(Editor’s note: In this 40th installment of The Rap Sheet’s “Story Behind the Story” series, we welcome Libby Fischer Hellmann, a Chicago author with several books to her credit, including Set the Night on Fire [2010] and Easy Innocence [2008]. Below, she recalls the development of her latest novel, A Bitter Veil [Allium Press], which tells of a young student in Chicago, Anna, who falls in love with an Iranian man, Nouri, and subsequently moves back with him to his native Tehran in 1978--not long before the overthrow of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and the rise of the Islamic Republic.)

So there I was at Bouchercon a few years ago. I had just finished my sixth novel and an author friend asked, “What are you going to write now?”

I had no idea. I told him I liked writing about women whose choices have been taken away from them. Who have run out of options. How do they survive without becoming victims? Is it even possible for them to prevail?

As we chatted, a memory swam up into my consciousness. A few years earlier, I’d gone to a high-school reunion. I’d published a few novels by then, and one of my former classmates approached and said that she wanted to tell me her “story.” Like most writers, I’m a sucker for a story, so we grabbed a glass of wine and went into a corner.

She proceeded to tell me how she’d fallen in love after college with an Iranian student. They married and she moved with him to Tehran. Four months later the Shah was deposed, and her life went from wonderful to acceptable, from acceptable to mediocre, difficult, and finally intolerable. After a year or so she was able to flee Iran, returned to the States, and got a divorce.

Now I told my author friend at Bouchercon about my classmate. He promptly suggested I write about her experience.

“I can’t,” I said. “It’s not fiction, and there was no crime.”

He cocked his head and looked at me as if I were a little strange. “You write crime fiction. Find one.”

I took his advice.

I began by doing research. Usually I’m the type of writer who believes in field trips. I’ve gone to Douglas, Arizona; Lake Geneva, Wisconsin; neighborhoods in Chicago I would never visit alone; even Cuba. But I couldn’t go to Iran. It was--and is--unsafe for an American woman, particularly a Jewish-American woman. I would have been questioning and interviewing people about a delicate time in their country’s history. It’s possible some people might have gotten the wrong idea. It’s possible I’d have been stopped, even apprehended. So a trip was out of the question.

However, not experiencing Iran first-hand was problematic too. How could I capture the setting accurately? The culture? The struggle that erupted when a religious revolution was foisted on a previously (mostly) secular society? Perhaps, I reasoned, the story was better left untold. After all, there already are plenty of books--both fiction and non-fiction--written about that period. Indeed, I’ve included a list of some at the end of A Bitter Veil.

But the story wouldn’t leave me alone. After much internal debate, I decided I wouldn’t write the book unless I did enough research to feel comfortable with the evolution, conflicts, and issues of the Islamic Revolution.

Fortunately I’m a former history major. Not only do I love research, but I have always been captivated by the past and how we bend it, learn from it, or ignore it at our peril. And Iran’s Islamic Revolution was one of the most well-covered revolutions in history. It was easy to find chronologies, books, articles, and reactions. I read nearly 20 books on the subject, both fiction and non-fiction. I took notes, read more, watched films, examined photos. A factor in my favor was that the revolution was relatively recent. Many of us remember TV news footage of the Shah piloting his plane out of Iran, followed by the triumphant return from exile of the Ayatollah Khomeini a few weeks later. It was not difficult to find materials.

I also put the word out that I was looking for Iranian Americans who’d lived in Iran during the early years of the revolution. Within weeks I found five people willing to talk to me. Some warned me not to be too critical; others not too gentle. One told me such a harrowing story that some of her history ended up in the book. As you might expect, none of these people wanted their names made public.

After sifting through what I’d learned, I decided I might be able to write the novel after all. The first 50 pages take place in Chicago, so that section wasn’t difficult. Once I moved the couple to Tehran, it became more challenging, but whenever I had questions, I did more research. For example, it turns out that my female protagonist buys two chadors. I discovered a chador shop in Tehran, read about chadors and their headpieces, and incorporated the information into the tale.

When I finished a draft, I sent it to one of the five Iranian Americans I’d interviewed. She vetted the entire manuscript and told me where I’d gone astray. I made revisions. Then I sent it to my editor, who sent it to a second Iranian American for further checking. Finally, when producing the audio version of my story, we checked with yet another person for the proper pronunciation of Farsi phrases.

I was comforted by the thought that I was writing about the era as seen through the eyes of an American woman. What she observed was in large measure what I learned during my research. Some of it was beautiful--for example, the sheer magnificence of the Persian culture. Some of it, less so. In all cases, though, I tried to be faithful to the research.

There’s one more component to the back-story that made writing A Bitter Veil irresistible. As crime writers, we learn early that “conflict” is the most essential ingredient in fiction. We learn that there must be conflict on every page, even if a character just wants a glass of water and can’t get it.

