My guest for this episode of the Crime Cafe podcast is educator and crime writer Michael Kaufman.

Check out our discussion of his Jen Lu series, featuring a brain implant character named Chandler. What would Philip Marlowe make of that? 🙂 The one question I forgot to ask!

You can download the transcript here.

Debbi (00:52): Hi everyone. Today I have a somewhat unusual guest in that he’s better known for his work in gender studies and his nonfiction books than for his crime fiction. However, along with his work as a lecturer and advisor, he co-founded The White Ribbon Campaign, a worldwide effort by men to end violence against women. And somewhere along the line, he decided to write crime fiction, mysteries. So it’s my pleasure to introduce my guest today, Michael Kaufman. Hi Michael. How you doing?

Michael (01:27): Great to be here with you today.

Debbi (01:29): Fantastic. Good to have you on. Great to have you on. Tell us about how you went from lecturing non-governmental organizations and other huge bodies of people and starting a worldwide movement to fiction writing and to your mystery series in particular.

Michael (01:51): Yeah, I think there’s a couple of answers to that. One is that it reflects what I read many decades ago. Now I was an academic, so I read all that stuff and over the years, just increasingly, I’ve just focused, most of my reading has been in my first love, which is fiction, and a good chunk of that has been crime fiction and mysteries combined with the classics and all of that. The other answer to that I’ve always written fiction. My first novel, not a crime novel, but a straight ahead novel was published by Penguin Random House back a couple decades ago now. And so I’ve always had that interest. But here’s the final answer to that. A lot of the work I’ve done in the United Nations system around the world, different governments, companies, you talk to people during a break over lunch or whatever, and I’d be there to talk about gender equality and inclusion and violence against women and transforming our workplaces and better lives for men and parenting, all sorts of things like that.

(03:02): You sit down with a couple of colleagues and you’d expect the discussion would be really sort of super highbrow and I’m reading the latest whatever philosopher. People say, yeah, I’m reading this great mystery. And one of the things that’s true is that for all of us, no matter what we do, the world of fiction and in the case for many of us crime fiction, it’s a combination of both a wonderful escape, a wonderful entertainment, but also a wonderful way to engage with the world. Good crime novels, the page-turning plot. And we all try to do that, but they also delve into characters. You think of some of your favorite crime writers over the years, you might say, yeah, I loved his or her plotting or their plotting, but you also love the characters they create. You love the worlds. And also in the case of these, some writers, you love the issues that they explore. So for me, this is what I decide to spend more of my energy on is my writing, my fiction writing in particular, and to use that as a vehicle, both to be blunt, to entertain and to give people something that’d be really fun to read and enjoyable and exciting, page-turning, but also to explore different social, cultural, environmental, and political issues. So there’s a multifaceted answer to your straightforward question.

Debbi (04:51): Well, I’m with you a hundred percent on that. I have really tried to do that in some of my books. Yes, I’ve tried. Anyway, let’s see. Tell us about Jen Lu, Is it?

Michael (05:05): Yeah.

Debbi (05:06): So what was it that inspired you to write about her?

Michael (05:10): So my first mystery series, I’ll just weigh them here. My Jen Lu series, The Last Exit and The Last Resort. I wanted to probably just came out of, I was visiting a friend in Washington DC. I’m affiliated there with a research center, and we were taking a walk and riffing on this and that, not rifting riffing on this and that he and I had written a strange novel together called The Afghan Vampires Book Club. There may or may not be vampires in it, but–

Debbi (05:49): I love the title.

Michael (05:51): Yeah, we started talking about the future and it was one of those sort of unexpected one thing leading to another. And we started wondering about basically what was going to be happening in Washington in 10 years in the future. So eight years now, seven years now, six years now, whatever. And of course we could not quite have imagined what did end up happening now, but we’ll see. We still have a few years until we get to 2033 and 34 when these two books are set. What I wanted to do was to not get deep into science fiction. It’s really a cross-genre book because it is set in the future. I didn’t want to spend a lot of energy on technological speculation except for one thing. And that is half of each book is narrated by the bioimplant in Jen Lu’s brain and Jen Lu is a DC cop, and she has this implant in her brain whose name is Chandler, and he’s this sort of wannabe tough guy, but Chandler’s only three years old, so he has a hard time pulling off the tough guy thing. Anyway, each of these books, the first book, The Last Exit deals with, aside from it, hopefully tells an exciting story, but woven into that are issues that explore around income inequality, inequality overall, and the impact of climate change. Now, this was written, I’ll tell you a funny story about this.

