me up because I kind of hope somebody in a position of authority hears this, but the law enforcement officer who was directing the whole search and rescue thing kept saying, "You know, this guy isn't smart. He thinks he's smart, but he's not." And I'm like, "Dude, don't say that because you've been looking for him now for 10 days and haven't found him." So if he's not smart, that's probably not the message you want to be sending out to people about the people who are trying to track him down. But it was fascinating.

I do think that it was dogs that eventually did help. I mean, I know there was a dog on the case when they did finally, you know, he had fallen asleep after two weeks on the run, he had fallen asleep and they happened upon him while he was actually sleeping. But it was a fascinating story. I hope somebody delves into more detail about that.

Kathleen: That does sound fascinating. And now that you said he went up on roofs and stuff like that, that would be, that's about as good as you're going to get. To not get rid of the scent, but make it harder. You're making it a lot harder on the dogs to track that scent.

Matty: Yeah,

Kathleen: Yeah,

Matty: Yeah, I guess it would be, yeah, well, I'm waiting for the book to come out. Maybe I'll start writing it myself.

Kathleen: You should go for it. I want to read your book on it.

Matty: We've been talking a lot about labs, but oftentimes you hear shepherds or shepherd mixes being dogs that are doing this, but then you also see, like, beagles at the airport sniffing baggage on the baggage carousel.

So, how do people match the breed of dog with the type of work that they want them to do?

Kathleen: That's a great question. So you really have to think about the job you want. And so, for instance, in our case, a drug dog could be a shepherd, it could be a Malinois, it could be a lab. I had a Russell Terrier, who was one of the best drug dogs I ever had.

Matty: I can believe that. As a person with a terrier, I believe that.

Kathleen: Oh, he was fantastic. I called him my undercover agent.

Matching Dog Breeds to Work Roles

Kathleen: He had more drug busts, and I don't know, I feel like it was just because he was that exceptional, but sometimes, too, I think people didn't take him seriously. And so then maybe they didn't see it.

It's just a terrier. But it really comes down to, in our case, we're going into schools and businesses and we want to be non-intimidating. So we have the labs, we have the terriers we've used over the years because, again, if you saw Sparky, you're not intimidated by him.

He was my little terrier, Sparky. But if you brought in a dog like the Malinois behind me on my book cover, all of a sudden you're a little more at attention, right? You're like, "Oh, I better stand a little straighter." That's a little more intimidating. That dog might bite me. That dog might be trained to do something like that.

So, law enforcement often has the more intimidating breeds because they need that. Because when they find someone who's been on the run for two weeks, they need a dog that is going to convince someone just to say, "Okay, never mind." And they need a dog who, when they do bite, is going to help them get control and make a suspect become compliant, because you're not deploying a dog to bite or apprehend someone unless something's really going wrong. Your average arrest is not going to have a dog hanging off of someone's arm. So when you think about the scale of what police officers use as far as just being in uniform and their presence to all the way up to an officer-involved shooting, the dogs are actually pretty high up on that scale.

And if you're deploying a dog, that officer is in a really dangerous situation, and it's not something you normally do. So you need the really intimidating dogs who are quite happy to go out and bite someone and hang on to that bite and help until they can get a suspect in handcuffs and everyone's safe.

So breeds really vary. I mean, you know, little Sparky, he thought he was tough, but he's not going to go out and take down a big criminal. But a Malinois will. So that is definitely something to research. A lot of bomb dogs are labs. And I think it's because they're out in public places. You see them at the Super Bowl.

You see them at our baseball games or football games, with the professional sports and they're in with the public. You want them to be non-intimidating. TSA, I've seen them use pointers, I've seen them use labs. The Beagles come into play a lot of times at airports for food.

They're really good at finding food. They're not always the best drug dogs, which is interesting to me, but they love finding food. They're little food hounds. So you see them a lot at customs, and you see them finding things coming in. You know, the USDA has pretty strict regulations about what can come into our country from other countries. They're right there, checking everything, making sure everyone's on the up and up. So yeah.

What Happens If a Dog Flunks Out?

Matty: And how about what happens when a dog flunks out of a program? What would cause that? And then what happens to that animal?

Kathleen: So we've had a couple flunkouts over the years. The first one we had was a border collie mix. He was smart enough to say he would check like 10 lockers. And you have to understand when we go into a school, we're probably going to check 500 lockers. I mean, it depends on how often they alert, but if you're just going through, you're checking a lot.

So he would check like 10, 20 lockers and then just say, "If you lost it, you should find it." So his nose was great, his drive was great, he just was like, "I don't need to keep working for something you lost."

Matty: That's interesting.

Kathleen: Yeah, I mean, you think of border collies as being kind of obsessively driven to work more and more. And that's why we thought when we found him, "Oh, this is going to be a great dog. He's a lab-border collie mix. He's got that border collie drive, you know, he's going to be fantastic." Well, he wasn't. So we found a home for him. He actually ended up living with our dog massage therapist who works on all our dogs.

So maybe he was the smartest out of everyone because he got to go live with her and probably got massages all the time. So he'd probably tell my dogs, "See how much smarter I was." And then we've had some that just couldn't handle the environment of a school. You go into a middle school and you have kids who get really excited to see dogs.

The Role of the Handler

Kathleen: One of the things I focus on, particularly during community outreach, is teaching kids how to properly approach a dog. The kids get really excited, they see my dogs, and they come running up. And I'm like, "Well, just stop. Let me teach you how to properly approach a dog you don't know, especially a working dog." We do allow the kids to pet our dogs. But our dogs have to handle that situation, which can be a lot of stress, and not every dog can handle it. So, we had another one flunk out. He never got aggressive; he was just scared. And I don't blame him; I told him middle schoolers can be scary.

Matty: I agree with that.

Kathleen: So, we found a home for him, and he was quite happy just being a dog. They do flunk out once in a while, but we've been pretty lucky over the years that most of them have worked out.

Matty: It's always interesting to see, every once in a while, I'll run across an article about service dogs, like seeing-eye dogs who don't make the cut, fail the bunny test or whatever, and then are offered for adoption as a pet. And I think that's probably the best-behaved pet you could get, except maybe they know how to open the refrigerator or something like that.

Kathleen: They are. We've had some interesting experiences with retired dogs because when they're working, part of the reason they can't just live in the house like a pet is because I can't scold them if they get up on the couch or check the counter—that's part of their training. So it's funny, we'll have people over for the holidays or something, and the family has even learned. The first time a dog jumped up, put his front paws on the counter, someone was ready to correct him, and I said, "Oh, good job! Good checking!" And then I said, "Okay, now leave it and let's go outside."

