Roadside Crosses
by Jeffery Deaver
Book of the Month: April 2010
Exclusives
Kathryn Dance's Kinesics Tutorial
The California Bureau of Investigation
Monterey Regional Office
559324 Monterey-Salinas Highway
Monterey, California 93908
Memorandum
From: Special Agent Kathryn Dance
To: Bureau Investigative Agents
Re: Kinesic Analysis
In response to a number of requests, I've compiled here a brief memo outlining my general approach to using kinesic analysis commonly called body language in interviews and interrogations. Note that this is a very cursory outline and I hope anyone interested in learning more will attend one of my day-long seminars on the subject, which I hold throughout the year at headquarters and in the regional offices.
Step One: Preliminary
1. Physical setting of the interview: In the interview, initially sit in the subject's "personal" proxemic zone (2 feet away). The other proxemic zones are the closer "intimate" (6 to 18 inches) and the farther "public," which is 10 feet away and beyond. Never sit below your subject; even an inch below someone puts you at a psychological disadvantage. Ideally, there should be no tables or chairs between you and the subject.
2. Analyze the subject to be interviewed. Ask:
a. What is their role in the incident? Witness, bystander, suspect, etc.?
b. Is there a motive to lie?
c. What is their personality type? Interrogators need this information to adjust their own demeanor when questioning the subject should they be aggressive or conciliatory? I try to assign them code letters from the Myers-Briggs personality type indicator, which includes three attributes in addition to introvert or extrovert: thinking or feeling, sensing or intuitive, judging or perceiving. This is to gauge how you should present yourself during the sessions. Subjects who are more rational, for instance, you can reason and be blunt with. More emotional subjects may require a softer approach. Remember that zealots, the mentally ill and antisocial criminals are "excluded subjects" they are nearly immune to kinesic analysis.
d. What is the subject's liar's personality? The common categories are manipulators, or "High Machiavellians" (they lie without seeing any problem with it, using deception as a tool to achieve their goals in love, business, politics or crime), social liars (lie to entertain), adaptors (lie to assuage insecurities and make good impressions), actors (control is important, only lie when necessary). This too will help you adjust your approach.
Step Two: Determining Deception
1. Begin the interview by asking questions to which you know the answer, to establish baseline behaviors. Note how the subject behaves when he's telling the truth and when you know he's lying. Remember you are not a lie detector; you are a stress detector. You have to recognize how a subject exhibits stressful behaviors, which suggest he's lying.
2. Slowly begin to shift to questions that are relevant to the inquiry, noting the behavioral flags and stress responses that suggest the subject is being deceptive. In spotting lies, you consider three factors: nonverbal behavior (kinesics), verbal quality (pitch of voice or pauses before answering), and verbal content. The first two are more reliable indicators because they're more unconscious.
Some examples of typical behaviors among those who are deceptive are these:
Shoulders aimed toward you (like an American football player's defensive posture) and more frequent glances at the door (liars actually glance at routes by which they can subconsciously escape the stress of the interrogation).
"I think," "I don't remember," "Believe me," "I swear to God" are denial flag expressions, suggesting deception.
Eyes play an ambiguous role in kinesic analysis. There's the belief among some officers that if a suspect looks to his left under your gaze, it's a sign of lying. This is not the case; averting eyes unlike turning the body or face away from the interrogator has no correlation to deception; direction of eye gaze is too easily controlled.
Remember that people feel stress not only when they lie; sometimes they feel it when they tell the truth.
Covering the face or ears is a negation gesture, trying to deny the stress the subject is feeling. Looking out of window is aversion, trying to avoid the stress.
Deceptive subjects often try to establish camaraderie with their interrogators ("You do the same") and use generalizations and abstractions ("Everybody, everywhere does that!").
With gestures, note the difference between "emblems" (common gestures that tend to substitute for words, like shrugs and finger-pointing), "affect displays" (wide eyes, for instance signs that the subject is experiencing emotion) and "adaptors" (gestures meant to relieve tension, finger-flexing, foot-tapping). The latter two could be evidence of deception.
Even without a baseline comparison, you can sometimes spot deception. Two clues signal lying with some consistency: one is a very slight increase in the pitch of the voice, because lying triggers an emotional response within most people, and emotion causes vocal cords to tighten. The other signal is pausing before and during answering, since lying is mentally challenging. A person who's lying has to think constantly about what he and other people have said previously about the topic, then craft a fictitious response that's consistent with those prior statements and what he believes the interrogator knows.
Answering a question with a question is a classic indicator of deception; the subject is trying to buy time to decide where the interrogator is going and how to frame a response.