(07:30): This was written, I guess it was published in what, 2020? 21? 21. So I was writing it pre-COVID, so as one does, and I had a scene at the beginning and it’s still there where there’s these huge fires in the Appalachian Mountains, and this was before all the fires in California and elsewhere, but these fires in the Appalachian Mountains, DC is covered with smoke, and there’s a scene at the beginning where Jen Lu, she’s been demoted for some reason. She’s on patrol and she puts on her N95 mask. So in the original pre-COVID I wrote, “she put on her N95,” and the note I got from my editor was “What’s an N95?” So I had to change it to, “she put on her N95 mask.” Anyway, so it’s set in the future, but it deals with issues that are very much with us today.

(08:31): Similarly, The Last Resort, the second in the series, a lot more very centrally on climate change, there’s a theme around climate reparations, but also issues around violence against women. So with both of these books, and what I’m really excited about in terms of the response I’ve gotten is people to say they love the voice. They love Chandler’s voice because he narrates half of these books. They love the characters, they turn the pages, but they also like that I’ve been able to in a fun, entertaining way engage with some issues that are, I think, important to a lot of us.

Debbi (09:10): Yes, yes. Sounds like it. Sounds like a remarkable concept there, the whole business with the technology in her brain that really … whoo!

Michael (09:25): Yeah, it’s rather scary actually. I mean–

Debbi (09:27): Rather scary. Yes.

Michael (09:29): Yeah, it’s interesting, because I don’t, the one thing I haven’t done too much yet in the series, and we’ll see where it develops. I’ve touched on here and there, this is really a creepy technology. This is a technology I actually hope does not happen. The way I use it here though is in a fairly light way. It’s just sort of an element of the story. It’s an element of the characters, but it’s one that you can start glimpsing here and there. This is actually a pretty problematic technology, and we’ll see where it goes. Chandler, who’s a character in it. That’s the other thing that just amazed me. We as writers always talk about, there’s that cliche about the characters having a life of their own, and it’s of course total nonsense on one level. But what it does represent, and I’m sure you can relate to this, is that as we write, if we’re really into a story, we actually come to know our characters unconsciously, deeper than we’re actually thinking.

(10:32): I think unless we’re the most brilliant writer around and has it all worked out, for most of us, our brains are actually doing a better job unconsciously than consciously. And so things happen, the characters do things that of course, we’re creating, well, here’s something, my character, this computer implant, Chandler, I knew he was going to have this sort of tough guy voice. He’s going to be somewhat humorous. I didn’t know he was going to evolve in the course of these books as a character. It hadn’t occurred to me. And that starts happening and he becomes a real live character. And I think that’s part of, in the reviews and Publishers Weekly and elsewhere, I think that’s one thing that the reviewers really talked about.

Debbi (11:19): Yeah. Yeah. That’s fascinating. That is very, very interesting. Raises all sorts of things in terms of multiple personality, stuff like that. Who knows?

Michael (11:32): It’s pretty endless, isn’t it? Yes.

Debbi (11:34): I could go on, but …

Michael (11:36): But no, you’re right. Who is this person now?

Debbi (11:38): Yeah, yeah. Wow. This other voice talking in my head, that’s part of me.

Michael (11:44): I mean, most of us have enough voices in our head as it is.

Debbi (11:47): Writers in particular. Do you think, as gender roles have changed over the years, as our perception of gender has changed, do you think that crime fiction has kept up with the changes? Can we be doing a better job?

Michael (12:08): I think that’s a fantastic question. I mean, one of the things in the world of crime fiction, as we know, some of our great writers have always been, have been the pioneers and have been women have been the pioneers. You think of the Golden Age of crime writing in Britain. I mean, you think first of, well, you think first, Agatha Christie, of course, and Dorothy Sayers and others as well as, of course, different men. But so women have always been prominent as crime writers. I think when we think of different subgenres, you think of the classic thrillers, which still have a bit of a macho, not bit of, still tend to be dominated by a very macho vibe. Actually, my agent is now shopping around a thriller that tries to get around some of those tired cliches of thrillers. But we’ll leave that aside, too. When it comes to, we’ll have another conversation. But I don’t know if it has actually fully adapted. We do see more either, if not themes, references to women, cops being sexually harassed at work. There certainly are themes around physical and sexual abuse of women sometimes. Unfortunately, that’s done in a, I think pretty, I’d say superficial and even exploitive way, a sort of titillating way, which to say the least, I find ugly and wrong and distasteful.

Debbi (13:44): What the crime writers have most inspired you to get into crime writing?

