Blog Archives
Nobody Tells You A Thing
CLEAN HANDS follows a detective investigating a murder case with two hundred potential witnesses, all of whom claim they know nothing about what happened. What inspired you to create this unusual mystery setup?
I’ve spent forty years being sent into companies after something has already gone wrong. Nearly fifty of them. A dozen bad enough that somebody had to be flown in. And in every one of those engagements you do the same thing first: you interview everybody. Not the six people you suspect — everybody.
Here is what I learned doing that, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to see it. Almost nobody lies to you. What people do instead is tell you a true thing that isn’t the thing. They answer a slightly different question than the one you asked, and they do it so smoothly that it takes a second interview and a document in your hand to notice.
Anybody who’s lived in a small place knows exactly what this feels like. Something happens. Everyone hears about it before supper. And then you go around asking, and the whole county turns into the most polite group of people you have ever met in your life. Nobody’s rude to you. Nobody tells you a thing. When two hundred people are potential witnesses, no one is a witness. Testimony stops being evidence and becomes weather.
That’s the whole book, really. I wanted to write a mystery in which the evidence is what nobody says. Gus spends the book trying to find one person who decided. That search is the plot.
Rourke’s colorblindness shapes the way he experiences and interprets the world. What inspired this aspect of his character, and what did you want it to reveal about perception and investigation?
In forensic work the first thing you’re taught is not to trust your eye. The eye is fast and it is confident and it is wrong constantly. So you don’t look at a set of books and form an impression, you tie things out. You take the number on this page and you find the same number somewhere it had no reason to be, and if the two don’t agree you have found something. It’s slow. It is also the only method that survives cross-examination.
There’s a kind of detective who walks into a room and the room simply hands him the answer. They see more than we do. I’ve never met that person. I wanted one who sees less and knows precisely how much less, because that’s the investigator I’d actually hire. Gus can’t take a glance and be satisfied by it. He has to count, verify, and — this is the part I think matters — he has to ask somebody. Every time he asks, the asking is a piece of evidence about the person answering.
Everyone else is certain. They saw what they saw. Gus is the one who has to say I can’t tell, describe it to me — which is, paradoxically, what makes him the most reliable perceiver in the county.
Colorblindness makes a man ask for help. That’s the whole thing right there. Gus has to turn to whoever is standing next to him and ask what color is that, and he has to do it in front of people, and he has to believe the answer. For a proud man in a small county that is an enormous concession, and it happens forty times in the book.
So he spends the novel depending on other people’s eyes while trying to find out which of them is lying to him. That struck me as a fair description of being alive in a place where everybody knows you.
Family relationships are woven throughout the mystery, from Gus and Casey to Eleanor Grant and her daughter Lily. Why was it important to include these personal connections alongside the larger conspiracy?
Because that’s what a county is. In a place like Calder County nothing travels through official channels. It travels through somebody’s sister-in-law. You can’t write an honest small-town mystery where the investigation and the family life are two separate departments, because in a small town they’re the same department, and half the trouble comes from a detective having to question people he’s going to see again in the grocery store.
And personally — I did not want to write the lonely detective with the apartment and the bottle and the ex-wife who calls to complain. Gus has people who need him at genuinely inconvenient moments, which is most of what adult life consists of. And it gives his character depth. Eleanor and Lily are the reason the book has a temperature. You can follow a conspiracy with your head. You follow a mother and a daughter with something else, and that’s what people actually remember six months later. They’re where the reader learns what Gus actually values, as opposed to what he says at work. A detective’s ethics are cheap when they cost him only a case; they get expensive when they cost him somebody at his own table.
Can you give us a glimpse inside Book 2 of the Calder County Novels?
Clean Hands was about a place where two hundred people knew nothing. Book Two is the opposite problem, and in my working life it’s the more common one: people who knew exactly what was happening, wrote it down carefully, filed it correctly, and were never once asked to explain it.
That’s the situation I’ve walked into more times than any other. Nothing was hidden. Everything was disclosed. The disclosure was simply written in a form that guaranteed no one would read it or understand it — which is a more sophisticated thing than lying and considerably harder to prosecute.
Gus is still in Calder County. He’s still colorblind, still stubborn, and after everything in the first book he is now a man that people in town have opinions about — which turns out to be worse for an investigator than being a stranger. Gus doesn’t arrive at Book Two intact. He starts the second novel with the one thing that’s most dangerous for an investigator, which is a settled opinion about his neighbors. Watching that opinion be wrong is a large part of the pleasure I’m building.
So the second book puts Gus up against paper instead of people. My ambition for the series is that by the fourth or fifth book the county reads as a single long ledger, and every volume is one more entry that changes the balance of the ones before it.
Author Links: Amazon | GoodReads
Philanthropist Eleanor Grant is murdered at her own gala — and within the hour, the city has agreed on a tidy story: a burglary gone wrong. Detective Gus Rourke doesn’t buy it. Colorblind, analog to the bone, and incapable of leaving a loose thread alone, he reads the staged scene in sixty seconds and starts pulling the one thread everyone wants left alone.
