MR. KOJO NNAMDIFew journalists ever get to see and experience as much of the world as Neely Tucker has in his career as a reporter. He's written stories about homicides for the smallest daily newspaper in Mississippi and he's filed copy after dodging sniper and mortar fire in Sarajevo. But when Tucker recently sat down to write his first novel, he didn't build a story around the chaos he witnessed in Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe or the violence he observed in Rwanda.

MR. KOJO NNAMDIInstead, he was inspired by the grit of a 1990s era Washington D.C. and a string of murders that rocked the nation's capital, at a time when it was just beginning to recover from one of the most violent chapters in its history. Neely Tucker joins us in studio. He's a reporter at The Washington Post. His first novel is called "The Ways of the Dead." Neely Tucker, thank you for joining us.

MR. NEELY TUCKERThanks for having me.

NNAMDIYou came to D.C. in the year 2000 after having spent a career reporting everywhere from Zimbabwe to the Bosnian war, but when you sat down to write this first novel, the story was inspired by the Princeton Place murders that took place here in the late '90s. Why did you want to write about D.C. and those murders in particular?

TUCKERWhen I came back from abroad, I'd been covering a lot of conflict, like you had mentioned, and I was very struck by, you had this huge process that would be focused and the courts on just one homicide. And without being flip or cute or anything, it was a striked difference from what I'd been reporting on, that there was so much attention focused on just one homicide.

TUCKERAnd the Princeton Place murders were just coming into court as I was taking it. Darryl Donnell Turner was the perpetrator in that, killed as many as nine women, certainly seven, police say and this was in a pretty rough part of town, over there in Princeton Place, right at Georgia Avenue there in New Hampshire, and a number of the women were, had been missing for a number of, for several weeks before anyone had noticed.

NNAMDIIncluding sometimes their own families.

TUCKERAnd their own families. They were, many of times, they were caught up in drugs or prostitution or some layover between the two. And I just thought it was a terrific metaphor that you would have all these women who would go missing and nobody would notice. And I was very struck by that and that idea just sort of stuck with me through the years.

NNAMDIWhat was your experience with this story as a reporter for the Post? It must've been going through the courts by the time you got here?

TUCKERYeah. Turner had, was indicted for murders three and four when I was covering it. And like most serial killers, he's an entirely unremarkable guy once you're in court. I was there with him at least once, possibly twice. You know, average looks, height, weight. If you put a tie and a suit on him, he'd look like a branch bank manager and yet he killed seven women, including cutting one of them up.

TUCKERI mean, this was, this was a very brutal person. So I was struck by, again, by there was a difference between the banality of his appearance and the brutality of the crimes he carried out.

NNAMDII'd like to invite our listeners to join the conversation by calling 800-433-8850. Were you living in Washington D.C. at the time the Princeton Murders took place? How did you react to that story? 800-433-8850. You can send email to kojo@wamu.org. Why did you take it to fiction? Why not just turn your reporting skills to writing a sprawling reported account of the murders?

TUCKERWell, that's a good question. I think what I wanted to do, I had a little bit more on my mind than I could get to in nonfiction, actually. I wanted to -- D.C., as you know, is a small town and particularly at this juncture, it's home to some of the most powerful people in the country, some of the most dispossessed and some of the most violent. And sometimes, all those groups run into each other on the front page of the newspaper.

TUCKERAnd I wanted to write about it from several different aspects of how the media covers this sort of a crime, how it works in the neighborhood and then how it gets caught up in the courts.

NNAMDIDo you find that there are things about the city that you wanted to express, particularly things that were going on during that era, but many of which still have a lingering effect that you simply couldn't do in newspaper stories, but that you could certainly do through a novel?

TUCKERYeah, because there is a lot of stuff that happens. One of the, the character, the protagonist, in this story is a reporter named...

NNAMDISully Carter.

TUCKER...Sully Carter. And Sully is a man who has come back from war and conflict and he is struggling to identify with the better parts of himself and with society, but he has a very hard time doing it. He's a functional alcoholic. He has a really bad attitude, has a very bad problem with authority. And so it's his journey through this crime that takes him through some of the most powerful parts of the city and the U.S. district court and then, in an unnamed paper, which might resemble a newspaper in his town, and then it takes him through some of the rougher neighborhoods in town.

TUCKERAnd I really wanted a reporter to be able to do that because reporters, they can't arrest anybody. They don't have subpoena power and it's just the press card and the idea that you show up in all these different places that I just talked about and people will talk to you. So you can get them -- he has avenue or license to go from the lowest part of society to the high, but he's only there on the forbearance of the people he's talking to.

