From Storytelling to Thriller

Lee Chauncey signing a reader's copy of his new book, Unsolved. -Photo: Submitted

By Tami Stevenson

For most of his life, R.L. Chauncey has been a storyteller. He just never expected that one day he would become an author.   

     “I usually tell my stories face-to-face,” Chauncey said. “I’ve never used this kind of medium.”

     That changed when a story he had carried around in his head for years finally refused to stay there.

Chauncey recently published his first book, a thriller featuring special agent Alex Harlan. What began as an idea he had tucked away as something he might “do someday” eventually became a year-and-a-half writing project.

     “I thought it was a good premise for a thriller and something with a twist I’d never seen before,” Chauncey said. “So I thought I’d put it down on paper and see how it looked. It seems to have come out pretty well.”

     Once he committed to writing, finding the time became one of his biggest challenges.

     Chauncey began deliberately scheduling time to work on the manuscript, and once he got started, he said he barely stopped. Writing a book, he discovered, is considerably more involved than simply putting a good story on paper.

     “It’s a big, time-consuming thing to do,” he said. “You have to edit it 125,000 times to get it to sound the way you want it.”

     There was another cost to all those hours at the keyboard.

     “It takes away from the people in your life wanting to spend time with you,” he said. “I kind of cheated my wife a little there. I’ll have to apologize to her for that.”

     For someone who never particularly aspired to be a writer, Chauncey found the experience to be a new adventure.

A familiar setting

    Chauncey’s story unfolds in the Atlanta metropolitan area, a setting he knows well from his years working in emergency medical services.     

     The main character, Alex Harlan, is a special agent assigned to a task force in Atlanta. The task force brings together different law enforcement agencies in the metropolitan area to investigate violent crimes that cross jurisdictional boundaries.

     The story begins with a collection of deaths that don’t appear to have much in common: a drowning, an overdose, a suicide, a series of brutal attacks and unexplained deaths in hospitals.

     As Harlan and the task force begin looking at the cases together rather than as isolated incidents, patterns start to emerge. Access, timing and opportunity become important pieces of the puzzle, along with the unsettling possibility that someone involved may understand how investigations work from the inside.

     Chauncey’s familiarity with Atlanta helped him create the setting.

      He worked for a medical system based in Gainesville that covered the state of Georgia and spent considerable time working in the Atlanta area. His experience gave him familiarity with the region’s geography and medical system, details that became useful when developing the story.

     Chauncey said his paramedic background wasn’t what inspired him to write the book, but it did give him the ability to add authenticity to the medical portions of the story.

     He became an EMT in 2008 and a paramedic in 2012. Although retired, he remains a licensed paramedic.

A story that finally made it to paper

     The idea for the book had been with Chauncey for years, although he wasn’t sure at first how serious the idea really was.   

     “It was one of those, ‘Boy, I’d sure like to do this someday,’” he said.

     Eventually, “someday” arrived.

     After spending about a year and a half developing and refining the story, Chauncey found himself holding something that had once existed only in his imagination.

     Interestingly, his first physical copy of the book wasn’t the first copy to arrive in his hands.

     Someone who had ordered the book through Amazon happened to run into Chauncey at a tractor store.

     “She said, ‘Hey, I just got your book. Come sign it,’” he recalled.

     She had received her copy before Chauncey received his own.

      For a first-time author, it was an unusual introduction to seeing his work in the hands of a reader.

     And apparently, one book wasn’t enough.

     Chauncey has already begun work on his next novel and has plans for three books featuring Alex Harlan.

     For now, though, his first book represents something a little different: an idea that lived in his head for years, followed by the decision to finally find out what would happen if he put it on paper.

     “I hope people enjoy the story,” Chauncey said. “I thought it was a very good story. I just hope I can tell it in a way that I can let people experience what my concept of the story was.”

     He believes he did a pretty good job of that.

     For Chauncey, the journey from face-to-face storyteller to first-time novelist is just beginning.

A life of stories

     Writing may be a new chapter for Chauncey, but an interesting life has given him plenty of material along the way.

     Chauncey was born and attended school in Live Oak through the 11th grade before attending Columbia High School. He joined the Army at age 17 and later built a career in emergency medical services.

     His experiences have taken him in some unexpected directions, including a 2007 appearance on The Montel Williams Show.

     Now, with one book completed and another already underway, he has added a new chapter to that story.

     Readers interested in learning more about Chauncey and his writing can visit his website at rlchauncey.com.