What triggers more conflict than a revolution? Whether it’s the French, Russian, Cuban, or Chinese revolutions, or what we’re now calling the Arab Spring, nothing shakes the foundations of a society more than internal conflict. That kind of conflict turns some people into heroes, others into cowards. The most satisfying part of writing for me is placing a character in the middle of such a conflict and seeing how he or she behaves.

That happened in A Bitter Veil. Some characters did what I thought they would, but others surprised me with their actions. In fact, I thought I knew who the culprit was when I began the book. But that changed several times during the writing, and it wasn’t until the climax that the perpetrator was unmasked. I hope readers will be as surprised as I was.

The conflict triggered by the Islamic Revolution manifested itself in a non-pluralistic way, as well. Through my research I learned that Persia had been invaded many times over the centuries. However, Persia’s invaders always tended to assimilate the Persian culture rather than imposing their own on Persia. In some cases, the invaders even allowed the Persians to retain a semblance of autonomy. That didn’t happen this time. Iranian customs, culture, and politics changed dramatically.

Why? Was it because the revolutionaries were insurgents, not foreign invaders? Was it because there was no choice--Iranians were required to “assimilate” the new republic’s dictums? I’m not sure, and it was a compelling question--one which I ultimately had to leave open.

Now for the punch line.

I finished the book, recorded the audio, planned my promotional campaign. I had decided early on not to use my high-school classmate as a source, so she knew nothing about the book. When it was done, though, I chose to dedicate the book to her if she agreed. It took almost six weeks for us to connect because she was traveling, but when we finally did, I said,

“Hi. You remember the story you told me about moving to Iran?”

“Iran?” She said. “It wasn’t Iran.”

“Of course it was,” I said. “You fell in love, you got married and moved to Tehran. When it became impossible, you came home.”

“No.” She corrected me. “It wasn’t Iran--it was India.”

“But ... but ...” I sputtered. India?? She’d gone to India, not Iran? How had I screwed that up?

“I can’t believe this,” I said. “I just finished writing a novel about Iran. And it all began with you!”

“Actually, I do believe it,” she said. “I moved to the Punjab area of India, which is predominantly Muslim. The Shiites in India tended to follow and do what Iranian Shiites did. The same customs, the same restrictions. So don’t feel badly; it was a similar situation.”

But of course, I did. Feel badly, that is. I spent a couple of days shame-faced and embarrassed. After a while, though, I realized it didn’t matter. Clearly, it was a subconscious error. I’d written the story I was supposed to write. A Bitter Veil is that story.

(Editor’s note: In this 38th contribution to The Rap Sheet’s “Story Behind the Story” series, we hear from author and sometime Rap Sheet contributor David Thayer, a native of Niagara Falls, New York, who now lives in the Seattle area. Thayer has published three e-book thrillers (with a fourth on the way), all featuring Manhattan police detective Armand DiPino. Below, he explains some of the background to the first entry in that series, Killer in a Box.)

For me the story of writing a novel is told by the first draft. I don’t use an outline, so I’ve learned to compensate by writing first drafts that become narrative outlines crammed with crazy scenes, discarded characters, vignettes, sidebars, and parts of future novels to be set aside. I took the original version of Killer in a Box to a writer’s conference where it was nominated for an award. That was fun, but four years later I was still rewriting, trying to find the sweet spot between what I thought I was doing and what was actually happening on the page.

The story is set at the time of the Euro conversion. I read an article in The New York Times about people with vast piles of legacy currency rushing to the meet the deadline. They had to bring their Deutschmarks, francs, lira, and pesetas to designated banks or the money would become worthless. I thought this idea would be a great setup for a crime novel, a powerful motivator for the villains.

The main character, Armand DiPino, is a young detective assigned to Midtown North in Manhattan. I chose the location because I used to live just south of Hell’s Kitchen. DiPino is a native Californian; his parents are professors who moved to New York City when he was in high school. Throughout the book DiPino tries to stay in touch with his family. His wife, Patti, died in a hit-and-run four years earlier. The void in his life cannot be filled by long hours at work.

Killer in a Box opens with a sustained gunfight between police and what appears to be a group of men in military garb. The NYPD responds by adopting an urban combat plan creating a grid of evacuated streets they call a box. Once the perimeter of the box is secure, the police send in a scout--in this case, DiPino. This shootout on the West Side leaves multiple cops dead and wounded. Richard Fast, a prominent lawyer, also dies in the melee, gunned down on Tenth Avenue next to his late-model Mercedes.

DiPino emerges as a hero credited with saving the life of a fellow officer while shooting dead a suspect in an alley.

