Suburban crime inspires local reporter-turned-novelist

There used to be a piece of paper tacked up on a bulletin board inside the Gurnee Police Department's investigations area that said:

"Whenever a man commits a crime, God finds a witness. Every secret crime has its reporter."

Former WGN and WMAQ reporter Doug Cummings doesn't remember what crime he was covering the day he read that quote, but the words resonated with him so strongly that they inspired the title of his second mystery novel, "Every Secret Crime."

More Coverage Links Excerpt from book Doug M. Cummings Web site

The book, available in stores this week, is about a high-profile suburban murder investigated by a crack Chicago reporter named Reno McCarthy.

Sound familiar?

Cummings admits his novels draw "100 percent" from his 17 years covering crime in the Chicago area, and many of the settings and characters will sound familiar to local readers. "Every Secret Crime" (Five Star, $25.95) is set in a wealthy suburb called "Falcon Ridge," which Cummings described as a composite of the Chicago suburbs.

"Anyone who lives in the suburbs is going to recognize it," he said.

The whole story was created around the fact that police sometimes lie to reporters ("There's nothing going on here") in hopes that they'll go away. Cummings said it's happened to him on more than one occasion.

"When the police don't talk, a reporter starts thinking, 'There's got to be something more there,'" he said. "People say nothing ever happens in the suburbs. And I'm thinking, that's what the suburbs want you to think. They don't want you to know that there's all sorts of stuff going on."

Born in Chicago, Cumings moved to Kansas in his early teens and became a deputy sheriff. Longing to be in broadcast news, he got a job at a Kansas radio station and later moved to Chicago, where he spent 17 years covering breaking news as a radio reporter for WMAQ-AM and WGN-AM.

He wrote his first novel, "Deader by the Lake," in 2003. By then, his reporting job was getting to him.

In particular, he said it was Columbine shootings in Colorado and the Lemak murders in Naperville that convinced him to quit the business.

"The emotion of (those stories) was overwhelming," he said. "It's funny that after 30 years I'd feel that way. But you can only have a steady diet of death and destruction for so long."

In 2005, Cummings quit WGN and started writing full time. Today, the 55-year-old spends his days writing from his Highland Park home. He has at least one and probably two more Reno McCarthy books in the works.

The idea for Cummings' first novel took shape while he sat in his car outside the Brown's Chicken Pasta in Palatine, shortly after the 1993 murders. Cummings, who was on his way home from covering a triple fatal snowmobiling accident in southern Wisconsin, heard on the police scanner (he had several in his car) that there were "victims in the freezer" and was on the scene within 30 minutes. He was the first reporter there and broke the story to the world.

"Palatine (police) didn't want to talk about it, so I had a lot of time to sit in the parking lot and play around with the idea for a novel. The name Reno McCarthy just came out of thin air. I listen to a lot of Irish music, so that may have had some inspiration there. It all started that day."