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AUTHOR’S NOTE

Readers familiar with earlier novels in my “Killer” series will recall that the preceding six books were all narrated from the viewpoint of Hobart Lindsey, a commercial insurance investigator. Having done some of that work myself, I felt reasonably confident in writing about it.

But with The Radio Red Killer, the viewpoint shifts to Sergeant Marvia Plum of the Berkeley Police Department. And what the heck do I know about police procedure? True, I put in a little time in the military police (as did Marvia), but that was long ago and far away, and my training in the proper method of guarding prisoners of war or of directing traffic at a crossroads is a far cry from learning how a detective tracks down a killer at large in an American city.

Thanks to the Citizen Police Academy conducted by the Berkeley Police Department, I now know a little bit about the world of police and the way a modern police force works. A thousand questions arose in the course of writing The Radio Red Killer, ranging from when and how an officer is required to Mirandize a subject to where the leftover dinner of a poisoning victim is sent for analysis.

My thanks to Sergeant Steve Odom and the faculty of the academy and to the entire BPD for their patience, concern, and all-around helpfulness. I know I didn’t get everything right, but their assistance helped me reduce the number of errors by a sizable percentage. One point that I got wrong “on purpose” concerns the parking facility at the Hall of Justice in Berkeley. There is no room in the parking lot for officers to leave their personal cars while they’re on duty. Thus, they have to park the better part of a mile away and walk to and from the hall. If only in a work of fiction, I spared them this chore.

My special thanks to Officer Jeff Katz, who started as my ride-along host and became my fast friend. He is typical of the intelligent, dedicated patrol officers and detectives I have met, and we are all better off to be served by men and women of his ilk. His contribution to this manuscript is incalculable. To the extent that its portrayal of police work is accurate and authentic, he deserves full credit. To the extent that any errors remain, chalk them up to my obtuseness, or better yet, to dramatic license.

Yes, dramatic license sounds a lot better than obtuseness.

And to any reader who ever gets mad at a cop—I know I have, and sometimes still do—all I have to suggest is, try walking a mile in their shoes. You have a lot to learn!

Radio station KRED and the Oceana Foundation are totally fictitious, as are all of KRED’s staff and on-air personalities. My own first experience in radio came as a news-writer for WIOD in Miami, Florida, in 1955. My boss and mentor was news director Gene Struhl. Less than a year later I was off to the army and never saw the inside of WIOD’s studios again. But in the few months I worked in that newsroom, Gene instilled in me a love for the medium that burns brightly to this day. In the years since I left WIOD, listeners’ ears in New York, Kansas City, Los Angeles and San Francisco have been assaulted by my silvery voice. From 1977 to 1997 I appeared regularly on KPFA in Berkeley, California.

Any resemblance between KPFA and its parent, the Pacifica Foundation, and KRED and its parent, the Oceana Foundation, is of course purely coincidental.

My thanks for Mr. Richard Brown and Mr. Harvey Jordan of dba Brown Records in Oakland, California, for guidance and information in the field of historic recordings. And my thanks to Mr. William Pfeiffer, the Old Time Radio Digest and its members, and to many generous old-time radio collectors for their assistance in developing Lon Dayton’s OTR program for KRED.

A final, special word of thanks to Ms. Carolyn Wheat, who proved to me that an old dog can still learn new tricks, and without whose wonderful advice The Radio Red Killer would have stalled somewhere around Chapter Six.

—Richard A. Lupoff

1997