My guest interview this week on the Crime Cafe podcast is with crime fiction author Desmond P. Ryan.

Check out our discussion about Toronto and the experiences in law enforcement that have informed his fiction.

You can download a copy of the transcript here.

Debbi Mack (00:07): Hi everyone. My guest today is a former police detective with the Toronto Police who draws on his experiences to write two very distinctive series, the Mike O’Shea series of gritty police stories, reminiscent of Joseph Wambaugh, so definitely gritty stuff. And also a series called A Pint of Trouble, which is closer in tone, apparently to the Thursday Murder Club books by Richard Osman. So I find that just a fascinating dichotomy of series there. Way not to get pigeonholed. It’s my pleasure to have with me today, the author Desmond P. Ryan. Hi Des, how are you doing today?

Desmond Ryan (00:54): I’m doing great, Debbi. How about yourself?

Debbi Mack (00:57): Quite well, thank you. I just got through wrapping on my first film. I directed a film a week ago. It was a short film. It’s a short film. Yes.

Desmond Ryan (01:12): I’ll bet that’s a lot of work.

Debbi Mack (01:14): Oh boy. It was a lot of work and it was a very, very interesting and eye opening, just kind of an experience I’ll never forget.

Desmond Ryan (01:24): What’s the film about?

Debbi Mack (01:25): It’s about a priest who has a dark, somewhat dangerous past who has to face the consequences of what he’s done.

Desmond Ryan (01:36): Okay.

Debbi Mack (01:37): I’ll leave it at that. I don’t want to spoil anything.

Desmond Ryan (01:40): And where will we be seeing this film?

Debbi Mack (01:42): I hope to have it somewhere online eventually. Somehow I think that the company that I was associated with, the nonprofit called Charm City Filmmakers helped make this happen. They basically teach new directors how to be directors, what’s involved and who does what on the set, that kind of thing, and what your role is. And you’d be surprised how much work the first AD or assistant director does. It’s just this amazing process that, it requires you to be really paying attention for one thing.

Desmond Ryan (02:32): So it’s not all magic?

Debbi Mack (02:35): It’s magic, but it’s magic that looks invisible. I mean, the best magic does not reveal its tricks. Right?

Desmond Ryan (02:44): That’s true.

Debbi Mack (02:45): But it’s funny. People go behind the scenes all the time and see the tricks, so it’s interesting, but it’s a magic that we willingly buy into. Something like that.

Desmond Ryan (02:56): Yes, you’re going to have to let us know when it’s going to be [inaudible] I’m already excited.

Debbi Mack (03:03): Thank you. I feel like I’ve kind of hijacked this interview with you here. Just mentioning that film. My God, the film was really just a great experience and I’ll probably talk about it more on a YouTube channel, so I’m on YouTube as Debbi Mack if you want to find it there.

Desmond Ryan (03:22): We will.

Debbi Mack (03:23): Okay, awesome. Let’s see. You have the Mike O’Shea Series and the Pint of Trouble series. It’s interesting. They’re so very different. I love that you’re writing though focuses on the diversity of Toronto’s neighborhoods. I’m just fascinated with neighborhoods and how cities are made up of neighborhoods often. Tell us about the neighborhoods in Toronto and in particular, Cabbagetown, which I never knew about until I found out you were there, looked it up and has a very interesting entry on Wikipedia.

Desmond Ryan (04:03): Yeah. Well, Debbi I’m born and raised in Toronto, and so I take a lot of it for granted, and it would take me hours and hours and hours to explain the diversity of Toronto. I believe it is the most diverse city in the world, not just because Des says so, but I think in whoever measures all of that stuff out it is. And it’s made up of little neighborhoods, and a lot of the neighborhoods are based on culture and ethnicity, and it’s a really, really, I think, fascinating city. You have things like Chinatown, Little Italy, Little Portugal, Little India. You’ve got Somali neighborhoods, you’ve got all kinds of neighborhoods. And the neighborhood I live in is called Cabbagetown, and it is an old, old neighborhood, when we are talking Toronto years. Many of the houses here were built in the late 1800s, and they were originally built as fairly large Victorian homes.

