Brian Lebeau was born in Fall River, Massachusetts, home of the infamous Lizzie Borden. After being awarded an "A" in high school English once and denied a career in music for "lack of talent" repeatedly, he taught economics at several colleges and universities in Massachusetts and Rhode Island before moving to Fauquier County, Virginia, to work as a defense contractor for two decades. In his debut psychological thriller, A Disturbing Nature, Mr. Lebeau merges three key interests: a keen fascination with everything World War II, a morbid curiosity surrounding the motivations and mayhem of notorious serial killers, and a lifelong obsession with the Red Sox.
A Disturbing Nature is set in the summer of 1975, when FBI investigator Francis Palmer believes that after the Vietnam War ended, so did his troubles. But the serial killer who strikes a southern New England town is like nothing he's ever seen. Mo Lumen—a young man perpetually stuck with the mental and emotional capacity of an 11-year-old due to a childhood accident—is the main suspect. Abandoned by the Great Society and sheltered from the counter-cultural revolution, he'd been forced to leave Virginia under the shadow of secrets and accusations. But as Palmer digs deeper, their intertwining lives blur the lines between fact and conjecture, truth and justice, man and monster. In war, you can identify your enemy. At home, it could be anyone.
Sitting down with In Reference to Murder for a little Author R&R (Reference and Research), Brian discusses the challenges and unique aspects of conducting research for a psychological thriller about a fictional serial killer from nearly fifty years ago.
My novel, A Disturbing Nature, is a psychological thriller in the strictest sense—with questions swirling around, and inside the minds of, a mysterious young man who arrives in Rhode Island just before the killing begins, raising suspicion that he may be the predator lurking in the woods, and an equally enigmatic FBI Chief Investigator tasked with hunting the monster down. While the primary storyline concerns a serial killer, and many significant serial killers from that time (called mass murderers before 1980) are referenced, the mystery unfolds with reduced emphasis on graphic violence and explicit sex, relying more on the resultant trauma. Yes, the story involves sexual themes, and, yes, there are violent crimes committed, but these unfold in such a way as to explore the psychological impact on the chief investigator and the newly arrived young man as they are drawn irresistibly together, though neither fully understands why.
The central theme concerns the thin line between man and monster, so I focused primarily on the psychological profiles of the hunter and hunted and the evolution of their thought processes as they react to distractions and disturbances. In addition to a long-time interest in true-crime documentaries, I leveraged heart-to-heart discussions with family and friends throughout my years as a professor of economics, a defense contractor, and CEO of a mid-sized firm. I also spent a great deal of time researching psychological profiling from the early-to-mid 1970s, as well as modern psychological studies. Combining all this with deep introspection into the darkest recesses of my own mind, I was able to develop a cast of fictional characters that couldn't be further apart intellectually, socially, or professionally. This afforded me an opportunity to explore the human psyche at the extremes and all the space in between. The result is a mystery with very realistic characters—individuals that could be living next door in your rural community, urban high rise, or even college townhouse. Compelling the audience to witness the transformation of a character's thoughts is intentional, evoking empathy and inviting the reader to speculate how similar circumstances in their past might have altered their mindset and motivations—the hallmark of a psychological thriller—because the scariest monsters usually hide in our own closets.
Historical accuracy is paramount in a period piece. Having A Disturbing Nature unfold in late summer and early fall 1975 created several challenges, including: weaving in significant social, political and cultural events, infamous serial killer investigations, accurate weather, and sports-related history. Fortunately, gathering historical information today is much easier than back in 1975, so my team and I allocated countless hours to online research, scouring websites like farmersalmanac.com, baseball-reference.com, and vault.fbi.gov, among many others. There's no doubt that online information is an author's first source of data, though the information can vary a great deal, so verifying through multiple sources, when possible, is required.
But online information only provides statistics and landmark references. It does not provide the ambience, flavor or authenticity associated with actually experiencing the locations and extrapolating backwards to the past either through experience or second-hand knowledge. I was eleven when the Red Sox and Reds battled in the 1975 World Series and saw the world through the eyes of an idealistic youth teetering on the edge of puberty. Raised in Fall River, where Massachusetts nestles along the Rhode Island border, I lived in several locations between my hometown and Worcester, Massachusetts while attending graduate school in my mid-twenties, so I'm very familiar with the geography, even back to that time. Additionally, I taught at Bryant College, now Bryant University, in Smithfield, Rhode Island—a key setting in A Disturbing Nature. Using old family photographs and a historical postcard collection of the area allowed me to put together a strong overall picture of central Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts at that time.
In the novel, A primary location for flashbacks and memories is Fauquier County, Virginia, where I lived for a dozen years while working in the D.C. area. During that time, I engaged in the small, rural community by managing youth baseball, coaching grade school basketball and joining civic organizations. I got to know the people—their joys, sorrows, and fears—and I visited the places—from the beauty of the countryside vistas to the hardship of natural disasters—experiencing perfect summer days and blessed fall foliage, along with historic snowstorms and a flood of biblical proportions. Along the way, I uncovered some of the past in the hallowed battlefields, haunted meadows, and historic town centers, finding, as with any community, if you scratch the surface, you'll unearth dirt (maybe red clay) as anywhere else. In truth, Fauquier County is a wonderful place to live and raise a family, an almost idyllic environment that compels one to wonder what well-kept secrets are masked in the landscape and what proverbial sins are washed away by the waters of the Rappahannock River.
Armed with history, geography, and first-hand experience, I dusted off a shoebox full of memories and self-medicated with an appropriate dose of cynicism before finally sitting down to write A Disturbing Nature. After selling my interest in a company to enjoy an early, if premature, retirement, I assembled a small team under the label "Tangent Inspired Stories" to assist with story layout, research, and editing. Now, a little more than four years later, we have nearly a dozen novels in the works, and we expect to release two per year starting in 2023. Our four-person Tangent team has been together from the company's inception, and has made a number of research trips for A Disturbing Nature, its sequels, and future novels. Destinations have included: China, Australia, Belize, Guatemala, much of New England, Virginia, Seattle, Salt Lake City, Philadelphia, and New Orleans.
While the countless hours of online research and extensive travel are crucial to make a story accurate and plausible, nothing enables a writer to transport the reader quite like personal experience. Specifically, for A Disturbing Nature, I found tapping into childhood memories and emotions through the disenchanted eyes of an adult proved both challenging and cathartic. But writing in the psychological thriller genre demands a heightened awareness of one's own psyche via extensive internalized research and introspection. For, only when we become familiar with the beast inside ourselves, do we have less to fear from the demons that haunt us.
To find out more about Brian Lebeau, you can visit his website and follow him on Facebook, Instagram, and Goodreads. A Disturbing Nature is available via Books Fluent and can be purchased through Amazon in print, eBook, and audio formats, or directly from brianlebeauwriter.com.
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