Michael (13:51): Wow. I am a very eclectic reader. I do particularly love the British, Scottish mystery writers a lot. I think those tend to be my go-to writers, although there are of course, some North American writers who I totally love and adore, and so I won’t start picking out names, but I read quite widely, and I spend a lot of time with the classics, sometimes going way back. I just reread the other day, Woman in White, one of probably the first mystery ever written by Wilkie Collins 160 years ago or whatever it was. And I think that wide reading is really important. I think it’s an important thing as writers, as readers, just to keep it broad.

Debbi (14:59): Yeah, yeah. I’ve noticed a tendency on the part of writers to read broadly anyway. But yeah, I’m sort of the same way. I like to read different things. I need my palette cleansed every now and then of crime writing. Something different something that tastes a little different and comes across a little differently.

Michael (15:21): Well, I hink one reason for this, certainly as a writer, if you’re just immersed in, let’s say contemporary crime fiction from the US, so you’re just trying to keep up with the hundreds and hundreds of books, or at least some of them, you’re going to be in such a little bubble of a certain writing style, a certain subject matter, subject matters, preoccupations, but a very small world. And I think that what that does, it’s not really healthy for your own writing or for the field. It just becomes, you just start reflecting back and forth. We become like AI machines that are just ourselves based on what we read. And there are things that are in contemporary mystery writing that’s very good. There’s other things, I think less so. I’m not enamored with sentences that have to explain every little thing in the sentence and have a lot of adverbs. She gasped with emotion, and it’s like, of course you don’t need to. And I think there’s a bit of a tendency in a lot of contemporary writing, and particularly sadly when we get into the self-published world in which there’s some great stuff, but tends not to get edited as much. And so you don’t have as much of that editorial oversight that can say, no, you don’t need that. Just cut it out.

Debbi (16:51): Yeah, definitely. An editor is something every self-published author should invest in along with the great cover.

Michael (16:58): Yeah.

Debbi (16:58): Period. That’s my advice.

Michael (17:01): Editors are great. I remember one of my–

Debbi (17:03): They’re your best friends.

Michael (17:06): They are. I remember one of my first experiences, it was actually years ago now, it was a nonfiction project with Ballantine Books and I had written this thing, and the comments back from my editor were, I don’t get this, this doesn’t, whatever. And I just thought, first thought was, how could she be so dumb? Why couldn’t she get that? And then of course, the obvious hit me, which is no, if she doesn’t get it, it means I’m not doing my job as a writer, because she’s obviously a smart woman,

(17:40): Just that dose of reality and someone challenging us to kill our darlings and all the cliches. I mean, luckily for one of my books, speaking of editors, one of my most recent works of fiction is actually a young adult crossover. It’s a fantasy, a present day fantasy. It’s a mystery in there. And under pseudonym Kayden Quinn, because I actually co-wrote it with my longtime editor, and we wrote this story together about a 16-year-old young woman who discovers on the horse farm where she’s working three, the horses are centaurs. It’s a fantasy, but there’s a climate change theme in it. There’s about to be, I won’t get into the details and spoil anything, but basically Andra and the centaurs have got to save everything. And so what was really fun, speak by the editors, is I did most of the writing as we started off, we developed all the ideas together, which was an amazing back and forth, to have someone to work through things.

(18:56): I did the writing and she would edit, but after a while, we were just mashing up back and forth and just learning from each other. And it was Marie Lynn Hammond, who’s a Canadian singer songwriter, and an avid horsewoman, I should add, since this is set in a stable, is a type of great editor who just pushes, pushes. I would have Andra just saying something or doing something. And it just seemed fine. And Mary Lynn would say, well, why did she not get under the covers? I’m just thinking, it doesn’t matter. She’s tired. And Mary Lynn would constantly be saying, even if you don’t tell the reader, you’ve got to know if you want to, what’s going on. So writing Moon Storm Rising was such a wonderful experience and ended up with a book, I think that’s quite magic. There’s magic in it. I mean, one of the things that Andra eventually starts to learn is centaur magic, which you probably didn’t even know existed. And apparently it does. I happen now to be an expert on centaurs.

Debbi (20:08): Awesome. And it sounds like a great collaboration you had going with your editor there.

Michael (20:13): Fantastic.

Debbi (20:15): There’s a lot of good in collaborative writing.

Michael (20:18): It’s very tricky. Several years ago, I co-wrote another strange hybrid book called The Afghan Vampires Book Club, and it’s not a fantasy. There may or may not be vampires in it. We got a beautiful blurb from Jane Fonda on the cover. I mean, it’s a nice book, but it’s about war. It’s a metaphor about war and love and life. And anyway, co-wrote it with a friend, and at some point we decided that our friendship was more important than wrestling over do we like this adverb or adjective? And we just kept deferring to the other. And so it’s a really interesting process. It is hard to write, to write together,

Debbi (21:07): Maybe on a novel more so than what I’ve been doing screenplay writing, which is so collaborative. It really is good to work with another person when you’re working on a screenplay. That’s all I’ll say about that.