(05:14): And as the neighborhood turned over and the economy went belly up and all that sort of thing, the houses got into disrepair. A lot of them were turned into rooming houses or broken up into flats and things like that. And one of the reasons that they call this neighborhood Cabbagetown is that the people who lived here, because of the economic depression at the time, were growing cabbages in their front yard. And so that’s how it came to be called Cabbagetown. And for a long time, this neighborhood was very disenfranchised and they put a very, very large public housing complex in the area, which was called Regent Park, and they ripped down a pile of old houses that were used as rooming houses to facilitate this. And then rather than invigorate the neighborhood—again, the houses were rooming houses, things like that—it became a very tough neighborhood.

(06:21): And at one time, I actually policed in this neighborhood, and that would’ve been in the early nineties. And I remember policing here and thinking, who the heck would want to live here? Now what ended up happening was this neighborhood is also very close to what we call the Gay Village, the Church and Wellesley area, which became heavily populated with gay men and lesbians, mostly gay men who then saw the economic opportunity in these old houses. And so they started buying these houses, refurbishing them, and through that action basically turned the neighborhood around. And so now these houses are worth millions of dollars. They’re gorgeous. I think it’s the largest historic neighborhood in Canada, which means that the exterior of the houses cannot be changed. So these are from the outside, they’re time-locked. So it makes for a very, very beautiful neighborhood.

Debbi Mack (07:27): Very interesting. That’s fascinating. Yeah, it’s fascinating the way things change over time, isn’t it? Let’s see. What inspired you to create Detective Mike O’Shea as a character and give him so many problems?

Desmond Ryan (07:48): Well, as you’d said, I spent almost 30 years in policing, and the first 15 years of my career were done in uniform in various capacities, including foot patrol and primary response and community officer and all that sort of thing. And then I became a uniform sergeant, and then I became a detective. And as my career was going on, more winding down, getting to the end, I realized that I had a lot of distinct knowledge that really had no relevance in the outside world. Not a lot of people want to know the stages of rigor mortis, not a lot of people want to know about gathering evidence, things like that. And so I thought, well, what can I do with this information? And I had done my undergrad degree at the University of Toronto in English literature and political science. It’s an obvious segue into policing.

(08:53): But what ended up happening is, I thought, well, why don’t I just start writing this story? And so I created this character, and as any of your listeners know who are writers, oftentimes you have an outline of a character. And even if you really define the character, they kind of develop their own selves. And so as I was writing the story, also looking at the impact of what was happening to the characters, specifically Mike O’Shea, of course, he would develop these problems because otherwise, I mean, don’t know, not to give anything away, but in the very first book, there’s a major … in 10-33 Assist PC, there’s a very traumatic event that forms Mike’s the rest of his policing career. And for him to be able to walk away with that, just shrug it off, I think would’ve been a bit unreasonable. And then more and more things seem to happen, and he responds in the only way he knows, which unfortunately isn’t the healthiest way. And then it also gave me an opportunity to discuss mental health, mental health in frontline officers, in first responders. And it just sort of opened up a whole world. In a place I didn’t think the character was going to go.

Debbi Mack (10:22): Yeah, they tell you where to go eventually.

Desmond Ryan (10:27): Yes.

Debbi Mack (10:29): They take on a life of their own. What do you think people get wrong and writers in particular get wrong about police?

Desmond Ryan (10:44): I think it is that sense that they’re tremendously troubled individuals or that they’re perfect when in fact, we’re just regular people that do a unique job. Like being a surgeon is a unique job. Being a mortician is a unique job. There’s a very different skillset. I think oftentimes, having said that, writers can sometimes write their characters as a little bit one-dimensional in terms of, yes, policing is a very involved occupation, and when you’re in it, you are in it, but there’s other things happening in the individual officer’s lives that if the writer can do it and sort of put a little bit of that in, I think that’ll add a little more authenticity to the character.

