'Soul Destruction' Author Draws Inspiration From A London Call Girl

In our ongoing series of WCI interviews, we're talking today with Ruth Jacobs, a novelist who lives near London, about her life as a writer. Jacobs studied prostitution in the late 1990s. She draws on her research and the women she has interviewed for inspiration. In addition to her fiction writing, Jacobs is involved in nonfiction for charity and human rights campaigning in the areas of anti-sexual exploitation and anti-human trafficking.

Women in Crime Ink: Welcome, Ruth. Tell us about your writing background. When did you begin writing, and what inspired you?

Ruth Jacobs: My grandmother was a writer and I’m sure that’s what made me want to write. I wrote poetry as a young teenager then started writing a book at sixteen. I wrote on and off over the years, but it wasn’t until 2010 when I started the first Soul Destruction book that I actually went on to complete my first novel.  That was Soul Destruction: Unforgivable, which was published earlier this year. Last year, I published In Her Own Words... Interview with a London Call Girl, which is the transcript of a video interview I undertook with a woman working as a call girl in London for my research on prostitution in the late 1990s. The woman interviewed was a very dear friend, and as she is no longer alive, all the royalties from that publication are donated to Beyond the Streets, a charity working to end sexual exploitation.

WCI: How often do you write? And how do you manage to fit in writing among other commitments?

RJ: For my fiction writing, I don’t have a fixed time currently, but that’s about to change as I get back into writing the second book in the Soul Destruction series. When I was working on the first book, I had a schedule of writing every evening. It was difficult with two children and a job, but I found the time by keeping the television switched off. I was also completely hooked on my characters and their world, and I couldn’t stay away for long because when I wasn’t writing about them, I was obsessing about them and the story.

WCI: In which genre do you most enjoy writing?

RJ: Crime fiction.

WCI: What draws you to write in that genre?

RJ: It’s the genre I most enjoy reading and having been on a death wish from my teens to mid-twenties, my past can be useful sometimes.

WCI: What is your current project(s)?

With author Harry Dunn

RJ: My novel, Soul Destruction: Unforgivable, was published earlier this year by Caffeine Nights. The story follows Shelley Hansard, a heroin addicted and crack psychotic London call girl who gets the opportunity to take revenge on a client who raped her and her friends.

WCI: What has the reaction been to your book from readers?

RJ: The feedback has been great with many readers telling me they were unable to put the book down. Other comments have included the book being real and graphic, having a fast-paced plot, unexpected twists, that the story is told in a compassionate way, and that it takes the false glamour out of prostitution.

WCI: What are two of your favorite books, and why?

RJ: Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting is one, but after countless failed overdoses and with posttraumatic stress disorder, my memory is so terrible that I can’t recall precisely why. I would have enjoyed the Scottish dialect because all my family come from Scotland, and I would have also enjoyed the story as that was my world at the time - heroin addiction. For a second book, I’m compelled to say London Fields by Martin Amis who I was obsessed with reading many years ago. Again, with my poor memory, I cannot remember why (Trainspotting was at an advantage as I’ve watched the film countless times over the years), but because of my poor memory and because after so long I remember the name of a character, Nicola Six, that book must have impacted me. I must reread it soon.

WCI: What are your writing plans for the future?

RJ: I’m about to pick back up writing the second book in the Soul Destruction series. It has a title but in case it changes, I’m not sharing it yet. From my experience writing the first book and being led away from my original plot by the characters, I know that could happen in this book too and, if it does, then the title might need to be changed.

I’m involved in non-fiction for charity and human rights campaigning, currently pushing for the Merseyside model to be made UK wide. This will mean all crimes against people in prostitution will be treated as hate crimes. Where it has been running in Merseyside since 2006, reporting and conviction rates have increased hugely. I’ve written a couple of articles about the Merseyside model for feminist websites including Ms Blog, and I’m currently running a series of interviews on my own website.

I have an article to write for an anthology on prostitution so I will be making a start on that project in the summer. A short piece of non-fiction I wrote is being published soon in The Survivor Anthology. And a short story I wrote called Life will be published as an e-book by Caffeine Nights in the next week or two.

WCI: Is there anything else we should know?

RJ: Although I write fiction, my work is very real. It’s important to me when writing about prostitution that it isn’t glamorized as it so often is in other books, films and on television. I want to show it for what it is - a dangerous and traumatic way to earn money. Most women in prostitution have been abused as children. Most women in prostitution have suffered rape multiple times. And most women in prostitution meet the criteria for posttraumatic stress disorder. I share many similarities in this, and I hope that enables me to keep my characters real, and my stories true to life. That’s very important to me.

