Ask the Author: James Garrison
Answered Questions (3)
James Garrison
Why a girlfriend ran away from home, and I helped her find a place to stay with a kind and generous woman who much later made my wedding rings.
James Garrison
My inspiration for The Safecracker came from some of my experiences as a young lawyer and from some of my daughter's experiences as she related them to me when she began practicing law and appearing in court years later. The Safecracker takes place in a fictional, mid-sized North Carolina city called Carrville, beginning in 1980, when gasoline lines snaked around the block during the Iran Hostage Crisis. Those days supplied the setting and the idea for a scheme to defraud an alternative energy project intended to respond to the oil shortage. Why an alternative energy project developed by a group of cities? As a new lawyer in the 1970s, I was involved in a legal battle in which some cities tried to buy an interest in the first nuclear power plants in the United States. The theory, then, was that nuclear power was going to be so cheap that no other electric power source could compete with it. That didn't turn out so well. As a writer, though, I started thinking “what if” there was a similar project for alternative energy using municipal bonds and some of the insiders set out to defraud the cities. As with war (my novel QL 4), where there are large volumes of money and goods flowing freely, especially in government projects, someone is going to be out to tap the flow, and legality is not an obstacle. And the safecracker who supplies the title: inspired by a true crime that still seems incredible even to me. But it's all a matter of public record buried somewhere deep in the past.
James Garrison
Read, read, write, write. Keep a journal and record your impressions of the world around you, how you react to it, and how others react to it.
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