Debbi Mack (11:47): Yes, definitely. What prompted you to write a series versus standalones? I’ve noticed people tend to have a preference for one or the other.

Desmond Ryan (11:58): I just thought that it’s one of those things like once the ball gets going, originally I actually set it up as a five, but then became a six book story arc because I wanted to tell this long story, but I also wanted to talk about individual homicide investigations, and I didn’t want to end up writing 400,000-word book. And as a writer, I just thought it was easier in terms of world building because once you create your characters, once you create the world, then in your next book you can advance the plot more, you can get more into the minutiae of investigations, you can do all of that. And I thought that made it easier for me. And as we were discussing with the film, it, it’s all magic. It’s all … fiction is all a suspension of belief, but once you establish where that suspension exists, then you can play around a lot in it. So that’s what made me want to do a series.

Debbi Mack (13:16): Yeah, yeah. It’s kind of nice to have a defined world so that you don’t have to keep building it each time. Just hint at it or whatever works.

Desmond Ryan (13:30): And I mean, now I’m working on the sixth book of the O’Shea series, and that’s the final book in the series. I set it up that way. And Debbi, I got to say, I am dogging it. I think, why is this so hard? It’s because I have been writing this series since 2014, and now it’s time to say goodbye, and I want to tie up all the loose ends and I want to do it right. And then that world ends.

Debbi Mack (14:03): Yeah. Yeah, it’s definitely, there’s a kind of a sadness that comes with the end. Yeah.

Desmond Ryan (14:10): Yeah. And it’s like it, we’re done. Goodnight, everybody.

Debbi Mack (14:14): Yeah, it’s been real.

Desmond Ryan (14:17): Exactly, exactly.

Debbi Mack (14:19): Do you plan to keep working on the other series?

Desmond Ryan (14:24): Yes, actually, and I have another series that’s unrelated to the Mike O’Shea characters also coming out also with Level Best Books, but with the Pint of Trouble, because what we’re talking about, the characters having their own lives, I put in the very first book, I put Mike O’Shea’s mother in Mary Margaret O’Shea as the typical Irish mother, and as a first generation immigrant from Ireland. She is more Irish than anybody in Ireland because she has manifested all of her Irish identity, and there’s no one to tell her that. That’s not really how it is. And I just put her in to lighten up the scene a little bit. But then she became a reader favorite. And by the third book, which is Man At the Door, I had to really stop her from taking off. She was just taking over more and more of the book.

(15:25): And I kept reminding myself, no, this is a police procedural. This is a Mike O’Shea book. And then what happened, Debbi was during 2020, right after we all got locked down, I thought, well, this will be a great time. I had … my marriage collapsed. I was living on my own, and I thought this would be a great time for me to finish off the Mike series and all that, but it got too dark. I couldn’t do it. And I thought, well, then I’ll just start with this Mary Margaret character and see what happens. And it’s a complete opposite. I mean, she’s mildly Machiavellian. She’s her own person. She marches to the beat of her own drum. The characters are fun. I used some of the same characters from the Michael O’Shea books, but writing them was tricky because in the Michael O’Shea books, they’re gritty. They’re in your books, and they use some swear words, a lot of swear words in the Mary Margarets, they don’t, and they’re softer. So it was really interesting balancing that out, and it was fun.

Debbi Mack (16:38): That is tricky.

Desmond Ryan (16:41): And so with the Mary Margarets, I’m now, the third one is coming out soon. A fourth one is in the works. I’m contracted for five of those, but I’m hoping to keep writing them just because she’s fun and the characters are fun. And the difference between a police procedural where you have to follow police procedures, you can’t make things up or you shouldn’t, versus a traditional or more cozy-ish crime fiction is that you don’t really have to follow the rules as long as your reader will believe what you’re telling them and will go along for the ride. You can do whatever you want. And so that’s a lot more fun.

Debbi Mack (17:27): Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah. Get away from all those rules. Yes. Let’s see. Well, you answered my question about what’s your plan as far as how many books you’re going to write in terms of Mike O’Shea anyway. What writing routine do you generally follow?

