Bjorn Hasseler

In 2017, I slushed a story called “Sunshine.” Susan Diana “Sunshine” Moritz appeared in some early Gazette stories and was mostly known for being Willow Moritz’s younger sister and a much less sympathetic character. She’s very different from the Bible Society girls who are frequent characters in my stories.

The story is about Sunshine’s summer job as a lifeguard at the Grantville municipal pool. I went through the up-timer grid and chose characters by sorting by year of birth and pulling up-timers who would be teenagers in Summer, 1635. That’s how I can across Hawker Baldwin, who hadn’t appeared in any stories yet.

Then my thought process went something like this: Sunshine and Hawker . . . This is a soap opera. And it’s at the pool. It’s basically Baywatch. Instead of trying to avoid it, I went for it. First I found several more up-time lifeguards: Colby the drummer, Acton the jock, Billy Stull, Jack Sims who wants to be a doctor. They all fit the theme nicely. I made up a couple down-timers.

Aaron Hoffmann wasn’t the character’s original name. I told a friend about my idea, and he made jokes about David Hasselhoff. So I ran with it. That’s where Hoffmann comes from, and that’s why he’s the one who serenades Sunshine in one scene. (Because Hasselhoff was a popular singer in Germany.)

That’s also where lifeguards interfering with an investigation comes from, although the police officer’s wording is based on something that actually happened at a college I attended.

Then I slushed it. I’ll characterize the feedback as “meh.” People thought it was neat that I’d chosen a character who’d been unlikeable and gotten into her head, but it wasn’t my best.

Somewhere around here I realized that a NESS story called “Shooting Fish in a Barrel” was happening on the other side of Buffalo Creek at the same time. I had the opportunity to use a time/date slug of “Meanwhile, on the other side of the creek . . .” You can’t pass that up. “Clearly” the two stories were related. This is where the Baywatch tropes came in again: it’s the lifeguards meddling in the stalker investigation that causes something to spin out of control in the other case. The A plot and the B plot are related, because of course they are.

Then I realized why “Sunshine” wasn’t working for me. The profile was off. That is, the bad guys’ actions didn’t match their motivation. This is where Criminal Minds came in. The television show is inspired by the real-life Behavioral Analysis Unit of the FBI. The agents published the Crime Classification Manual, and I was able to purchase a copy online.

I revamped the profile of the bad guy, and for “Sunshine,” it was definitely one guy. But now I needed someone who could be the profiler. And there weren’t any up-timers. Police Chief Preston “Press” Richards was a possibility—he’d been to the FBI’s National Academy program, which meant he’d been exposed to criminal profiling. But 1) there had been claims on the character, 2) I didn’t want to have the chief investigating this himself, and 3) he doesn’t have time to be the chief and the profiler.

Then I remembered that Barbara Kellarmännin sits back and watches people. She’d been on the Bibelgesellschaft‘s trip to Jena and their trip to Erfurt. She doesn’t panic in tense situations, and she watches people. That’s how “The Observer” Grantville Gazette 78, 2018 came about.

Barbara figures out what sort of person committed an act of vandalism. Press Richards meets with her and her parents because her observations were correct all down the line. He pitches the idea of her studying to be a profiler. He’s got his National Academy notes and two paperbacks he found in spin racks at a grocery store in Fairmont: John Douglas’s Mind Hunter and Robert Ressler’s Whoever Hunts Monsters. These are memoirs by real-life BAU agents that discuss many cases.

So that’s what Barbara starts with. Not long after, her up-time friend Alicia Rice disappears from school after being bullied. Alicia solves the case and finds Alicia in “Clique, Clique, Boom!” Grantville Gazette 82, 2019. The profiling is more subtle than in “The Observer.” It’s finding out Alicia’s family history and how that affects her as well as what group offender dynamics are like.

Once both of these stories were published, I was ready to return to “Sunshine.” At the time, we were discussing the possibility of an anthology centered on the fair. But I started writing Neustatter’s European Security Services novels. When the chronology reached a story I’d already written, I incorporated it into the novel in progress. So both “Sunshine” and “Shooting Fish in a Barrel” ended up in the fourth NESS novel, Security Solutions. It explains a number of things that happened in the third novel, Security Threats, and it’s the profile of the bad guy that ties it all together. The elevator pitch for Security Solutions is “Baywatch meets Criminal Minds in Grantville.”

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