As a 30-year CIA veteran now writing fiction, the questions I most often get are really two parts of the same equation.
Why don’t you write spy fiction?
We love spy vs spy books. TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY by John LeCarre, RED SPARROW by Jason Matthews, the BOURNE books/movies, SLOW HORSES by Mick Herron, and LONDON STATION, the newest from fellow CIA alum David McCloskey. They abound with gray characters, operations gone wrong, betrayal, deception, and nail-biting danger.
When I retired from the CIA after 30 years, I felt strongly that I had something to say about Mexico, its social structure and those who were fighting the drug war spilling across the US-Mexico border.
BUT I refused to write anything that might reveal/jeopardize real counterdrug operations. As a result, I never contemplated writing contemporary spy fiction set in the region.
But writing about the first female police detective in Acapulco incorporates many of the same elements beloved by spy fiction fans: deep deception, danger in dark places, allies-to-enemies and enemies-to-allies plots, and outcomes that are rigged but outwitted some of the time, but not all.
Doesn’t modern tech make it hard to write police thrillers?
Not really.
The law enforcement environment in the Detective Emilia Cruz series has less to do with CCTV cameras and advanced forensic work than it does with the authenticity of many Mexican police investigations: lost evidence, intentional delays, corruption, scapegoats, and bribery.
As the federal investigation into the local investigation of 43 missing students from Ayotzinapa has revealed, both phone records and bags of evidence were ignored. Cover-up trumped technology, as it does in so many other cases there.
That being said, I spent most of my career in the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology and seed the Detective Emilia Cruz books with bits and pieces of work we did then, including:
Speech-to-text video search in 43 MISSING,
Video surveillance in NARCO NOIR and RUSSIAN MOJITO (which featured a Russian spy),
Hidden audio files in BARRACUDA BAY, and
Vehicle tracking device in DRAGON CARTEL.
That being said, police detective Emilia Cruz is mainly a HUMINT (human intelligence) collector. She is asking questions, observing, and reaching for context. Crimes and villains are revealed through her tenacity, resilience and analytic skills, not because a lab achieved a forensic breakthrough or AI spit out the correct answer.
The rest of the story
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