Kathleen: Because, you know, we even caught little Sparky. He was so funny. We learned that when he was retired and loose in the house, we had to push the chairs in at our table. Otherwise, he knew how to jump up on the chair, then onto the table. My husband came in one day and caught him trotting around the table, cleaning up crumbs. And then he saw my husband and froze, like "you don't see me."

Matty: Oh, he knew he was being naughty.

Kathleen: He knew. We had been working with him on, "You don't do this anymore." But, you know, when he was working, we were at a middle school dance and the drinks had been spiked. I put them up on the table, and he went down the table indicating, "This drink, this drink." Because we train our dogs to find alcohol, which is important since we work in schools, and he was like, "This drink is spiked, and this one, and this one." So, he had done that throughout his career and thought, "Well, why should this change?"

Matty: It's funny. It would be difficult to have him at a cocktail party. He'd be wanting to turn everybody in.

Kathleen: It was.

Matty: I also want to ask about the human side of this. So, in your circumstance where you're going to schools with a dog looking for drugs or alcohol, what training do the people have? Not specific to the dogs, but to the people in the environment. So, if you're searching lockers and there's a group of middle school kids hanging around and the dog alerts at a locker, how do you handle that situation as you manage the dynamics with the other people there?

Kathleen: There are a lot of factors. One is the handler has to go through a lot of certification and training just to work the dog. The second part of that certification and training is understanding what you can and can't do regarding Fourth Amendment rights within the school setting. For example, if there were a group of kids around hanging around the lockers, and this is specific to a school setting, so if anyone's using this video for research, I would probably wait for those kids to leave or I would go somewhere else. The reason for that is our dogs do not alert on people because the Supreme Court ruled that having a dog sniff and alert on a person is the same as a strip search. While our dogs can smell it on someone, and they might, I always used to joke Sparky would be like, "You."

Kathleen: And I could tell the schools, "Well, if you feel like checking some pockets, that might be a good kid to check." But that's up to the school. That's not up to me. So if there's a group of kids or it's a passing period, I just hang out and try to be visible. If there's a class out doing an activity in the hallway, I might just say hello, be visible, because again, that presence is meant to deter drugs, alcohol, and gunpowder in schools.

They see us, they hopefully think, "Oh, the dog was here. We should make good choices." That's what I always tell them: "Let's make better choices." And then I'll go to another part of the school that doesn't have anyone there, that's empty, and check lockers. I often have an administrator with me.

Navigating Legalities in Dog Handling Operations

Kathleen: So, if we do classrooms, the administrator will ask the students to leave the classroom and then we go in and check their belongings. Parking lots are always interesting because if a student parks on school grounds, that parking lot belongs to the school. So the Supreme Court has ruled that basically, you're renting that spot. If I have the right to come out and check vehicles, I might do random checks. For example, if someone says, 'We suspect a black truck,' okay, well, hopefully there's more than one black truck. If not, I'll just go check all the trucks in the parking lot.

There are a lot of different scenarios you get yourself into that you have to know the Fourth Amendment rights. And then those are great questions to ask if you're doing book research, because again, every agency is different. For instance, at the airport, if I had something on my person, those dogs probably are, I'm going to just assume, I don't know this 100 percent for certain, but I'm sure Homeland Security overrides any sort of, and, and we're willingly there.

Unlike kids that are mandated to go to school, that was part of the Supreme Court's decision with the searches and not allowing a dog to sniff a kid out of school is because they're legally forced to be there. At an airport, it's our choice to be there, right? We're going on vacation or we're flying to a writer's conference, wherever, and that was our choice.

We bought the ticket. We're in the security line. Those dogs, if you have something on your person, they're gonna alert on you. And then you're going to be taken away and searched. So there's a lot of different scenarios. And so I encourage writers out there to learn more about the Fourth Amendment cases that have gone to the Supreme Court concerning dogs, because there's actually been a few, especially for law enforcement.

And can you use a dog, like, could they just show up with a canine and check around my house if they thought I had a drug lab? The Supreme Court said, no, you can't do that. But it's a fascinating thing to read.

So it is important. That would be a great research question, depending again on what agency you're using, what you want to have happen. Is this a legal search? Is this an illegal search? And, you could certainly do an illegal one as a plot point to, you know, have the case thrown out or have a canine handler get fired or whatever you want to do with that.

Matty: Yeah, if all our books were about everybody following the letter of the law, they would be pretty boring books.

Kathleen: They would be, yeah. So it is kind of fun to play with that.

How to Get More Information for Writing About Working Dogs

Matty: So if someone is interested in researching this for their own book, are there any suggestions you have for how to go about this? Like, I always wanted to be the person that hid in the woods so that the dog could come look for me. I don't know if there's some qualification you need to be the person who goes and hides in the woods or gets buried under the snow or whatever.

Kathleen: Sure. What I would do is, first, figure out what agency you want, then go to their public information officer, assuming it's a law enforcement agency. If it's a private agency like ours, you can just reach out to me. I would go to the public information officer and say, "This is what I'm writing, is there a canine handler willing to talk to me?" Usually, canine handlers love talking about our dogs. We're so proud of our dogs and love telling stories. The only time I heard of a writer having any kind of a hard time finding a connection was TSA with the airports, and that probably just has to do with security. But when it comes to that, you could probably just get some basic dog information and use it if that's the agency you want to use in your book.

I'm also happy to help. On my website, KathleenDonnelly.com, people are welcome to reach out. I don't know everything about every type of working dog, but I could at least help someone get started. So if someone really was stuck, I would be happy to try to help them, but public information officers are great, and they can usually connect you with canine handlers, and it's a great way. In fact, I have a wonderful person I use for my books because my protagonist is a Forest Service law enforcement officer and canine handler, and it took me a while to find a real canine handler in a forest service, and it was through their public information office that I was able to connect with him.

Matty: So great. Well, Kathleen, thank you so much. I could talk about dogs for hours, but I appreciate the information you shared and please let everyone know where they can go to find out not only to contact you, to find out more about you and your books and everything you do online.

Kathleen: Thanks so much. The website is a great place to start. I also have a monthly newsletter and the signup is on the website. If you sign up, you get my free ebook called "Working Tales: The Stories Behind the Canines." I'm on social media, mostly Facebook and Instagram are great ways to connect. But otherwise, my newsletter and my website are fantastic.

Matty: Very good. Thank you so much.

Kathleen: Yeah, thank you!