Step Three: Arriving at the Truth
Once you determine your subject is deceptive, your job is to get him to tell the truth. Stress when lying pushes an individual into one of the following states: to become either angry or depressed, to deny he's been lying, or to bargain his way out of the situation. You have to adjust the rest of the questioning according to which of these states the subject is in. I.e., you have to deal with an angry deceptive subject differently than you deal with a depressed deceptive subject.
After you make this determination, you use your own verbal skills to attack, bargain with or cajole the subject into telling the truth. Those techniques are beyond the scope of this memo but I go into them in depth in my seminars.
Finally, I urge you to recall that however difficult, repulsive or hostile the subject is, you must never engage them on a personal level, or take anything they say personally. You must remain detached and in charge. In interrogation and kinesic analysis, remember that the enemy is not the liar, but the lie.
K.D.
Q&A with the author, Jeffery Deaver
Q: Did you always want to become a writer?
Jeff Deaver: Yes. I wrote my first "book" at age eleven.
Q: How do you manage to find fresh story ideas?
Jeff: I'm often asked where the ideas for my books come from. To answer that I have to describe what I think is my responsibility as a thriller writer: To give my readers the most exciting roller coaster ride of a suspense story I can possibly think of. This means that, rather than looking through newspapers or magazines for inspiration, I spend much of my time during the early stages of a book sitting in a dark room and trying to think up a story line that will fit the typical Deaver novel: one that features strong (though possibly flawed) heroes, sick and twisted bad guys, deadlines every few chapters, a short time frame for the entire story (eight to forty-eight hours or so), lots of surprising plot twists and turns and plenty of cliffhangers.
Q: You've been described as a 'psychological thriller writer.' Do you think this is accurate?
Jeff: It's accurate to the extent that I explore the psychology of crime and crime detection in my books: the minds of the criminal and his hunters. I also try very hard to create characters both heroes and villains with psychological depth. In other words, the people who populate my books are more than caricatures. We inhabit their minds throughout much of the book. Of course as in my Lincoln Rhyme series there's a great deal of forensics and police work that has little to do with psychological profiling.
Q: How did your first writing get into print?
Jeff: I was editor of my high school literary magazine and a reporter for the school newspaper.
Q: Does writing come easily to you? Do you revise much?
Jeff: I wouldn't say it comes easily to me but I thoroughly enjoy doing it so I'm lucky in that sense. I revise a great deal. My publisher doesn't even get a peek at my manuscript until I've revised it at least twenty or thirty times (and I mean major revisions).
Q: Where do you like to write?
Jeff: I write pretty much anywhere on planes, in hotel rooms, anywhere in my house. (My office sometimes gets so cluttered I end up working in the kitchen. When the kitchen goes, it's up to my bedroom. And so on and so on. I wish I had a bigger house.) I like the writing area to be silent (or with jazz or classical accompaniment occasionally) and either windowless or shaded. When it comes time to write the book itself I'll shut the lights out, picture the scene I'm about to write then close my eyes and go at it. Yes, I can touch type. And, yes, sometimes my hands accidentally move over one key and I end up with a paragraph or two of encryption.
Q: Are there any books about writing you would recommend? Did you take writing classes?
Jeff: I never took classes. There aren't any books that I would recommend. The best way to learn about writing is to study the work of other writers you admire.
Q: Do you ever have "writer's block?
Jeff: I've often said that there's no such thing as writer's block; the problem is idea block. If you have a craftsman's command of the language and basic writing techniques you'll be able to write as long as you know what you want to say. This is not to belittle the affliction, of course, because figuring out what you want to communicate can be one hell of a daunting task. When I find myself frozen whether I'm working on a brief passage in a novel or brainstorming about an entire book it's usually because I'm trying to shoehorn an idea into the passage or story where it has no place. I ask myself: What am I trying to say? If I can't answer that, or if the answer doesn't enhance the work, I back off and try another approach. Trying to write books with a subject matter or in a genre or style you're not familiar with is the best way to find the Big Block looming.
Q: What is the best advice about writing anyone ever gave you, and who gave it?
Jeff: Mickey Spillane: "People don't read books to get to the middle. They read to get to the end."
Q: Why do you think forensics are so popular now in commercial fiction?
Jeff: Certainly going back to Sherlock Holmes we have a tradition of forensic science featured in detective stories. The recent fascination, I think, reflects the shift in approach by law enforcement officials to embrace technology as wholeheartedly as the rest of the world. After all, a psychotic criminal can fool the best psychologists and lie detectors, but he can't beat a DNA match.
