Join crime writer Matt Cost and me, as we discuss how Matt manages to write and publish three books a year, in various series.

You can download a copy of the transcript here.

Debbi (00:00:52): Hi, everyone. Happy New Year. Today is the third of the month, so it’s still a pretty new year. Anyhow, my guest for this episode is the former owner of a video store, a mystery bookstore, and a gym. I assume that he formerly owned these. He’s also taught history and coached just about every sport imaginable, in his words. So I’m trying to imagine some sports he might not have coached. Coming to us from Brunswick, Maine, it is my pleasure to introduce my guest, Matt Cost.

(00:01:31): Hi, Matt. How are you doing today?

Matt (00:01:33): I’m fantastic, Debbi. Thank you much for having me on.

Debbi (00:01:37): Oh, it’s my pleasure. Believe me. I always enjoy talking to people about their books and stuff.

(00:01:43): So I read your guest post. My goodness, your life sounds exhausting. It sounds like you’re constantly on the go. And you write three books a year and publish them?

Matt (00:01:55): Yes. You know, I got my first book published in 2020 after a short 29 years of waiting to get it published because I wrote it in 1991, originally the first draft. So when I got that door open, I decided to just go straight for it. And so that’s kind of what I do. I write seven days a week, 365 days a year and do all the other pieces that I put with that guest post on your blog.

Debbi (00:02:24): Wow. Well, I’m impressed. I got to say, three books a year is really good, in my opinion. That’s a fantastic output.

Matt (00:02:35): The variety of things you do is pretty cool, though. You’ve got mysteries and thrillers and young adults and screenplays. So that’s all very cool.

Debbi (00:02:44): It’s very cool. It may not be remunerative, but it’s cool. I’m enjoying it, though.I do enjoy writing screenplays very much.

(00:02:54): How do you organize your workflow? Do you keep a calendar of, say, short-term deadlines, things like that?

Matt (00:03:03): Not so much. Like I said, I write every day because without writing, nothing else matters. And so I fall into a rhythm where it takes me three or four months to write a book, but then it takes me three or four months to edit a book and three or four months to market a book and then three or four months promoting a book. And I’m generally doing all four of those things at the same time for four different books.

(00:03:31): So that’s kind of how my time is managed, you know, I break it out and what I need to get done. But I always start the day with writing because none of the rest of it matters if you don’t write.

Debbi (00:03:43): Exactly. Exactly right. Yeah. And how do you manage the paperwork in terms of like, or the filing system, as it were, if it’s an online filing system of your research and stuff, because you do a lot of historical research, don’t you?

Matt (00:04:02): Yeah, I’ve done three standalone historical fiction pieces. And then I also have started a series that’s a historical PI mystery series set in 1920s Brooklyn, New York. Bushwick, not too far from Queens. And, so to answer the question, I start with a document where I’m taking notes on the research that I’m doing. Much more heavy for historical, but some of the mysteries, you know, like when I get into genome editing and my book Mouse Trap, that took a lot of research on my part to understand the science behind that, because that’s not my forte, so to speak. And so I take all of those notes and then I develop character sketches.

(00:04:52): And I usually pick a picture that corresponds with what I think, maybe some famous actor, maybe just some schmo off of the internet that fits the image of who I’m looking for. And then I create an outline, which has over time become a pretty exact science for me. It is, you know, 40 chapters long and there’s three things in each chapter and a date and a word count. And I generally don’t fill that outline in until I’ve written the chapters that it’s going into because that helps me keep the place for what has happened. So, when you ask about the filing system, that allows me to come back and say, okay what was that guy’s eye color in chapter one or much more convoluted, you know.

(00:05:49): And when I’m on Book Six, which I’m currently on Book Six of my Clay Wolfe Trap series is, you know, what was the name of that park over in this fictional town of Port Essex that I put into Book One? And so I can go back and look into those outlines and find the appropriate place and names and things. And that’s very helpful.

Debbi (00:06:11): That’s a great system for a series. And your mathematical approach to story writing reminds me a great deal of screenwriting, which is highly mathematical. You need certain things to happen by page 10, by page 15, by page 20, that sort of thing. Have you ever considered screenwriting as an option?

Matt (00:06:33): I have, you know, dabbled with turning some of my works into screenplays. But then I realized that, you know, out in Hollywood, they have 10 or 12 screenwriters that they like to use for most of the work that they do. So you perhaps had some luck with it, but I was thinking it was going to be a tougher nut to crack than even getting published. So until somebody comes along and asks me to do it, I think I’ll hold off.

Debbi (00:07:03): I was going to say that I have not had Hollywood producers pounding on my door. It doesn’t happen like that. It really does not. Yeah, you kind of have to want to do that sort of thing or have an agent that wants to explore that, something like that, or produce it yourself. You could always do that, which is every bit as hard as it sounds. Let’s put it that way. Producing.

(00:07:34): Let me see, so your different series, where did you get the inspiration for them and tell us about them. How are they different? They deal with different protagonists, correct?

Matt (00:07:52): Yeah my first mystery series was based in the town that I live in Maine, so I went with the adage of write about what you know. And so I based it in Brunswick, Maine. And interestingly enough, my private investigator, Goff Langdon, is a private eye and a mystery bookstore owner in the town of Brunswick, Maine, because neither one of them is a job worthy of paying the bills in Brunswick. Small town, Maine. But if he puts the two of them together, he’s able to make a living. And that bookstore that he owns is based on a mystery bookstore that I actually owned in the 1990s, the Copy Dog Mystery Bookshop. And it sort of had a short run in the 90s. But now it gets to live on in the pages of the book. So that’s kind of fun for me. So it’s much more successful in the book than it was in real life.

Debbi (00:08:54): Yeah. I love the idea of a mystery-solving mystery bookstore owner. I think that’s great.

Matt (00:09:01): Yeah, so that was a fun one to put together. And so then, you know, as I was thinking about coming up with another series, I decided to create a fictional town because there’s certain problems with writing about a small town that you live in, such as people coming up and saying, “Is that me?”

Debbi (00:09:21): Yeah.

Matt (00:09:23): Or similar such things. I had one terrible story with that is, an elderly lady got my phone number and called me. She must have been in her 90s. And she said she absolutely loves my books and explained where she lived in Brunswick and that some of my scenes take place in and around where she lives. And as she explained where it was, I realized that in the book I was currently writing, I had just killed somebody in her building.

Debbi (00:09:59): Oh, my gosh. Oh, dear. Oh, no.

Matt (00:10:03): And I didn’t really have the heart to say that, thinking that it was the same building.

Debbi (00:10:09): Oh, my gosh. How awkward would that be?

Matt (00:10:13): So I decided to write a series about a fictional town that I created in Maine called Port Essex, which is actually loosely based on a real town, but it gives me the liberty to change things and do things that I want. And I have that private investigator, Clay Wolfe, be a little more professional. He’s a former Boston homicide detective as opposed to a mystery bookstore owner slash PI. And so he’s a little more professional, well-dressed and worried about his looks and appearance than Goff Langdon, who’s a bit of a slacker. But I would say both those series, as well as my third series, develop a very colorful cast of characters.

(00:11:02): I’ve always liked Elmore Leonard or Carl Hiaasen where they have just zany, fun characters. And so both Clay Wolfe and Goff Langdon have a group of friends who are a little zany, pretty colorful, a little crazy. And so I have fun with that.

Debbi (00:11:20): Oh, my God. You had me at Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen, two of my favorite writers.

Matt (00:11:26): Yeah. I mean, once I got past the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew and things like that, I would say that those were the two that made the biggest impact on me and maybe tempered a little bit with Robert Parker. So you put those together, that’s the vein in which I try and write because those are kind of what molded me back in the day.

Debbi (00:11:48): So cool. That is really cool. Have you ever thought of writing a nonfiction book about productivity for writers?

Matt (00:11:56): [Laughs]

Debbi (00:12:00): Time management?

Matt (00:12:03): I haven’t planned on writing that. But up till now, as writers, we do a lot of conferences. And I go on panels and things like that. And I’ve never really felt like I should teach a class on writing. But now I’m starting to come around to doing exactly what you said. Productivity for writers or as my blog is called the Evolution of a Book, because I feel like I have fine-tuned that pretty well to hit all the different aspects that you need to as an author in this day and age, which, as you well know, is not just writing a book and then going to the bank and depositing your check.

Debbi (00:12:43): Exactly. Exactly. It’s not. Standing out is harder than ever these days. What advice would you give to anyone who’s interested in writing as a career?

Matt (00:12:58): I think, you know, go with the fact that there is no magic bean. As we just mentioned, it’s not as easy as writing the book and collecting the paycheck and going out. You know, really what you have to do is you have to spend your entire day gathering a whole bunch of beans and then you grind them up. And at the end of the day, if you’re lucky, you have enough for a pot of coffee. And the next day, you can drink your coffee and do it all over again.

(00:13:37): And that’s pretty much what it is. And if you don’t love writing, researching, editing, promoting, and marketing books, you probably are in the wrong field. Because there’s a chance that you’ll make a lot of money. And there’s a chance that you’ll make a living. And there’s a good chance that neither one of those things will happen and you’ll have to be doing it for the love of the craft and just enough to scrape by.

(00:14:12): And so, you know, you have to love it. There’s no major magic bean. You just have to gather the beans and grind away at it and make a pot of coffee and then do it all over again the next day.