It leads north — to a gray town the dead woman spent her life escaping, to a beloved old man no one will say a word against, and to a hundred-year-old network that washes the worst money in the state through its most trusted charities, and has never once been named.
They have buried everyone who got this close. A boy. An accountant. A cop. Now they know Rourke’s name — and his daughter’s.
He can’t put them in a cage. So he’ll do the one thing they’ve never survived.
He’ll say their name out loud.
CLEAN HANDS is the first Gus Rourke novel — a propulsive, atmospheric crime thriller for readers of Michael Connelly, William Kent Krueger, and Greg Iles.
The Daring And The Crimes
Founding Crimes examines how America’s founders challenged British authority while also allowing injustices such as slavery, Native dispossession, political exclusion, and corruption to persist. Why was it important for you to write this book?
I wrote Founding Crimes because I don’t believe you can love a country honestly without being willing to look at all of it. For most of my life I understood the founding of our country heroically, simply as courage, genius, liberty, and stopped there. The Revolution produced some of the most radical language of freedom ever written, but the same men who risked everything also built a new nation that was built and sustained by systems of unfreedom — slavery, dispossession, exclusion, and the ordinary corruption of men protecting their own interests. Founding Crimes examines that contradiction as its central subject rather than an obscure footnote. I wanted to give readers a founding they could actually reckon with: the daring and the crimes in the same frame, told with enough honesty that the achievement ends up meaning more, not less.
Why was it important to include “witnesses” such as Phillis Wheatley, Abigail Adams, Elizabeth Freeman, Benjamin Banneker, and Robert Carter III alongside better-known founding figures?
Because they were there, and they saw it clearly — often more clearly than the men we usually quote. History told only through the powerful is only half a history. It’s easy to dismiss a modern critique of the founders as hindsight. But Phillis Wheatley was writing about liberty while she was enslaved. Abigail Adams told her husband at that time to “remember the ladies” while the new government was still being imagined. Elizabeth Freeman heard the words “all men are born free and equal” and walked into a courtroom to hold Massachusetts to those ideals. Benjamin Banneker wrote directly to Thomas Jefferson and named the hypocrisy to his face. Robert Carter III freed more than four hundred people when almost none of his peers would free one. These weren’t anachronisms. They were contemporaries and people who saw the gap between the words and the deeds and said so out loud. Their witness is what makes this a story about choices, not just circumstances.
How did you approach writing about historical figures who are often celebrated while also acknowledging their contradictions and failures?
I approached them the way I’d want to be approached — honestly, and as an adult. I resisted the urge to resolve the contradiction, because the contradiction is the point. A founder can be both a liberator and an enslaver; saying so plainly isn’t an attack, it’s accuracy. It would have been tempting either to excuse everything because of what these men built, or to reduce them to their worst acts and throw the rest away. Neither does justice to history or to the modern reader. So my rule was to hold the greatness and the guilt in the same hand: for example, to let Jefferson write the most luminous sentence in the language and to keep the salves he owned. A founder can be both a liberator and an enslaver. I was careful not to characterize anyone as just a hero or even a villain. Real people don’t come that way. We all go through life with flaws and weaknesses and, yet, heroically. I resisted the urge to resolve the contradiction because the contradiction is the point of being human.
Some readers may approach the book with strong opinions about the founding era. What would you say to readers who feel uncomfortable examining the contradictions you explore?
I understand the discomfort. I felt it when I realized the flaws and weaknesses of the great men we celebrate. I’m not asking anyone to stop loving this country or admiring what the founders accomplished. I’m asking us to love it the way you love a real person — with open eyes. A patriotism that can only survive if we hide half the story is a fragile thing. The one I’m after is sturdier: it can hold the greatness and the crimes together and still believe the American promise is worth keeping. You can honor the founders and still tell the truth about them; I think that’s the only honor worth giving.
Author Links: Amazon | GoodReads
David H. Tolly spent forty years as a turnaround executive, walking into companies to read the records everyone else had skimmed and find what they were hiding. He brings that same forensic eye to the American founding and reads it as what it legally was: a case file. The Declaration of Independence is a signed confession of treason, drafted by men who knew the penalty was the rope. The Revolution was financed by a continent of smugglers. The Constitution was written in a sealed room by men who counted human beings as three‑fifths of a person. An entire state legislature was bribed to sell off an empire of western land.
Across twenty‑seven documents and ten witnesses — from the Sugar Act and the seizure of John Hancock’s smuggling sloop to the Yazoo land fraud and the Alien and Sedition Acts — Tolly builds the case, exhibit by exhibit, with every claim sourced and every legend flagged. This is not founder‑bashing: each chapter credits the genius as honestly as it charges the crime. Abigail Adams, Benjamin Banneker, and an enslaved woman who sued for her freedom take the stand as witnesses the official story leaves out.
The result is genius and rot, on the same page, in the same hand — a founding history with the pace of a thriller and the rigor of a prosecution. The charges are real. The evidence is signed. And two hundred and fifty years later, the case is still open.