Michael (21:22): Well, and as in when you think of screenplays, it’s something that’s ultimately going to be out of your control. And to have that collaboration from the start, I think is so healthy.

Debbi (21:31): Exactly. Yeah.

Michael (21:32): Someone pushing back and creating ideas together. But no, I love that brainstorming together. It’s terrific.

Debbi (21:39): I mean, you can have it in your head, but unless it’s on the page, nobody’s going to see it. Nobody’s going to really know what’s going on here.

Michael (21:47): That’s why they call us writers rather than thinkers.

Debbi (21:51): Hopefully we do both.

Michael (21:52): I should tell you quickly, my other recent novel, these two actually ended up being self-published, which I’d never done before, but my agent thought it were so different from my other writing, just let my publishers, been published by Penguin and Random House and Crooked Lane and others. Let them do what they do. And just so these are actually self-published on Amazon of all things. This one is for fans of Dick Francis, that very sort of light mystery writer from England from the Sixties, Seventies, Eighties, who wrote these horse racing themed mysteries. They’re all sort of the same. But anyway, I thought I’m going to copy his formula, do the same thing he did, but in the world of golf of all things. Anyway, The Perfect Lie, again under a pseudonym, Joshua Slate, came out of that thinking. Just sort of fun. I was talking earlier about the political and the social themes of my Jen Lu series set in Washington DC, 10 years in the future. This is pretty straightforward stuff, and this is just turn the page entertainment and have fun with it.

Debbi (23:04): Cool. Well, that’s always fun. It is always nice to have a read that’s just easy and fun.

Michael (23:10): Yeah.

Debbi (23:11): So cool. Is there anything else you’d like to add before we finish up? Do you have any advice for people who would like to write for a living, for instance?

Michael (23:22): I think one of the main things is, and the two classic answers are the best answers, and that is to read, read, read, read. And as we were both saying earlier, read diverse. If you’re into fiction, great, you can just read fiction. But the world of fiction, don’t just get stuck in one genre or one period. You’ll just stymie yourself from the beginning. So read as broadly as you can. Work at it. Don’t be scared of the big books of the classics. Actually, I have a little series I started on Instagram. I can’t remember if I already mentioned that, but if not, this little series saying, don’t be scared of big books on my Instagram account. So read. The other, of course, is just write, write, and write. I’m not one into this, you have to write a certain number of words a day. That’s not my, that’s not me.

(24:19): When I’m into a project, I could start first thing in the morning and then at midnight I have to force myself to stop. And other days it’s not what I’m doing. So I am not saying you have to crank out a certain number of words a day, but writing is not just an art, it’s a craft. You have to work at it. And part of working at it is that it gets into nothing, trying to work with, if you can just scrounge up the money or whatever, but hire good editors. When you show friends, friends just love what you write. And you know what, sometimes you’ll have some friends who are good critics too, and that’s fantastic, but most people are not editors. Most people are not book critics. So get that support.

(25:09): Don’t be in too much of a hurry. Particularly if you’re querying agents, you don’t get many shots at it. And if you’re sending out things to your list of whatever, 30, 50 agents, once they’ve seen you and turned you down once, your next, when you rewrite that book in a half a year, they’re not going to be interested. So be patient, make sure you’ve got a good, if you’re writing a book or stories that you’re going to get there. Unlike being a professional athlete, writers do not peak in their 18 to 25-year-old. There’s a few prodigies that are there, but most writers, they’re peaking in their thirties, forties, fifties, whatever. So just hang in there, learn the craft of writing, develop your own view of the world. Read and learn to, when I said read, learn to read like a writer, I find when I read a story, I just get so into the story. I’m not reading like a writer, so I have to sort of slow down and think about how did the writer make me feel this? How did I realize this is happening when they haven’t said so? And to really just try to slow down a bit. So yes, reading, writing, getting criticism and challenge are all really, really important.

Debbi (26:41): Yes, I couldn’t have said it better. Thank you so much, and I would like to thank you for being here today with us to talk about this. I appreciate your being here. Thanks.

Michael (26:52): Well, thank you. In your 10th year, which is amazing doing this, and best of wishes for your own writing and just keep up the great work.

Debbi (27:02): Thank you. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. For those of you listening, please consider leaving a review, if you enjoyed the episode on your favorite podcast app. Also consider supporting us on Patreon where we offer bonus episodes, early access to episodes without ads, excerpts from my work, and reduced prices on various books and other items in my store on Patreon. On that note, our next guest will be Priscilla Paton. Until then, take care and happy reading.

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