Hands-On Research

Working Stiffs welcomes guest blogger Jeri Westerson today. Jeri tells us about some very, um, interesting research she did in her own backyard!

Hands-On Research

by Jeri Westerson

There's nothing like a little hands on investigating. For the most part, I do my research for my medieval mystery, VEIL OF LIES, in books and in the papers I can dig up in archives. But sometimes this just won't do.

I am very interested in medieval weapons. I own a few at home. Some are fairly authentic and some not so much. It's just fun to have them around. For instance, I own a sword. This is a pretty authentic piece in terms of weight and length. I doubt it was forged (not for what I paid for it), but more likely cut out of a piece of steel and then finished, polished, and sharpened by hand. A sword is a wonderful thing. It speaks of the Middle Ages to me, for all it represents: knighthood, chivalry, the movement of troops across Europe, borders changing, religion, class levels in society. It's only about 40 inches long and weighs three pounds, and yet this single object has moved mountains and populations.

I also own a small battleaxe. It's about the size of a hammer and can do some damage if you sliced someone over the head or across their neck. Likewise the flail I own. It is a metal ball with spikes hooked to a chain which in turn is fastened to a wooden handle. Swing that around and smite someone in the face with it and they stay smote.

I also have a dagger. A small, but very sharp dagger. Too small to use in a sword fight, it would be for closer association. Perhaps a sinister woman using it to kill her unfaithful lover.

All great stuff. And there would be plenty of opportunity for my villains to use such instruments to dispatch their victims. But then I began to wonder, with my sharpened objects, what it would be like to actually stab someone. Oddly enough, I couldn't get any volunteers for this. So I went to Costco.

Now it's not easy picking out your victim, although it's a little easier when you look for him in the meat section. I got myself the biggest slab of beef I could get. I couldn't get one with ribs, so I bought those separately and planned to make my own Frankenstein's monster.

I chose my victim who was already conveniently encased in plastic and hauled him home. I wanted ribs so I could get a sense of what it felt like for the steel blade to glance off bone and I also wanted to see what it would be like to take my sword to it.

When I brought it home, my victim's body was already prone, lying there innocently on the butcher block. How to attack it properly? There was no help for it. I needed the fellow to be upright and the only way to do this was to take him outside and nail him to the wooden post of my son's swing set.

I first must explain that my son wasn't home. No one was home but me and my meat victim. I only hoped that the neighbors weren't peering out of their windows into my yard when I decided to get all CSI out there.

First thing I did was attack it with the dagger. It is so sharp a blade it went in cleanly. I tried the fattier parts because at this point, we aren't going through skin, so I was trying to mimic as closely as I could what my characters might be experiencing. Of course, Sir Loin of Beef was not struggling, but that was okay. I could extrapolate the rest. Next I wanted to feel the blade against the bone. The ribs were nailed up behind the slab. I lunged. Very hard. Lots of spine chilling scraping there. Yes, very tough if you had a small blade like this and managed to catch a rib.

After stabbing it a few more times at a few more angles, it was time for the sword!

Now I had used the sword before to slice off the scalps of pumpkins. You see, the blade isn't sharp at all and I thought it best to keep it that way with the sword hanging on the wall in the living room. When my son was a teenager and had his friends over the thing was a boy magnet, to be sure. I never thought I would hear myself say, in my best Mom voice, "A sword is not a toy!" But there you have it. So I wanted to see what kind of power it took to use a dull blade to lop off the scalps of something head-like, even though our pumpkins didn't have skulls inside of them (but that would be way cool if they did!) and I also wanted to get the feel of really swinging the thing (because broadswords are not rapiers or foils. You generally do not use them for stabbing. You used them for chopping and swinging). It didn't take much to do it to the pumpkins. It was pretty easy, in fact, even with a dull blade.

But now it was time for Sir Beef.

I cocked back the sword one-handed and gave it a good whack. Right through the bone on the first go and into the wooden post. Wow. That was fun. Another! Yup. This guy was dead. Really dead. Really most sincerely dead.

It was a good day.

What happened to my hapless victim after I hosed off the post? I had to hide the body, after all.

So we ate him.

Jeri Westerson grew up on the mean streets of South Central Los Angeles and so always had a thing for noir. She also always had a thing for the middle ages. It was a natural fit. She tried her hand at acting but real life auditions were too brutal. She turned her attention to her other interest of art and design and became a successful graphic artist in L.A. and Pasadena in the mid '80s and early '90s. After becoming a mom, she directed her passion again to writing and embarked on the long, slow goal of publishing her growing body of historical fiction. But when she switched to writing historical mystery, she found success. Veil of Lies; A Medieval Noir is her debut novel. Jeri has had various careers in the meantime: a luggage salesperson, winetasting host and tour guide for a winery, choir director, travel insurance agent, secretary, ceramic studio manager, and journalist.

She is married to a commercial photographer, has a son in college, and herds two cats and a tortoise at her home in southern California.

Gambling On Research

Let’s talk about research. As an engineer it’s a big part of my life. As an author of crime fiction it’s even a bigger part. For my first book, Reason For Dying, I have an immense amount of research invested in it. No, it’s not a Tom Clancy techno-thriller, but, because it deals with viral outbreaks and the potential sources of those outbreaks, I had to do a lot of homework. I had to be familiar enough with infectious disease research to bring it to life on the page and yet bring it to layman’s terms. We are taught to trust the reader's intelligence, but you need to walk that fine line of explaining too little and explaining too much. Making yourself clear without sounding condescending.

