For most of my working life I was a materials analyst. The job sounds like a laboratory, and some of it was, but most of it was writing. When a part failed, somebody had to find out why, and then somebody had to write down what they found so the next person would not have to learn it again the hard way. Often both of those people were me.
There was rarely much drama in it. A bearing that seized. A weld that cracked along a line anyone could have predicted from the last three inspection reports. A pump that ran ten thousand hours past its interval because the log said it had been serviced when it had not. My work was to look at the broken thing, look at the record of what had been done to it, and find the place where the two accounts stopped agreeing.
That is the part of the work that never left me. People remember what they meant to do, and a part shows what was actually done to it. Memory rounds things off and lets them slide, and a cracked casting does none of that. It holds the whole of its own failure in the metal, and it is still there in the morning after everyone has gone home and agreed on a kinder version. After twenty years of reading the metal against the story, I started to trust one of them more than the other.
Things and records
My father taught high-school shop. He could take almost anything apart on the kitchen table and say where it had been made badly and where it had just been used hard. My mother was a librarian, and her whole working life was the other half of the same skill, knowing that the answer to nearly any question has already been written down somewhere, and that finding it is a discipline and not a lucky guess. One of them taught me things and the other taught me records, and it took me a long time to notice that my job was both at once.
Starting over
I did that work for more than twenty years. Somewhere past fifty I went back to school for a writing degree, which is a strange thing to do with a good pension in sight, and I started writing fiction. What came out was murders. That surprised a few people who had only ever seen me write inspection reports. I had spent my career on failures that somebody was hoping very much would be written down as accidents. Fiction was the same problem with the constraints taken off and the stakes made plain.
Why the gentle kind
People ask why I write the mild sort of mystery. No gore, a small town, a body found early and treated with some decency. The answer is that the puzzle is what interests me, not the shock, and a puzzle only works if it is fair. Fair means the reader gets the same evidence the detective gets, every piece of it, shown at the time it mattered. I will have more to say about that another week.
A first novel is on its way. More on that when it is ready.
So that is why I write about broken things. A broken thing keeps the marks of what happened to it, and it will not tidy them for whoever is standing in the room. The tidying is a human habit. That is the difference my whole career came down to. Broken things don't lie. People do.