Criminologist R. Barri Flowers

Hey everyone, today we’re excited to have a GREAT special guest blogger, author and criminologist R. Barri Flowers. He’s published multiple books in the mystery and romance genres as well as bestselling true crime books. And he’s agreed to let the Killer Fiction readers pick his brain today, so I hope you all came loaded with lots of questions. Mr. Flowers, take it away…



Hello, all. My name's R. Barri Flowers, author of criminology books, true crime, and mystery novels (with some romance fiction under a pseudonym for good measure).

How nice of Gemma and the other gals at Killer Fiction to invite on as a guest blogger.

With the lion's share of my writings in the criminology field, I'm what's known as a literary criminologist. That is, I am one of those who writes the criminal justice and criminology textbooks used in colleges and universities by professors and students alike.

I take pride in making a contribution to higher education and hope that through my books and articles, graduates in the criminal justice/criminology/criminal law fields come out with more relevant knowledge than when they went in.

So what goes into criminology writing, you might ask? Well, lots of research, verification, studies, surveys, tables, graphs, notes, references, and information on crime, criminals, and criminal justice or lack thereof.

The fundamental questions in the study of criminality consist of: why are crimes committed, who commits them, what are the precursors, how are crimes solved, is their differential enforcement of the law, and can criminals really be rehabilitated?

With twenty-five such books covering the range of criminal behavior, I have written about virtually every type of popular perpetrator in crime fiction, including serial killers, psycho killers, female killers, mass killers, domestic-related killers, team killers, juvenile killers, terrorists, rapists, molesters, sadists, property offenders, drug-related criminals, and more.

Some general conclusions are as follows:

* Firearms are involved in two-thirds of the homicides in the U.S.

* Drug use is pervasive in our society and often a factor in the commission of other crimes, such as murder and sexual assaults.

* Crime is largely intraracial and not interracial in this country.

* Identity theft and cybercrime are two of the fastest growing crimes in the country.

* Two-thirds of all rapes and three-quarters of sexual assaults are committed by an intimate, acquaintance, or family member of victim.

* Males, not too surprisingly, constitute the higher percentage of violent, sexual, property, and drug offenders.

* When it comes to serial killers, a common theme in thrillers and romantic suspense, men rule the roost. However, more women have been serial killers throughout our history than one might imagine, such as black widows who kill their mates for financial gain.

* Females are slowly making inroads into traditionally male-dominated crimes, including homicide and property offenses.

* Men are predominantly the aggressors in domestic violence and women the passive victims. However, the actual incidence of verbal and physical abuse in relationships is more evenly divided by gender.

* Though we hear most often about men being arrested for child molestation, women may actually be just as involved in child sexual abuse but are more easily able to mask due to traditional female sex roles in society, such as child rearing and homemaker.

* Teens and young adults have the highest rate of involvement in violent crime.

* The laws are not always applied equally when it comes to arrests, conviction, and incarceration, often varying by offense, gender, race, ethnicity, and/or location.

My other main area of focus as a criminologist is on true crime. The genre was popularized by Truman Capote with his book, IN COLD BLOOD.

Though true crime books are nonfiction, they are separated from typical factual books by employing fiction techniques in combining a police procedural with mystery and suspense.

I wrote a bestselling true crime book, THE SEX SLAVE MURDERS (St. Martin's Press, 1996). It chronicles the sexual homicides of husband-wife serial killers, Gerald and Charlene Gallego.

The book is a basis of an upcoming episode of the popular Dateline like Canadian investigative crime TV series, Crime Stories, shown on A&E's Biography Channel.

Writing true crime differs from criminology books and a decidedly academic approach in that it involves reading transcripts, interviewing witnesses, law enforcement, and others in piecing together the time line of the crime, investigation, evidence gathering, apprehending the suspect, the trial, and outcome.

It certainly keeps me on my toes moving between these two branches of writing on criminality. Having a basic understanding of the dynamics of criminal behavior certainly helps the cause in doing true crime books.

Similarly, my expertise as a criminologist laid the perfect groundwork for a foray into crime fiction, with several novels, including the most recent, STATE'S EVIDENCE (Dorchester, 2006) and JUSTICE SERVED (Dorchester, 2005).

I enjoy the creative side of writing mystery fiction and using one's imagination and creative juices to blend with strong characterization and plotting in building to a dramatic climax.

Inspired by such crime novelists as James Patterson and John Grisham, along with male romance writers Robert Waller and Nicholas Sparks, I have also tried my hand at writing love stories.

