A Conversation With Scott Eden on Turning Real Crimes Into Narrative Nonfiction (Killer Writers)

When journalists turn real-world events into books, the challenge isn’t just reporting the facts; it’s uncovering the story behind them. In A Killing in Cannabis, journalist Scott Eden demonstrates how a crime investigation becomes narrative nonfiction by revealing the hidden world surrounding it, the people who live in it, and the place where it happens. In this conversation, Eden explains how journalists find the worlds, characters, and places that turn reporting into compelling true crime.

(Find more Killer Writers conversations here.)

“Scott, when I read the book, what struck me immediately was that the crime itself isn’t really the story. The murder almost becomes a doorway into something larger, the world behind it. As writers, we’re often told that true crime is about the investigation or the procedural elements, but your book doesn’t really work that way. Let me start with this: How is writing a true crime book different from writing a journalism story other than length and, I imagine, the years involved?”

“That’s a key aspect. I don’t think I treated it any differently. True crime is a work of journalism.”

“That was my impression while reading the book. It feels like journalism expanded into a larger story rather than something completely different. When you approached the book, were you basically writing in the same voice and style you use in your journalism articles?”

“I think so. I try to be conversational.”

“It definitely comes across that way. That’s one of the things that works especially well in the book.”

“I’m always on the lookout for, even in magazine reporting, a character or two or three whose narrative will kind of carry the reader through the world that we’re exploring. In this case, it’s California cannabis and all the interesting people involved there. In A Killing in Cannabis, there are probably between three and five characters, where I hope the reader kind of falls into their lives and really, really cares about those people as we move through this world and interact with the central character, who I never got a chance to meet, obviously, who is Tushar Atre. He’s the murder victim at the center of the story.”

“Let’s discuss how this project started. If I understood correctly, it began as a magazine assignment. When did you realize the story was more than just an article?”

“An editor that I knew well at Inc. Magazine (Inc. writes about entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial efforts and the business world) had run across the local news articles about Tushar Atre’s murder from the Bay Area, and he passed on the local news stories to me and said, ‘Dig into this and see if there’s anything interesting there.’ Within two phone calls, I pretty much knew that it wasn’t just a magazine article. There were so many little tidbits, little hints, little threads, and rumors that people started telling me that I just realized that there was so much to explore, so much I wanted to investigate, and I knew I couldn’t get it all into a magazine article. I really conceived of it as a book and a magazine article at the same time.”

“One thing I find fascinating is that the crime becomes the entry point, but the world surrounding the crime becomes the story.”

“As a journalist, I let the material sort of guide the structure, and I wanted to tell the story of Tushar Atre. He was a Silicon Valley tech executive who decided, when California legalized cannabis recreationally, to get into the weed business. He was an outsider coming into the weed business. The murder was obviously a high-stakes event, and there is the whodunit aspect of it, but I was sort of coming at the story from the murder is not the central thing. The murder was the door that opened a doorway into a world that I didn’t know anything about, that it was kind of a secret and hidden world, the industry of producing cannabis in California, which was just then emerging from prohibition. I was almost more interested in Tushar’s career in cannabis, his three-year effort to build a cannabis startup, and the people that he sought out and interacted with in the weed business in California over the course of those three years. The murder was almost a way in to exploring this interesting world that I think is covered a lot, but I don’t think it’s written about much for a general audience.”

“As a reader, I remember reaching the end of the book thinking, ‘If I don’t learn what happened to Rachel, I’m going to be very disappointed.’ That’s when it dawned on me that the characters had become the driving force of the story.’

“I’m always on the lookout for characters whose narrative can carry the reader through the world we’re exploring.”

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“Another thing writers sometimes overlook is how powerful a setting can be. Santa Cruz nearly feels like a character in the book.”

“In this case, it’s Santa Cruz, California, and the setting of the book is a character in and of itself. Santa Cruz County is part of the Bay Area, and it’s in one of California’s coastal ranges, the Santa Cruz Mountains. It’s an area of cultural importance. It was one of the ground zeros of the counterculture. The Merry Pranksters—Ken Kesey had his writing cabin in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and one of his buddies was Neal Cassady, who was Jack Kerouac’s buddy—so they kind of launched the hippie movement of the ‘60s. That kind of spurred the first pot growing in the country in that same spot where Tushar Atre was murdered and where he wanted to create his cannabis company.”

“Let’s discuss reporting, because writers often picture stories like this coming together smoothly once the idea is there. In reality, the process is usually much messier and requires more patience.”

“First, you just have to start talking to people. In this case, it’s people who are maybe involved in the black market weed business and don’t want to talk. You slowly try to persuade people that my only goal is accuracy. I want to tell the truth, but I want to tell it well so there is an audience for the story. Then you just start interviewing, taking notes, and recording and transcribing them. There’s also a whole document side of reporting this story. There were a lot of court proceedings that kicked out tons of documents. It’s a long process with starts and stops. There are little reporting mysteries that I might have spent weeks trying to figure out and never solve.”

“Many of the people you spoke with had ties to crime or the black-market cannabis industry. Yet, they still talked to you. How do you earn the trust of people like that?”

“People like to tell their stories, and here I am offering them the chance. I don’t go in there with a list of questions. When I sit down with someone, even minor characters, I find it’s not respectful or helpful to start grilling people with questions. The way to do it is to have them tell their story, starting at the beginning, where they were born and how they got into weed. It takes a lot of time, and it’s inefficient, but that’s the way you get people to trust you.”

“One thing I appreciated is that the book doesn’t read like a typical police procedural. It feels much more literary.”

“There’s a long tradition of that in the United States, starting with The New Yorker. Writers like Tom Wolfe, John McPhee, and Joan Didion have tackled journalism projects in that style.”

“Of course, the classic example is In Cold Blood.”

“Yes. It first appeared in The New Yorker, written by Truman Capote. That tradition goes back decades.”

“Let me ask a craft question that writers always want to know: Did writing this book change anything about how you approach storytelling?”

“There were techniques I’ve always wanted to use more. Because it’s book-length, there was more opportunity for that. I used different points of view from different people. Rachel might interpret something one way, while someone like Evan Scott, one of Tushar’s early business partners, interprets it another way. The reader encounters those conflicting perspectives, which create a kind of dramatic irony.”

“Scott, listening to you describe the process, the lesson for writers is clear. A crime alone isn’t enough to sustain a book. What matters is the world behind the crime, the people, the place, the culture, and the reporting that reveals it. When journalists uncover those layers, reporting becomes narrative, and journalism becomes a story. For writers tackling true crime, your process offers a reminder: The story rarely starts with the crime itself. It begins with the world that the crime reveals.”

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Scott Eden is an award-winning investigative journalist whose work has focused on crime, corruption, injustice, business, science, technology, and the dark side of sports. He’s written for ESPN The Magazine, GQ, Wired, The Atavist, The Believer, and many other publications. He is the author of Touchdown Jesus. https://www.spiegelandgrau.com/a-killing-in-cannabis