NNAMDIIt's not only the newspaper that some people may find vaguely familiar, but the reporter some people may find vaguely familiar. Sully Carter is covering crime in D.C. after years of covering stories like the war in Bosnia. He rides a motorcycle, a Ducati. You ride a motorcycle, not a Ducati.

TUCKERA BMW.

NNAMDIBut how much of yourself did you put into this character?

TUCKEROh, a little, but some of the superficial things -- I think what I took was some stuff that I was familiar with and that I knew about. That's always a good place to start writing from. And I wanted to -- but it's also my life experience that isn't that common to me. For example, there was a former foreign correspondent who was covering the Princeton Place Murders and put them on the front page of the paper.

TUCKERAnd he really did go to the strip bars in the neighborhood and he really did get pushed around a little bit by the police and it really was controversial, getting it on the front page of the paper. No one wanted to believe there was a serial killer at work. He really did crawl beneath the floors of one of the buildings where one of the victims was found. And that reporter's name was Gabriel Escobar, who's now the managing editor of the Philadelphia Enquirer.

TUCKERSo it's not just so much of my personal life experience, although there are some things. It's a fairly common reportorial life experience, actually.

NNAMDIWe're talking with Neely Tucker. He's a reporter at The Washington Post whose first novel is "The Ways of the Dead." And inviting your calls at 800-433-8850. How did you find the balance between what really happened and what classified this novel as fiction?

TUCKERIt is -- I did a little bit of research, but not a whole lot, you know, because at the time, I was -- since reported a piece that will run in the Post at some point in the near future about what really happened in the books. But I didn't want to get caught up too much in the homicides themselves. I didn't want to feel like there was this set of rules I had to play with or play by and I certainly didn't want any of the victims' families to think I was talking about any of their family members in any specific way. This was a very -- I took some of the events that actually happened and then I kept to it as much as, basically, as it benefited my purposes.

NNAMDIIt's my understanding that you met your current wife while reporting on a local murder case. You've since written a touching account for the Post that was nominated for a Pulitzer. I happened to read that. How did the experience of getting so close to a murder case affect your perspective on race, violence, justice and, for that matter, media?

TUCKERIt was completely different going through that experience with Carol who lost her daughter, Erica and Erica's dad, Greg, a number of years ago. Erica would be 21 now. We just passed her birthday. And it was certainly -- it was that experience why I didn't want to focus it too much on any one particular victim in this case, in the Princeton Place homicides. I wanted to keep it very general.

TUCKERBut it was striking to me, even as much as I had been reporting on these issues to go through that experience with Carol on the other side of the process. It was just really very humbling. It is -- violence never really goes away. And when you lose someone, particularly through homicide, they're with you all the time. It's not like anything every really stops.

TUCKERAnd I think I was just very humbled and very struck by that, that it set me back a couple of paces from what I had viewed as material for a, more or less, for storytelling to a deeply-felt personal experience and I became aware that that's what -- how I was wading into people's lives more or less every time I wrote about a violent crime.

TUCKERAnd Sully Carter goes through some of that as well. He really gets bumped back by a couple of people he's reporting on and he should. He goes to the cemetery where a funeral is happening and he gets what's coming to him.

NNAMDIWe're gonna take a short break, but you can still call us 800-433-8850. If you go to our website, kojoshow.org, you can read an excerpt of "The Ways of the Dead." That's the novel by Neely Tucker, who we're talking with today and the novel that we're discussing. You can also send an email if you have question or comment. What do you think you can learn about the identity of a city from studying its most vulnerable? 800-433-8850. You can send us a tweet @kojoshow or email to kojo@wamu.org. I'm Kojo Nnamdi

NNAMDIWelcome back. We're talking to Washington Post -- talking with Washington Post reporter Neely Tucker about his first novel. It is called, "The Ways of the Dead." And it is set in Washington, D.C., in the 1990s. But you grew up in Mississippi. A place your first wife remembered from her childhood as being, quoting here, "So bad, that as a black person from Detroit you were actually grateful to get to Alabama."

NNAMDIYou have married two black women. Adopted your eldest daughter from Zimbabwe while stationed there in the 1990s. What is the role that race has played in your writing and in your work as a journalist?

TUCKERI don't think I'll ever figure that out, to tell you the truth. It is some, you know, primal sort of force. You can't grow up in Holmes County, Miss., when I did. I was born in 1963. You -- at that point it was the poorest, most predominately black county in America. And you really -- I think it just sort of imprints itself upon you in a whole way of looking at the world.

