The Tattered Blue Line is out in the world!
Last year, encouraged by Colin Conway‘s 509 Crime Anthologies, I decided to explore an anthology project of my own. The idea was to get a diverse group of authors who all had one thing in common — being law enforcement professionals — to write a story that presents a slice of the police experience.
I’ve found that public understanding of the true reality of policing is pretty sparse. However, people are not lacking for opinions, despite this dearth of knowledge. That bothered me, especially when those opinions became louder and louder.
At the same time, I see the cracks in my own former profession. There are things we could do better, philosophies we’d be wise to embrace, and certainly we don’t do a great job of explaining ourselves.
This has led to a lot of estrangement between police and their communities.
Much of the estrangement, in my opinion, comes from a lack of communication. No big leap of faith there, I know. Most struggles in human history have this component. But I figure if people listen a little more, perhaps we can make some progress.
This concept is what drives my forthcoming novel in the Charlie-316 series, The Ride-Along. That’s a post for another day. But while I have two very different people (a graveyard patrol cop and a police reform advocate) exchanging very different ideas in that book, it occurred to me that I could approach this goal of getting ideas out there in another way. I could gather together another dozen or more authors to do the same thing. Increase the voices, and the viewpoints.
The authors I chose are diverse in every sense of the word — age, gender, race, geography, law enforcement background, agency background, you name it. But they have all worked as professionals in law enforcement.
I gave these authors the guidelines — tell a compelling crime story that explores the humanity of the people who do this job, as well as the humanity of those they interact with every day.
Did they succeed?
I’ll let you be the judge, but I’ve already checked the YES box on my survey.
Source: All The Madness In My Soul
