By Thomas Geyer
Moline Dispatch and Rock Island Argus, Ill.
MOLINE, Ill. — During his more than 30-year career as a Moline police officer, Greg Heist wrote hundreds of pages of reports on crimes committed and solved, as well as untold hundreds of documents for the courts involving the cases he investigated.
Heist admits that early in his career he wrote because he had to but never saw himself becoming a writer.
But gradually, writing began to take hold.
Heist has now published a novella called “The SILO,” a psychological thriller that drew on his experiences growing up in farm country and from his three decades as a cop.
“Later in my career, near the end, writing became a little bit of a hobby,” he said. “I found little stuff to write about. I recently found some little stuff I wrote by hand, short stories and stuff like that.”
Heist spent seven years working in Moline’s Community Oriented Policing program and helped start a small library in the police building in Moline’s Floreciente Neighborhood. They set up a library for the children who could check out books or listen to officers read stories to them.
“I was thinking then, wouldn’t it be fun if I wrote my own detective story and read that to the kids,” Heist said. “I called it the Johnny Copper project. It was Johnny Copper and the Case of the Missing Chocolate.”
After he retired about 12 years ago, Heist got the Johnny Copper story done. He found a printing company in Maquoketa and got a local artist to help him with the cover. He had the printing company make copies that he would take to the schools where he would sign the books and give them to the children and give a short talk.
“I never sold a single one on Amazon,” Heist said. “I never thought to.”
After writing Johnny Cooper and the Case of the Missing Chocolate, Heist attended a writing conference in Davenport featuring author Randy Wayne White.
White, who is the creator of the Doc Ford novels and attended Davenport Central High School in his youth, had just released “Night Moves,” Heist said.
“We spoke and he saw my book, then encouraged me to try writing an adult novel of suspense,” Heist added. “I think it was because of my background. I took that as a challenge. So, I started working on a story. Writing then became a hobby. I wasn’t focused on publishing. I wanted to see if I could put stories together, even if no one else ever read them. Sounds weird I know. Maybe it’s the fear of my work being rejected. I found it fascinating how great authors could tell stories with such different styles.”
Heist said there was not one specific thing that drove him to “The SILO,” which takes place on the fictional Weaver family farm.
“I have five full-length suspense novels sitting on my computer, never published, and for the sixth book I told myself I wanted to experiment with writing a novella,” he said. “I was always impressed with the great classical authors that could put such interesting stories in just 100-150 pages.”
The goal was to have a story told by just a few people through dialogue in an interrogation room, then expand to the crime scene at the farm.
The plot for “The SILO,” he said, came from his upbringing in Port Byron and his years as a detective.
Heist joined the Moline Police Department in 1980 when he was 22 and retired as a captain. His brother, Jeff, also was a Moline police officer.
His dad worked at John Deere Harvester, while his mom worked for Sandstrom Paint in Port Byron for more than 20 years.
“I lived a block away from the Mississippi River, but many of my friends and my grandparents lived on farms,” he said. “I did a lot of farm work during the summer. I found rural life and the farm environment gave a young person a sense of freedom. Hard work. Wide open spaces.”
Writing fiction gives him the chance to expand on that background, creating new settings like the Weaver farm.
The toughest part of the writing was having the patience to let the story unfold, he said.
“It is easy to get ahead of yourself,” Heist said. “Then, it is tough going back and making necessary changes to improve it. My original draft had no chapters. It was a story told straight through, with no breaks. My editor, who was very knowledgeable, suggested I do some structural changes to the book. So, adding more narrative to go along with that dialogue, and chapter breaks, added about 40 more pages to the book. In the end, I was glad I went with her idea. I hope the readers are too.”
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