Who's next / The Who
Spider James never claimed to be a reporter, journalist or researcher. He was a writer. He happened to write true crime. It wasn’t even that he began with a specific interest, it was something that he happened to ‘fall into.’
It began just after he’d graduated from college with a degree in English and no job. He’d answered an ad for a ghost writer. He hadn’t expected it to go anywhere. In some ways it didn’t. He’d gotten the job, accepted the deal, started the process. He was going to writing an autobiography that was not his own. In fact, it was likely that he would never even receive credit for the words that would appear on the page.
Ironically, ‘the author’ died in a car crash. The project over before it had really begun.
But not for Spider. He started thinking, if he could write a book for someone else why not a book for himself, but he needed a topic. He had been sitting at the Starbucks trying to think of one, when the idea fell into his lap. Almost literally.
At the next table, a young woman had sat reading a newspaper. Finished, she rose, tossing it aside. She left without looking back, the paper sliding across the surface and threatening to fall, Spider had grabbed it. The headline announced that the Rocky River Murders was now solved, the case that had plagued law enforcement for years, over.
The idea was hatched and his career born. Now he had five true crime books under his belt. He knew what his editors and publisher wanted. He knew what people liked to read. It was surprisingly easy. If anything it was formulaic, serial killers as unoriginal as romance novelists. But it was easy and the money decent. It allowed him to travel, meet people, do the things he liked to do. And that was what it was all about, doing what he liked to do.
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