TUCKERAnd I, as a reporter and a writer, though, I remember being struck that once you figured out in Mississippi, that particular point of history, that the grownups were lying to you, then it really sort of moves the ground up under your feet. It really changes your perspective on how every -- how you look at everything in the world.

TUCKERAnd so it's that sort of, you know, tectonic plate sort of way of looking at the world that I think it really changed my life certainly when I, you know, was 16, 17, 18, 20. And I started figuring out that, you know, that everything that was supposed to be true, that you were told growing up, isn't really quite true.

NNAMDIThat's a path that I'd like to go down with you, but we'll have to do that on another occasion. Because when you say the grownups were lying to you, we'd all like to believe that our parents and our relatives and those who came before us were basically good, solid citizens. However, when you find out that on certain matters they've just been lying to you, in some cases because they believed the lies that they were telling you, and another simply because, well, they were just lying to you.

TUCKERAnd well, it's an incredibly vicious way of life, particularly back in Mississippi, back in the day. You mentioned the part when Vita, my first wife, when they'd drive down to Detroit. I mean, she was scared driving through Mississippi, as I think it was reasonable to be. But that meant she would have been scared of me and my parents and all the people around me who I thought were, you know, nice people.

TUCKERIt was a little shift in reality between what you think you are and what you actually might be. And I continue to find that era and before it just absolutely fascinating. And also, you know, just very frightening.

NNAMDIOkay. Back to "The Ways of the Dead."

TUCKERHere we go.

NNAMDIThere's a moment early on in the book when you describe the map that the main character uses to keep track of homicides in the district, where they took place, which cases are closed, which ones are open, and you write that his way of understanding the living is to study, as the book's title said, the ways of the dead. What does that mean to you?

TUCKERIt means that the way we kill each other means something. You can look at the gun laws in this country. How is America nuts? How is America different? What makes it unique among other countries? Well, one thing is guns. There are those charts that, you know, the number of people killed by guns in the United States, it's incredibly different than most industrialized countries. So that's one way that, that you understand how the…

NNAMDIHow we live.

TUCKER…how you live on a very, like I said, a left-hand way of looking at the world, which is what, you know, certainly that Sully has. And when you look at homicide victims you're also looking at, most of the time, people who were caught up in really pretty rough ways of life, a lot of the time. So you get to look at the, all the ways that society breaks down and it's most brutal ways.

NNAMDIAnd when I think about it, that idea can shape your reporting, not just here, but anywhere in the world you are, if you're reporting from the Congo, if you're reporting from Zimbabwe, the ways of the dead will give you a lot of insight into what life is like in that country.

TUCKERHow you kill people, how -- or don't kill people. How they're buried, how they're remembered, the prosecution. You remember I told you earlier they -- at the start of our conversation, the way that everybody was paying attention here to just one homicide. And I was really struck by that. Look at all these people walking around and all of this is just about one homicide.

TUCKERMost of the places I'd been reporting as single homicide wasn't -- didn't cross the, you know, it didn't meet the reportorial barrier. And so I think that says something. And, again, in a primal, really sort of difficult, and maybe not in a very nice way, but in its way it is as telling and honest as anything else.

NNAMDIThe murder that sets the story in motion is the murder of the white daughter of a federal judge. It seems that you've got very strong feelings about the disproportionate amount of attention this kind of story might have gotten if it actually happened, compared to the killings that almost became routine in many neighborhoods throughout the District.

TUCKERYeah, I mean, it's -- there's parts about the media, again, we're back to "The Ways of the Dead." What do killings tell you about society? Well, the murders of white women, in fact, tell you a whole lot, in ways that they get media attention, legal attention, some court's attention -- I'm not saying, certainly, that there's anything wrong with that. You just want everybody to get the, you know, the same shake of the, of whatever it is. You want everybody to get a fair shake.

TUCKERAnd when it doesn't happen that way, then it tells you something about the society that you're living in. And after reporting in a number of countries all over the place, where people are all sorts of complexions, it, you know, was a very telling lesson for me to come back here.

NNAMDIYour main character, Sully, is trying to report the story and find answers while the cops are investigating. He's often racing with or really against them to find answers. Tell us about the distrust of law enforcement. How much of that do you share?