WCI: Where can readers learn more about you and your writing?

RJ: On the Soul Destruction website and on my author website.

Ruth Jacobs' series of novels, titled Soul Destruction, expose the dark world and the harsh reality of life as a call girl. Her debut novel, Soul Destruction: Unforgivable, was released in April 2013 by Caffeine Nights. It is a free download on Amazon today, April 24th, through Monday, April 27th. Click here to download.

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True and False Handwriting

by Andrea Campbell

Years ago I studied handwriting for several years with the intention of becoming a Questioned Document Examiner. I got sidetracked along the way for Forensic Art and Forensic Sculpture instead, but I never lost my interest in this discipline.

One of the most interesting things is this: when people try to write false content, there are ways to analyze the sample toward finding the deeper truth.

Cognitive Differences

Writing out lies is different from creating truth on paper, because the brain has a way of making those cognitive characteristics different, thus exposing the real truth. The differences can be seen in the flow of the writing, the length of the strokes, and the amount of pressure of the pen against the page.

A new research study was conducted at the Faculty of Social Welfare and Health Services at the University of Haifa, a school tucked into the Carmel Mountain ridge southeast of the city of Haifa and surrounded by the Carmel National Park in Israel.

The research was based on a computerized "writing-analysis system" meant to measure the differences in the pressure on the page, the duration of the pen when put to page and off again, and the flow of writing.

According to Dr. Gil Luria of the Department of Human Services and Dr. Sara Rosenblum of the Department of Occupational Therapy, who carried out the research, "It seems that the act of writing a false text involves extensive cognitive resources, and the automatic act of writing is thereby affected." 

Hard to Decipher Lies

Most people would agree it's difficult to identify lies. We have a need to trust people, and there are many complex problems to solve to be sure about truthfulness and generally, we aren't good at reading them. Even today, the polygraph or lie detector, which has been used as an investigative device by law enforcement and various federal agencies, can be beaten. The typical machine is set up to measure and record physiological changes in the body. There is, in fact, an organization set up to challenge and discredit the polygraph called Anti-polygraph.org, and you'll find many sites on how to beat the polygraph. And it's true, the test has no scientific basis in a court of law.

Joe Navarro

If you remember my interview with Joe Navarro and his book What Every Body is Saying, he writes, “The truth is that identifying deceit is so difficult that repeated studies begun in the 1980s show that most of us—including judges, attorneys, clinicians, police officers, FBI agents, politicians, teachers, mothers, fathers and spouses—are no better than chance (fifty-fifty) when it comes to detecting deception.”

The First Effort

The first recorded effort to construct a mechanical device to measure emotion and determine truth and deception came from Cesar Lombroso. In 1885, Lombroso was recording changes in blood pressure in police cases in Italy with some success.

The Changes Induced by Lying

When a person lies, the body reacts. These physiological changes result from interactions between chemical processes in the body, triggered by mental states or emotions that are behavioral. In the case of a polygraph, the questions act as the stressors. The alterations can include changes in blood pressure, an increase in pulse, higher respiration, skin conductivity—perspiration or sweating—and what is generally referred to as breaking rhythms or ratios. The belief is that during a series of questions, the deceptive answers produce physiological responses that can be differentiated from those associated with non-deceptive answers.

Research Now

The Haifa study examined whether the act of lying causes cognitive, or brain, changes. The approach is based on the assumption that lying—writing lies in this particular case—requires special resources and causes cognitive stress, which in turn affects performance that would otherwise be carried out automatically.

To start the survey, participants were asked to write two paragraphs. In the beginning, the first writing was supposed to describe an event that actually took place. Then volunteers were instructed to follow that with a description of an event that didn’t actually occur.

Electronic Pen to Electronic Board

The instrument to collect the data was an electronic pen and board developed with the aid of a program that Dr. Rosenblum participated in years earlier. The system manually measures pressure, rhythm, speed, frequency and duration of writing.

Results

Deceptive writing produces a consistently heavier pressure on the page than writing the truth. In turn, the "flow of strokes when writing false text, as expressed in the height and length of the letters, is distinctly different from these elements in truthful writing." In addition, the act of thinking about writing falsely sets up a different performance, and the letters expressed are changed in both size and duration.

Something to Think About

"A lie detector that analyses handwriting has many advantages over the existing detectors, since it is less threatening for the person being examined, is much more objective and does not depend on human interpretation. The system also provides measures that the individual has difficulty controlling during performance. This is certainly a system that can improve—alongside the existing detectors—our ability to identify lies," the Haifa researchers concluded.

Searching to perfect the system is a worthwhile goal.

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