Matty Dalrymple 10/17/23 Matty Dalrymple 10/17/23

Episode 208 - Mistakes Writers Make about Bladed Weapons with Teel James Glenn

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Teel James Glenn discusses how he got his start as a stuntman and how "the will to push through" physical challenges enabled him to follow his dream; the different varieties of swords; the fact that your first service is to the story; how opponents will never be exactly equal; the fact that tough people don't pose; how to achieve a realistic portrayal of bladed weapon wounds and guidelines for realistic recovery times; and examples of well-done current-day knife and sword fight movie scenes.

Teel James Glenn has killed or been killed hundreds of times—on stage and screen—as he has traveled the world for forty-plus years as a stuntman, swordmaster, storyteller, bodyguard, actor, and haunted house barker. He is proud to have studied sword under Errol Flynn’s last stunt double, and has made hundreds of appearances in Renaissance festivals, soap operas, and feature films, including having been beaten up by Hawk on the Spenser for Hire TV show. He has also published dozens of novels, and his poetry and stories have been printed in over two hundred magazines including Weird Tales, Mystery, Pulp Adventures, and more. His novel A COWBOY IN CARPATHIA: A BOB HOWARD ADVENTURE won best novel 2021 in the Pulp Factory Award. He is also the winner of the 2012 Pulp Ark Award for Best Author.

Episode Links

Author website: TheUrbanSwashbuckler.com
Facebook profile: Teel James Glenn
Instagram profile: @teeljamesglenn
LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/teel-james-glenn-6a334b1/
Blsky.: @Teelglenn

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to the Indie Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Teel James Glenn, or TJ. Hey, TJ, how are you doing?

[00:00:07] Teel: I'm doing fine. Very nice to meet you and everyone viewing.

[00:00:10] Matty: Oh, we are happy to have you here. And to give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Teel James Glenn has killed or been killed hundreds of times on stage and screen as he has traveled the world for 40 plus years as a stuntman, swordmaster, storyteller, bodyguard, actor, and haunted house barker. He's proud to have studied sword under Errol Flynn's Last Stunt Double, and he has made hundreds of appearances in Renaissance festivals, soap operas, and feature films, including having been beaten up by Hawk on the Spencer for Hire TV show.

He has also published dozens of novels, and his poetry and stories have been printed in over 200 magazines, including Weird Tales, Mystery, Pulp Adventure, and more. His novel, "A Cowboy in Carpathia," a Bob Howard adventure, won Best Novel in 2021 in the Pulp Factory Award, and he is also the winner of the 2012 Pulp Arc Award for Best Author.

I invited TJ on the podcast to talk about what's going to become one of a series of "Mistakes Writers Make" episodes.

[00:01:06] Matty: And we're going to be talking about mistakes writers make about fight scenes and how to avoid them. This is going to join other entries in this series, which are: Police Roles with Frank Zaffiro, Forensic Psychiatry with Susan Hatters Friedman, P. I. s with Patrick Hoffman, The F. B. I. with Jerry Williams. First Responders with Ken Fritz, Coroners with Jennifer Grazer Dornbusch, Police Procedure with Bruce Coffin, and Firearms with Chris Grahl of TacticQuill. That set of podcast episodes became so popular that I finally created a little listening list on theindyauthor.com/podcast. So if you're writing crime fiction or a topic that includes any of those topics, you'll be able to find all those "Mistakes Writers Make" and how to avoid them all in one place.

[00:02:00] Matty: And so we're going to be adding to that list, "Mistakes Writers Make About Fight Scenes," and I'd like to start out asking TJ, what got you started as a stuntman?

[00:02:13] Teel: I was thinking about that actually last night very specifically. I was a very sickly kid. I couldn't take gym. I couldn't do any sports. Asthma. Sickly. I looked like a potato with pipe cleaners stuck in me. And when I was 15, I went to a Phil Suling comic convention. I was a reader of comic books, of course, and I saw chapter two of the "Adventures of Captain Marvel" movie serial, made in 1941, and the stunt work in it by a guy named Dave Sharpe. The editing and shooting were so amazing; you really did believe a man could fly. You really did see guys flipping around. And I went, "I want to do that." I started making Super 8 movies in high school. I read every single thing I could on stunts and movie serials and how they did it. I taught myself how to do stair falls at my high school with washcloths wrapped with ace bandages around my elbows and knees on the marble stairs, still wearing my glasses because I couldn't see otherwise. I learned to do high falls off of garage roofs and how to build box rigs and all of it from reading it, seeing any behind-the-scenes footage I could. And then, of course, I went to art school. But the last night in art school before I was supposed to graduate, I had a party who was auditioning people for a film, and on a lark, because I knew about film and I'd been making my own little stupid Super 8 movies, Captain Marvel, Rocketman.

I went, I got a part in it, and then he needed somebody to choreograph and storyboard it and to choreograph a fight. I knew how they did it in the movies, so that got me started. Once I did that, I ended up getting a lead in the movie, although he lost the equipment halfway through, and the film never got finished. But that led me to other movies, and then I thought, I got to get some training. So I was researching a book I was writing that had a sword fight, and I took a friend of mine who had studied with Ralph Faulkner in California, who was the swordmaster in a lot of the Errol Flynn movies. He said, "Hey, there's this guy teaching stage combat in the city. Do you want to come with me to the class?" I went, "Heck yeah!" So I took Swashbuckling 101, and the minute I held a sword in my hand, I knew that's what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. It was like a heavenly choir with lights shining on me. From that point, I started to train to be able to hold the sword, move, and breathe, and I never looked back. I studied with my first instructor for three to four years. When he started a Renaissance Fair, I was one of the instructors. Then I auditioned for other Renaissance Fairs and ultimately ended up doing 60 Renaissance Fairs, either as the fight choreographer, the assistant choreographer, the jouster, or, for the last bunch of years, I participated in a story show. What was cool about that was I did storytelling with all the voices and characters, and my daughter joined me when she was eight.

[00:05:17] Matty: Oh, cool.

[00:05:18] Teel: Every year we did at least one Renaissance Fair together for a weekend. Where she would beat me up with a quarterstaff at the beginning of the show because everyone likes to see the big guy beaten up. The last time we did it was just before she went off to college, and she was six foot three.

[00:05:38] Matty: Wow.

[00:05:39] Teel: It wasn't funny anymore. It was just an old guy fighting a young woman. It wasn't the giant fighting a little girl. So she did the last quarterstaff fight on her knees, so it looked funny. And she still beat me, of course. So, I mean, that's it. From learning stage combat, I ended up getting parts in low-budget movies, soap operas, where they needed a big guy who could be the tough guy and throw a punch. So I would often get hired as an actor, and then they would add stunts, or they would hire me as a stuntman and realize I could act, so they would start beefing up my part. But many of my roles were like, "You can't come in here," and then there'd be a fight. That was the main part of my career.