Q: How do you balance the needs of plot with the portrayal of relationships among your characters?
Jeff: My books are primarily plot driven but the best plot in the world is useless if you don't populate them with characters that readers can care about. So I work hard to present the human side of my characters while not neglecting the plot. Ideally, I like to integrate the human issues into the suspense story itself. In suspense novels even subplots about relationships have to have conflict.
Q: How much of the stories come from your real life experiences?
Jeff: In my case, none. I was an attorney but I practiced corporate law. It means working harder to do the research but I don't really mind I don't think I have what it takes to chase criminals through back alleys and wade through blood at crime scenes. Of course, all writers draw upon their personal experiences in describing day-to-day life and human relationships, but I tend to keep my own experiences largely separate from my stories.
Q: What portion of your writing time is spent in research? How do you research? Jeff: I spend about eight months researching and outlining my book. Most of this is through books, publications and the Internet. I do, of course, interview individuals who're knowledgeable about the subjects I'm researching but doing this often results in too much information. There's nothing wrong with over-researching but there's a problem when you put too much of your research in the book. All the technical details have to further the plot. If not, out they should go.
Q: Forensic details can be quite gruesome. How do you decide to draw the line so you don't turn off readers?
Jeff: That's a tricky question. Of course, I write crime stories, and I have to describe violence and the aftermath of violence. Readers (and people in general) are fascinated with some detail. But I've had readers tell me they won't read me anymore because of the violence in, say, The Bone Collector, and I've had other readers tell me that they "loved the rat scene" (one of my most gruesome) and can I write more like that? In general, I think, less is more and that if a reader stops reading because a book is too icky then I've failed in my obligation to the readers.
Q: How do you pick the settings for your books?
Q: You trained as a lawyer. Why do you think so many lawyers and doctors become novelists?
Jeff: The easy answer is that writing novels is a lot more fun than practicing law. But there is an analytical component a left-brained component to writing crime fiction that I think is an element of such professions as law, and medicine as well. For me a thriller is a very carefully structured story. I spend eight months outlining and researching the novel before I begin to write a single word of the prose. The skills I use to do that are the same I used when practicing law researching and structuring a legal document or case.
Q: You've also been a folk singer. What led to that interest?
Jeff: Ah, there's nothing like music. It's seductive, it's all-consuming, it's emotional, it's infinitely creative . . . . I was a singer-songwriter, not particularly talented musically but drawn to the craft of song writing. I liked the challenge of writing in a very concise structure in which both meaning and form are important. (It's far easier to write long than it is to write economically.) I performed and taught music in clubs in the San Francisco Bay area and Chicago. But that was years ago and I don't do it anymore. Q: Your first published books were Voodoo and Always A Thief. Can you tell us about those? Jeff: Yes, they were published by a small company called Paperjacks, a paperback original house that's no longer in business and hasn't been for some time. They are out of print and there are no plans to reprint them in the future. But there is certainly a collectors' market for them. Voodoo was a supernatural book, a genre I decided not to work in, and Always a Thief was a caper about an art thief.
Q: Were you happy with the movie version of The Bone Collector? And were you involved in making this movie?
Jeff: I thought the movie was very good. There were probably some things I would have done differently but my expertise is in writing novels, not making movies. Directing films is extremely arduous work and I wouldn't want to do it for any money. I let the movie-makers do their thing and they let me do mine. That's a great relationship. And, no, I was not involved with the making of the film.
On other movie fronts: I've sold The Blue Nowhere to Joel Silver at Warner Brothers (The Matrix, Lethal Weapon, Die Hard) and The Devil's Teardrop to Wolfgang Peterson (The Perfect Storm, Air Force One, In the Line of Fire).
Q: What do you do for fun?
Jeff: Cook and have dinner parties, including some rather bizarre ones (Roman and medieval, for instance). When you work alone, you need to socialize at some level.
Q: Can you list some of your favorite books?
Jeff: Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
Humboldt's Gift, Saul Bellow
Winter's Tale, Mark Helprin
The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow
Hugging the Shore, John Updike
From Russia With Love, Ian Fleming
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Marquez
Collected Poems of Richard Wilbur
Tailor of Panama, John Le Carre
Silence of the Lambs, Thomas Harris
Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein
The Arms of Krupp, William Manchester
The Hound of the Baskervilles, A. Conan Doyle
Collected Stories of John Cheever
The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Fowles
Collected Poems, Robert Frost
Any Doc Savage novel, Kenneth Robeson
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
Music For Chameleons, Truman Capote
The Making of the President1960, Theodore White
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