Debbi (00:14:25): Absolutely, yeah. It’s interesting because there is definitely routine in a writer’s life.And the idea of writing as a job is something I can fully appreciate in terms of putting in the hours, and making sure you apply your time in the best way. And I was reminded of, when you were talking just then, of Robert Crais, who spoke at Bouchercon one year and said he considered himself a blue collar writer. And I thought that’s such a great attitude. You have your little lunch bag or whatever, you sit at your computer, you do your thing for a few hours, you take a break,you do your thing some more for a few hours, and you just work at it and work at it. And it’s a job. He treated it as a job. And I thought, that’s fantastic. And it sounds like you do the same sort of thing.

Matt (00:15:21): Absolutely. You know, I think another one of my heroes, Robert Parker, treated it that way as well, as a blue-collar job. And I think that made an impact on me, for sure. And, you know, people are always talking to me about how are you so prolific? How do you write so much?

(00:15:41): And then I kind of hear how many thousands of words they write when they sit down to write, and it’s always higher output than I do. But I do it every day. I do it seven days a week. And it just dovetails into the next day. And I just keep going at it. And when I finish one book, I’m lucky to take a day off and I start writing the next one. So, you know, you’re grinding away doing the blue collar work. I like that. If that’s what you call it.

(00:16:15): And, you know, it’s not sitting at your fancy desk, you know, whipping off a book in a couple of weeks and then taking the rest of the year off to, you know, just go around signing it.

Debbi (00:16:27): Interesting. Yeah, it isn’t. What conferences do you usually attend?

Matt (00:16:34): You know, ones that I never miss are local to me, Crime Wave in Maine and Crime Bake in Massachusetts. I’ve done ThrillerFest down in New York. I’m pretty sure that I’m going to try and get down to Nashville next year for the Silver Falchion one.

Debbi (00:16:57): Cool.

Matt (00:16:59): Which is something I’d like to do. I have not yet done Bouchercon, which I would like to do sometime. And I’m not sure if I’ll get there next year or when exactly that will be.

Debbi (00:17:12): Well, one of these days, I hope to get to one of those conferences because it’s been a long time since I’ve been, since before the pandemic.

Matt (00:17:20): Do you go to Malice Domestic?

Debbi (00:17:24): I haven’t lately, but I would like to this year.

Matt (00:17:27): That’s right in your neck of the woods.

Debbi (00:17:29): It is, yeah. I always go to C3, if you’ve ever heard of that, Creatures, Crimes, and Creativity.

Matt (00:17:36): Yeah, I’ve heard of it.

Debbi (00:17:38): It’s in Columbia.

Matt: (00:17:39): Oh, it’s right in Columbia.

Debbi (00:17:40): Yeah, it’s right there. It’s like, hey, all I have to do is just drive right over there. Yeah, it’s great. So is there anything else you’d like to talk about before we finish up?

Matt (00:17:53): No, I think, oh, I think my third series, which was the impetus behind my Brooklyn 8 Ballo series was really the fact that my daughter lives in Brooklyn. She’s in Bed-Stuy. And so I said, you know, if I’m going to write, and the first step was I wanted to combine my love of histories and mysteries.

(00:18:19): So I said, well, let’s write a historical PI mystery. And then I decided to write about Brooklyn because my daughter lives there and I could go do research and visit at the same time. And so I set my PI detective in Bushwick, right next to Queens there. And I decided on the 1920s because it was such a fabulous time and place with the Roaring Twenties and the Jazz Age and prohibition and gangsters and everything. So all of those things get woven into my so far two book series. The first one was Velma Gone Awry and then this past summer City Gone Askew came out, and in the first pages of the first book Dorothy Parker makes an appearance. And she’s such a fabulous character that she refuses to leave the pages and she becomes a regular throughout the book, both of them, as do many other characters like Coleman Hawkins and Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky.

(00:19:27): And so and then, you know, other appearances by famous people is fun to weave into it as well. So that’s kind of my Brooklyn 8 Ballo series.

Debbi (00:19:39): Have you been to the Algonquin and the Round Table?

Matt (00:19:43): I have.

Debbi (00:19:44): It’s kind of cool. My husband and I went there once, and there was a cat that was roaming through the restaurant, and apparently it kind of came with the place. I don’t remember the name of the cat now, but I just remember there was a cat.

Matt (00:20:00): Yeah, I didn’t see the cat when I was there, but I did go in because – My first chapter, you know, 8 Ballo, my PI hops into the Algonquin Room to talk to Dorothy Parker, who’s at the Round Table with Benchley and some of those others. That starts the whole thing off.

Debbi (00:20:21): That’s fantastic. That sounds like great fun.

Matt (00:20:24): Yeah, the research is so much fun on a lot of those things. I also visited the back room of The Back Room, which is a speakeasy in lower Manhattan that has been kept exactly like it was in the 1920s, so they haven’t changed a thing. But on top of that, they’ve kept pristine a back room to this speakeasy called The Back Room, where Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky and Charlie “Lucky” Luciano planned Murder Incorporated and kind of laid the foundation for the modern day mafia.

(00:21:04): And they play parts in both of my books so far. So it was neat to get in to see that, you know, just so many different things to the historical aspects. The history of Roosevelt Island which used to be known as Damnation Island and the East River there. It’s just mind-blowing so.

Debbi (00:21:29): Fascinating. Oh, my goodness. Well, I want to thank you so much for being here and sharing all this with us because it really is fascinating. And so I appreciate your being here and waiting to get on, also.

Matt (00:21:44): Oh, it’s fantastic. And it was great talking to you. It’s always one of the best, you know, I didn’t quite get to this, but one of the best parts of the whole gig is interacting and talking with other authors. And it’s such a fantastic community, mystery writers specifically, that I’ve enmeshed myself in and have really enjoyed. So I’m very happy to be on and chatting with you.

Debbi (00:22:12): Oh, well, same here. And thank you. Because yeah, you’re right.I mean, mystery writers are just awesome people. Crime writers, mystery writers, all of us.

Matt 00:22:23): Yeah, I think we get our angst out on the pages. So we’re a little more chill.

Debbi (00:22:28): That’s what it is. Yeah, we get all that angst out on the page and don’t have to take it out on anybody else. So yeah. Again, thank you. And my thanks to everyone who is listening as well. You can get early access to the episodes ad-free if you become a supporter on Patreon or Substack, one or the other. One of these days, I’m going to decide between the two of those, maybe. Who knows what’s going to happen? I never know what’s going to happen.

(00:23:00): Anyway, you also get bonus episodes and excerpts from my work, et cetera, et cetera. In any case, our next guest on the podcast will be Melissa Yi. And in the meantime, take care, happy new year and happy reading. Be seeing you.

Matt (00:23:19): Happy New Year. Write on!

Debbi (00:23:21): Write on!

*****

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The Crime Cafe once again is pleased to bring another episode from the annals of radio! Yes, a radio program. With one of my favorite protagonists–Philip Marlowe!

Bogie as Sam Spade!

He was also great as Philip Marlowe!

See what I mean? 🙂

Also, check out these show notes from out of the past. 🙂 Get it? Ha!

And for your holiday viewing pleasure, one of my other favorite Philip Marlowes!

I even did a tribute post when he died.

So, I just had to include him in this, didn’t I? 🙂

Image by Brigitte Werner from Pixabay

This week’s Crime Cafe interview features journalist, attorney, podcaster, and true crime writer Kerrie Droban.

We talk about psychopaths and writing about them. And other stuff.

You can download a copy of the interview here.

Debbi: Hi everyone. My guest today is an award-winning true crime author, podcaster, attorney, and television journalist. She writes about violent subcultures such as outlaw motorcycle gangs and about criminal pathology. She has appeared on numerous television documentaries and shows. Her books have been adapted to create the show Gangland Undercover and have been optioned for film. It’s my pleasure to have Kerrie Droban with me today. Hey, Kerrie. How are you doing?

Kerrie: Good. Thank you so much for having me.

Debbi: I’m so glad you’re here with us today. I was just checking your website and I was fascinated to see that you grew up in a “spy family”. What was that like?

Kerrie: I did. I know. Everybody asks me that. It was actually the perfect backdrop for true crime and really sort of set the ball in motion, unbeknownst to me until a lot of years later. I grew up in a family of secrets and undercover operations and I really didn’t know anything about what my parents did until I was 17. And so it really just sort of set this whole career in motion of what does that do to somebody who lives in a duplicitous world where you’re not really sure what’s real, what isn’t real? What are the stakes of keeping secrets and living in a family where you at one point, on one occasion you have to protect them while they’re trying to protect you at the same time. You know, you really just don’t really know who to trust and who your confidences are. It was an interesting world. I had two brothers, and my brothers and I, none of us really knew what the other knew. So it was one of those sort of compounded duplicity. You couldn’t really ask, and so we sort of lived in a world of walking on eggshells, not really knowing who knew what and what was real.

Debbi: Oh my gosh. What a background to have as a person getting into crime writing of any sort.

Kerrie: Yes, yes. It was perfect.

Debbi: Yeah. And you had a Masters in writing, essentially from the writing seminar program at Johns Hopkins University first before you went to law school.

Kerrie: Yes. I started out actually as a poet. I mean, that’s a very circuitous route into true crime, but I wound up honing my skills as a poet and realized you really can’t make a living as a poet, and unless I wanted to be a poetry professor, I really wasn’t going to go very far with poetry. So that’s what launched me into law school.

Debbi: That’s interesting, because I had a similar story except it was with history. I was a journalism major, and I thought about getting a Masters in History and decided I don’t really plan on teaching history and ended up in law school.

Kerrie: Oh, wow.

Debbi: Funny how that happens.

Kerrie: I know. It’s sort of like your practical brain says, okay, how are you going to actually feed yourself, you know?

Debbi: Exactly.

Kerrie: Poverty was not fun.