The NYPD is wary of their new poster boy, however. DiPino doesn’t fit the mold; he’s tainted by his time in Patrol, suspected of being part of a corrupt ring of cops known as the 8-9 Pad, so called because street taxes were collected on the eighth and ninth days of the month. DiPino is assigned to the shootout investigating team, which is commanded by an inspector named Rinaldo Beladon. Beladon belongs to the Internal Affairs Bureau. He knew Patti. He cleaned up the 8-9 Pad. Now he’s interested in DiPino.

Killer in a Box could have been written in the first-person. Instead, I chose a tight third-person point of view that keeps the focus on DiPino. As he learns more about the shootout, and also more about the past, the reader is right there with him every step of the way. The death of Richard Fast leads DiPino to discover that Fast had represented officers indicted in the 8-9 Pad scandal, and to an Uzbek crime family that has millions of German Marks to exchange for the newly formed euro currency. Making that connection proves crucial for DiPino on a very personal level; it moves the story toward the crime within the crime, toward discovering Patti DiPino’s real history. Patti was a civilian employee of the police department, working as an assistant to a precinct commander who was indicted after her death. That’s what DiPino has believed--until he discovers that Internal Affairs had an undercover officer inside the 8-9 Pad.

As the plot lines merge between past and present DiPino throws the rules aside, provoking his bosses and the criminals who are growing more desperate as the conversion deadline looms. Tensions between DiPino and his partner, Mickey Reidel, reach an explosive level. Mickey is the senior detective, one of the elite First Grade in the Detective Bureau. Mickey made DiPino walk the box in the opening shootout scene. He withheld backup, and then led them into a confrontation with a mobster named Frankie Maggavero, a key figure in the currency heist--and a suspect in Fast’s murder. Mickey is crazy with jealousy, tied to Richard Fast’s widow, Ellen Houk. Ellen had a child with Mickey years earlier, a secret that could get him dismissed from the force.

Like most crime novels, Killer in a Box deals with lives in crisis. DiPino has to confront the truth about his marriage to Patti and his complicity in her death. What he discovers about her demise leads to the most knee-buckling scene in this novel. During a meeting at a cop bar called The Squire, a disgraced officer warns DiPino that he is being set up for a hit. Not by mobsters, but by his fellow police officers. Incredulous at first, DiPino follows the informant’s advice: “Don’t go out the back door when you leave. Use the front door.”

After exiting The Squire, DiPino circles the block. The rear entrance to the bar is staked out by two men--one of them a cop, the other a retired cop, Bill McCaffrey. Patti’s father. Shocked and angry, DiPino follows McCaffrey home to Far Rockaway to the same house where Patti grew up, the neighborhood they planned to live in after they had kids.

(Right) Author David Thayer

Her own father? For DiPino, discovering the truth is devastating, but he presses on, flushing out Patti’s killer through a series of bold moves that threaten to push him beyond the limits any police officer must respect.

Because this is the first book in a series, I wanted to set up the characters without diluting the story or loading up on back story. I’ve written four DiPino books now, and I think they can each stand alone if read out of order. That’s my intent: that each of the novels is complete with front story pushing the pace, rather than worrying about what’s happened in the previous books. In The Working Dead, the third book in the series (following Red Mountain), we leave New York for DiPino’s hometown of San Francisco; the as-yet-unpublished fourth book, Crazy People, is a prequel, in a sense, because it has DiPino working with Mickey Reidel again on a homicide case.

Writers know they have to make many decisions as they write, that there is a discipline that shapes and sometimes limits creativity. No two books are alike even if they include series characters; some go fast, some crawl, and none of mine have turned out the way I thought they would. Sometimes the characters really do take over and we experience our version of the runner’s high. At other times, the process is a slog. I guess the author’s trick is to not allow the reader to see those paragraphs that turned into blood-sucking leeches instead of smooth prose ...

That’s what rewrites are for.

(Author photograph by Brian Myers)

(Editor’s note: This 36th entry in our “Story Behind the Story” series comes from Tom Vater, a journalist and author who operates principally in South and Southeast Asia. His stories have appeared in such publications as The Times of London, The Guardian, The Far Eastern Economic Review, Discovery, Marie Claire, The Asian Wall Street Journal, and Penthouse. He’s currently The Daily Telegraph’s Bangkok expert. Vater is the author most recently of a non-fiction book, Sacred Skin: Thailand’s Spirit Tattoos. Below, though, he looks back on the roots of an earlier work, which--after being unavailable for some while--can now be enjoyed as an e-book.)

My first novel, The Devil’s Road to Kathmandu, recently received a second lease on life. First published to favorable reviews by Dragon’s Mouth/Orchid Press, a very short-lived Hong Kong-based imprint, in 2006, The Devil’s Road has now been reissued as a Kindle e-book with up-and-coming crime-fiction publisher Crime Wave Press, also based in Hong Kong.

