Scott Morales - From Law Enforcement to Crime Fiction Writing

Retired law enforcement officer Scott Morales shares his journey from working in Louisiana, Indiana, Ohio, and Tennessee to becoming a published crime fiction author. With experience spanning the Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office, Fort Wayne Police Department, Cincinnati security details, and Nashville's Department of Homeland Security during the 2020 bombing, Scott brings authentic insider perspective to his writing. He discusses how an unsolved 1986 homicide case from his early career, later connected to serial killer Sean Gillis, became the foundation for his writing. The conversation reveals how a chance reconnection with an old girlfriend after 9/11, where they discovered they had waited at different movie theaters for a planned meeting 20 years earlier, inspired his exploration of missed opportunities in his fiction. Scott explains his creative process of blending historical facts with fiction, particularly in his book "A Strawberry Concrete," which interweaves the JFK assassination and the Charles Whitman Texas Tower shooting. He discusses learning to write with more humanity after initially producing work that read like police reports, drawing on his uncle's experiences working for the Austin Police Department and Secret Service under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. The episode explores Scott's tactical mindset of thinking "if-then" rather than "what if," which helps him both as an investigator and as a writer planning multiple storylines. He reveals his current project on Huey Long, imagining an alternate history where the assassinated Louisiana governor lived to become a socialist president in 1936, and shares that he has outlines for 10 to 15 more books representing about a decade of work ahead.