[00:06:24] Matty: I have to ask what happened between the asthmatic child that looked like a potato with pipe cleaners. Did something happen that enabled you to take part in those activities, or did taking part in those activities help address it?

[00:06:38] Teel: That's it. I had the will to push through it now because there was something I believed in. I don't care about sports; I still don't. So the idea of training to run around a field and throw a pigskin, why would you do that? But training to be able to sustain a sword fight and do a Shakespearean monologue all in a show? Yes, I would train for that. I used to live at the top of a hill, and you'd have to climb up stone stairs in a park for my stage combat class, which was on Saturday mornings. I would literally have to crawl up the stairs. At the end of the class, I could not function.

I still carry an inhaler with me to this day. I'm still asthmatic, not as bad as I was as a child, fortunately. One of the first fight choreographers, Jim Manley, who hired me as his assistant, was severely asthmatic; he always had his inhaler with him. And I mean, I can't run a block, but I can do a fight. I can jump off a building, and my martial arts, by the end of a martial arts class, I would be almost like a non-functional lump. But I'd made it through alive, and that was always an achievement for me. So it never went away. My reason for fighting it was stronger than the actual disease.

[00:07:58] Matty: That's a great story. We had sort of come up with a couple of categories about which we wanted to discuss the idea of mistakes writers make about fight scenes. We've talked about bladed weapons already a couple of times. So I'd like to start with that one. What are some mistakes writers make? And if you have any good or bad examples from movies people might be familiar with, that's always a fun way to illustrate it.

[00:08:23] Teel: Yeah, I almost always end up using movie references because most people haven't read obscure Raphael Sabatini books or whatever. First thing is when people say "sword," there are hundreds of types of swords, different weights, and each sword has a different purpose. When people are thinking, for instance, of the Conan movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger, I will always and forever say that it was junk because Milius got his samurai instructor to teach Arnold how to use a sword, which makes no sense because samurai swords and broadswords don't work anywhere like each other. It would be the equivalent of having a bicyclist teach someone how to do motocross racing because they're completely separate. So everything he does with the broadsword is essentially wrong, and he moves like such a truck that anyone should have been able to kill him immediately.

On the other hand, you see a movie like Ladyhawke with Rutger Hauer, William Hobbs, who choreographed it, was the swordmaster in the 70s, 60s, 70s, and into the 80s. He did the Three and Four Musketeers with Michael York, the Mel Gibson Hamlet, and the Cyrano with Gepard. So he would study the specific weapon and teach you how to use that weapon. The broadsword techniques in Ladyhawke are real broadsword techniques, and you can see he moves completely differently. And, you know, and it really wouldn't have been a bad thing if they said, "We got a samurai guy, okay, we'll give him a curved sword." That's why Sandahl Bergman actually looks like she knows what she's doing, aside from being a dancer. She had a curved sword, so she was actually doing curved sword techniques. Samurai swords cut on the draw; they don't cut on the extension, so it's a completely different way of cutting. So, again, it's a stupid little nuance, but it's the kind of thing that drives me sane.

[00:10:34] Matty: The scene that this reminds me of is, and I'm not coming up with the name of the movie, but there was a movie with Liam Neeson.

[00:10:40] Teel: Rob Roy.

[00:10:43] Matty: Rob Roy, and there's that scene where he has what I guess is a broadsword. You can correct my terminology.

[00:10:48] Teel: A Scottish broadsword, Basket Hill broadsword, and he's fighting the guy.

[00:10:51] Matty: He's fighting a guy.

[00:10:54] Teel: With a small sword.

[00:10:55] Matty: Yeah, like a fencing thing almost.

[00:10:58] Teel: They were contemporary, same time. The Basket Hill broadsword was basically a war weapon, and the walking sword or court sword that ... He's always playing horrible, horrible human beings, and he's also really tiny. But he was using a contemporary sword of what the noblemen would have worn on their hip while walking around. They call it a walking sword. In that fight, he would have killed Liam Neeson in about 20 seconds because he had the lunge. The lunge gives you extension. Also, those basket-hilted swords, Rob Roy, whom Liam Neeson was playing, fought 60 duels in his life and never lost a duel. His last duel was when he was 63 years old, which, at that point, was old. We've pushed the extension of things. They wanted to make Liam Neeson the underdog, but in fact, if Liam Neeson's sword had ever actually contacted the court sword, it would have snapped it in half like a toothpick. So they had to work really hard to make you think the other guy was going to win, whereas if he'd gotten a lunge in that fight, the way it was choreographed, Liam Neeson was dead. In reality, the guy with the big hacking sword with longer arms would have won and gotten him on the first cut. If you miss while you're down there, the guy just lunges, and you're done. There's historical evidence of samurai swords against rapiers in Portuguese against bandits in the China Seas, and the Portuguese always won because a cutting sword requires an arc. A lunging sword does not. So while you're doing this, he's going like a sewing needle, and you're done.

[00:12:41] Matty: A That's an interesting, I mean, I imagine that in Rob Roy, they fussed with the reality because they needed that scene to extend longer.

[00:12:59] Teel: Yes, absolutely. And, yeah.

[00:13:00] Matty: Are there tips you can share that say, even like, how can someone do a realistic sword scene but extend it to extend the drama of the situation?

[00:13:10] Teel: If you ever see any of these commentaries on YouTube where they'll have, you know, a Swordmaster looks at a real thing and tells you, you know, the one thing all of them will say is that most fights, even if they last a long time, it's because nobody's doing anything. As soon as the blades start touching, the fight's over real quick because it is a case of who makes the first mistake. One of the things I write, I have a sword and sorcery series, and in any of my stuff, if I talk about people fighting with swords, I talk about the type of sword. Because certain swords have an innate advantage over other swords. And because of that, you then have to say, I want my hero to have a disadvantage so the other guy will have an arm that's three inches longer or my hero will have a stiff shoulder because he fell off his horse, to give them a disadvantage with that.

But in terms of, it's a case of just looking at the weapons and going, how is it used? And always, it's not the weapon, it's the individual using it. If somebody is skilled, the biggest problem I always see is people pick up a sword in some movie or in some book against someone who's actually trained in that weapon and somehow win. It doesn't work that way. You, even when they were training for combat, you trained with a weapon which was as close to the real weapon you were using as possible, even to the point where in Hamlet's time when they talk about foiled swords, they would take the real swords and wrap it in metal foil and stick a golf ball on the end of it. Because you wanted the actual weight of your weapon in your hand. If it's lighter, you're not going to learn how to use your weapon correctly. The familiarity with it often is the answer.

