The Origins of Storm Warning

Storm Warning began, as many of my story ideas do, in a dream.  I dreamed I was in a convenience store and saw a girl ahead of me in line who looked familiar, although I couldn't place her.  She was with an older woman and gazed around the store, although not directly at me.  However, I saw enough of her face to realize that I'd seen her before but couldn't remember where.    Later in my dream, I was home, sitting at my breakfast table. I poured a bowl of cereal, and as I reached for the milk, I saw the girl's face on one side of the carton.  She had gone missing several years previously.

I don't know if milk cartons these days have pictures of missing children on one side, but they used to, and I recall looking at those photos when I was younger and wondering what had happened to those kids.  Whatever happened was tragic, and I was frustrated at not being able to do anything to help them.

That idea--seeing a missing child in a store and later realizing that she'd been kidnapped--was the genesis of this novel.  However, I didn't want my protagonist, Sonny, to be the one who saw the girl's photo.  That would be too convenient, so I invented a friend of his, David Fetchenheir, who saw the girl.  It had to be plausible that David would recognize a girl, seven years later, who went missing when she was five years old.  So I made David a videographer for a television station that had recently worked on a story about missing children in California.  I also gave him an unusually strong visual memory, someone who would excel at the game of Concentration.

The next challenge was creating a central character who would decide to find the missing girl. I wanted to avoid having Sonny be a cop or a private detective--someone whose role is to investigate crimes.  I felt he'd make a stronger character if he was a man who had no business investigating missing children but feels compelled to follow up on his friend's discovery because he has a powerful sense of justice and is driven to right wrongs.  Making him a musician worked well because he had enough free time to pursue the case.  Moreover, he sees strong parallels between music and solving mysteries.  Songs have beginnings, middles, and endings, just like mysteries.  Sonny believes that the clues are like notes in music.  If you can put enough of them together, you can recognize the melody (or the narrative of the case), and from that, you can track the genesis and development of the crime and follow the story/melody where it naturally takes you.

I also felt that Sonny needed a "support team," a small group of close friends who become his sounding boards and allies in his quest to find the missing girl.  I appreciate hardcore protagonists like Dashiell Hammet's Sam Spade or Lee Child's Jack Reacher, but I don't find the lone hero as compelling or realistic as a casual investigator who depends on allies like Ari Kirakosian, Earl Zepeda, and John Sebastiani.  Sherlock Holmes had Dr. John Watson and his Baker Street Irregulars, so I invented the Philosopher's Club, which allowed me to have Sonny discuss the case with people who disagreed with him sometimes, had other perspectives, and occasionally came to his aid.

The closing of the book required Sonny to be inventive and to marshall all of his resources to combat the large, well-organized group who form the moral counterpoint to his and Kat's moral center.  He needed not only his core allies but a broader number of people whom he could trust and who would come through for him.  The challenge was how to make those allies act outside the law but still be shielded from the wrath of law enforcement once the dust settled.

Katrina Hastings is an essential character for many reasons.  She represents authority, the lawful, rule-bound approach to solving this case.  But she is stymied by the laws she upholds, and she can't see the bigger picture because the scope of the conspirators' undertaking is too vast and seemingly disconnected.  One of the fundamental themes of the novel is the alliance she and Sonny form:  law and order, on the one hand, and unrestricted problem-solving in the pursuit of justice, on the other.  Kat is bound by rules; Sonny knows there are none when it comes to doing what's morally right.  He is free to take license; she feels conflicted when they do.

What the conspirators are trying to achieve was an invention I struggled with.  I had to have a reason why people would kidnap 5-year-old children beyond the usual motivations of greed or perversion.  I think what I invented for the evildoers in this story is plausible given their resources and their twisted desire to save humanity from itself.  What they are attempting was in fact a serious academic study a century ago and found its fullest realization in Nazi Germany.

Storm Warning is more than the title of the band's debut album, and it's more than a prediction of unsettled weather.  It is a warning about the consequences of misguided attempts to alter the nature of humanity.

I hope you enjoyed the story.