Desmond Ryan (17:50): Well, usually I find when I get up, I’m kind of at my best, not right away. I’m not at my best. When I right away get up, I’ll get up, poke around a bit, have a coffee, greet the day, and then I’ll say, okay, now it’s time to settle down. And I have the luxury of time, so I can sit and I can write for a couple of hours, and then I’ll get up and do something else and go for a walk, have some lunch, and then I’ll come back again, try, I write fairly quickly. And I think that’s a result of spending years writing police reports, which is basically writing short stories. So if you go out to 10 radio calls, you’re writing 10 short stories, and you’ve got to be good. It’s got to be fast. So that allows me to write quite a bit. And I find I have to write, I usually don’t write on weekends, but I have to write every day during the week or I’ll fall out of … fall out and I’ll, it’s hard to get back in step again.

Debbi Mack (19:01): Yeah, having a routine really, really helps. It’s just something to do.

Desmond Ryan (19:06): What’s your routine?

Debbi Mack (19:09): I tend to write in the morning, usually. That’s usually when I’m at my best. And then I’ll do anything else that needs to be done in the afternoon.

Desmond Ryan (19:20): Right. Yeah.

Debbi Mack (19:22): Mornings are for writing, afternoons for all the other stuff that has to get done, which is not inconsiderable at this point.

Desmond Ryan (19:30): And sometimes I’ll, even after dinner, I’ll think, well, I just want to touch this little piece up. But then before I know it, it’s like, oh my gosh, it’s 11.

Debbi Mack (19:41): Yeah, it’s amazing. My husband just doesn’t quite believe how wrapped up I get in writing something and it’s like, you didn’t notice that it was 5:30? I’m like, hey, I was in the middle of putting something together, that it just came and I just had to do it. And anyway, some people just don’t understand these things. They’re generally not writers. Yes. What authors have most inspired you as a writer? I think Joseph Wambaugh would be one,

Desmond Ryan (20:15): Probably. Yeah. Yes. And I’m just trying to think. I, well, I really liked, still like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway. I like that era of writing. I tend to be a very eclectic reader. I mean, I studied Dickens at university, and one of the things I think that’s, not that I’m remotely comparable to Dickens, but what I liked about his characters were no matter how small they were, they came complete as opposed to just there was someone with a black jacket walking by. There was a whole story about all of those characters. And that’s something that really impacted me. And I like to, again, I’m certainly not comparable, but I like to think when I’m writing a character, I want them to be a complete character as opposed to just some person in the hallway.

Debbi Mack (21:21): Interesting.

Desmond Ryan (21:22): I want to present, again, in presenting, I think what makes a story good is the authenticity of it, which again, provides is the depth of the people involved in it.

Debbi Mack (21:34): Yeah. Yeah, that’s a very good point, an excellent point. It’s amazing how some people can describe a character in a few lines, and you have real sense of who that person is.

Desmond Ryan (21:49): Yeah. Just a turn of phrase.

Debbi Mack (21:52): Exactly.

Desmond Ryan (21:53): Well, Debbi I used to work with, well in the same division as this traffic cop, and the way it was set up is there’s divisional officers who respond to the calls to service, and there’s traffic officers who do all the enforcement. They’re the ones that we don’t like. The ones that if you go through the stop sign, they stop you and they give you a summons and all of that, and this guy would go to court and it’s not an exciting thing. You ran the stop sign, whatever. He would tell a story that would have you on the edge of your seat for every single summons he wrote. It’s like, wow. It was riveting. I’m thinking, anybody else? The vehicle failed to stop at the white line. I observed them proceeding through this stop sign. I stopped them. This guy would tell it was fabulous, and I just thought, wow, that’s how to tell a story.

Debbi Mack (22:50): That’s it. You’re right. That’s it. If you can do that, you can do it.

Desmond Ryan (22:56): Yes.

Debbi Mack (22:58): What advice would you give to anyone who would like to make a living as a writer, have a writing career?