Now, a good swordsman is supposed to be able to use multiple weapons, but you always have your favorite; everybody. It's like everyone even has their favorite chair. You know, you get used to certain things. With any weapon, that weapon, even when I'm teaching stage combat or choreographing shows, I assign specific stage swords to specific actors and say, "That's yours," because every sword's balance is a little different. The weight of it is a little different. For instance, if you hand me a sword that I've never used before, and I'm immediately in battle, I really am not going to be familiar with how it moves. And that would be a disadvantage, which you can turn, as the protagonist gets used to it, perhaps. It gives you a nice disadvantage, even with a skilled fighter.

The other thing that drives me nuts, this is just the thing about cover artists and comic book artists. You don't switch your sword from one hand to the other unless you're Cornel Wilde, because you always have a strong side. Cornel Wilde in the old movies, the big trick at the end of every movie, he'd get stabbed in the right arm, and he'd have to do the final fight with his left hand. He was really a left-handed guy. He had to learn to do right-handed when he was competing for the Olympics. And so this was actually his strong side, but he learned to use the right. And 99 percent of people, or 98%, are right-handed. So a left-handed fencer always has an advantage because people are not used to going up against it.

[00:16:51] Matty: It makes me think of the scene in The Princess Bride, of course.

[00:16:55] Teel: Yes, yes. Believe it or not, that's the other thing. In the text, they go, "Ah, I see you've learned your Capo Ferro, ah, but I will use my Marozzo against you on Uneven Ground." They quote all these specific techniques, and they don't use a single one of them in the movie. The writer took the time to research them so they actually used real techniques. If you choreograph the fight that's in the book, it's a real fight.

[00:17:19] Matty: Oh, interesting.

[00:17:20] Teel: Using real techniques. Goldman did his research. But for the movie, they said, "Now we just want it to look like an Errol Flynn fight." So they had the dialogue, but they weren't doing Marozzo or Capo Ferro.

[00:17:30] Matty: That's very disappointing.

Your first service is to the story

[00:17:32] Teel: You know what? I still, it's still one of my favorite movies of all time. Because when you're choreographing fights, the first service is to the story. The second, but when you're doing it with real people, the story. And then if you're lucky, you can educate a little. You know, but when you're just writing it, it's always got to serve the story first. You know, and you can always fudge it if you don't know what to do with it. You could make it impressionistic. The feelings of the fight, without actually describing.

[00:18:04] Matty: Well, one of the things that I was thinking that's kind of related to that is that when you were describing, and people who are just listening maybe can pop over to YouTube and watch, but you were sort of illustrating why someone who is swinging a sword is at a disadvantage over someone who's thrusting a sword. We're using different terminology, but that's very apparent. Like, if you were watching a movie scene, I think even someone who knew nothing about swordplay would understand that, but when you're describing it, that would be hard to convey in writing. Do you have any tips for that?

[00:18:37] Teel: Honestly, I don't think it is because you can literally say, "I looked at him, and he had a curved war sword. That meant he had to swing it. I was lucky. Mine was straight. If I could avoid that first swing, I could stab him." I've actually had a scene in one of my books where two friends are fighting different bad guys. One guy has a two-handed sword and he's against a bunch of straight-handed people, and the other one, she's fighting a guy with a curved sword, she has a straight sword. So, literally, in the middle of the fight, they switch so that it goes straight to straight, curve to curve, to even it out a little. Because she had an advantage with the guy with the curved sword, but her buddy had none. She's also the better swordsman than him, so it makes sense she could take on the two guys with straight swords, and he would take on the one guy with the curve. You can build it in as part of the jeopardy for your hero, you know?

Size matters

[00:19:39] Teel: Also, the length of the sword matters. I'm sorry, size matters. If your hero is a petite woman, and even if she's an expert swordswoman, as my character Irina is, she has a sword that's scaled for her body, and so she will have less length than some goon she goes up against who's six inches, eight inches taller than her, who therefore has longer arms, and therefore, even if he had the same length sword, had an advantage. She has to make up for it by being more fleet and trying to get inside his range so that her blade is effective. So you really, there are a lot of factors you can use to even the fights up or uneven them against your hero.

The other thing is there's an old saying that the greatest swordsman in France is not afraid of the second greatest; they're afraid of the worst. And... So literally, someone who has no idea what they're doing can be on their side. They can just swing wildly, hit the right spot. I mean, how many times have you accidentally hit somebody's funny bone when you were reaching for something? You know, that could happen with a sword, to hit that one spot. There's a very funny story about when... if you've ever seen the movie The Court Jester with Danny Kaye, there's a scene in it where he's going up against Basil Rathbone, who was an excellent real fencer and a great stage combat fencer. But Danny's character is hypnotized to be the greatest with a blade. Unless you do this, then he's unhypnotized and he's a complete bumbling oaf. In the sequences where he's the greatest with the blade, Danny Kaye learned it so quickly and so well that the fight choreographer had to double Basil Rathbone because he couldn't keep up with the speed of Danny Kaye. On the other hand, there's a sequence where he's out in a courtyard, and he goes to Rathbone, "Your life's not worth that." Huh? Huh? Huh? And he's suddenly confused, and there's a scene where he's running around screaming, throwing the sword in the air, and you can see Basil Rathbone doing this. Rathbone said, "Neither one of us knew what he was going to do," and it was the only time I've ever been terrified with a sword in my hand because he could have literally stabbed him. He could have killed him. He was just running around being wild and crazy. So that can work too.

Opponents will never be exactly equal.

[00:21:57] Teel: You can work to have the guy you're up against. If you do something insane, they'll be like, "What are you doing?" Because also people who train in a style, and this is what Bruce Lee was against, when you train in one style, you're used to certain answers to certain movements. I do this, he always does this. Well, if you go up and complete a different style you've never seen before, you have no idea what they're going to do. If you, you do this and you expect them to do that, but they do this, suddenly, it throws your whole world out of kilter, which is why, In a lot of cultures, you would go around training in different schools, because everybody had their secret, vota secreta, their secret move, and each school would teach it, and you'd try to stay there long enough to learn their secret, and then you'd go on to the next school to learn their secret, because in a fight, you, you, you're not going to face a peer, you're going to face a peer, maybe. But you're not going to face an equal. No fight is ever equal, even if you both have the same training, the same body, the same skill level. one of you is going to be more motivated, or one of you is going to be tired from not getting enough sleep. So it's always, you might be equivalent, but it's never going to be exactly equal.