Under the pseudonym, Devon Vaughn Archer, I have written four romance novels. The latest, CHRISTMAS HEAT (Kimani Romance, 2007), will be published in December by a Harlequin imprint.

Overall, I remain a criminology and true crime writer, first and foremost and am happy to lend my talents to the study of crime and criminals; along with trying to get a handle on how we can best deal with criminality in American society.

Feel free to ask me whatever suits your fancy and I will try my best to answer.

And visit my web site and pages on CrimeSpace and MySpace:

http://www.rbarriflowers.com

http://mysite.verizon.net/mysteryauthors/flowersr.html

http://crimespace.ning.com/profile/RBarri

http://www.myspace.com/devonvaughnarcher

Best,

R. Barri Flowers

Getting. Older. Sucks.

The date that I was freaking over last week – it never happened. Which, considering the state of my hair, might not be a terrible thing. Though, it is getting better thanks to all your wonderful suggestions. Thank God! But I digress… Okay, so the non-date. Well, in addition to owning a nightclub Mr. Hot Stuff also owns customs cars that tour in car shows. They’re currently in Florida somewhere, and apparently last weekend someone set fire to them. Huge damages and, even worse, one of his crew was badly injured in the explosions. Not good. Obviously, Hot Stuff had to fly right out, but he did cancel our date with a promise of dinner and a movie when he gets back.

So, instead of holding hands in a dark theater with Mr. Hot Stuff I decided if I couldn’t have a romance of my that weekend, I’d do the next best thing and read about one. I booted up an ebook from one of my good friends, Babe King. (Between the Gutter and the Sky – a great story, you should totally check it out! It’s out Oct. 7th from FreyasBower.com) I was loving it, getting into the characters, the juicy sexual tension… when I noticed something. I was squinting at the screen. I’d never noticed myself doing that before. And, I realized, during the course of the book I had scooched my chair back about a foot from my computer in order to read the print. How had it suddenly become so small and fuzzy? I checked my settings. Nope, same font I always used, same size text. So what was wrong with me?

I shrugged it off. Maybe I was just tired.

Well, the next day, I continued to read. And squint. Until I found myself with a twitch in my right eye and a headache from Hades. After messing with my monitor settings for a good half hour, I consulted my friend Suze. She suggested that maybe I needed (gasp, horrors!) reading glasses.

Um, no. Old people need glasses. I am not old. Ergo, no glasses for me. I am totally fine. My eyes are great.

Though, as soon as Suze said ‘reading glasses’, in the back of my mind, I heard the voice of my college human development teacher. I remembered her saying that up until the age of 30, the human body is a constant state of growth and regeneration. After 30, this stops. At age 30 the human body actually starts decomposing. Now, to my college self 30 seemed a long ways off, but, I’ll admit, on my birthday last year instead of a card with a cake and candles, my sister sent me a sympathy card offering her condolences on the loss of my twenties.

So, just in case (though, I was sure I didn’t need them) I made an appointment with an eye doctor. Who handed down the verdict that years of reading Nancy Drew in the dark until all hours with a dim little flashlight under my covers had finally caught up to me. Yup, you need reading glasses, chickie. (I hate it when Suze is right.)

So, the weekend that I had planned to include hand-holding, dark move theaters, and Mr. Hot Stuff ended up with me in an optician’s office having my pupils dilated and being told that glasses are a fact of “getting older” by the twenty-one year old college kid with piercing in her upper lip holding the eye chart.

But, in a show of defiance, I picked out a pair of hip designer frames in screaming hot pink. Hey, if I’m going to decompose, you'd better believe I’m going to look good doing it.

~Gemma 'Trigger Happy' Halliday

P.S. I’m still waiting for catslady to contact me as the winner of Wendy Nelson Tokunaga’s new book MIDORI BY MOONLIGHT. If you’re out there, catslady, email me!

I Can Do Anything You Can Do Better...

It figures. The week I’ve been under the gun with family commitments, college crap, work issues, as well as playing hide and seek with a stubborn muse would be the week everyone on the Killer Fiction Writers Blog is so freaking entertaining and clever I feel an inordinate amount of pressure to perform. Now I know how guys with performance anxiety feel.

Normally I thrive on competition. My family will tell you that I give a whole new meaning to the word ‘sore’ loser. I’m told I’m even worse when I win--which, of course, isn’t often enough for me. I have this competitive streak that borders on OCD sometimes.