In my simplistic mind, there are three basic types of research. Internet and/or books, interviews and hands-on experience. In order to give the reader a rich experience, I believe the author needs to know and experience the places and situations in their writing. For example, I know that China has a smell to it. You walk down many streets in any city in China and there is an odor. It’s hard to pinpoint, but it follows you, tracks you down and permeates your clothing and hair. Mostly it’s a sour mix of burnt cooking oil, sewage and diesel fumes. Oftentimes it’s very subtle, but it can quickly get overwhelming. I would never know that, except for having been there. And of course, smell is most closely linked to memory.

But what I really want to talk about is that hand’s on stuff, like Annette Dashofy’s Citizen’s Police Academy and Ride Alongs. In my second novel, I start off the story with an explosion in a fictitious Atlantic City Casino. Okay, I didn’t fly out to Atlantic City, because I didn’t have to. The scene takes place IN the casino and that’s what I had to become familiar with. The noises, the atmosphere, the feel. I HAD to go to a casino for my readers. At least that’s what I told my wife. Okay, I’ve been in a casino or two or a few dozen, so I don’t think I actually had to go, but what the heck, seemed like a good excuse and my wife bought it.

So I went to Harrah’s here in St. Louis and I sat and listened to the rowdy shouts from the craps tables; the stink of the cigarette smoke and subsequent tightening of my nasal passages. I wandered through the maze of slot machines and their monotonous melodies, dodging the blue-haired ladies trying to stuff dollar bills into the machines and then slap the buttons with fervor.

I listened to the simulated sound of coins dropping in the tin pot as the machines print payoff tickets instead of dropping coins. I went to the bar and listened to the overly polite bartender work the patrons. And the husbands telling their wives that they are pretty much even for the night. I’ve used that one before. Yeah, I probably didn’t have to drop the $50 at the craps table, but it was burning a hole in my pocket.

So, I came home and put a lot of that experience on paper. (You can read a bit if you’d like by following this LINK.) Then I realized something. In my novel, when the ATF and FBI come and investigate the explosion, they will want to look at surveillance video. By the way, ATF is in charge of investigating explosions.

I could have relied on my knowledge of casino video surveillance gained through watching the TV series Las Vegas, but that would be akin to relying on watching CSI as a primer on forensics. So, I jumped on the internet and surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly, there is little to no information about casino surveillance capabilities available. So, the next step, pick up the phone.

I called one of the local casinos and asked for the Surveillance and Security Department and after a short hold, a young lady picked up. When I explained I was an author and I was writing a scene in a novel and had some basic questions regarding the department’s capabilities, I was put on hold. AH, success. This was easy. A few minutes later I found myself being transferred to Public Relations and an annoying recorded message. They never returned my call. The same scenario played out for the other three casinos in the St. Louis area. Now what?

Road trip. I picked a different casino, who by mutual agreement as I’ll explain later, will remain anonymous. I walked in and started looking up at those ominous black domes on the ceiling. They were everywhere. I did a complete loop, sitting at a few slot machines, and feeding in a few dollars here and there. I lost count of the numbers. This was going nowhere. I decided to sit down in the anchor chair at a vacant (meaning no other players) blackjack table and bought in for $50. I played a few hands and struck up a conversation with the dealer. He seemed spooked when I asked about the cameras and like magic, the pit boss walked over and listened in. So, not thinking too much about it, I explained why I was there, showed him my business card (my author card, not my engineer card) and asked him if facial recognition was really used or not.

He said he didn’t know much about the systems, except they could read the serial number off a dollar bill lying on the floor. Within a few minutes, a big man in a suit, tapped me on the shoulder, asked me to collect my chips and follow him. “Uh Oh.”

I asked why, even though I knew why. He merely repeated, “Follow me.” Now my stomach was beginning to churn like when you see those flashing lights in the rear view mirror, even though I knew I didn’t do anything wrong. I was escorted through a door for “Authorized Personnel Only,” where I met another man in a nice business suit. The following conversation unfolded.

The man. “Mr. Bereswill, may I ask what you’re doing here tonight?”

Me. “How did you know my name?”

“You gave the dealer your player’s card when you bought chips.”

“Yeah, right. Well, I’m an author and I’m writing a scene about an explosion in a fictitious casino in Atlantic City. I believe in being thorough about my research and I wanted to know if facial recognition is used in casino security.”

He checked a piece of paper in his hand. “Mr. Bereswill, you arrived at 6:45 PM. Walked over to slot machine #XXX. We noticed you checking out all the cameras. You play $5 in that machine, then at 6:59 you walked to slot machine # XXX, still looking at the cameras and played another $5. At 7:18 you sat down at the blackjack table and changed $50. Now you’re here.”

“Can you tell me about the system?”“No sir, I’m not allowed to discuss it. But it’s designed to capture the facial features of EVERYBODY that enters the casino. There are no dead spots.”“Oh. Facial Recognition like on Las Vegas?”

“I don’t watch Las Vegas. But yes, and now we have a picture to go in this file.” He held up a file folder with my name printed on it. “Mr. Smith here will escort you out.”
On the way to the exit, Mr. Smith suggested I drop a book off when I’m done. He said that the Security Chief never talks about his baby to anyone.

Just a bit about facial recognition. It uses biometrics. Spacing of facial features. Obviously, it has to scour a database to come up with results and it’s only as good as the databases it’s linked to.
So, do you have any good stories about your research?