[00:23:43] Teel: That also works to give tension. When I have characters who are heroes and have had real training, I have to make sure they don't just Mary Sue their way through a story. You know, they can't walk into a room and kill everybody in the room like John Wick. Otherwise, there's no tension. Nobody really worries that John Wick is going to die; it's just about how he's going to kill them. It becomes like the Columbo of action films. You know he's going to win; you just want to see how.

[00:24:05] Matty: That makes me think of another interesting dramatic twist, which is the calm, cool, and collected combatant against the frantic, desperate combatant. And you can play that either way. You could say, you know, because he was frantic and panicked, he lost the fight. Or because he was frantic and panicked and had nothing to lose and was perhaps not trained. What you were saying before about it.

[00:24:30] Teel: That's a real thing. They train you in martial arts. The reason they want you to fight calmly and not fight angrily or excitedly is because when you have adrenaline in your system, you have the fight or flight response. Because of that, your body thinks, "Okay, I'm going to need energy to run away." It starts shutting down finer motor nerves, cuts off power to certain things. So you're, the old trope about somebody not being able to get their key in the door when the bad guy's coming after them, that's true because when you're in a frightened state, you lose fine motor nerves. So one of the reasons for martial arts repetition, and swords are martial arts, as are guns really, is you want to build a sense of, "This is the way you do it, and you're calm about it." You don't fight angrily, and you don't fight scared. You put that away, and you get angry or afraid after the fight is over.

One of the nice things, if anybody's ever read Modesty Blaise, or maybe I'm giving my age away, they were great books. One of the first true female heroes, who actually Emma Peel was somewhat modeled on, and one of her character traits is she will be phenomenal through a fight, very level-headed. Afterwards, she falls apart hysterically, but only in her friend Willie's arms. That's her complete release. She literally bottles all the emotion, and at the end, she explodes. It's her own way to deal with her own PTS. And he wrote this in the early '60s, before there was a real understanding of PTS. So I give much kudos to him, Peter O'Donnell, the writer. But you can really use the craziness because you will do things and take chances that no sane fighter would do.I had a friend, the first time he was in France, they still have rapier dagger fighting as a competition. And now it's been revived with HEMA, but back in the '70s, HEMA wasn't doing that stuff yet.

[00:26:08] Matty: And what is HEMA?

[00:26:22] Teel: Oh, Historical European Martial Arts. It was an answer to the huge explosion of martial arts, which everyone thinks is everything. They really are mostly referring to... Asian, but there's, I mean, the European martial arts are absolutely sophisticated, but we got guns earlier, and so they sort of became less a part of the world curriculum, but the more isolated communities in the east kept The older techniques alive much longer, but anyway, he was in a competition, and one of the things they allowed there, he didn't realize, he's busy, you know, parrying, blocking with rapier and dagger, he parries something, and the guy goes, whoop, and throws the dagger at him, and he said, I was standing there, and I watched this thing through my mask, coming at me in slow motion, going, this can't possibly be, and the guy won the point because they're allowed to throw the weapons.

[00:27:16] Matty: Interesting.

[00:27:17] Teel: Now, no one in a sane fight would throw away their only weapon, but in this case, he had parried the sword with both of his, so the guy had a free shot, but he wasn't in range to stab him, so he just threw it, and it's an insane move in a real fight, but on the other hand, he hit him. Now, in a real fight, maybe the guy would have dodged his head, but at the same time, that would have thrown his timing off, and you might have been able to kill him with the sword. You know, crazy stuff. It's perfectly justifiable, you know, the best knife fight I ever saw in any movie, the most realistic, was years ago, they used to have little video boxes outside movie theaters, and they would run a clip of a movie, and some Spanish film, I'll never, I don't know what it was, Mexican or Spanish film, because I don't speak Spanish, on 48th Street in Manhattan, and these two guys are in a pool hall, and they both got knives, and they're kind of doing this mirror thing, back and forth, one moves in, the other moves back, the other moves left, that guy moves right, and then, the first time one of them commits, he starts to lunge with it. The other guy reaches back, grabs a pool cue, and breaks it over his head. Most realistic sword-knife fight I've ever seen. Not the fight in Under Siege where they go, and they add in the sound effects of knife blades. You don't really parry with knives. Yeah, they're too small. Even Bowie knives are just too small, and the chances of actually catching it on your blade are minuscule. Again, an insane person or an unskilled person might do it, and that would be the one in a thousand times it worked.

[00:29:26] Matty: Well, I think that pool hall scene suggests an interesting scenario, which is the person who is carrying a knife because they intend to get in a fight and win, and the person who's carrying a knife because they're striking a pose, you know that they're threatening, but they're not positioning themselves in a way that they're imminently about to have an attack. Can you talk about that a little bit? Like if someone's using it mainly as a prop to threaten.

[00:29:51] Teel: Yes. Well, I mean, it's the whole bully scenario. People who bluster very seldom have the courage to carry through. I always tell actors when I'm working with them, don't play tough. Tough people don't pose. Tough people just are. They don't have to go, "Hey, oh," you know, they just look at you and go, "If you do that again, I'll kill you." It's just there. The mindset, and the samurai will talk about this a lot, is that every fight is won or lost before the first blow is struck. It is the mindset and the commitment, because you can't stop someone who's interested in hurting you and doesn't care about whether they get hurt or not. You cannot stop a determined assassin who does not care about their own safety. Which goes back to the crazy person. If a mother is protecting her child, she will leap onto a sword to throw the guy off a cliff with her. She won't parry it. She will do whatever it takes to make sure the child is safe. And if someone feels that the reason for defeating you is greater than their own personal safety, they will win the fight or have to be hacked down to the point where they can't function.

