Adam Plantinga

Adam Plantinga’s first book, 400 Things Cops Know, was nominated for an Agatha Award and won the 2015 Silver Falchion award for best nonfiction crime reference. It was hailed as “truly excellent” by author Lee Child and deemed “the new Bible for crime writers” by The Wall Street Journal. His second book, also nonfiction, is Police Craft. Plantinga began his career in law enforcement in 2001 as a Milwaukee police officer. He is currently a sergeant with the San Francisco Police Department assigned to street patrol.

Plantinga's new novel Hard Town follows The Ascent, his debut.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

It's a pretty heavy lift. (The Heavy Lift would also be a good title for a thriller). Titles matter, and are hard to pick. Hard Town seemed a good fit to me because it's short and stark and consistent with the book's style and themes. I was going for a dirt-under-the-fingernails kind of vibe.

What's in a name?

Kurt Argento is a name I'm pleased with. His ancestry is half German, hence Kurt, and half Italian, which gives us Argento. Argento is a composite of several cops I've worked with over the years, but I was inspired to name him Kurt because that was the first name of a Milwaukee street cop I know who was a memorably tough piece of meat.

The last name was trickier. I cycled through some other options. One was Anselmo, which I concluded sounded too soft for a former Detroit SWAT operator. Anselmo is the leafy town in SoCal where you'll find lots of nice spas. I finally landed on Argento. It's the name of one of Maximus' two horses in the film Gladiator. I just liked the sound of it.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Beginnings and endings have flowed pretty well for me so far. It's that tricky middle that can be tough sledding. I'm hard on my characters, so in my first two books, I've tossed them into a meat grinder. Not all of them make it out. I do find myself doing a fair amount of tinkering throughout the novel to make sure I earn my ending.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

Argento and I have some similar world views and attitudes about policing. We're both urban cops with a fair amount of experience with urban blight and dysfunction. He may be slightly better at fighting than me, an admission I make grudgingly. I'm taller, so there's that. But I didn't want to write a thinly disguised fictional version of myself, because I'm not that interesting. So there are key differences. I earned a degree in English and Argento was lucky to graduate high school. I'm a family man and he's a loner. He likes to throw back beer and I'm a lifelong teetotaler. He's handy and I can't fix anything. It's the sparkly magic of fiction, folks.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Movies with some moral brawn to them, like John Sayles' film Matewan. Springsteen's lean and sometimes bleak album Nebraska. The kinds of drug-ravaged, unpredictable streets I work as a cop. News stories about improbable tales of survival, like someone being rescued after days of being stuck under earthquake wreckage or escaping a burning building. I'm drawn to accounts of people being pushed to their limits.

Visit Adam Plantinga's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Ascent.

--Marshal Zeringue