Debbi: Oh, God. I can name some classes that were totally not fun. I hated Estates and Trusts for one thing. Lord, Lord. I read your guest post and I thought it was really good. I wanted to recommend that everybody read it. What struck me about it was kind of the general sense that psychopaths can’t really be fixed as such, in any sense that we would normally think of “fixing” a person. And in fact, we have to be better educated to avoid being in danger from them. That’s kind of what seemed to be your point. I just wondered if you had any thoughts on how environmental factors might affect persons in becoming a psychopath.

Kerrie: Yeah. I mean, it’s a subject that has fascinated me for a very long time, and of course, it blends in really well with true crime writing, and being a criminal defense attorney and being a family law lawyer. What struck me really starkly in practicing in this area, is that people really didn’t have an understanding of that kind of pathology. And when you don’t understand psychopathy, then you really don’t know how to – number one – litigate it, address it. Judges don’t know how to give appropriate sentences. Victims don’t know how to survive this. I mean, it becomes this sort of escalating ball that really can take you into areas that are not even helpful.

So to answer your question, it’s a whole nature/nurture question. Are psychopaths born? Are they made? And I think the consensus, and in fact most of the research that I’ve done, is they are really born that way, and so because of that, they’re different. It’s a very nuanced personality disorder. Oftentimes it’s sort of interchanged with verbiage like sociopaths or narcissists, or people will just say it as sort of hyperbole. Oh, he’s such a psychopath. But I think it’s really important to understand what that personality disorder is in order to know how to address it, particularly in the litigation area.

I’ve seen people – lawyers, judges, victims – become re-traumatized, re-abused by the very system that’s designed to protect them. So and, and the reason it’s important to understand that environment doesn’t necessarily play a factor is because you don’t want to wind up blaming the victim, blaming the parents of the child who might be born that way, or what do you do when you’re faced with them? We have so much teen violence now, which is really hard to comprehend, hard to wrap your brain around. I mean, what do you do with them? Do you try them as adults? Do you rehabilitate? We’re a nation that really wants to rehabilitate criminals, and I know this sounds weird coming from a defense attorney, like an imposter defense attorney.

I don’t believe that rehabilitation can actually help somebody who is a psychopath, and the common other terminology for this – antisocial personality disorder. When I was a capital lawyer, that was sort of the kiss of death diagnosis where if somebody had antisocial personality disorder, there was no cure. There was no helping them. And so then you talk about, well, how do you keep other people safe from them?

Debbi: Yeah. That’s a very good question. Where do you land on something like the death penalty?

Kerrie: Interesting, because I was a capital lawyer for about 15 years and really started litigating in those areas mostly on the appellate post-conviction side, and so I would see them after they were convicted, and after they had gone through these lengthy mitigation hearings where you would see the lawyers presenting really umpteen factors in their childhood that could have contributed to the way they became. Things like they had domestic violence in the family. They had abuse, they had trauma, they had sexual abuse, you name it, and how did that impact the later crime?

I actually stopped being a capital lawyer when I got to the one case that just I couldn’t do anything with. And I had to get off of that case because in my opinion, it was the first time that I actually encountered what I would describe as a true psychopath. There was no way to help this person, and I felt, just from a moral/ethical standpoint, there was really nothing that I could authentically argue to help my client.

I really believed – and this was sort of my moral crisis at the time or my ethical crisis – I really believed that if I continued to … I couldn’t represent him because I really believed that he deserved to die. That is so stunning for me to be able to say that as a defense attorney, but it really sort of flipped everything on its head for me and I started to really reevaluate the work that I was doing, why I was doing it, why this particular defendant was different from the other ones that I had represented, and what made him different. And so that’s what sort of launched me on this whole trajectory of, well, maybe there’s another way of analyzing these cases.

Debbi: This is great. I mean, I just love hearing this from a defense lawyer because we don’t get to hear enough from defense lawyers, I think. A lot of people have this picture of them as sleazy or something like that, and they’re not.

Kerrie: They’re not. It is such a tough job. It’s a really tough job.

Debbi: It’s a tough job. Yes.

Kerrie: Actually it sort of launched me into a whole other sort of area of like the ripple effect of representing people like this, representing psychopaths. What does it do to the lawyers? I think lawyers need to be trained in that area as well, and not just spit out the party line of let’s do all of this mitigation when sometimes there isn’t mitigation. It doesn’t exist, as in the case of the one client I had to withdraw from. There was nothing, and that’s what led me to conclude evil is not a mental illness. I really went on this sort of soapbox of let’s not conflate the two terms because they’re not the same, and they deserve to be treated differently.

And I think it’s really important for a defense lawyer to … any lawyer, but really a defense lawyer … and the reason I say that is because psychopaths will manipulate anyone. They’ll manipulate the judges, their lawyers, the juries, and they will get away with it, and they will use the courtroom as another method of manipulation. And so unless you are really attuned to that, you’re going to fall right into that trap. It has happened to colleagues of mine, and the ripple effect stays with you forever. I mean, you can get roped into it.

The classic case that I always think of is my colleague who represented Jodi Arias and all of the fallout that he went through of having to represent somebody like that. What’s important for – I’m sure that your viewers understand this – there are a lot of defense attorneys who represent capital clients, 99% of them are court appointed, so we don’t pick and choose who the clients are. And so if somebody is assigned to a truly vile person, and I can think of, for example, James Holmes, the mass shooter of Colorado movie theater killer shooter. The attorneys that represent James Holmes, the defense lawyers, they were vilified, they were hated by the public. It was almost as if they were an extension of James Holmes, which is really an unfair characterization, but it happens quite often to defense lawyers, and it really, I think, can have a psychological toll on practicing in that area.

I think that’s really important too, to sort of have the public understand that, that they’re not extensions of their client. They’re not. Just because they’re out there defending somebody like that. I mean, everybody deserves a defense and all that stuff, but I think it’s really important to understand the kind of client that you’re dealing with, how they’re going to manipulate everything that you say or do in the courtroom, and that’s really what sort of my path has taken me on, all this true crime stuff. I’ve really been fascinated by that. What is that ripple effect? What does it do to people? What does it do to the community? What does it do to the lawyers representing them?

Debbi: Those are great questions. And yeah, really, what does it do to the community as well as the lawyers? I mean, that has to take a toll on your psyche after a while. One of the questions I had for you was if you ever got depressed doing this work.

Kerrie: Yes. I think I would be lying if I said I didn’t. I think that what was really key for me in doing capital work and then of course doing true crime work and really starting to drill down into some of these really dangerous characters, was to make sure that I had my own balance. I didn’t let it absorb me, and you have to realize when it is absorbing you. You have to realize when it’s important to step away, to practice mindfulness, to recognize that this is not your identity.

Just because you’re representing somebody who embodies the worst of the worst, it’s not who you are. You don’t have to take it on. It’s easy to say that, but I’ll be honest, I was in therapy for many years. Probably the only thing that kept me going was having some kind of sounding board.

I know this sounds kind of tongue in cheek, but you know they have the scenes in The Sopranos where he goes to see his therapist. Well, it’s really true. It’s that kind of relationship where you go to your therapist and you say, listen I do something really strange and a lot of people don’t understand it, and I can’t talk to anybody about it because everything’s confidential. It’s secret so you can’t talk to your client about how your client’s affecting you. You can’t talk to anybody really. Maybe the State Bar, maybe the Ethics Committee, but not really, because it’s just not that kind of thing where you can divulge anything personal about what you’re going through with respect to what your client’s facing.

So it’s a very interesting sort of private, hellish world, but it did remind me in a lot of ways of that Sopranos scene. Well, he has many scenes where he goes to see his therapist.

Debbi: Yes. Yes. What authors have most inspired your own writing?

Kerrie: Oh, it’s interesting because even though I am a true crime writer, I don’t read a lot of true crime. I find I have to really step away from that, and so I am very fascinated by memoirs. I absolutely love reading about other peoples’ lives and other peoples’ experiences because again, I really believe that we can learn so much from shared stories and I admire the courage that it takes a lot of these writers. One that comes to mind is Glennon Doyle, Glennon Melton Doyle, who’s one of my favorite writers. What I love about her is her authentic voice, how she can just completely 100% be herself and not worry about how other people are going to perceive her. I just find that so courageous and so fascinating, and I don’t know how she does it, but she does it and it’s amazing to me and so I’m very intrigued by that.

Another one is Cheryl Strayed, the fact that she could take one experience out of just a terrible tragedy in her life and not let it define her life, but show you how she moved through it. What I love about those two authors in particular is that they’re not celebrities. You know, they’re not out there … I mean, now they are in the public eye, but at the time they weren’t and this was just a slice of their life that they were willing to share with the world. And because they did that, we all gained something from it.

I remember reading Cheryl Strayed’s book and thinking at the time I was going through some very traumatic experience in my own life, and I thought, wow if I had not found her book, I don’t know that I would’ve had the same sort of epiphany that I had coming out of my own tragedy. I find that such courageous writing, and it reminds me in a lot of ways of the – because there are times where I come back to true crime writing – and I don’t know if it’s a worldwide phenomenon, it might be, but I’m just going to say the American phenomenon, we have savage appetites for crime and it really sort of made me think about that a lot on sort of an academic level. What is it about it that really draws us in, and predominantly women? I mean, women make up the main audience of true crime, which is even more fascinating to me.

Debbi: Why do you think that is?

Kerrie: Well, there are many theories on it, but I think in a lot of respects, it’s sort of that idea of – I’m not much of a roller coaster rider and I don’t like riding roller coasters – but it’s that idea of being on a roller coaster, being able to have the thrill of almost in my opinion, almost dying from the speed and then whipping around things, but knowing that you’re not going to. So for a woman who is in – and I hate to say this – in all likelihood, going to be the target of a predator or more likely than a man, for example, to be a victim of a crime, for women, it’s that sort of I’m going to sit in the comfort of my living room. It’s like watching a horror film unfold, and I’m going to see this play out on a screen. So I’m protected, but I’m watching it and maybe I will learn something. I will learn something about the pathology of that predator. I will learn something about how that victim became a victim, and what can I take away from it.

