I
lived in Chicago and worked at the American Society of Clinical Pathologists’
Chicago headquarters, directly across West Harrison Street from the Cook County
Medical Examiner’s office, when I wrote Claw
Hammer. My ASCP job was to sell continuing education classes to pathologists,
and I got to sit in on many of those classes because I was the person who registered
pathologists for various courses, set up microscopes in classrooms at
conference centers, ran the overheads and slide projectors, hawked new books
published by the Society or the College of American Pathologists, and hosted
cocktail parties for the Docs at national medical conferences. One of those ASCP
classes featured the latest techniques of tool mark analysis available to
forensic pathologists interested in identifying the instrument of death, and I
was fascinated to learn about the variety of ways people quite often used
common household implements to kill beloved family members and friends.
That class reminded me of several terrible
tragedies that had happened to grade-school classmates of mine in my own
hometown of Rockford, Illinois. I recalled awakening one dawn to the sound of sirens
when I was only about eight or nine. I learned that a neighbor had allegedly gone
crazy during the night and killed his entire family—all but one daughter who
survived--with a claw hammer. The milkman, the same milkman who had just
delivered milk to my house,
discovered the bodies when he entered the neighbor’s house to put milk in the
refrigerator as he normally did twice a week. In those Father Knows Best and
Leave It to Beaver days of the early 1950s, people were very trusting and nobody
ever locked their back doors. All that changed, of course, after an entire family
was killed in our close-knit suburban neighborhood. It never dawned on us that locking
the doors would do no good if the killer lived inside the house and had keys.
Not long after that first tragedy, the mother
of another female grade-school friend was electrocuted in her bathtub.
Supposedly, a radio fell off a shelf and added 110 volts to an afternoon bubble
bath and fried the lady like a lobster. Police arrested the lady’s husband and
charged him with her murder. My young friend had to leave school to go live
with her grandparents. I never saw her again.
One of my favorite uncles, Eric Ekebom,
was a Rockford police detective sergeant and I remember asking to see his gun
when I was too young to know any better. He told me he hadn’t had to use his
gun even once in more than twenty years on the police force. He did carry a
gun, he explained, but he said he really didn’t need one because “Good
detective use their brains and not guns to catch criminals.” I’ll always
remember that.
When Pinnacle Books bought two of my novels
and wanted them delivered right away, I wrote a rough draft of Claw Hammer and sent
it off with the expectation I would have time to revise and polish the
manuscript. I had one day between the time I received the page proofs and the deadline
for getting the completed novel back to New York in time to make the publishing
window. I overnighted the proofs back. I have never missed a deadline. In the
old days when I was learning the newspaper business, we published what we had
in order to make a deadline. “Go with what ya got,” the editor called out as
the deadline approached. Some stories were incomplete or inaccurate. We knew we
always had the next day’s edition to round out the details or publish a
correction. I’m glad Claw Hammer endured to see a next edition.
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