Author sets murder mystery on CT’s Gold Coast
Writer Tim Cole describes old hometown in his first novel ‘The Sea Glass Murders’
“How can murder take place in these special places? And murder does take place in these special places, with humans who are failed and flawed and always very interesting.” Tim Cole, author of “The Sea Glass Murders”
As a frequent air traveler, Timothy Cole always had a ritual when he got to the airport: find a good book that would take him on a literary journey as well as a physical one.
“Traveling cross country, the first thing I’d do is stop in at the bookstore at Kennedy or Newark airport and buy a spy thriller. I’m very interested in the genre — and how do authors piece together the disparate elements that keep the reader reading? What’s the technique to keep readers moving forward and turn the page? Engaged to the last page?” said Cole, a Greenwich resident.
Eventually, the story-reader became a story-teller. Cole, a former technology and aviation editor at Popular Mechanics who traveled the world on assignments for the magazine, decided to try his own hand as a novelist.
He found he loved writing in the fictional thriller genre — assembling characters scenic locations, putting them through adversity — as much as he enjoyed reading them. “That puzzle was fascinating to me, and I enjoy, immensely, the process myself. It’s something I love to do,” said Cole, the chief content officer at a health and technology publishing company in Norwalk.
Cole’s first novel published this fall by Pace Press, “The Sea Glass Murders” is set in Westport, where Cole used to live. He describes his old hometown on the novel’s first page as “home to McMansions, fancy retail outlets and gifted children.”
In the story, a local cop, a former spy and a television news reporter join forces to find a murderer. The Westport police detective is content to let the investigation into the grisly murder of a young woman be taken over by state police, until he discovers a cover-up arranged at the highest levels of law enforcement, as well as the trail of a sinister killer on the loose.
Cole said he set the novel set in Westport to fulfills one of the requirements of a good thriller — a picturesque and upscale locale, and in the case of the Connecticut seashore, where a unique combination of “wind and wave and light” play out, he notes.
“It’s a formula that has always worked,” he said of his choice of location. “How can murder take place in these special places? And murder does take place in these special places, with humans who are failed and flawed and always very interesting.”
A medical examiner’s office in Stamford also prominently figures in the novel, and there are plenty of references to only-inConnecticut oddities and lingo — it could be the only murder mystery ever written where the “representative town meeting” gets a mention.
The debut novel introduces readers to the character of Dasha Petrov, a former spy who has a long history of espionage in the Cold War era, now comfortably retired in Westport. Cole has written three other manuscripts centering on her adventures in the world of spy craft, assassinations and deceit which he hopes to publish in the near future. The first-time author said he loved the process of writing spy thrillers and getting all the pieces assembled in the right order, so that Petrov, for example, is in Dallas in November of 1963, soon to become an eyewitness to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. “Trying to get your character into position, so she can experience the history, and therefore get the reader into position to experience history, it’s the challenge and the enjoyment,” Cole notes.
The author is an avid sailor, a pilot and a lover of all kinds of technology. His books include plenty of material on aviation and seafaring, and he’s packed them with as much period detail as he can. Cole spends hours researching the properties of a 1933 Rolls Royce, or how a pilot ran through the pre-flight checklist for a U.S. heavy bomber in World War II, to immerse the reader into the sights and sounds of history.
“Little things become fascinating to me: I can do a search, and the whole world opens to me,” he said, “Writing is my first love, something I never want to get away from. And there’s something very liberating about writing a novel — because you can write any damn thing you want....And trying to bring technology to a lay readership is one of my passions.”
Doug Logan, a friend who worked with Cole on a trade publication for the boating and sailing industry, said he was well suited to write mystery novels. “He started out as a good writer to begin with. And he’s a Renaissance man, he has an interest in a lot of areas of life, particularly technical knowledge. He has an interest in how things work, and he’s adept at describing how things work,” said Logan, a Branford resident, “And his sense of place in the book is very good, evoking the nature of life of southwest Connecticut, the Gold Coast.”
Cole also brings a sense of high spirits and adventure to his work that shine through the pages of his debut novel. As he says with a laugh, “It’s as fun as a s fun as a serial murder can be.”