And so that always brings me back to why I write true crime, and why I devote so much of my time to doing podcasts of it, is that I really believe that there is a fine line between entertainment and education. I think that it’s such an important vehicle to be able to educate people about these different pathologies and about if this happened to this woman, what could you do differently? What could you learn from this, and what can you take away from it?

But the one thing I will say about true crime that I really would love to see a turn in, which I haven’t seen too much of yet, is to not have the victim be a footnote. I think that that’s something that really does need to change. It’s not sensationalizing so much the killer or the predator or making that such the focal point, even though it’s really important to know that sort of pathology, I think in many respects, it’s really important not to forget the victim that this happened to, and they have a life and how did it impact that? Again, that’s that ripple effect. How did it impact that community, that person? I mean, taking one precious life out of that, and how did it change the trajectory of so many lives? So it’s really sort of a double-edged coin.

Debbi: Yeah, yeah, for sure. What kind of writing schedule do you keep, and how much time do you spend on writing versus, say, the podcast?

Kerrie: Well, I think I’m probably a little bit insane that way, a little ADHD. I have kept the schedule probably, oh my gosh, for as long as I can remember really, and it just sort of became my biorhythm. I get up at 4 every morning, and I work from about 4 to 7, and then I go to my day job, which is law. I really try to compartmentalize those two because it’s too difficult to bring them into the same space, so I really focus on writing, and by writing, it doesn’t necessarily have to be being physically at a typewriter writing something. It can be thinking about an idea. It can be going for a walk, it can be reading something, watching something. I get a lot of inspiration from watching documentaries.

And then, now that I have these two podcasts, one of my podcasts, Crime Stands Still, started out of a case that I represented a woman for 15 years who I believe was wrongfully convicted, and I was actually her post-conviction lawyer. And so at the end of the day, she said to me, there’s nothing left that you can do in the legal system, so what can you do in a different media platform? I had never really thought about podcasting until I got to her case, and I thought, you know what? Her case is so interesting, so compelling, I think I’m going to start there. So I started by telling her story and offering different legal theories and different perspectives, different new evidence that the jury never heard, and so that became that platform. That was kind of easy to do and fun to do because I already had all the research.

The other one I do is Crime Bites, where I just do kind of snippets of what’s in the headlines, and I offer it from a defense attorney’s perspective. What would I see legally that maybe an audience doesn’t get from another podcaster? What can I offer that’s different? I do spend quite a bit of time on that one, because I have to, number one, find the case and figure out what’s interesting about it. I don’t want to just talk about a case that’s sensational, but I will talk about something that is in the news and maybe offer a different perspective. It’s quite a bit of work so I devote maybe two days a week to researching and writing those scripts and doing those podcasts, and then the rest of the time as a lawyer. So it’s a juggling act.

Debbi: Wow. It must be quite a juggling act. I really admire your determination and persistence there and your work ethic. That’s great. What advice would you give to anyone who’s interested in having a writing career?

Kerrie: Well, the one thing that I would say to somebody that I wish somebody had said to me was do not expect it to replace your day job, at least not for a very long time and if you’re very, very lucky, because you cannot or shouldn’t I think, be doing it for the money because it’s not there and it’s not there for a variety of reasons. 90% of the time it has nothing to do with the quality or time expended on your book.

It’s just a fact. There’s so many books out there. The publishers take the lion’s share of the royalties and so it can be very frustrating. I’m traditionally published, so I can’t really speak for the self-publishing arena, but being published traditionally, it’s been a very sobering experience. While they certainly have a wide distribution and they get your books in a lot of places, and it’s fun to see that, you lose a lot of control over the creative project. You really don’t see a lot of money from it.

Debbi: That’s right.

Kerrie: Yeah. And that’s why I’m still a lawyer. I get asked that all the time. Why do you still do this? Well, because I have to.

Debbi: People have this notion that somehow you come out with a book and suddenly you’re a millionaire. No, it’s not the way it works at all.

Kerrie: No.

Debbi: That’s definitely true for self-published, I can tell you that from a personal perspective. I know that from experience. Is there anything else you’d like to add before we finish up?

Kerrie: The only other thing that I would add is in addition to just doing it because you have a passion for it, don’t write to the market necessarily, but write to what you are absolutely passionate about, because you’re going to spend so much time working on it, rewriting and editing, no matter what, no matter if you’re self-published or traditionally published, it is going to consume your life for a couple of years at least. And so be prepared for that and be sure that you really love what you’re doing. And the last piece of thing I would say is don’t read the reviews.

Debbi: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely!

Kerrie: Just don’t read them, because people will write whatever. They haven’t tried to write a book and so they’re just going to be trolls in a lot of cases.

Debbi: The heck with them.

Kerrie: Yeah.

Debbi: Ignore that kind of stuff. If there are people out there who like you, that’s enough, isn’t it?

Kerrie: Right.

Debbi: Have that crew of people who like you. Well, thank you so much for being here, and this was a great talk and I could probably talk for an hour about this, but unfortunately I don’t have the time. Zoom won’t let me.

Kerrie: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

Debbi: Oh, I’m pleased to do it. Believe me. It’s always nice to have a lawyer on, too, especially a defense lawyer. I love defense lawyers, so … not that I don’t like prosecutors, I know they have a very important job, but defense lawyers really take it on the chin sometimes, and I like to defend them..

Kerrie: That’s cute.

Debbi: So, in any case, I just want to thank everyone who’s listening. If you would please, leave a review if you enjoyed the episode. And also, we have a Patreon page with perks for supporters, so check that out. With that I’ll just say, take care and until next time, happy reading.

*****

If you enjoyed the episode, consider becoming a supporter on Patreon.

This week’s episode of the Crime Cafe features another story from The Adventures of Philip Marlowe.

I’ll gladly provide transcripts when I can afford it Enjoy my expensive hobby the show! 🙂

This week’s episode of the Crime Cafe podcast features my interview with lawyer and crime writer Dan Flanigan.

Dan started off writing poetry. Check out the story of how his writing journey began.

To download a copy of the transcript, just click here.

Debbi: Hi, everyone. My guest today is a lawyer, author, playwright, and poet, who among other things, has taught legal history and jurisprudence and practiced civil rights law, as well as worked in financial services, so he has an impressive resume. His written work includes the Peter O’Keefe hardboiled crime series, which has earned praise and awards. He has also written stage plays and short stories. His novella Dewdrops was adapted from a play. It’s my pleasure to have with me a lawyer and acclaimed author, Dan Flanigan. Hi, Dan. How are you doing today?

Dan: Good enough, thank you. As I said, better than I deserve I’m doing.

Debbi: Oh, dear me. Oh, I’d hate to think that. You always wanted to write a novel but ended up going to law school. How did that come about?

Dan: Well, I’m not sure.

Debbi: I know the feeling.

Dan: I wanted to be a writer from the time I was a sophomore in high school, and found many ways to avoid or evade it. When I look back on it, I punished myself a whole lot all those years, and unfortunately punished my wife as well for selling out, not doing what I was supposed to do. But when I look back on it now, I wonder if I really had anything to write and you’ve lived your whole life. You have had a lot happen to you.

Debbi: There’s a lot to be said for waiting before you start writing, because then you have more content to draw from.

Dan: In any event, I never thought it would, but it worked out well.

Debbi: Absolutely. Yeah. What was it that started you? You started with poetry, correct?

Dan: Yes. I had written in sort of spurts occasionally over a long period of time, between my sophomore year in high school and when I really started writing in earnest, and I had a period in the 1980s when I was on kind of a two-year break from practicing law and I wrote several plays. I wrote some poetry, a couple short stories, and I wrote a novel. One thing led to another. For example, I had an agent, I had a publisher for the novel. The publisher went bankrupt, and I had a stage reading of a play in New York. I thought I was going to be on top of the world for about five seconds. Where do you go eventually with any of that? So I decided I’m going to quit punishing myself and have nothing to do with writing.

And about 20 years later, if you got something like that in you, I guess it stays in you. My wife died in 2011, and I thought I’d do a kind of tribute, I guess – she might not think so – to her with a book called Tenebrae, which is a book of poems, mostly focused on her last illness and death. That sort of broke the dam, if you will, and sort of led me back into writing in a very serious way, and I really kept to it since.

Debbi: What inspired you to create Peter O’Keefe, this character? What kind of a person is he and what do you draw on to create stories about him?

Dan: The way I ended up there is odd, but I had no thought of ever writing crime fiction or detective fiction or anything else. I had read some of it over the course of my life, but never was steeped in it in any way, and the first two books, one was poetry and one was a short story collection, Dewdrops that I guess – not to be pretentious – but you might call literary fiction. But then I wanted to write this novel, sort of a fall in reparation sort of thing. I thought I want to make this more interesting than just navel gazing, and so I said, you know, I’m going to try to put it in this sort of private detective format and see how it goes. And that was the book that I wrote, and got accepted by a publisher.

But in the course of … I’m now in 2013 – in the course of writing the book of poetry, I pulled that book out of the box and said, you know, this is okay. This ought to be. So I rewrote it very extensively, and that’s Mink Eyes, the first in this series. Then I thought, oh, that’s one book, and I’ll go onto something else. But then I had this notion of doing it as a series. The first book was set in 1986. I thought it would be interesting to take this group of characters and deal with serious “literary” kinds of subjects, but in a more interesting format, and move it along as much as possible, and do the history of our times.