Desmond Ryan (23:06): Wow, that’s a great question. Well, I don’t think there’s a blueprint for it. I don’t think if you get a master’s in fine arts in writing, if that will guarantee you a job, like a career in writing. I mean, if you’re a journalist, it might if you’re a reporter, but in terms of being a novelist, I don’t think there’s a career path. I think though, what there is is just never giving up, is you just keep writing, keep, and sooner or later, hopefully someone will notice you that will move you up to the next level. And whether that moves you from the level of the only person who read your book was your mother, to now you’ve got a community reading your books to now you’ve got strangers buying your books to now you are in stores to now whatever your goal is. But it’s to never stop writing and never stop producing, because I think for a lot of people, it’s, as you know, writing is hard work. It’s wonderful. It’s wonderful work, it’s fun, it’s exciting, it’s frustrating, annoying, and it’s lonely. It’s a lot of work by yourself. And Melodie Campbell, who’s an author here in Canada, she said she figures it takes about a thousand hours from the time you sit down and start your book until it’s published. And that’s a lot of time, but you just keep going. Keep going, because why wouldn’t you?

(24:56): So that would be my advice, and maybe it’ll happen to you. The first person who picks up your book will say, this is great. We’ll turn it into a movie, and my people will call your people tomorrow. But I don’t know of anybody that’s really happened to, but maybe that’s just the circles I travel in.

Debbi Mack (25:13): Who knows how these things happen? Things happen for all sorts of reasons.

Desmond Ryan (25:18): And in a lot of cases, it’s to give us time to get better at what we do, because the more you write, the better you get. Someone else was saying that never publish your first book, put it away, and because you’re not as good as you think you are.

Debbi Mack (25:40): Yes, that’s absolutely true,

Desmond Ryan (25:44): And that’s your calling card. So put it away, and then maybe after you’ve written and publishers picked you up, then you can pull it out again and dust it off, and try not to be too embarrassed that you thought it was great, but realize how much better you’ve gotten.

Debbi Mack (26:00): That’s an excellent point. Thank you for saying that, because a lot of people don’t really quite realize, I know the first time I wrote a novel, it was hard. That first novel is the hardest, but once you’ve done one, you can do it again. It’s just a matter of keep practicing, keep at it, and take advice from the right people in terms of get with a writer’s group or something, someplace where you can get constructive criticism and really take it

Desmond Ryan (26:33): And realize that rejection isn’t, it’s nothing personal.

Debbi Mack (26:38): It’s not the end of the world. It’s nothing personal.

Desmond Ryan (26:41): It’s a business. And just because that person doesn’t like the book doesn’t mean somebody else. And I mean, chances are there’s somebody out there who’s going to like your book.

Debbi Mack (26:54): Exactly. Right.

Desmond Ryan (26:56): Maybe it’s just not the person that you think will, or the agent you think should be representing you, but just keep going. Somebody will find you.

Debbi Mack (27:07): Yep. Great advice. Is there anything else you’d like to add before we finish up?

Desmond Ryan (27:14): No. I mean, I just hope that your listeners who are writers keep writing. The other thing is we all have stories to tell, and I think it’s really important that they get out there as opposed to people saying, well, oh, I never really told this story because I didn’t think. It’s like, it’s a great story. Tell it and find a way to tell it. And whether it’s through writing, whether it’s through film, whether it’s through visual art, you’ve got a story to tell. Tell the story.

Debbi Mack (27:50): Great advice. Thank you so much. Thank you for being here today.

Desmond Ryan (27:54): Oh, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Debbi Mack (27:58): It was my pleasure to have you on, and thank you. Thanks. Also to everyone listening, especially my Patreon supporters and Substack subscribers. Thank you so much. The Crime Cafe monthly magazine should be out for September by now, by the time this gets up. So look for the one for October. Each issue of the magazine has a listring of new releases, as well as book reviews, podcast episodes, and more, especially if you’re a paid subscriber. I tried to add a lot of extras in there, a few extras where I can squeeze them out. In any case, until next time when my guest will be Amanda DuBois, take care and happy reading. Be seeing you.

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