For example, last week my daughter bought a 500 piece puzzle and we began to put it together on the cocktail table in the living room. When she left for work at five, I laughingly told her I’d have the puzzle together by the time she got back home. When she responded, “No way!” I took that as a personal challenge--and remained glued to the damn thing for hours until I had it completed. My victory was short-lived. Katie wasn’t a happy camper when she discovered the puzzle all finished when she returned home and I was crabby I’d frittered away my writing time. My daughter, being a chip off the ol’ ‘game on’ block, responded by informing me it wasn't a big deal, that the puzzle had been an easy one anyway. So, what did the victor do? I went out and bought a 1,000 piece puzzle (this one of a seaside terrace over-looking a white sand beach) and now I find myself poring over it when I should be writing. Do you know how hard it is to connect puzzle pieces consisting of sand???

My, uh, spirited compulsion has its roots--as most things do--in childhood. It didn’t matter what the game: Heigh Ho Cherry O, Chutes and Ladders, Old Maid (hey, be nice!), chess--I hated to lose. The trend continued into adolescence. My older sister was a star athlete and I always wanted to be, if not better than her, then just as good. I failed big-time. She’ll say that’s because I was a skinny, bony weakling. I say it’s because she was built like a brick @#!*house. If I was really catty--and had a serious death wish (my big sister is a captain in the State Patrol--with all those lovely accoutrements like the 44 Auto, chemical spray, handcuffs, etc. that come with said occupation) I’d say she’s still built that way. Ah, sisterhood.

That same urge to out-last and out-do (I sound like Survivor here) reared its Rambo head off and on throughout my life. During the Public Safety Academy where I suspected a number of the male recruits were secretly hoping their female counterparts would wash out, I kept on pluggin’ during those long runs, puking my guts out, yet somehow managing to remain in formation. (What’s a few soiled Nikes between fellow recruits?) While other women were content to marry and have one child at a time, I had three.

Even in writing I fight this passive-aggressive impulse. When someone kicks my butt in a page count competition, I experience this desperate drive to crush them to a fine powder the next time out.

This week my fifth book, Calamity Jayne Heads West, hit bookstores and I find myself fighting the urge to constantly check on-line sales rankings. I’ve done my job, I tell myself. I’ve written a solid addition to the series. I’ve promoted it to the best of my ability. Now it’s up to the booksellers--and, most importantly, to the readers. So, I promised myself this time I would try to avoid obsessing over numbers or rankings. It’s all speculative data anyway. My only job now is to write the next book.

It’s liberating--letting go of that craving for a contest--foregoing the competitive fix that has been my companion all these long years. (Uh, did you really think I was going to tell you just how many years? Get real.)

What? My book was ranked 511 on Barnes and Noble.com yesterday? No! What? It went up to 1,424 today? Oh, crap. Where’s it at now?

Now, remember I said I was fighting the urge, folks. I never claimed I was cured. Besides, I’m blaming it all on my maniacal muse. :) Are there things you are over-the-top competitive over? How do you handle losing? Or winning? Has an out-of-control competitive spirit gotten you into trouble? Do tell.

That’s it for this week. I’m off to RWA’s Kiss of Death Mystery Suspense Chapter Writers’ Retreat in Omaha this weekend. Next week I’ll try to include photos and a wrap up of the retreat! For now it's back to those white, sand beaches. And I've got the feeling by the time I get home, that puzzle will be all put together. Oh, well, here's to keeping that competitive edge!

Oh, and don't forget every time you post a comment on our Killer Fiction Writers Blog at http://www.killerfictionwriters.blogspot.com you're automatically entered in the contest that is currently running. If you send someone over to the blog and they post a comment and mention you sent them, your name is entered in the drawing ten times! I'll be giving away the first prize package of signed books and other goodies.

~Bullet Hole Bacus~

The Chimp in the Grey Flannel Suit

I loved yesterday's blog. Maybe that's why I'm so late in posting today - because I want you to enjoy it THAT much more. Actually, it's an excuse for forgetting it was Wednesday - which also means I didn't get the garbage out again. Damn.

I was at the Yarn Shoppe today and heard some of the women talking about being afraid of clowns. My ex-brother-in-law was afraid of clowns. He had a great t-shirt that said, "Can't sleep...clowns will eat me..." I'm not afraid of clowns. I'm kind of partial to them actually. I think my biggest fear is of losing my sense of humor. That would totally suck.

