The Radio Murders: The Collectors

"Sometimes you gotta be dead before anybody knows you’re alive."
- Gene Minues,
Talk Radio Caller

 

In The Beginning: The Caller

 

CallerCover1bsmallAfter getting The Radio Murders: The Collectors in the libraries and in the hands of many readers, the clock has started on the next book. The Radio Murders: The Caller was my first effort and began in the late summer of 2002. It was inspired by a simple news story on WKYC-TV3. A home invasion was reported, but the victim refused to show her face, we just heard her claim and a description of the events.

I have been in a business that is audio driven and voice driven for a very long time. There is something about listening to a person's voice without seeing the body language and other emotional attachments that serves as a lie detector. It is not perfect, but to the trained ear it is significant. I was convinced that the woman, the victim of the crime was lying. She was covering up something.  

What followed in my writer's journey was a series of puzzle pieces that seemed to fall together one by one, day by day. I drew from characters in real life - adding or subtracting just enough for individuality - and gave them a place to play. Eventually they became motivated and very much alive, to me anyway. They drove the story.

What I didn't know then, and have learned since, is how to extract my own hopes, fears and dreams from the text. I would take these little side-trips just to prove that I can research a topic or throw in some inside joke that means nothing, or that I am a smart guy. It is a flow-killer.

So this version of The Radio Murders: The Caller will be a success because the people are real, very real, and I can draw their life and actions on the page almost with ease. I just have to be careful to keep my bullshit off the page.

Stand by, Editor Pat and I are cruising at near top speed to re-write, refine and polish the story that started it all. You'll meet Mick Molnar, Lani Janich and Jerome Bennett for the first time and understand how thier actions helped create The Radio Murders: The Collectors.  You'll be there when a radio stunt went horribly wrong and how forces were at work to make sure it turned out almost exactly the way it did. Then you will be ready to perhaps revisit The Collectors as a new experience.   

These are my hopes, fears and dreams. Welcome!

 

It's Only Rock N' Roll

"You're only as good as your last show." Bill Crash Kradich told his niece Sue Janich.

Excerpt

"I heard. Honestly, it sucked to know my mom’s murder was on the radio. Hearing it on your show made it ten times worse."

Kradich could not help wondering whether Sue was talking about the murder Lani Janich had been attempting or the one that had been prevented by the stranger. " Right. But we did air it, and, well, let me just level with you, Sue. My business is changing a lot. I need an angle, a hook to keep an audience. It’s like, did you ever hear that Rolling Stones song, ‘It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll’?" He was losing Sue, but it was too late to turn back. " Jagger sings about sticking a knife in his heart, blood all over the stage. ‘Would that get you excited’ the audience, I mean. Something like that?"

"What are you talking about, Billy?" Sue folded her arms across her chest. "Are you telling me you are going to put that horrible night on the radio again?"

"Might have to." Kradich could not help but notice how much Sue’s body language resembled that of his sister." Bullshit! You don’t have to do anything!

Meet NY Times Best Selling Author Lisa Jackson

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Inside The Radio Murders

Special People

Free AudioBook

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Spreading The Word

 

The Radio Murders: The Collectors has plenty of victims. But this is just a story, drawn from the imagination of a writer, nothing more. Sadly, there are real victims in our society because there is real evil. With that in mind the author and publisher of The Radio Murders: The Collectors have agreed to donate a dollar of every hardback and half that for trade paperback sold.

So Who Wrote TRM?

Sitting down and writing a full-feature mystery novel, or anything for the public, takes certain assumptions.

We are all storytellers in one way or another. But what makes this storyteller think this tale is worth your time?

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The Book

A Simple Idea

The Radio Murders is a simple idea; a radio talk show about real-time murder, As It Happens with a deadly twist.  How could such a thing exist? More importantly, how could it become an entertainment vehicle?

The latter is not so difficult to conceive. We have a bloodlust evident from the beginning. It took four short chapters of The Bible before we had our first murder mystery. It was predicated only by sex and betrayal. Sex has been regulated almost out of radio except in the most nuanced terms. Betrayal is a side dish at best.

So what’s left?

The Radio Murders: The Collectors vividly illustrates how greed, revenge and vanity deconstructs a suburban Chicago family, and draws a relative, a Chicago talk show host, into their deadly pursuits. As a result a home invasion and murder is actually aired, live during Bill "Crash" Kradich’s broadcast. The event is a ratings winner and sends some staff at radio station KCI on a mission to create and "own" the concept.

As part of the Janich family’s near demise, another group of men become involved. Known only as The Collectors, these men take greed to epic heights and will not stop until they acquire some very special items. The Radio Murders: The Collectors tells both stories as they move along parallel runaway courses only to collide in a stunning climax.

Are You Ready?

The Radio Murders is not for everyone. There is plenty of action in this story and it is adult in nature.

The Collectors is not a Romance, not a Cozy Mystery or light reading. "This is not a two-dimensional story," said one reader. "There are layers, each more interesting than the last." The Radio Murders is at times a story about desperate people doing desperate things. And the people you find here do what people do. There is sex, harsh language and graphic scenes of crime and murder.

If you enjoy the work of James Patterson, Michael Connelly, Tami Hoag, Jeffery Deaver, Patricia Cornwell and others who are not affraid to tell a difficult story, then you are exactly the person I am writing for.  The Radio Murders: The Collectors is not a story for the easily offended.

Just thought you should know.

-Chuck Collins

Coming Soon to Amazon.com

The Radio Murders will debut at on-line stores everywhere in December.

 

Now Available at Barns&Noble.com

The Radio Murders: The Collectors is now available at one of the nations' leading booksellers.

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