This guy starts out, he’s a Vietnam vet. Like everybody else, he’s a recovering cocaine guy and an alcoholic and has PTSD, although he won’t acknowledge it or do anything about it. He’s divorced, has a daughter who’s 9 years old in the first book, and he’s really at the bottom. His childhood buddy, who’s a big time lawyer named Mike Harrigan sort of plucks him out of jail, gets him a deal with the cops to be free of it if he goes straight and narrow. I’m going to make a private detective out of you, and that’s the start, the origin story, if you will.

The first several books are really him trying to come to terms with being a new person. As he describes it, a more useful person, and then there’s a whole theme. He gets crossways with the Mafia in the first book. The books attempt to be standalone, but one theme in the first three is him struggling and dealing with the Mafia, and it’s also about really the decline and disappearance really of the traditional Mafia in that period of time through RICO prosecutions and wiretaps and all that.

Debbi: Interesting. Where is the series set and how much does the setting play in the book?

Dan: It’s different in different books. When people ask this question, I say a place like Kansas City. That’s where I’m from, and we had quite a Mafia group in town, too. But I don’t ever say it’s Kansas City, because I don’t want to be tied down to streets and I want to be able to do something purely fictional if I want to, so I never say that, but people would recognize it as that if they knew Kansas City and it’s a whole Midwestern thing. And then down in southern Missouri and northern Arkansas, not far from us, it’s the Ozarks. The first book Mink Eyes is in fact about a Ponzi mink farm scheme down in the Ozarks and all kinds of other crazy stuff. The latest book, An American Tragedy … no, pardon me… the book I’m working on right now is another kind of Ozark-set book, where a lot of hate groups and fundamentalist Christian survivalist kind of stuff was going on in the 80s and 90s. So I make use of all that but without ever saying. I call it the Lake Country instead of just saying it’s the Ozarks.

Debbi: Well, that’s interesting. I noticed in an article about you that it says you described the 80s as not being a golden era where everything was just so much better than it is today, and with more hairspray.

Dan: Yeah. And that’s not me. That was the author of the article.

Debbi: I noticed that. Yeah, it wasn’t exactly an exact quote.

Dan: Right. And she’s very young, and I think she probably had this exalted view of the 1980s.

Debbi: I find that very fascinating. I think we have a tendency to do that. Go back 20 years and say, oh, gee, things were so much better then.

Dan: With a whole lot of things. And I never thought so, even though it was in a lot of ways good to me, financially but it was fairly rotten in its heart, you know?

Debbi: Oh, yeah. I mean, there was some really bad stuff going on in the 80s, and don’t even get me started about the 60s. Talk about an overrated decade! Okay, moving on. You’re still practicing law, so where do you find the time to do the writing?

Dan: Well, luckily we have this great sabbatical program in my firm where every five or six years, you take three months off if you want to, and that let me sort of jumpstart this series business. And, then also, I do a lot less law practice than I did at one time, and I’m sort of … let’s call it moving toward the horizon.

Debbi: Yes, I know the feeling.

Dan: So I have more time, but I think maybe in that article, I don’t know, somebody asked me, how do you do all that? I said, well, it helps start out being a workaholic and …

Debbi: And living for a while.

Dan: A very helpful thing in certain ways anyway.

Debbi: I think that lawyers tend to be a bit workaholic generally.

Dan: Yeah, right and so that could carry over, although I don’t have the same discipline writing that I did as a lawyer where you’re writing for clients and their expectations and deadlines and all that, and especially in the era that I practiced, everything changed to “I want it yesterday.” But, with the books, I wish I would get up every morning and write two or three hours, and every day and all that, but it doesn’t happen now. I need to sort of wallow around in it for two or three days. But on the other hand, I’ve gotten six books out now, so …

Debbi: There you go. Whatever works. That’s the way it works. How much research do you do for your novels?

Dan: Varies a little bit, but a lot. The most recent one – An American Tragedy – I did lots and lots of reading plus I did a lot of different things as a lawyer, but one thing I never was a criminal defense lawyer. And the book is about a trial, and so I had to really, even as a lawyer, had to do all kinds of research to make sure I was doing it right.

Debbi: I get it!

Dan: I also made sure that I had a couple of really experienced trial lawyers review it to make sure. You know how whatever field you may know or you watch Law & Order, if you’re a lawyer, you go, that’s ridiculous. That can never happen. I just didn’t want that to happen to me. I hope it didn’t.

Debbi: Yeah, exactly. You don’t want that.

Dan: And then for the Mafia thing, I sort of immersed myself in non-fiction stuff about the Mafia, and so I never want to be exactly like what really happened, but just to try to be versed enough in it. One of the things I did a lot of was bankruptcy, and Kansas City, they were all around that. I was a naïve kid when I was practicing law. I was all around those guys and didn’t really know what I was doing.

Debbi: Oh my!

Dan: So anyway, it depends on the situation. I’m no good at firearms, so I have to not only research, but get some help from people. I have one book where venomous snakes play a significant role. I had to research that. It’s like, you go down that road, you say why did I do this?

Debbi: I know the feeling. Do you tend to outline or pants it when it comes to writing?

Dan: I do an initial very rough outline, and I usually know where the book’s going. I really mostly have the last page in mind and stick to it, but there’s a whole lot in the middle that I don’t do, that changes, so it’s a combination really. It’s not pure pantsing, but it’s more pantsing than plotting, I think. It’s plotting, but not a detailed outline.

Debbi: Exactly.

Dan: Jeffery Deaver type …

Debbi: Jeffrey Deaver just amazes me with what he does. I could never do that. It’d be like, okay, the book’s written.

Dan: And I do believe – not that I set out with that philosophy – I’ve done so many things that I hadn’t planned to do that I think worked out very well because you let the story kind of take you places soon.

Debbi: Exactly.

Dan: So I’m pretty happy with that approach.

Debbi: It’s when you have the most fun, I think when you’re writing, when the characters just kind of tell you to go this way, or the situation just seems to lend itself for going a slightly different way than maybe you anticipated. What advice would you give to anyone who’s interested in having a writing career?

Dan: That’s really hard because mine is so strange, but this is probably just what’s on my mind today is to be careful about following expert advice too much. There’s so much advice out there that is really formulaic that will turn you into a formula writer. A lot of it is very good and very important, but what you need to do is be able to say, that’s good and I need to think it through. That may or may not be for me, that sort of thing. It’s one of those things where you have to want to be taught, but be careful about just following along with your teachers instead of what you really think you need to do. I don’t want to say stick with it no matter what or any of that sort of thing, but in my own case, it just turns out if it’s really driving you, you’ll end up there one way or the other probably.

Debbi: Yeah. Yeah.

Dan: I always wanted to do a little play where people like Shakespeare and the Russians and Faulkner and Fitzgerald and those guys were all students in a MFA class that all got Ds because they didn’t follow any of the rules.

Debbi: Nice idea. I like that. What are you working on now?

Dan: This is the fifth book in this O’Keefe series, and I managed to finally get out of the 80s into the early 90s here. It’s about the rise of the survivalist, anti-government, Christian identity, racist, neo-Nazi groups around that time. The whole witch’s brew that ultimately led to the Oklahoma City bombing.

Debbi: Mmm. Interesting. Sounds like you cover some really interesting topics in your books.

Dan: That’s what I like so much about this series. I mean, having started out not even thinking about writing crime books, then writing this one, it has provided me both an anchor and a compass in terms of where to go and hopefully dealing with some major issues in human life and in our lives as Americans, and doing it in a little more interesting way, trying to be somewhat thrilling but realistically so. That’s the intent anyway.

Debbi: That’s great. That really is wonderful what you’re doing. Is there anything else you would like to add before we finish up?

Dan: All of the O’Keefe books and the newest one, An American Tragedy is just in production right now, they are in every format you can think of, including audio books. I’ve resurrected the Dewdrops book, and I’m doing a new edition of it. Hope I’m not running out of time here, but I added a new story, so I’m doing a new edition and doing that as an audiobook. And this one part of it, the novella that was the play Dewdrops is a full cast audiobook. I tried to do it as a podcast but I don’t know how to distribute or market a podcast, so things like that are in process. And also, I probably should mention my website, danflaniganbooks is the website. Got some things on there.

Debbi: Interesting that you’re thinking about doing that as a scripted podcast, because I’ve been thinking about doing a scripted podcast for years.

Dan: And since I converted it from a play, it’s almost all dialogue anyway, so it’s set up really well for that.

Debbi: So you just add in some sound effects, a little sound design.

Dan: Yeah. I even have a song or two in it and stuff like that.

Debbi: All right. Sounds awesome. That’s fantastic. Well, I have to tell you, it’s been a pleasure talking to you, and it sounds like you’ve got some really cool things lined up.

Dan: I appreciate it. I started late. I have to get moving here and get things done.

Debbi: You are an indie author, right? Self-published still?

Dan: Yes.

Debbi: One of the awesome indies. Yay. Yay for us. Thank you so much for your time.

Dan: Thank you. If I have time, I want to add one more thing.

Debbi: Okay, sure.

Dan: I call O’Keefe a soft-boiled detective, not a hard-boiled detective.

Debbi: Oh, I like that. Soft-boiled! So not quite hard-boiled, but …

Dan: He doesn’t fit the cliché.

Debbi: Yeah, yeah. He’s not a cliché. He is his own private eye. Well, that’s awesome. I love it. I will definitely have to check out your books, because I was looking at your third book in the series, and I was like, oh my God, what happened to him with the … I won’t say it, but…

Dan: Oh yeah. A lot happened to him. I had to ease off that a little bit.