I always say that I fight like Brian Boru until five minutes after I'm dead. He was just that crazy. He would just charge large masses of people. There's actually an incident in Mexico when every year the Foreign Legion salutes a wooden hand. It was because it had been a lieutenant in a detachment when Maximilian was occupying Mexico. The lieutenant had a wooden hand from a previous engagement. There was a bunch of legionnaires that were trapped in a hacienda surrounded by hundreds of juaristas. The lieutenant was killed, but the sergeant made them all swear on his wooden hand they would never surrender. And it got to the point where there were like five of them left. Two of them were wounded. They had no bullets and they fixed bayonets and charged the Mexicans. The Mexicans were like, "You see this?" And they didn't fire because they were like, "These guys are crazy." And they didn't fire and didn't fire. The guys kept getting closer. And finally, somebody went, "Hey, we've got to do something about this." They all got up and surrounded them with bayonets to their throats and said, "Surrender." And the corporal, who was the only leader at that point, said, "The Legion does not surrender, you surrender." They all got bayonets at their throats. The Mexican commander said, "I'll tell you what, let's call it a truce." And he said, "We leave with our colors and our wounded comrades." The Mexicans were like, "You got it." And they saluted them as they marched out. Their determination was like the Alamo, but they won. Their determination. Their spirit was stronger than the people they were fighting because it really wasn't their battle anyway. They were occupying a foreign country, but it was for the honor of the Legion. That's one of the things is we've instilled a lot of artificial values in humans. One of them is the whole honor, flag, country, family. Family is the only one of those that's kind of a natural thing. You would protect your flag, and you would protect your offspring. The others have sort of been manufactured to give a reason for people to do things. Like I said, my reason to become fit, or at least appear to be fit, which is hilarious, people always used to say I was a physical guy, and I'm still not, never was. My reason to be fit was to be able to hold a sword. So that overcame my physical tiredness, my sickness, the exhaustion and stupidity. I mean, sometimes I think back at what I did when I was, you know, a 20, 30-year-old, and I'm like, how come I'm still alive? I mean, I went on to have people set me on fire for money.

Achieving a realistic portrayal of bladed weapon wounds

[00:34:01] Matty: That could be a whole other podcast episode, but I wanted to use that as a takeoff. I want to stick with the bladed weapons conversation because I think we're delving into a great topic, and that is one of the other things we wanted to talk about was the wounds and the reaction to wounds and realistic portrayal. And we talked a couple of times about what adrenaline does for you, and you were just mentioning people fighting for things like family and honor and so on. So what do you see in movies, if you're the recipient of the bladed weapon attack, what do you see that is good or bad? What should people try for or avoid?

[00:34:37] Teel: I do a lecture on guns and violence with weapons that way. And one of the things is, Matt Dillon in 20 years of Gunsmoke was shot 50 times and knocked unconscious 20 times, and in 8 years on air, Mannix was shot 20 times and knocked unconscious 37 times. Now, if you're knocked unconscious, that's a concussion. You have enough concussions. You don't talk right. You don't walk right. You're neurologically dumb. If you're shot, there's trauma shock. If you're stabbed, one of the things in duels, realistically, most duels post-1600 in Europe, personally, if it was a duel of honor, you fought stripped to the waist, male or female. And the reason for that was they figured out that if you drive fabric into the wound, which you would if you're stabbing somebody wearing a cotton shirt, there's always going to be some cotton fibers in there. They will fester, and you will die of the infection. More people died of infections after sword fights than the actual cuts or thrusts. Now I've been stabbed. I was stabbed in the stomach when I was doing a movie, and one of the guys I was working with, we're doing a sequence, and he missed the mark and he just stabbed me in the stomach, and I looked down and said, "Damn it, Scott, you frickin stabbed me." And he looked at me and went, "Yeah, sorry about that."

[00:36:03] Matty: So, fortunately or unfortunately, I had enough blub, and he stopped it as soon as he made contact with my body. But I still have a stab mark. He went in maybe about an inch, and any penetration anywhere on the torso and in most of the limbs even, any penetration more than two inches, you will hit a vital organ. Which is why there used to be a rule in New York that you couldn't have a knife first. You can't have a knife that's two-edged, ever, because the only purpose for a two-edged knife is to kill. That's a weapon, and you couldn't have it longer than two fingers' width when you hold two fingers up and you're measuring from one side to the other, because that's a little bit less than two inches. It's supposedly to reduce the chance of fatal injuries if someone has a knife and uses it in a fight.

So, swords, you can survive an 8-inch, 10-inch, 12-inch slash with a much greater chance of recovering almost completely than you could a 3-inch stab. Anywhere on your torso, because that three-inch stab will go into the liver, kidney, heart, lungs, and at a point in history, there was no way to stop sucking chest wounds. There was no way to stop a punctured lung. You either recovered or you didn't. Jim Bowie was stabbed and shot and clubbed and spent, I think it was seven months recovering because he had a thrust through the lung, and after that, everybody considered him a superman, that he was unkillable in the famous sandbar fight.

So, infection was a very big risk. One of the things that's odd about history is the Mongols wore very light armor. They wore silk shirts. And one of the reasons they wore silk shirts is because when they were hit with an arrow, it would not penetrate the silk; it would push the silk into the wound, and you could literally grab the edges of the shirt and work it to pop the arrow back out. It reduced the chances of infection since silk didn't promote infection, and it also reduced the chances of penetration because silk was a stronger fabric. It's funny that now we have spiders weaving spider silk Kevlar fibers to be used in bulletproof or bullet-resistant vests. So, we've taken modern technology and gone backward. If you look at modern riot armor, it looks like 15th-century fighting armor because what worked then still works now. If someone's going to hit you with something, you're protected in those areas.

However, there were some wounds they could not heal. There was something called the Coupé de Jeannac, a very famous duel between the Comte de Jeannac and a favorite of one of the Louis. Dueling was forbidden except this was affair of honor. They got all dressed up in their armor, and the Comte de Jeannac asked his sword master, "Look, we're in armor. I'm not that good with a sword. Can you teach me something? Something that I might be able to use, you know, a secret move." His secret move was to parry, slide in on the blade, and then cut the back of the knee—the tendons in the back of the knee—because in armor, you have to leave that area open. Even if you're wearing chainmail, it's much less armored or protected. In this case, most of the time they were not wearing chainmail pants, or they were fighting on foot. It was just too heavy.

They fought for a while. He sliced the back of the guy's leg, and he went down. They moved into the pavilion to try and stitch it up, but they didn't have the capability to really fix it, and he would have been crippled for life. He was so upset he ripped off the bandages and bled to death. The other side of that was that he was the favorite of the king, and the king was so sure that his guy was going to win that he had a big pavilion full of food for the big party afterward. But when the guy died, the king was so disgusted he left, and the populace went in, looted the pavilion, and had a great feast. The Comte de Jeannac had to flee to another country. But it's called the Coupé de Jeannac, the Cut of Jeannac. There are a lot of wounds like that, unhealable. If you were a swordfighter who'd been in any kind of battles for any length of time, you limped, or you were missing a finger, or you had scars on you. You woke up in the morning and you ached like crazy. There was a reason Athos drank a lot of wine. He ached a lot from a lot of fights. The other thing people don't realize is Athos was probably in the ancient age of about 30. He was the old guy. You know, D'Artagnan was 16, and Aramis and Athos and Porthos were probably around 20 because you just didn't live that long then, certainly not in a profession where you were either under fire or being stabbed on a regular basis.

