How Branching Out into Audio Drama Helped Me Explore Conservation Crime

The whine of chainsaws drew me outside. Here we go again. We’d had frequent storms in our area, so the sound of tree work was common, but not so common that I could block it out. What neighborhood tree would be taken this time? Another centuries-old oak, removed to widen a driveway?

As I ran toward the big red tree work sign, my heart pounded in time with the woodchipper. How to describe the growling engine, the crunch of metallic teeth chewing through wood fiber, the groan and thud of branches and trunks hitting the ground? Bzzz! Whirr! Crash! Thud! Comic book sounds. I couldn’t find the right words.

The once-towering neighborhood tree was in pieces, lying on the roadside, by the time I arrived. The likely reason for its culling? Apparent rot through the trunk. Still, the sudden, unexpected loss of an important tree in the canopy shook me to my core. I sat on the trunk and squinted at the sun, the unfamiliar patch of sky. That’s when I noticed the heart etched into the bark, painted bright pink. I’d passed it on many a walk. Taped next to the heart was a handwritten note: “Can you please cut and save this pink heart for us? It has sentimental value.”

I don’t know what became of that heart, but the heart of that tree worked itself deeply into my next mystery. I was already interested in conservation crimes and eco mysteries, which I explored in my Backyard Rangers mysteries for kids, Trouble at Turtle Pond and The Owl Prowl Mystery. I already knew I wanted to explore such crimes for an adult audience, to encourage them to cultivate curiosity and become nature detectives. On my walks through town woods and conservation land, I’d recently stumbled on the idea of Rambling Roads Mysteriesa story about a former investigative journalist named Evelyn who comes to a small, historic town seeking a fresh start. She falls into step with some quirky walking tour guides. Their company, Rambling Roads Walking Tours, would provide opportunities to investigate crimes undercover, and on foot.

Walking tours involve paying close attention to places. I wanted my characters strolling through Turners Grove noticing history, architecture, people, wildlife, landscapes, and changes. They would be honing their skills, noticing what’s around them and what seems out of place, which is exactly the skill required to investigate conservation crimes. In fact, detectives and walking tour guides are professional noticers.

I was building this world of Rambling Roads when the heart tree came down. Its gift? It helped me to land on my crime. Now I love a small-town murder mystery, but I had been wondering: does mystery always need human victims? And what happens if something else disappears, and most people don’t even notice it’s gone? After researching types of “invisible” environmental crimes, in part through a conservation in action certification course I was taking, I had become fascinated (and horrified) by the impacts of habitat degradation. I’d been reading about various reasons for taking down trees, legitimate and not. Tree poaching can be very hard to detect, invisible to people who aren’t looking for signs. After all, how many people notice a missing tree or two? How many of us drive by “tree work” signs without a second glance?

My research combined with the pink heart tree helped me decide the immediate victims in Rambling Roads Mysteries would be non-human. Yet the more I researched, the more I realized trees weren’t just victims or background scenery. They could also be culpable. For example, black walnut trees produce a toxin called juglone that can affect certain types of plants around them. Viewing trees as complex entities raised compelling questions. In my story, was the local matriarch’s death in her beloved woods an accident, or caused by a wayward root?

My tree research made me certain I wanted to tell this story of “invisible crimes” not in prose, but in dramatic form, specifically audio drama. The audience doesn’t just hear dialogue about environmental changes. They’re immersed in the soundscape with the characters and listening for clues.

A surprisingly satisfying part of script writing was crafting sound effects instructions. I wanted to make sure we heard healthy forests as well as destruction. I also wanted very specific effects, like an angry chipmunk chattering, or the sound that a hollow tree makes if you tap it, or a truck peeling out at just the right moment to make you wonder, or a tree coming down in the night. I’m very grateful to my talented sound designer, Hayden Robinson, and the production crew I worked with for coming up with these enhancements.

I know too well the sounds of habitats changing. There is often an eerie quiet, a move toward the diminishing of sound. The heart tree wasn’t the only tree that inspired my story. A wooded lot next door was subdivided and sold. While I gained lovely neighbors in the house that was built, many trees were lost. The songbirds and spring peepers are quieter now, even in the conservation land nearby. The wind no longer rushes through the tops of tall pines. The entire ecosystem feels dialed down or muted. Ultimately, Rambling Roads Mysteries became a way to channel my own grief about the loss of our leafy neighbors.

Listening is a powerful way to notice. It turns out audio drama is well-suited to a mystery about invisible crimes like stolen trees. If a tree falls in a forest and nobody hears it, did it happen? In an audio drama, we can actually hear it happen, as well as the aftermath. Conservation crimes depend on people failing to notice things that are changing or disappearing. Branching into a new storytelling medium for Rambling Roads Mysteries gave me a way to ask my characters and listeners to notice more.

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