Debbi: Oh my gosh, yes. Wow. I was just like, oh, I can really feel that. It’s like, oh, oh, ouch. So anyway, I won’t tell you what happens in the beginning of the third book, but check it out for yourself. For everyone listening, I just want to say thank you for listening, and if you enjoyed the show, please leave a review on your favorite podcast platform, Apple or wherever. We also have a Patreon page where you can get early access to ad-free episodes, as well as bonus episodes and samples of my work. I’ve been posting chapters from my novels there, so paid members at a certain level can get access to those. And I’m also going to be putting some new stuff up there, so that should be interesting. In the meantime, our next guest will be Ted Flanagan. No relation that I know of. Different spelling.

Dan: Oh, really?

Debbi: Yeah, really. Spelled differently. So in any case, I will see you in a couple of weeks. Take care and happy reading.

*****

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This week’s guest on the Crime Cafe podcast is historical crime writer Stephen Eoannou.

Check out our discussion about the creator of the Lone Ranger!

Grab a PDF copy of the transcript here!

Debbi: Hi, everyone. My guest today has published two novels with the third coming in May of next year. Along with novels, he has written at least one short screenplay. He lives and works in Buffalo, New York, which also provides the setting and inspiration for his work. It’s my pleasure to have with me today, the award-winning author Stephen Eoannou.

Stephen: There you go.

Debbi: Did I get that right?

Stephen: Yes.

Debbi: Awesome. Fantastic. So thank you for being with us today.

Stephen: Thank you for having me.

Debbi: I’m pleased to have you on. I really enjoyed your book Rook, your debut novel. That was a very interesting story. What inspired you to write about this particular man from the FBI’s Most Wanted List?

Stephen: Yeah. I had finished my first book Muscle Cars, which is a short story collection, and I was picking around trying to find an idea for the next project, and I can remember it vividly. It was a Sunday morning. I was standing in my kitchen and I was reading the newspaper. It was spread out on the kitchen table, and I saw an article, and the title of the article in the Buffalo News was “The Strange Tale of a Buffalo Bank Robber Turned Writer”, and that immediately caught my eye, thinking this maybe is another career avenue for myself. But I started reading this article about Al Nussbaum. I had never heard of the man before, and by the end of the article, I knew that I wanted to write about him.

I wasn’t sure it was going to be a novel or a short story or what, but I knew I wanted to learn more about this man and write about him. And what fascinated me was not only was he this kind of cerebral bank robber who approached the robberies like chess matches – which he was an avid chess player – and he’s quoted as saying that robbing banks is like chess for cash prizes, which I think is a great quote. He became a writer when he was in prison, and he was a penny-a-word guy, Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock. He even was writing for Scholastic Books, if anyone’s old enough to remember Scholastic Books.

Debbi: Oh, I do

Stephen: Yeah, me too. I still have a few of them. So the man who was doing time in Leavenworth was also writing Scholastic Books. He was just a fascinating character, and he was a Buffalo guy. I had kind of decided after I completed Muscle Cars that really Buffalo, New York was going to kind of be my literary turf I was going to carve out for myself. Kind of what William Kennedy did for Albany and Richard Russo did for upstate New York, the Catskill areas. That’s what I was going to do. And so this just kind of fell in my lap and I just kind of really became intrigued with Al and his story.

Debbi: Interesting. Very interesting that you were able to find this in the local paper, right?

Stephen: Well, what it was his daughter, who’s just an infant in the novel, she was trying to do a Kickstarter campaign to gather up all her father’s short stories and anthologized them, and so the newspaper did a feature on it. And what was really great about this whole experience with Rook is that since the publication, I’ve become friends with her. She lives about two hours away. She’s a retired attorney, not a defense attorney or criminal lawyer. We’ve had coffee a few times and she’s come to a couple of my events when I’m in the Central New York region, telling me some fascinating stories about her dad that I wish I knew while I was working on the manuscript.

Debbi: Interesting. Because this is a fictionalized account of a true story, were there permissions involved in terms of using his name and so forth?

Stephen: No, and I figured the legal team at the publisher would worry about that. I just wrote it the way I wanted to write it, and no one said anything. So we’ll just keep it amongst ourselves.

Debbi: Hard to say. Hard to say what happened. Okay. Your second novel is also historical. I take it that you’re basically focused on historical writing most of the time?

Stephen: Yeah. And that wasn’t the plan; I just kind of … I’ve always enjoyed it, but you know how these things are. You kind of stumble from one … an idea finds you and next thing you know, you’ve written a story set in the early 1960s, and now there’s a story, Yesteryear, the second novel was set in the early 1930s, the book that’s coming out in May is set in 1942. The thirties and forties have always been an era that has really intrigued me primarily because of my parents, that’s when they were growing up. And so I kind of grew up listening to their stories about growing up in the Depression, the immigration experience from my father coming from Greece. Just growing up with those stories, watching old movies like The Maltese Falcon with my dad. He was 20 when The Maltese Falcon came out, so he remembers that from his youth. That was kind of my upbringing, if you will, listening to those stories and watching those movies. Next thing you know, fast forward 40 or so years, and I’m writing about those types of things now. So you never know what’s going to percolate up to the top when you’re in the creative mode.

Debbi: Exactly. Yes, and that era is very inspiring. There’s so much from it that informs what we do today.

Stephen: Yeah, and my mom always said, she chastised me. She goes, you romanticize that period, but it was really hard. The Depression and World War. You romanticize it, and she was absolutely right. I do.

Debbi: Absolutely. I was fascinated by the subject of Yesteryear, which was a playwright that I had never known about who created the Lone Ranger. Tell us how you got interested in that.

Stephen: Another Buffalo boy, and I had never heard about him either. I was at a party or a bar somewhere where they were serving alcohol, and someone said to me, well, you know the guy who wrote the Lone Ranger is from Buffalo? And I said, no, he’s not. I would’ve known about that. I mean, Buffalo is very good about promoting any creative person who’s been successful, no matter what the connection. Mark Twain was the editor of the Courier Express newspaper for two years. He’s a Buffalo writer. We made him our own. So for someone who … because Fran wrote not only the Lone Ranger, but also the Green Hornet and Sergeant Prescott of the Yukon, so he has a huge influence on 20th century pop culture, and no one’s really heard of him.

I think because he sold the rights to the Lone Ranger for $10 before the Lone Ranger just exploded into this 90-year money making franchise. And to make matters worse, the man he sold it to for $10, George W. Trendle, who owned WXYZ radio in Detroit where the Lone Ranger was broadcast from, started claiming in the 1940s that he was the creator of the Lone Ranger, not Striker. So Fran kind of missed out on the fame as well as the fortune, because if you think about not only the radio and the TV show and the movies, think of the comic books that Fran wrote. There were a dozen or so hardback novels published in the thirties and forties that Striker wrote, the comic strips that appeared in over 200 newspapers, all the spinoff toys. The Lone Ranger is one of the first kind of crossover into marketing and spiffs and toys. So all the masks and hats and holsters and all that money bypassed Striker and went to Trendle.

When Trendle sold the rights in the mid-fifties, he sold the rights for $3 million, which was a record in the entertainment industry at that time. I think Fran was working for him up until that time as head writer at WXYZ, but he may have received a bonus from that 3 million, but certainly not the millions that Trendle made.

Debbi: Oh, my gosh. It just goes to show you the importance of owning the intellectual property.

Stephen: And you know? It’s a common story. You look at all these artists – visual artists, literary, musical. When it’s a new medium or something new like the early days of rock and roll, and you think of all the African-American early rock and rollers who were screwed terribly with their contracts and rights. It seems like every time there’s something new, a new medium, a new form, the artists are so desperate to get that work out there that they get taken advantage of.

Debbi: Yes, definitely. Yes. That is definitely true. It’s a shame. So your latest one coming out next May about the private eye named Nicholas Bishop. He has a background from World War I that he carries into the story, correct?

Stephen: He has got a lot of baggage that he carries. A lot of abandonment issues, alcoholism, he may or may not have stepped in front of a taxi cab on purpose that has left him with a limp and unable to serve in World War II. His alcoholism is out of control, and when the novel begins, he wakes up on the floor of a hotel room where he’s the house detective, because he has lost his private practice, he’s lost his secretary, who he has been in love with forever. He can’t find his car, and he wakes up on the floor after a five-day bender, can’t remember anything, and two shots were fired from his gun and the police are downstairs. They want to talk to him. And that’s how the novel begins.

I call it my pandemic novel, even though it has nothing to do with any type of pandemic, except the one that we were going through when I wrote it. I started it right before the lockdown and finished it two years later, which is pretty quick for me because there was nothing to do except write, so that’s why it’s my pandemic novel. I was alone in a big house with a little one-eyed dog during the lockdown, and Nicholas Bishop has a one-eyed dog that he doesn’t know where it came from. He just woke up on the floor and it was there. He names the dog Jake, and finds out later it’s a female dog. So Bishop has all sorts of things going on in his life.

Debbi: Well, it sounds intriguing, I have to tell you. What kind of writing schedule do you keep?

Stephen: I’ve been pretty disciplined for a long time. I get up at five and I write from five to seven, every day. That’s my goal. Sometimes I can go longer. Sometimes after my day job, if I still have some creative energy, I’ll do some at night or some editing, and if I miss for whatever reason, I try to make that up on the weekend. So every morning, quarter to five, the alarm goes off or I wake up on my own, because I’ve been doing it for so long. And when I was about halfway through Rook, it was about this time of year, mid-October, early November. It was starting to get cold up here in Western New York and dark in the morning, and for like three days in a row, I just could not get out of bed and go up to my office to write. I was awake, but I just could not get out of bed. And of course, you beat yourself up about it.