Guidelines for realistic portrayals of recovery time

[00:41:29] Matty: If someone's writing a current-day story and they have someone who's stabbed or otherwise injured with a bladed weapon, can you give some guidelines about what would be an actual realistic recovery time? And maybe you can assume one scenario where the person actually has access to medical care and one where they don't. Can you give some guidelines about that?

[00:41:49] Teel: Yeah, if you're stabbed, it depends on where you're stabbed. They're really big on getting shot in the arm or shot in the leg in Mannix and in a lot of Westerns, and they usually just put a handkerchief on it and wander off. By the end of the hour, they're wandering around. If you're shot in the leg, you're done. It's the largest artery in the body, the largest muscle group. You're going to walk like Chester if you recover. If you're stabbed, it depends on if it's in a muscle group, how much tissue damage is to it. So realistically, let's say it's a four-inch knife. You get cut badly on the forearm and then stabbed in the leg before you break a bottle over the guy's head, and he's out. The forearm, if it's a cut, chances are it'll be stitched up. Unless he cut tendons, you know, a couple of weeks from then, it'll be sore for quite a while, and you may always feel the weather, but you'll be fine.

If he stabs you in the thigh, that could be months of recovery time because it went deeper, and they would actually have to do surgery internally to sew up the layers. We are basically onions, and that's why we cry so much. If your hero has a deep cut like that on the leg, it could be months before they can walk normally, if ever, really. And I said if you're cut on the back, that's what I say if you're in a knife fight, you want to control where you're cut. If you're cut here, there's less damage than if you're cut here. If you're cut here, it's all the tendons that work your hand.

On the outside of the arm, if you're going to get cut or slashed, even in the bicep or tricep area, is the least of two evils. If you're cut on the inside, you have all of the tendons that operate your fingers, and you have a major vein that runs on the inside. The brachial vein runs on the inside of the bicep, so you want to protect that. There's a reason we were built like a cage. We are basically a layer of suet on top to help protect the bones so they're not brittle. That's fine for slashes or contact wounds. A stab can go through and between those bones. So that's why it's always more dangerous.

There's a very famous moment in the historical battle of Agincourt where the French were so jammed together because the English stopped the front line with their longbows. The French were so anxious to get going, they kept moving. So the back lines kept piling up on top of the front lines. They had their distance, so the English just kept shooting bows at them. They got to the point where they couldn't swing their swords. The big cry was, "Estoc! Estoc! Stab! Stab!" Because it was the only way they could fight. Also, when you're wearing armor, stabbing is actually more effective if you can get to the joints. Most knights, when we think of knightly combat, their main weapon was a hammer because you were wearing a tin can, you can't cut that, so they would basically use blunt force weapons, or they would have a pick. One side would be a flat hammer, and the other side would be like what we think of as a railroad pick. You would try to use the pick to get through the armor and pry the guy out. So, you know, it's, and while knights could move very fluidly, you know, up until recently, maybe 30 or 40 years ago, the myth persists because historians never put on armor. Historians sit in places and read books.

You have got guys who actually put the armor on when it's fitted for them. It actually is lighter than modern combat gear and is suspended from more points. A full suit of armor might have 80 points of suspension. You wore an arming coat underneath it. Each section was connected, and it might weigh 60 to 80 pounds. Modern combat gear that a Marine might wear, like going into Afghanistan, weighs 120 pounds. It's basically just over the shoulders and the waist. So it's only got three points of suspension. I liken it to modern-day firefighters with all of their gear. Knights could move faster and more nimbly. They could swim. They could climb. They could swing on ropes. Otherwise, no castle would have ever been invaded. You know, so the illusion that knights were big and clumsy and could move very well was not true. They also were the best-fed of the people. They had the most meat, and that's why the Royal Guards are called the Beefeaters. They got the highest percentage of actual meat and vegetables. They didn't have to live off millet and leeks. They also had a more nutritious diet, which gave them more energy and a higher calorie count.

A well-done current-day knife fight movie scene

[00:46:58] Matty: Well, I wanted to wrap up with one more question. This is to bring it back to writers who are writing more current-day knife fights or bladed weapons fights. Is there a movie scene that you think does an especially good job?

[00:47:14] Teel: The best knife fight I can think of is in a William Friedkin movie, "The Hunted." It stars Benicio Del Toro and Tommy Lee Jones, and they have a brilliant knife fight in it. They have a little bit of a Wolverine thing going on. They play the wounds, but not as seriously as it would really be. They wouldn't have had that much adrenaline to keep going after being stabbed a couple of times. But, yeah, it's very realistic in the sense that they are two experts who know each other, so they can really engage in a fight, checkmate, fight, checkmate kind of thing realistically. It's not terribly drawn out, but it gives you a real sense of a visceral sword fight or knife fight.

The other one, believe it or not, is a Japanese film with Christopher Lambert called "The Hunted." The premise of it is that Christopher Lambert's a murder happens and he sees the face of one of the ninjas. They think they killed him, but he's not dead. This martial arts sect, though contemporary, has been fighting this ninja sect forever. They find out he's alive and they have to protect him.

It has some of the most realistic sword fights, and it's contemporary, from around 1990. There's a fight on a train that's phenomenal, where they're literally fighting guys in the middle of the smoking car, basically on a train. It very much kind of has Highlander vibes in that sense. Brilliantly shot, but both movies are called "The Hunted," so you have a nice, realistic and well-done knife fight, and another slightly less realistic but really well-done sword fights in the Lambert movie.

Matty: Well, DJ, thank you so much. This has been so interesting. I appreciate you sharing your insights and expertise with us. And please let the listeners and viewers know where they can go to find out more about you and everything you do online.

Teel: I have a website called theurbanswashbuckler.com. My books are on Amazon. I have "Dragon Throat," which is a novel of Alteva, a sword and fantasy, and "Journey to Stormrest," from the same series. I also have a book about a modern-day ninja, which I call "Martial Arts Noir." It's a murder mystery story, but his mother was an assassin for the Japanese during World War II, and he was raised by her. She taught him how to kill people. It's called "Killing Shadows," and they're both out from Airship 27. I'm around, I'm on Facebook with Teel James Glenn, T E E L, James Glenn. It's very hard for me to hide. I'm too big.

[00:49:55] Matty: Perfect. Thank you so much.

[00:49:57] Teel: Thank you.

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On The Indy Author Podcast, we discuss the writing craft, the publishing voyage, and how we can navigate our way to the readers who will love our books. Click the links below for the show notes for episodes since 200, including summaries and transcripts.

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Episode 208 - Mistakes Writers Make about Bladed Weapons with Teel James Glenn

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