The Devil’s Road to Kathmandu was and is a long work. In 1976, four friends--Dan, Fred, Tim, and Thierry--drive a bus along the hippie trail from London, England, to Kathmandu. En route in Pakistan, a drug deal goes badly wrong, yet the boys escape with their lives and the narcotics. Thousands of kilometers, numerous acid trips, accidents, nightclubs, and a pair of beautiful Siamese twins later, as they finally reach the counter-culture capital of the world, Kathmandu, Fred disappears with the drug money.

A quarter-century later, after receiving mysterious e-mail messages inviting them to pick up their share of the money, Dan, Tim, and Thierry go back to Kathmandu. The Nepalese capital is not the blissful mountain backwater they remember. Soon a trail of kidnapping and murder leads across the Roof of the World. With the help of Dan’s backpacking son, a tattooed lady, and a Buddhist angel, the aging hippies try to solve a 25-year-old mystery that leads them amongst Himalayan peaks for a dramatic showdown with their past.

I first started thinking about writing a novel/thriller about the overland hippie trail between London and Kathmandu in the late 1990s, when I did the journey myself, albeit in the opposite direction. In 1998, with barely an inkling that I would soon be a writer making a living from my craft, I set off from Kathmandu in Nepal, traveled through India, Pakistan, Iran, and finally Turkey, where I ran out of money and used the last few dollars I had to fly to Switzerland to work in a factory.

In Pakistan I met a drug dealer, in the now notorious Swat Valley, who would later become the template for Harun Rashid, one of the drug dealers in The Devil’s Road. In Peshawar, a hotbed of smuggling and then one of the centers of Taliban activity, I met a Mr. Khan, who ran a tourist hotel in which numerous junkies, most of them Japanese, were lying in a dormitory, consuming and clocking time.

Back in Europe, I attended a party at which four old friends, all of them significantly older than me, celebrated an odd reunion--they had driven a bus from the UK to Nepal in the mid-’70s, had lost track of each other, and finally met up again. It was the spark that I needed for my story. But the characters in my novel were not based on those men. At the time I was just starting out to write fiction and made a living from travel journalism. I adopted friends, acquaintances, lovers, and enemies and combined them to come up with the exotic individuals who populate my story.

I did not get into writing the text properly until 2001. Then living in London, but already with many thousands of miles of travel in Asia under my belt, I composed the first draft in an old tower block council flat just as the planes slammed into the World Trade Center in New York City. But by that time, the story was already standing and I chose to ignore 9/11 in the context of my tale, some of which was of course set in 2001, though it did provide constant--and in a perverse way, welcome--distraction from the writing process.

I was very close friends with a tattooed lady at the time, which provided significant inspiration for a long tattoo episode in Kathmandu. I also remember very much enjoying the writing of a long nightclub scene. The Grey Parrot, as I called it, was the funkiest place in Esfahan, Iran, prior to the Islamic revolution and it was a truly wild place. The club, with its allusions to drugs and sex, was more than a figment of my imagination; I knew someone who had spent considerable time in 1970s Iran, and who conveyed to me stories of Tehran’s eclectic nightlife. The true template, though, was a club in Luxor, Egypt, I hung out in during the mid-’90s, which had similar music and a clientele like the eccentrics described in my novel. I passed through Iran in 1998, during the football world cup. The United States played its eternal foe, and I ended up playing a match against Iranian security forces in Esfahan. This formed part of my impressions of the city, and the story can still be read on my blog today.

I think William Burroughs once wrote that writers are like people who sail ships, and the less experience they have, the closer they should stay to the shore. I took this advice to heart, so almost everything in The Devil’s Road to Kathmandu is in some way based on an experience that I had, or that a close acquaintance of mine had. I needed to be able to relate to everything I was writing about, directly. I needed to be able to feel the very fibers of my narrative to make the story ring true. As unlikely as this tale of high adventure may seem today, I lived it more than my next novel, The Cambodian Book of the Dead (now available as an e-book, but with a paperback release due in October), which is far more of a classic genre enterprise.

To me, The Devil’s Road to Kathmandu is a part of my life in the same way a relative I occasionally bump into might be. The second, new edition is actually quite different from the original version. Given the opportunity to republish, I cut a lot of flab (about 3,000 words worth), straightened out the style a little, and lost a sub-level narrative that appeared stilted and awkward. A meaner and leaner tale of derring-do and high crime (and that’s a pun folks, as the protagonists in the 1970s segments are completely stoned almost all of the time) has emerged, a more focused text with more entertainment and less writer’s ego. It’s been an incredible and long journey on The Devil’s Road from those early thoughts about writing a novel based on my experiences in the ’90s to its current reissue.