Former Police Chief's Crime Novel Has Bay Area Roots

NOVATO, CA — A former Novato police chief described how his past experiences led to his new career as a crime novelist after his third book debuted May 1.

Brian Brady, 77, who served as the Novato Chief of Police for nearly 12 years, released his third book “Greed,” which centers around a group of art thieves working out of New York, Amsterdam and Paris who engage in art forgery.

Brady got the inspiration for his most recent book from his wife, a graphic designer, who learned about art forgery while attending art school. After focusing on San Francisco serial killers in his previous two novels, Brady was intrigued by this idea and began researching and working on connecting the art world of Paris and Amsterdam to his San Francisco characters.

"The third book really isn't about a serial killer, so it's more of an isolated killer. But what makes it interesting is the connection to the art world," Brady told Patch.

His previous book, “Hiding In Plain Sight,” focuses on a young girl taken by a serial killer in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, and his other novel, “Oh, What a Tangled Web,” is about a San Francisco serial killer whose victims are sex workers. But the characters from each of his books all live in the same world.

"It's not exactly a series, but they are the same characters. It's kind of like Michael Connelly with Harry Bosch, where each episode could really stand alone, but as you read them in a sequence, they do kind of fall in place," Brady told Patch.

Brady draws on his life growing up and working in the Bay Area and beyond for his books. He was born in 1948 in San Francisco’s Noe Valley neighborhood. He attended St. Paul’s Grammar School and St. Ignatius High School in San Francisco. His father, who worked as a brewer, was from Ireland. His mother was born in the U.S. but her parents were Irish immigrants as well. She died when he was in grammar school, so it was just him, his brother and his dad looking after each other.

Like his family, most of the families in the neighborhood were Irish and he still gets together often with many of his friends from back in the day.

“There was this real sense of a very close knit neighborhood," Brady told Patch.

After high school, Brady wanted to be a police officer and applied to several departments. He mostly wanted to work in San Francisco, but his 2050 vision prevented him from doing so because San Francisco at the time required 2040 uncorrected.

He got some advice from a neighbor, a homicide inspector, who told him to apply to the Berkeley Police Department because he would get better training as a detective. He worked in Berkeley for nine years before transferring to East Los Angeles in the ‘70s and eventually ended up working in New Mexico before retuning to California and transferred to the Novato Police Department in 1982.

In 1992, he became the police chief. During his time as a police officer and as police chief he had many experiences that he would later tell friends about. They would all tell him he needs to write a book one day.

He told Patch about an incident in which a woman, who owned the Olive Tennis Club at 1150 Olive Ave. that has since closed, was kidnapped and left in a storage locker. She likely would’ve died in there but a passerby heard something and called the police.

Brady credited a tip from an NBC reporter that led to the arrest of the suspects. He recalled asking the reporter if he could credit them in the police report.

"So he picks up the phone and he calls his editor, and says, ‘You can use it, absolutely. That'd be great.’ I said, ‘Well, thank you so much, because we're getting sued on this, and we wanted to know who we could blame.’” Brady told Patch. “Well, I thought this guy was going to die right there in my office, and we'd have to revive him and tell him what we're just kidding."

On a more serious note, Brady also recalled one of the most important cases of his career that became the inspiration for his second novel, “Hiding in Plain Sight.”

Jennifer Moore was a 13-year-old girl who was raped and murdered in a Novato church library in 1982. Brady told Patch that he learned a lot about how unreliable eyewitness testimony can be during that case.

"When you're involved in an investigation, especially a murder like that with a young kid, everybody, for the most part, wants to help,” Brady told Patch. “Sometimes you get eyewitness testimony that is well meaning and well conceived, but not necessarily accurate."

Brady told Patch he credits a bloodhound named Sadie for solving the crime after she led them directly to the crime scene behind a church, contrary to much of the eyewitness testimony. He also praised the FBI and said they bent over backwards to provide assistance in concluding the case quickly.

Although Moore was not murdered by a serial killer, he used it as inspiration when crafting the killer in his book.

Brady retired in 2003 and finally decided to do what all his friends had been saying for years. He decided to start leaning on his experiences and putting them down on paper, fictionally at least.

Today, Brady lives in Penngrove up in Sonoma County with his wife whom he met back in grammar school, divorced and then 40 years later remarried in 2019.

“That could be a story all by itself,” Brady told Patch.

Brady is most proud of his family, including his son and stepson, and the work he did as a Novato Police Chief.

“I think we made a lot of inroads, making the department more welcoming, more community oriented,” Brady told Patch. “At the end of my tenure people felt we could be trusted, and they could actually come to us with problems and we cared."