And then I realized, smart guy that I am, I could just bring my laptop from my office downstairs and just put it next to my bed. And so at five o’clock, I just reach over and grab my laptop. So there’s no rituals, there’s no coffee, there’s no tea, there’s no candles, there’s no music. I just literally prop myself up on the pillows and write in bed. And that’s where I’ve been doing the majority of my writing, or splitting it up in my office.

Debbi: There’s a famous author that used to do that. I can’t think of his name now.

Stephen: Oh, it’s crazy stuff. Hemingway wrote standing up, Dalton Trumbo wrote in the bathtub. So for right now anyways, that’s my routine. I would like to wake up at seven, walk my little one-eyed dog and then start writing at eight, but that’s not possible right now with the day job.

Debbi: So you work around the day job. I’m impressed. Very. But how much research do you do when you write historical novels? I mean, what kind of research?

Stephen: A lot went into Yesteryear. Of the three novels, Yesteryear required the most research. Research on the early days of radio, research certainly on Fran Striker’s life, research on the Lone Ranger. I was very fortunate when Fran passed away in the early 1960s, the Striker Estate left all of his papers to the University of Buffalo, and I’m an alumni. There were about 14 cartons that they have in their special collections, and it is just a treasure trove – letters, telegraphs, handwritten manuscripts, typed manuscripts with notes on them. So I would go online – they had an inventory of the cartons – and I would put in my request that on Thursday, I would like to come in at 10 o’clock and review the contents of carton number 12. I would get to the special libraries collection at 10 o’clock, and there it would be waiting for me, and I’d put on my white gloves, and I would hold an original Lone Ranger radio script from 1932. It was just fascinating. So a lot of research went into that book. In the back of Yesteryear, there’s a bibliography, because a lot went into it.

There wasn’t as much written about Al Nussbaum, but it was fun research, tracking down on eBay the young adult novels that he wrote for Scholastic books and buying those, and researching the newspapers about his career in crime and then his arrest. Just really fascinating stuff. So a lot of time spent at the downtown library going through microfiches for that novel. With After Pearl, it wasn’t as extensive. This isn’t based on any historical figure like the first two novels were, so much of the research was just about what it was life like in 1942 Buffalo, New York. What did a carton of Chesterfields cost or a gallon of gas? What nightclubs were around? I knew a few of them from my parents’ stories, but where might he hang out? So that again, was reading old newspapers, not looking for anything in particular, but just going and reading the advertisements from the department stores of that time to see what they were selling. And what was really fascinating, you read the front page from 1942, and it’s not much different than what’s going on today. The same countries, the same stories, the same local corruption. It is really kind of disheartening in that regard.

Debbi: Yes. Everything old is new again, or something like that. So have you ever thought of writing a series?

Stephen: Well, it’s a funny story. So I finished After Pearl, and I had my little writing group of these wonderful women I met in grad school at the Queens University of Charlotte. So there’s Ashley Warlick who wrote The Arrangement, a great crime novelist, Carla Damron who wrote The Orchid Tattoo, her latest. Beth Johnson and Araminta Hall. And so that’s my writing group. We’ve been together forever. I sent it to Carla first and I said, Hey, can you take a look at this? And she read it, and the first question she asked was, is this a series? I said, no, it’s a standalone. I just wrote it during the lockdown. She made some suggestions. I made my corrections, sent it out to Ashley. First question she asks, is this a series? I said, no, I just wrote it during the pandemic. It’s a standalone. Going to move on to something else. I sent it to my publisher, and he comes back and says, is this a series? Because I think Netflix might like something like this.

Debbi: Oh yes!

Stephen: I said, yes, it’s a series with no idea what the second book is going to be about. But I said, absolutely. It’s a series.

Debbi: Of course it is

Stephen: And so now I’m working on the second book in the Nicholas Bishop series

Debbi: On the subject of Netflix, now that you’ve mentioned it, what about this award-winning short screenplay of yours? How did you get into screenwriting?

Stephen: It was funny. That screenplay is called Slip Kid, and it’s based on a short story. It’s kind of the centerpiece to my short story collection Muscle Cars, but originally that was going to be my first novel. It dealt with a true story. When I was 16, my parish priest was murdered in a botched robbery at the local Greek church here, and they didn’t catch the killers for a few months so it was always in the news. It turns out that they were just teenagers, 17, 18 years old that made some terrible, awful choices with huge ramifications. The novel didn’t work so I cut it down to a long short story. I still wasn’t finished with it yet. It still wouldn’t leave me.

I was, at the time, just graduating from Queens, and I had a lot of friends who were in the screenwriting program, and they were always talking about writing screenplays and what they’re working on and the challenges. I said, well, I’m going to try that, and so I bought the software and hopefully it was going to be a feature, but I couldn’t make it into a feature. It was only a short, and then I finished it, I go, well, now what do I do with it? And they said, well, just submit it for some prizes. The Denver Film Festival was having a contest and one of the categories was original short film. So I submitted it and kind of forgot about it, to be honest with you, and the next thing I know, I’m getting this email that I won. So it was a shock, but a lot of fun.

They flew me out to Denver. I got to walk the red carpet. I went to all the screenings. I’d never been to a film festival before. Andy Garcia was there. It was just a ton of fun and something that normally would not happen to me, but it was a great thrill. I’ve written one or two screenplays since, but I haven’t done anything with them. I really see myself in it. I’ve always seen myself as a novelist, and that’s really my main pursuit right now.

Debbi: Have you ever considered writing a scripted podcast?

Stephen: I never have, but that might be interesting.

Debbi: Because that’s something I’ve considered.

Stephen: Yeah. I’ve never done that, but that’s something to think about.

Debbi: Hmm. Cool. Keep thinking about it.

Stephen: Yes, while I try to come up with the third Nicholas Bishop novel.

Debbi: Maybe Nicholas Bishop would make a great radio show, so to speak.

Stephen: Yes, absolutely.

Debbi: “So to speak”, yes because that’s what scripted podcasts basically are.

Stephen: Right, right.

Debbi: What advice would you give to anyone who’s interested in writing for a living or just having a writing career?

Stephen: Don’t give up. It’s not original, but it took me 30 years to get my first book published. I went the traditional route because when I started out wanting to be a writer in the mid-eighties, there really wasn’t … self-publishing really was frowned upon. Right. It was a vanity press.

Debbi: Oh boy, was it!

Stephen: It had a stigma attached to it, it was cheating, so that was never really a consideration for me. So I took the traditional route. And about that time, in the mid to late eighties, that’s when all these American novelists all around 30 were getting their first books published. Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis, Bret Lott, Michael Chabon, all those guys. They’re a little bit older than me. They were probably around 30, I was in my mid-twenties. I said, well, that’s going to be me. I’m in grad school, I’ll have my first novel when I’m 30. I was sure of it, and then my 30th birthday came, and then my 40th birthday came, and then my 50th birthday came.

Debbi: I know that feeling.

Stephen: I think Muscle Cars came out in 2015 when I was 52, so I was not an overnight sensation. But I was trying all those years, writing poorly, getting a lot of rejections, trying to get better at my craft. Something happened when I went to Queens, not that getting an MFA is the answer for a writing career, but I think what it was, was for the first time I was surrounded by a group of writers and I found my group that you could share work with and get feedback and give feedback in an honest and constructive way. And like I said, that group that I’ve been together with, those women I mentioned earlier, it’s been over 10 years now that we’ve been doing this. That I think made a huge difference, having that network which I never had.

I tried to get into different writing groups throughout the years, but usually I was the one who took it the most seriously. Most of them were there for the food and the wine, which I enjoyed, but when you tell me I wrote this story on the bus ride this morning, how good is it going to be? Or how valuable is your critique going to be if you just did it on the ride over to the workshop or meeting? So it took me a long time to find my network, my group, and once I did that, and plus you do anything for 30 years, you get better eventually. So I think the two all came together at Queens and that really kind of set me on this path that I’m on. So the last 10 years have just been for me, an explosion of creativity and productivity.

Debbi: That’s fantastic. Is there anything else you’d like to add before we finish up?

Stephen: No, except maybe go to my website, which is SGeoannou.com. There’s a ton of information about that, about my books and my bio and appearances. But I always say the most important part of my webpage is the final tab, and that’s the contact page, so any readers out there who want to have me come to their book club, or if they just want to ask me questions or just drop me a note, I answer all of them. It’s the best part really when you get an email from someone who’s curious about your work and what you’re doing. I love that. So I encourage everyone to go out there.

Debbi: That’s excellent. Wonderful. Thank you so much.

Stephen: Oh, thank you. I had fun.

Debbi: It was a pleasure talking to you. Thank you.

Stephen: Oh, it was great.

Debbi: Thanks. With that, I will just say thank you for listening and, if you would, if you enjoyed the episode, please leave a review. They help with the algorithms. It’s so nice to be judged by bits and bytes of data, isn’t it? Anyway, these things do help so please leave a review if you enjoyed the episode. And we also have a Patreon page with benefits for patrons, so please check it out. Until next time, when our guest will be Dan Flanagan, take care and happy reading.

*****

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This week’s episode of the Crime Cafe podcast features my interview with paleontologist and crime writer Leonard “Kris” Krystalka.

Check out his reading from The Bone Field!

Grab a PDF copy of the transcript here!

Debbi: Hi everyone. My guest today is both a professional paleontologist and a novelist. He writes the Henry Przewalski – is that correct, I hope? Przewalski?

Leonard: Literally, it reads as Przewalski but it’s actually a Russian-Polish name, named for the discoverer of Przewalski’s horse, that small kind of dwarfish horse that lives wild on the Asian steppes. So it’s pronounced in the Russian sense.