I don't really have a fear of anything like spiders, bats, mice or such. Actually, the closest I come is my loathing of seeing monkeys dressed in human clothes. Now, I'm not exactly sure why that is. But seeing chimps in suits has that nails-on-a-blackboard feeling. For years, I had (sick, twisted) co-workers who loved to wallpaper my cubicle walls with photos of primates in pants. This was almost always followed with involuntary dry-heaving and threats of some sort of discrimination charges (although I never could find a good one. Evolutionary discrimination perhaps?).

My grandmother hated monkeys. She always said they were dirty, filthy creatures. Of course I knew it had to do with an unfortunate trip to the local zoo where monkeys gleefully lobbed excrement at shocked, Midwestern onlookers.

I don't dislike monkeys. I'm a huge animal lover - primates included. But for some reason I just can't stand to look at an ape in haute couture. (Of course, that's probably just envy on my part.)

I'd love to hear your theories on why this is. Give me a good enough suggestion and I'll throw it in one of my books (with credit to you, of course!).

Yours Truly
The Assassin

What Are you Afraid of?

Fears. We all have them. Some of them are justified. I mean, who isn’t afraid of the dark, of spiders, or of things that go bump in the night? Sure, some of our fears are a bit irrational, but I’m here to tell you that even the irrational ones are real to the person suffering from said trepidation.

I once heard a woman on a talk show talk about her phobia of . . . macaroni. Now, personally, the carb lover that I am, I haven’t ever met a piece of macaroni that I feared or that I didn’t find tasty, but I can only imagine that at some time this woman had a bad macaroni experience. (Don’t worry, I’m not even going to try to guess what it was.)

Needless to say, I have my own misunderstood fear. Frankly, most people unjustly chuckle at my phobia or at least they chuckle at the situation from which my phobia stemmed. Not that I personally see Zoo-phobia as a laughing matter.

Yes, I’m afraid of going to the Zoo.

You might be thinking that maybe I could have been one of those children who fell, or was tossed, into the Gorilla cage. But nope, my mom never wanted to get rid of me that bad—or at least not on the days we were at the zoo. You might think I just happened to get lost at a zoo as a child, but nope, mom always held my hand extra tight.

My fear didn’t even stem from a childhood event. Yes, it was years ago, but I was an adult. A full-fledge adult, I might add. We-- my husband, my little girl and I—were visiting the Los Angeles Zoo. And for first time in my life, I was . . . well …felt up by a stranger.

Now, my husband, the man who had vowed before God and our friends to love, honor and protect me, was standing right beside me during this assault. But like the rest of the crowd, he was bent over from the waist down having one of those real belly laughs. (Okay, I’ll admit the villain of this crime was a lot larger than my 6-foot husband and probably outweighed him by a couple of tons, but still, I expected more from the man I married.)

Now, when we first approached the elephant exhibit, I was excited. (But not that kind of excited!) The big guy was strutting his stuff, prancing around for the crowd, his trainer doing a talk about their power and charm. When the big brut started moving in my direction, I instantly became aware of the low fence, but hey, my thought was that for the first time in my life I was actually going to get to touch an elephant. I had somehow neglected to realize that if I could touch him, he could also touch me.

Now, like I said, it was several years ago. I was young, thin, and filled out my little t-shirt rather nicely. At least, the elephant thought so. (But let me ask you . . . did you know elephant trunks have suction cups in them?)

Anyway, there I stood, all four feet eleven inches with my right D-cup boob being suctioned by a male elephant in front of hundred or so laughing-so-hard-they-cried people. I seriously considered slapping the rude perpetrator, but the trainer had just explained about how elephants could pick up over a thousand pounds with their trunks. Right then, I had a terrible vision of this elephant tossing me over his shoulder and taking me back to his pad for some hanky panky. And hey, he had completely skipped first base, gone straight for second, and quite frankly, I was in no mood for home runs.

But unfortunately, I was pretty much without options. So I stood there and let him have his jollies. It took the trainer zapping the guy before he finally released me. But did you know their trunks are wet and kind of slimy? I didn’t. Well, not until I looked down at my right boob to see the large ring he’d left. Oh, and the ring stained the baby blue Tee and all day people were pointing at me and laughing.

Amazingly, I have forgiven my husband, but whenever he says… “Why don’t we go to the zoo?” I start feeling panic and then get a strange sensation in my right boob.

So there you have it. Now, you know what I’m afraid of and why. But what about you? What are your fears and phobias? Care to share? And please, if I can tell you about being molested by an elephant, surely you can tell me anything. Even if it is a fear of macaroni.

