A second career in crime

The crime novels of Raffi Yessayan come from the perspective of man who worked in the Suffolk District Attorney's office for a decade, including a stint as chief prosecutor for the gang unit. He's now a Quincy-based defense attorney, and this month published his second book, "2 in the Hat,'' which is set in Boston like his first book, "8 in the Box."

The Avon resident's appearances around the Boston region include a visit to the Front Street Book Shop, 165 Front St., Scituate, at 7 p.m. on May 7. He spoke recently with The Globe about his writing career.

For my first book, I had all the time in the world. My wife's a writer and writing teacher, and I used to come home with stories from court and the crazy things that happened, and people would say, 'You've gotta write a book.' One day I was in court with a cop and another DA, and one of them had just read a James Patterson book. So I borrowed it and read it, and I said to my wife, 'I could do something like this.'

That was around 1997, and I wrote for about a year, but then I got promoted to the gang unit and we bought a house, and I stopped at about 100 pages. In 2003 or so, I ran into one of my law professors, Jeremiah Healy, who also writes fiction. He told me: 'There's always an excuse as to why you can't write. You've just got to save room for dessert; you've got to make time to write.' So I started writing again, and ended up with 350 pages....

I left the DA's office early in 2007 and within a month I had signed a two-book contact with Random House, and they gave me a deadline of a year for the second book. The first book came out in the summer of '08, which was the deadline for the book two. I had a good draft by then, but it needed another six months before I sent what I considered a final draft.

The lead character in the two books, Angel Alves, has some of my characteristics, and also a lot of characteristics of different detectives I've known and admired over the years. The same is true of the books' other detective, Sergeant Mooney.

I try to show the way an investigation is conducted, and that shapes who your characters are going to be. The people I've worked with really care about solving these cases for the families -- that definitely influenced how my characters act and how they pursue the kiler.

Some of the scenes in my books are based on real life experiences. I've seen someone, for example, jump over a balcony and try to escape from a courthouse, and I took that incident and did something different with it.

But as far as the killings go, everything is from my twisted imagination. I never experienced a serial killer in Boston. I try to have my killer do things that somebody couldn't copy; I don't want to give anybody ideas. I do want to do something different, but in a lot of books, the killer does horrible, gruesome things, and it seems like the author's just trying to see how much more gruesome it can be from another guy or the last book. I don't do that.

"8 in the Box" is what they used to call district court juries, and the first time I heard that phrase, I thought, 'Boy, that's a good title.' For the second book, I had finished writing it and was trying to come up with a good title, and one day I'm in Brockton District Court and I walk into the first session and see [attorney] Kevin Reddington. And he says, 'Hey, I heard you wrote a book. What's it called?'

I said, '8 in the Box,' and he just laughs and says, 'two in the hat.' [Jargon for a mob killing.] And the second he said it, I thought, 'There it is.'

I don't have a contract for my third book, but I have lots of notes. It will have the same main characters. I know the beginning. I know the ending. I've got what I think is a good title, but it doesn't include a number in it. So I don't know where we're going with that.