The author of Sunset Beach (2009) and Beach Dreams (2008), Trish Perry lives in Northern Virginia with her hilarious teenaged son. She discovered her love of writing while earning a degree in Psychology. She switched career paths in 1997 and never looked back. Her debut novel, The Guy I’m Not Dating, placed second in the 2007 FHL Inspirational Readers’ Choice Contest, and her second novel, Too Good to Be True, finaled in the 2008 FHL IRCC, the GRW Maggie Awards, and LCRW’s Barclay Gold Awards.

Dilemma: You’re writing yet another crime scene and your villain makes his getaway. He jumps into his car, floors the gas, and triggers a high-speed chase.

Zzzzzzz.

This is why I can’t write crime novels. Creating new characters I can do. Creating new crimes, mysteries, and getaway scenes? Not so much. So how does the crime novelist keep the getaway scene fresh? Might there be some real-life examples that would prove different from what we’ve all come to expect?

One fellow in Santa Fe, New Mexico, comes to mind. The opening line of the AP wire reads, “A 21-year-old man was accused of driving drunk and leading police on a chase that finally ended with him running over himself.” Now, doesn’t that last little bit make you just a mite curious? It appears everything happened rather quickly. This particular motorist managed to crash through a barbed-wire fence, drive into a ditch, throw his truck into reverse, and flop out of the truck like a wide-mouthed bass on a hook. He landed just in time for his truck to reverse over his legs. I would imagine he stayed put for the reading of his Miranda rights after that.

Too stupid to be believable, you say? I beg to differ. This phenomenon appears to be somewhat common among our fellow citizens with skulls of a particular thickness. Take the lady in Cape

Coral, Florida, who stuffed $1,200 worth of Dooney & Bourke designer purses into her pants at her local T.J. Maxx before trying to hustle away.

As an aside, I cannot tell you how often I come across stories of people stuffing contraband into their pants. Dear reader, am I wearing my pants too tight? I couldn’t stuff a decent-sized wallet into my pants, let alone $1,200 worth of purses. Not, that is, without asking someone, “Does this purse make my butt look big?”

Our shoplifter with more style sense than common sense waddled out of T.J. Maxx and was promptly confronted by the store guard. The shoplifter tried to jump into the car driven by her accomplice, only to fall out and get run over. Apparently Dooney & Bourke purses are nicely padded, though, because the thief managed to get up and jump onto the hood of the getaway car. Still, she fell and got run over again. Unbelievably, she arose like a phoenix from the ashes with purses in her pants and made it into the getaway car and escaped.

I say we need to look into the cost effectiveness of air bags versus Dooney & Bourke designer bags in our vehicles. I’m impressed.

I’m also out of time. Trust me, I found oodles of examples to inspire crime scene authors, and I’ll have to resurrect this subject at a later date. In the meantime, I should caution you all to avoid drinking and driving, as well as stuffing your pants and driving. The life you save may be your own.