TUCKERA good bit. I mean, a good cop is a good thing. And they're, you know, but not everybody who puts on the uniform is necessarily a good guy. And that would apply to any business. Certainly in this book, Danny Whelan, who has the epigraph of the book, is a good cop who really helped solve this case. He really put two and two together. And this was a very difficult case to solve.

TUCKERBut especially from -- you remember, like I told you, growing up in Mississippi, the good guys were not wearing the uniforms. The guys wearing the uniforms were often people that were very good to be afraid of. And that experience was born out in my reporting experience abroad. Soldiers, men in uniform, they have the ability to tell you when and where to go, to sit down and shut up. And if you don't do that, you will have many, many, many problems.

TUCKERBecause if they have a badge, they have the uniform, they have the authority. And you have to be very careful in dealing with that. And that's why I think good cops are really great people. And they can be really dangerous as well.

NNAMDIYou were saved by some people in uniform once. Was it in Rwanda where you were…

TUCKEROh, yeah.

NNAMDI…about to be set upon?

TUCKEROh, yeah, I got whacked on the head pretty good over there. We were covering the Rwandan executions. That's, you know, again, that's a good point. We were covering the Rwandan executions. After the genocide, they were executing 22 people in a day around the country. And I was there just outside of Kigali where they were executing four. And I wound up very near, just a few feet from the people who were tied to poles being shot.

TUCKERAnd after they got shot everybody was very excited and very upset. And because I had a ponytail at the time, they thought I was French. And French was a bad thing to be then. You would have been a sympathizer with the Tutsis, one of the ethnic groups there. So they really got very angry that I was there and had a notebook. And there was -- the crowd press was so great that at one point my feet were off the ground. That's how close everybody was.

TUCKERThis was 30,000 people at this thing. They weren't all paying attention to me at this point, but enough of them were. And this cop came through and said, "Hey, hey, get out, get out, get out. Leave the guy alone." And then he took me out by his truck and he said, "You just stand right here until the crowd breaks up because these guys over there -- you don't even know this because you're too dumb to notice, but these guys are over here plotting what they're going to do when you leave. So just stay here with me until they leave."

NNAMDIThe guys with the very sharp machetes. Here is Nick, in Winchester, Va. Nick, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

NICKYes. I'm Nick, from Winchester, but I grew up in Mississippi, just south of Memphis. And I spent a lot of -- most of my time growing up either in DeSoto County or Washington County. You know, of course, we had to drive through Holmes County on the way. Several things, one I'm about 19 years older than you are. And I'm rather curious. About the time you were born was some of the worst violence and the worst conflicts, in terms of the desegregation.

NICKAnd I'm curious about the fact that you're wife, your first wife, when she came down, was afraid to come to Mississippi. Because it was my understanding -- and by that time I was overseas -- if she came down at the same time you were a grown man, I think the violence was pretty well under control.

NNAMDIWell, you tend to remember what you grew up with. Here's Neely Tucker.

TUCKERWell, yeah, the violence was long gone by then. And I, you know, I've since remarried. As Kojo pointed, my wife, Carol, is Jamaican. We go down there. My first wife and I went there, and Chipo loves it there, my 16-year-old daughter. She loves going down and seeing Granny. It's not quite the place that you read about in the newspapers. It's not nearly, you know, as, you know, as sort of bad as the national media -- those evil guys -- make it appear to be.

TUCKERBut it has a certain history. And that history stays. And you have to have distinct events that will change a national perception of what a place is like. So Mississippi really hasn't had that many different events that have been wonderfully positive. So a lot of that history lingers. And I certainly didn't -- I didn't think Vita was in any danger going down there or Carol or Chipo. But I understood their ambivalence about going.

NNAMDIThank you very much for your call, Nick. What did you want to impart to readers by setting this story in a time before cell phones, before email and Google searches? Sully is a guy who gets drunk with a detective, drinks beer with a drug dealer, sleeps on his coach to do his reporting. He's not a guy who spends a lot of his time blogging or tweeting or reading blogs and tweets.

TUCKERI didn't want Sully to tweet. I really, really, really did not want Sully to tweet. And part of it, you know, I'm old, I'm a fossil. And I -- this was the last glory days of the American newspaper, really. I don't think we realized it at the time, but the late 1990s, by 2000 websites were just starting then. And it really hadn't happened yet. It was going to happen. We were sort of the walking dead, if you will. But it hadn't happened yet. And what the news cycle was not 24 hours.

TUCKERWhat came out and landed on your front doorstep the next day, particularly in a major metropolitan daily, was what controlled and drove the news. And I'm so old I grew up in that era. And I sort of like the idea of doing something at the very end of that era, when it was all about to come crashing down, but it hadn't quite yet.

NNAMDIDavid Carr writes in The New York Times yesterday or today about the reason why so much of the media got it wrong in Eric Cantor's district in Virginia. He said that's because we spend so much time now thinking that all information is available online in some kind of way. And reporters no longer walk the streets like they used to, to find out what was going on at that level. Had they done that, they may have been able to figure out what was going on there.

TUCKERWithin, I mean, everything has its ups and downs. Like, you mentioned, you can spend too much time, you know, staring at the computer and just doing searches and talking on the phone, which is sort of a lousy way to do reporting, but it's necessary a lot of the time. Back in the day, of course, without that you had, you know, in the political processes you had guys like Lee Atwater, who were happy to tell you, "Oh, we got a poll here. We're up 34 points. We're up 34 points. We gotta…" "Well, what's that poll, Mr. Atwater?"

TUCKER"Well, we can't give you that. It's proprietary information, but, you know, but we're up 34 points." And so people would say, "The Atwater campaign, they're up 34 points." And it was all, you know, he was making it up. I don't think he was the only one, by the way. So you were vulnerable as a reporter, almost all the time.

NNAMDIYou left Zimbabwe, and the fast-paced life of foreign reporting to spend time with your family in 2000. What was it like to transition from such a mobile lifestyle to the more stable life of the Metro desk, at the Washington Post, where you've worked ever since? And how did that help you to get into the details of what took place on Princeton Place and understand Washington in the way that you do?

TUCKERIt was so different. I used to -- I remember I would look at my face in the mirror sometimes and just sort of press around my nose and eyes and saying, "Is this really me? Is this -- what am I…" Because I went from working in -- I don't know, you know, 50, 60 countries over seven or eight years, to, you know, I lived on Capitol Hill and I walked down to Superior Court. And that was about the extent of where I went. Getting in a taxi was a big deal.

TUCKERBut it allowed me to focus on -- and I really did want to bring out some of the ways that a number of people have from coming back, whether it's soldiers or correspondents or aid workers or any number of people. You really do have this sort of post-traumatic stress adjustment to coming back, to adjusting to a new reality where things are different. And it's difficult to put in place. And it's particularly difficult when you have limited amounts of violence, which is what I would call here in the United States.

TUCKERIt's compartmentalized. And it's very difficult to adjust your emotions and your professional expectations and make it fit into that box. That box where we keep violence. And that is one of the things that Sully, in sort of out-sized ways, struggles with in this book. He understands -- you mentioned the drug dealer that he works with. And he understand that from his foreign reporting as just another war lord.

TUCKERIf you want to know who's killing people in a lot of bad -- well, you go see the guys with the guns. And that's sort of his approach here. Of course, he's sort of reckless, in my humble estimation, but that's Sully's business, not mine.

NNAMDIA couple of old-school journalism questions. I guess I'll only have time to ask you one of them. Your character Sully, early in the book, basically says, if you can't file a story drunk then you don't deserve a press credential. Where does that…

TUCKERThat's more or less what he says.

NNAMDI…kind of attitude fit into the modern newsroom? Any Sully's around today?

TUCKERThat was definitely a saying, I can tell you, among the Bosnia press corps in Sarajevo and, yay, back in 1994. So everybody -- there was the Holiday Inn, and -- which was the one place that had electricity in town. That and the AP bureau. And you had to file out of this, you know -- so all these hacks -- this is never a good idea -- you know, are stuck in one hotel.

TUCKERAnd obviously there's -- somebody's got to be able to get some alcohol past the siege lines in there. And there's -- the nights are long. There's not a lot to do. There was no, you know, electricity, other than the generator. So you would, you -- that was definitely a saying back then. Whether or not that was tongue-in-cheek or sincere, I, you know, I'll plead the Fifth.

TUCKERBut there was -- here certainly was -- you'd fall out of the Newsweek bureau and it was very common to see reporters, you know, cross reading each other's stories. Like, "Hey, read my story. Make sure it makes sense for me." Not that anything was necessarily wrong, but, again, it's that era that I was talking about that's past now.

NNAMDIIt's the old-school journalism that Neely Tucker is a part of. He's a reporter at the Washington Post. His novel is -- his first novel is called, "The Ways of the Dead." George Pelecanos, you've got company. Neely Tucker, thank you so much for joining us.

TUCKERThanks for having me.

NNAMDIAnd thank you all for listening. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.