Earl Emerson
As part of a special CBS.com series profiling mystery writers, CBS News Correspondent Anthony Mason interviews Earl Emerson.
When the bell hits at Fire Station Six in Seattle, Earl Emerson makes a costume change. One of the best-selling mystery writers in the Northwest becomes the leader of Ladder 3 as it roars out of the house:
Mason: "When you're on the truck and headed to a fire, are you thinking about another book? or are you too busy playing with the siren?"
Emerson: "I have story ideas all the time and I always keep something in my pocket to jot things down on."
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Mason: "Do you see yourself as a firefighter or a writer or both?"
Emerson: "I always see myself as a writer. I always see myself as a writer. I've been a writer, I think, in my head since I was 11 years old. But there's an incredible thrill to driving down the street in a fire engine. I mean you can't beat it. And as long as I have the uniform on and I'm with the crew and we're on a rig, I feel like a firefighter and it feels pretty good."
It was not the career he had planned. But from the beginning, little in his life went according to plan.
"My folks divorced when I was four," Emerson says. Emerson's mother, who worked in the tower at the Seattle airport, was forced to give up Earl, his two brothers, and their sister.
Emerson: "She had four children and she couldn't handle the children and the job at the same time. So, basically we were taken care of by, actually, a series of elderly women in their homes."
For years, the kids moved from house to house. Emerson went to 13 different schools.
Mason: "What effect, if any, does that have on a kid?"
Emerson: "Well, I'll tell you one thing. The library was my home, so I was always a big reader. I was always lonely and I was always the new kid in school. And so, I had a library card from the time I could read... I think that probably turned me into a writer."
Emerson dropped out of college to write full time. Over the next decade, he'd finish a dozen novels. Not one of them was published.
Mason: "What do you say to yourself after each one of these gets rejected?"
Emerson: "You live on hope. You know, all writers live on hope."
But you can't make a living on hope. While his wife Sandy kept the faith and supported the family, Emerson's relatives had their doubts.
Mason: "What were they saying?"
Emerson: "They think I'm the greatest thing since sliced bread now."
Mason: "And then?"
Emerson: "'Get a job. Get a job.' I heard that a lt. 'You can still write with a job'."
After more than 125 rejection slips, he applied to the fire department.
Mason: "Why a fireman?"
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Emerson: "Well, firefighting was the one job I knew about personally, because my brother was a firefighter, where I would have enough time off-shift, enough days off where I could keep writing."
Emerson: "The schedule is we work 8 days a month, 24 hours at a time. And that works out to about 46 hours a week."
Mason: "So you come in here for a 24-hour shift and you're just here for one full day."
Emerson: "Right, it's a little bit like being in jail. When the shift first started I kind of felt like a prisoner at 9 o'clock at night. Because you can't really go someplace without the truck."
Emerson went into culture shock at first. But after the solitude of sitting in front of a computer screen, the writer soon found he enjoyed the camaraderie of a fire company.
And then it finally happened. His writing career caught fire.
Emerson: "I was at Station 27, my first assignment. I got the phone call from my agent, said I'd sold my first book."
The Rainy City introduced Seattle private eye Thomas Black.
(From The Rainy City): "I had squandered the day polishing off a dismal case. A pipe fitter with long arms and long teeth hired me to discover what his girlfriend played at while he worked the night shift at Lockheed. I found out and even turned down a modestly tempting opportunity to play at it with her."
Emerson: (walking in Chinatown): "I find this area fascinating."
...and Emerson found his new job took him inside some intriguing places.
Emerson: "I've been inside that building a number of times. It's all boarded up and vacant but in my job in the fire department, you know I can get in."
The old Milwaukee Hotel in Seattle's Chinatown became the setting for a climactic chase scene.
Emerson: "Because this is one of the buildings that we think is going to burn down and we think it's going to be pretty big when it happens."
It all inspired him to create a new character, an arson investigator turned small-town fire chief named Mac Fontana.
Emerson: "I had been a little bit nervous about writing things about the Seattle Fire Department, becausmaybe that'll happen. I mean I was nervous about that from the very beginning."
But that's exactly what happened in 1995, when what seemed at first like a routine fire broke out at the Pang Food warehouse.
Emerson (reads): "As soon as the officer and nozzle men kicked in the outer door to the basement, they were driven back up the stairs by a ball of flame."
A year earlier, in his novel Morons and Madmen, Emerson had described a remarkably similar blaze in a building nearby. Three firemen died in his fictional fire.
Emerson (reads):"Firefighting, thought Fontana, it was the best job on earth, right up until the moment it killed you."
Four firemen would die in the real fire that night. It was the worst disaster in the department's history:
Emerson (at scene): "The floor collapsed and those guys fell into ...four of those guys fell into about a 1,400 degree inferno."
Emerson's unit had responded. He had been off that evening. But reporters called him about the eerie coincidence.
Emerson: "But I couldn't do it. I just couldn't talk about it. It was just - it was just way too close. I knew everybody who died there."
Four years later, flowers are still left in the fence around the debris:
Emerson: "Kind of touching."
Mason: "Is it always like that?"
Emerson: "Flowers here. Fresh flowers every week that I've ever been by it."
Fitness, firefighters will tell you, can be critical to their survival, and at 50, Emerson is still remarkably fit. He has just finished his 32nd novel, a thriller this time.
Mason (walking Seattle waterfront): "Why that?"
Emerson : "Raw ambition."
It's about Seattle firefighters, of course. Emerson is trying to climb to another level in his fiction. This from a man, you might be surprised to learn, is afraid of heights.
Emerson: "Yeah, a little bit scared of heights."
Mason: "How can you be a fireman and be scared of heights?"
Emerson: "How can I work on a 108-foot aerial? You know as soon as I put the uniform on, I can do it. But I don't think, you know if I was walking up the sidewalk and somebody said, 'hey, you want to go up the ladder, no way would I go up the ladder. It just somehow becomes easier with the uniform on. I don't know. Batman."
The writer isn't ready to take that uniform off yet. After two decades of riding fire engines, Earl Emerson has learned the siren has an irresistible allure.
Mason: "That's a kid's rush isn't it?"
Emerson: "It's an incredible kid's rush. And one of my favorite things to do is play with the siren when we're on our way to an alarm. I can play tunes. And if you get downtown where there are a lot of buildings, you can make it echo."
Emerson: "Maybe after I retire, they'll let me come back and just play with the siren a little bit."
©1999 CBS Worldwide Corp. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed