Crime Scenes

Admittedly, Paul McCormick answers to a fickle muse.

Ideas come to him on breezy and unexpected whims, and during the most benign and everyday of circumstances.

A family barbecue, a holiday party; each inspiration arrives as unannounced as the last.

He’ll excuse himself from the room and start scratching notes on paper.

Then later, reading over his work, his wife, Bernadette, might say, “You thought about this during a barbecue?”

Over the years, the kamikaze inspirations yielded two young novellas and a third that’s nearly completed. McCormick explained his works with a careful precision, bearing the marks of painful editing and thoughtful omissions.

His job – he’s an investigator with the Augusta County Sheriff’s Office – influenced an estimated 30 percent of his writing, he said. And a brief dip into his pages shows it.

McCormick said he recognizes his books are not for the faint of heart. Delving into the darker shades of gray, he’s worked to capture an essence of humanity sometimes ignored – one that’s ugly, shameful, sad and often despicable. Through it, McCormick said he believes his books capture a genuine and honest slice of human experience. He does not attempt to shock, he said.

“I try my best to be completely and utterly honest,” he said. “Everything isn’t going to be beautiful. I’m comfortable and I’m going to create.”

His stories pull together much like his evaluation of a crime scene. When he steps past the yellow tape he begins piecing together the narrative.

“As an artist, it probably goes back to my painter days,” McCormick said. “What makes sense to me. I go more for the emotions of people though.”

According to McCormick, every investigator possesses strengths and weaknesses. While he said he could collect and analyze evidence thoroughly, his primary fascination with investigative work is speaking with people.

And he’s good at it.

His understanding of facial and emotional highs and lows appear in his second novella, “The Physics of Madness.”

As his unnamed character walked the streets of a town in fictitious Morgan County, he thought about the elements of trust.

“Words can be very misleading,” he wrote. “I’m talking about the actual meaning of words when spoken. The tone and volume of the words spoken contain the heart of the matter.”

A student of psychology, musician and writer, McCormick said he wouldn’t automatically classify himself as an analytical person. But for someone who reads physics for fun, wonders about the molecular world and dissects simple actions using an anatomical breakdown – the pegging might not be far-fetched.

In “The Physics of Madness,” McCormick draws sharp lines between adults and children; stillness and movement; purity and rust.

“The 17-year-old in this book has been exposed to more violence and drugs and felonies than any of us could imagine,” he said. “We so want to believe the best in everybody – and that’s how scam artists work.”

His writing bites at learned behavior. Characters fall to the habits that trapped their parents.

McCormick’s stories live outside of books, as well. In collaboration with long-time friend, Peter Deichmann, he’s created separate storylines using music as a medium.

“When I was in my early 20s he gave me lyrics which became a song named ‘Hangman,’” Deichmann said. “Paul and I connected on a level with that stuff. He was able to give me words and music came out of the words in minutes.”

McCormick said he started writing his first book, “Marsupial Man,” as a joke. Poking fun at broadcast news personalities obsessed with alliteration, he said he jotted out a line of his own. It later appeared in the second paragraph of his book.

“It’s a cool book, its got cool concepts,” Deichmann said. “There’s a certain timelessness to it that you can apply to different periods of time, even a future that’s 10 minutes away.”

McCormick said “Marsupial Man” was adapted into a screenplay recently by David Haase, a friend from Colorado. The detective described the screenplay as a potential “A Clockwork Orange” of 2010.

He describes McCormick’s work as dark and “shockingly frightening,” Themes emerge from an unknown origin. “Is there an impetus in his life that created this, or is he just creative,” Deichmann asked.

At the core, his works clears away the trappings that might inhibit other authors from writing about life honestly, Deichmann said.

McCormick has a talent for “stripping away all the B.S. people put into everyday life.”

Nearly finished with this third book, McCormick said he’s still tweaking. And while he often wonders how people might receive his jagged style, especially in the new work, he often thinks back to a favorite lyrical line:

“Life! Life! Life is the only thing worth living for.”