Author writes about homicide but says he isn’t ‘Castle’

Del Quentin Wilber is nothing like TV’s “Castle,” and the homicide detectives he shadowed for his book joked once that they wish he were, Wilber told a National Press Club Book Rap June 21.

People often ask Wilber how the experiences in "A Good Month for Murder: The Inside Story of a Homicide Squad" differs from TV.

“It is completely different than television because these are real people,” Wilber said. “Everyone is real. The victims are real. This is not a game to anybody. Everyone takes this very personally.”

Wilber embedded with the homicide unit of the Prince Georges County, Md., Police Department for six months.

Unlike the fictional Rick Castle, he never tried to solve a homicide, Wilber said. He couldn’t, he said, because he was looking for different details. Details that were necessary for him to tell a good story but not as necessary in solving a homicide.

After six months, he had 120 notebooks full of information. He knew he needed to focus, Wilber told the audience, which included his two young sons.

He chose to tell the story of one month, February 2013. It was a month with three police shootings and 12 murders – one of which was the “Red Ball,” or high-priority, case of Amber Stanley, a 17-year-old honor student who was killed by a masked intruder. Stanley’s murder has yet to be closed.

Wilber made a ground rule before he began working with the homicide unit: He would allow one person from the police department to review the manuscript and object to “anything that might hurt a witness or that might endanger a prosecution,” he said. There were very few objections.

The homicide detectives never really got used to having Wilber with them but they eventually forgot he was ever there, said Detective Brown, who was in the audience. Brown graciously answered a question from one of Wilber’s sons who asked how hard “is it to catch the bad guys?”

“It can take one day or it can take years or it can never happen sometimes,” Brown said. “I have cases open now after 12 years of working there and I closed a case with Del in one day.”

Wilber is a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. He previously worked for the Washington Post and Bloomberg News. He was introduced by former Club President Angela Greiling Keane, White House reporter for Bloomberg.