Crime Scene Christie

P.S. Make sure you take note of our new contest. The info is also posted below.

Bring a friend to come play on our blog and you’ll be entered to win a fab prize from Kathleen Bacus! We’ll be drawing one winner at random from our prize hat on Oct. 15th. Every time you comment on our blog between now and Oct 15th, your name will be entered in the hat. BUT, if you tell a friend to come check us out, have them post a comment that includes the name of the person who referred them to our blog (you!), then you’ll both be entered in the hat TEN TIMES! Bring as many friends as you want and your chances of winning just keep growing!

The Idea Well

One of the most often asked questions you get as a writer is "where do you get your ideas?" This is a hard question to answer because there's not really an Idea Well that writers go to and fish out their next plot line. The reality is, writers are full of ideas. Our wells are using overflowing and the only thing we lack is the time to write the all.

As to what creates those ideas in our heads - well, everything. Writers have unique ways of looking at the world. If we didn't, we wouldn't walk to write about it. And because we can take the smallest thing we see and blow it up into something big, that's how we come up with ideas.

So to give you a bit better idea of how my thinking works, I'm going to talk this week about how I came up with the idea for RUMBLE ON THE BAYOU.

First off, I'm from Louisiana. My parents had a camp on the bayou off the Gulf of Mexico and you could only get there by boat. This is the real deal. I didn't just visit one weekend and decide I could write bayou country and people. I spent a heck of a lot of my childhood at that camp - fishing, shrimping, crabbing and reading books. I also heard all the stories.

Like the one that says the guy who owned the shrimphouse got all his money by running drugs on his shrimp boats in from the Gulf of Mexico. Is it true? I don't know, maybe - heck, probably. It makes for great urban legend anyway. Then there's the small prop planes that used to fly over unihabited areas of the bayou - we saw them sometime. Large items would fall from the planes then they'd turn and leave. Everyone knew better than to go look because most knew it was a drug drop. (and that fact was verified later when I talked to the Game Warden for the area)

So essentially, our camp was on a bayou that was full of alligators and people were dropping drugs from planes. Now one day I watched an alligator eat a ton of floating styrofoam, so apparently they're not overly picky about what they ingest, so I got to thinking, what if an alligator bit into one of the bags of drugs and got high?

And that's the opening scene to RUMBLE - a stoned alligator crashed in the town drunk's swimming pool.

I started with that one little scene and continued until I'd built a full-blown plot and characters around it, and the town of Gator Bait, Louisiana was born.

Next week I'll talk about UNLUCKY (coming October 30th). It's a story about a woman who's luck is so bad she can't even touch other people for fear of ruining their lives. It's sort of autobiographical and I'll leave you hanging with that. :)

- Deadly DeLeon

He Said, Hero said...

The quintessential differences between the men we love and the men about whom we love to write and read.

Why did you put the empty carton back in the fridge?

Hero said: To remind myself to buy more milk when I go grocery shopping. You’ve had a long week so I figured I’d take care of it this weekend.

He said: To remind you we need more milk.

Does this [insert comically unflattering article of clothing/shade of makeup/style of hair] make my [insert least favorite body part or feature] look [too big/too small/fat/slopey/droopy/dull/flat/frizzy/like that woman across the street/actress I hate/frenemy from the junior league]?

Hero said: Not at all. Even if it did, you are perfect in your imperfections and that is why I love you.

He said: Ummm...yeah. I mean...I mean...kinda.

I don’t know…should I have the filet or the lobster?

Hero said: I’ll order the filet, you order the lobster; we’ll have both.

He said: Is the salad an option?

30! 3.0. Ugh!

Hero said: Think of it this way -- you’re beyond all the gross insecurities and uncertainty that plagued your late teens and twenties. You’re at an age where you’re coming into yourself. Aware and finally ready to enjoy life.

He said: Yep, it’s all down hill from here.

How do I look?

Hero said: Great/beautiful/sexy/gorgeous/Wow. Just…wow!

He said: Fine.

*sniffle* *weep* *cry*

Hero said: Want a hug?

He said: That time of the month?

We need to talk.

Hero said: Of course. Let’s talk.

He said: [audible sigh] Again?

Wanna snuggle?

Hero said: Seriously? Love to.

He said: Seriously? Is it Sunday? Already?

Oh, and abs. Heroes have six packs, Honeys have kegs. More to love, right?