TBT: Writing MS-13 as villain

A writing blog

This particular post gets funnier every time I come across it.

Please remember, I wrote Hell Spawn in 2017. (Eight years ago? Yikes. I feel old.) I had seen MS-13 used in two places: Vince Flynn’s Consent to Kill, and CSI: Miami. Hell, since Hell Spawn, I’ve seen MS-13 used in two other places: the film Peppermint, and Gregg Hurwitz’s excellent Orphan X novels.

Aside from that … why aren’t they standard, disposable bad guys in a video game, or an action movie? Sic John Wick on these guys and he’d mow through them for four hours.

Anyway, onto the original post. I think you’ll find it amusing, considering how they were perceived then, versus now.

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When I first started writing Saint Tommy, NYPD #1, Hell Spawn, I figured that I wasn't using any controversial bad guys when I threw in MS-13 as a throwaway character.

I had heard of them back when I was taking a course on Organized Crime in 2003, and I then tripped over them in Vince Flynn's Consent to Kill. Much to my surprise, few if anyone else has used them much since then.

I mean, these are bad guys who were one step away from being on a terrorist watch list in 2003. They’re a street gang that owns rocket propelled grenades. They had freaking military training. Their motto was "rape, control, kill."

Frankly, they’re wonderful, made to order minions for an action-adventure film — you know, one of the faceless thugs that Ahhhnuld mowed down in droves.

And when I put MS-13 into Hell Spawn … they were just going to be a random encounter. There would be no follow up from them. At all. They were one random blip in the outline.

During the writing, I felt I needed another random encounter. The one I had outlined was several chapters away, and there was a ton of dialog in this book. After all, how much of a detective’s job is just talking to people? Many, many people.

Hey, let's have a small little encounter on the street...

Hey! Maybe that little encounter leads to the big encounter in a few chapters! That would be solid.

And, suddenly, MS-13 became a running sub-threat and mini-boss in Hell Spawn.

Dang. That spiraled. The story of my writing life.

Anyway, a month after I finished the book, MS-13 had murdered several people not rock-throwing distance away from my house in Queens. It was only a matter of blocks; perhaps a whole mile, but I doubt it.

I thought, "Hey, I'm ahead of the curve by a little." More often than not, someone will do something that mirrors my books far too close for my comfort. If MS-13 were an emerging threat in real life, maybe they would be in the media by the time Hell Spawn released in September. That would be really, really lucky.

I finished writing Hell Spawn in November of 2017.

The state of the union in January 2018 featured MS-13, and Trump even had the parents of their New York victims at the State of the Union.....

So maybe they would make national headlines a little sooner than I thought.

But hey, they were already there. And they're MS-13. They've been bad guys for 15 years. Even CSI: Miami had their own, thinly veiled knockoff of MS-13.

Apparently, they're slightly more controversial than that now…

One idiot went into the Amazon reviews and accused me of being a “white nationslist” for having MS-13 as a villain. Obviously, I didn’t let him get to me, since he’s a glaring illiterate.

But overall, MS-13 become surprisingly large in the story thread. They're no where near main bad guy status, but boy, do they provide good shootouts.

And just wait until you see what they do in Death Cult. Heh heh heh.