Debbi: Got it. All right. I’ll try to remember that. It’s my pleasure to have him with me today. It’s Leonard Krystalka, who goes by Kris. Like Kris Kristofferson, may he rest in peace.

Leonard: May he rest in peace. A terrific person.

Debbi: Indeed. Yes.

Leonard: Yes. Wonderful artist.

Debbi: He was, yes. I want to thank you for being here so much. It’s good to have you on. Tell us about Harry Przewalski. I almost screwed that up again. How much did you draw from your own experiences in creating him?

Leonard: A great deal. I named Harry Przewalski as a homage to the study of the life of the past and the study of present biodiversity. So, Przewalski’s horse is this miniature horse that roams wild on the steppes of Asia. It almost became extinct by over hunting, and in World War II, the German soldiers ate what is reputed to be some of the last Przewalski’s horses in a zoo in Poland. But enough were saved to repopulate the wild steppes of Asia.

Debbi: Interesting. Did you choose that name deliberately?

Leonard: I did. I chose it deliberately, although it’s hard to pronounce, and as a homage to the paleontological studies of the evolutionary history of life on Earth, the three billion year history of life on Earth.

Debbi: That is so cool. How many books do you have in the series, and how many do you plan to write? Or do you have a plan for the series?

Leonard: There are four books now in the Harry Przewalski series. There’s THE BONE FIELD, DEATH SPOKE, THE CAMEL DRIVER, and the newest one just published this year called NATIVE BLOOD. I have a fifth novel, which is not in that series. It’s a historical fiction of a murder that occurred in Lawrence, Kansas in 1871. A doctor accused of murdering his patient because he was having an affair with the patient’s wife. The doctor was arrested and the resulting trial was equivalent to … imagine the OJ Simpson trial in 1871 in Kansas. You have sex, you have murder, you have adultery.

It attracted reporters of every single newspaper in the country from San Francisco, from Chicago, from St. Louis, from New York, Washington, Detroit, and so forth. This is 1871 Kansas. It’s only six years after the end of the Civil War. So the trial was a national sensation, and one of the Lawrence women becomes the heroine. She talks the editor of one of the Lawrence newspapers into hiring her as the first woman correspondent west of the Mississippi. She covers the trial and solves the murder.

Debbi: Wow.

Leonard: She also fights for women’s rights. She fights for suffrage for women and blacks. Yeah, she’s quite a woman.

Debbi: And which book is this again?

Leonard: This is called THE BODY ON THE BED. I could hold it up for viewers to see.

Debbi: That’s very cool. I noticed that book was outside the series.

Leonard: Yeah, it is. I’m writing the sequel to that now. It’s called The Body on the Bricks. She is the heroine of that book as well. But your original question was about the Przewalski series of which there are now four, and yes, there may well be a fifth.

Debbi: Fantastic. Do you see yourself ending this series in a particular way, or do you just think you’re going to keep writing them?

Leonard: That’s a really good question. Yeah, I do see myself ending the Przewalski series in a way that does poetic justice to Harry’s character, how he thinks, how he acts, and when he would take off his gun and put it away somewhere and say, I’m going to do something else.

Debbi: Yeah. So putting up the guns and retiring at some point.

Leonard: Correct.

Debbi: In what ways does your protagonist differ from you?

Leonard: Well, Harry is not me. Of course, as with any writer, there are parts of you that you cannot help but insert into characters – experience, emotions, the way one thinks, senses of humor, senses of tragedy. In all of those ways, yes, there are parts of Harry that come from my life and my experience. But there’s a great deal to Harry that isn’t like me. So, for example, Harry was a student of paleontology and quit when his fiancé, who was a social worker, was brutally raped and murdered by a social misfit. He left his studies. He went to volunteer for a war in Iraq. He came back with a gun and a license to detect. That’s not me.

Debbi: So he’s a veteran.

Leonard: Yes.

Debbi: Wow. Yeah. That will have an effect on you.

Leonard: And he uses his skills that he learned by thinking as a paleontologist about those scarce clues, about a bone here, a tooth there or a skull there, to piece together the evolution of life on earth. He uses those skills of piecing together clues from different spheres to solve murder mysteries, which are all wrapped inside science intrigues as well.

So for example, The Bone Field investigates a paleontologist who is murdered for scientific glory, for fame, for one of the fault lines in the human condition that I like to write about. I think the job of every novelist is to explore the fault lines in the human condition, and the mystery genre, the hardboiled mystery genre, is a perfect vehicle for exploring those fault lines. So in The Bone Field, I quote John Wolcott, a Scottish satirist who wrote “the rage for fame infects both great and small! Better be damned than mentioned not at all.” That infects a great deal of science intrigues. So there’s a great deal of paleontological intrigue, geological intrigue, and of course, murder and betrayal in The Bone Field.

In the second book, in Death Spoke, the scientific intrigue is the archeology of prehistoric art. Who painted the spectacular bison and deer and horses and mammoths and the caves of France 12,000 to 34,000 years ago? And why didn’t they paint in those caves? Why didn’t they paint the outside environment? Sky, clouds, trees, grass, water, lakes, streams? There is an answer to that, which you will not hear in archeology class, but if your audience wants to read Death Spoke, they’ll find out the answer to that question.

Debbi: Fascinating. That really is fascinating. I’m intrigued by the science here. How much scientific detail do you include in your books?

Leonard: A great deal, but the trick in writing the scientific parts is interweaving the murder story, the detective story with the scientific mystery, so that the two are inseparable and both of them are page turners.

Debbi: Exactly. Yeah.

Leonard: So that one compliments the other. So in what I just mentioned about the novel Death Spoke, the solution to the mystery of who were the artists and why did they paint art in the deepest recesses of the caves, and why only those four animals in almost 99% of the caves, that mystery is interwoven with solving the murder mystery.

Debbi: That is really cool. That is so cool. Have you ever thought of writing a mystery with dinosaur bones for kids?

Leonard: That’s a really good question. I used to make up stories for my kids and not read it, but relate it at bedtime. And they loved those stories. I wish I’d written them down, and they did have dinosaurs. Yes.

Debbi: Oh my gosh, because kids seem to love dinosaurs, and I thought right away that you’d be a natural at telling that kind of story.

Leonard: Yes, they do.

Debbi: Wow. Do you work full-time as a paleontologist?

Leonard: I did work full-time as a paleontologist. I don’t anymore. I go into the field once in a while, still excavating dinosaurs and other fossils in Montana, but I am not a professional paleontologist any longer in terms of publishing in the field, writing scientific articles and so forth. I’ve switched from that to writing about paleontology and archeology especially, in my mystery novels.

Debbi: That’s really interesting and cool. What kind of writing schedule do you keep?

Leonard: I don’t, and I wish I was disciplined enough to keep a writing schedule, then I would finish a novel in six months or a year, rather than take two years to write a novel. It’s easy to procrastinate. It’s easy to do other things that one enjoys. Reading. I’m an avid cyclist, so I do a great deal of cycling that takes a great deal of time. I like to camp and so on.

Debbi: That’s great. That’s wonderful actually. What was it that drew you to the field of paleontology?

Leonard: Say that again.

Debbi: What was it that drew you to the field of paleontology?

Leonard: That’s a good question. There are two passions that made me a paleontologist. First was the passion of ideas, and in many ways, my novels are about those ideas. Paleontology asks ultimate questions. What triggered the myriad explosions and extinctions of life on the planet during the past 3 billion years? That’s an ultimate question. Hundreds of millions of species came and went on land and in the waters, from the tiny one celled algae, all the way to the dinosaur that everybody knows – Tyrannosaurus Rex. So basal to that answer is the tree of life. And as a paleontologist I try to decipher that 3 billion year tree of life on Earth.

The other answer was the passion of place. The Badlands, where the rocks are preserved in a row, wrote all the answers to the ultimate questions that paleontology asks. It’s only in the Badlands that you find all those fossils. And for me, the Badlands are primeval. Those canyons, stark rubble strewn, the buttes rising in stacked layers of red and gray and blue, much like people would see in the Grand Canyon. Every time you find a fossil, you can imagine that the earth itself has bled from the red rocks. As a city kid – I was born and raised in Montreal in Canada – so as a city kid, when I first saw the Badlands, I was seduced by their beauty. And for me, it was a beauty so terrible that it hurt the heart.

Debbi: I know the feeling. I am originally from New York City, and then I moved to Fresno, California, and it was like, oh, look at this place. No big tall buildings. I feel like I’m out in the open at last.

Leonard: Right, right.

Debbi: Yeah. It’s almost a shock, almost a culture shock to go from that to Fresno, California. What authors do you like to read, and what authors have inspired your writing?

Leonard: That is a great question. Let’s see. I actually have a list because I don’t want to leave anybody out. Who do I like to read? I grew up on Rex Stout and his Nero Wolfe mysteries. I used to reread them every few years. The stories are entertaining. They’re almost mannered. They’re set in New York where you’re from, but what stayed with me when I read them was Rex Stout’s craft as a writer, as a storyteller. I also read all of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James Cain. They introduced me to that streetwise, hard-boiled detective. The private eye, the simple short, declarative sentence. Ernest Hemingway introduced me to that as well, the wisecrack. And it also revealed how the gritty alleys of Los Angeles and other cities are perfect settings to fester the strands of human rot, and to tell the story of the gritty underbelly of human life and the human condition. This is why the detective story is so perfect.

I continued reading Ross Macdonald, James Crumley, whose prose is unmatched. For readers out there, the best dialogue, the absolute master of dialogue is Elmore Leonard. Boy, he paints his characters, their plots, the emotions, their psyches. He paints it with their words, how they speak, their expressions, their syncopation. When I read these authors, I find myself envious saying, damn, I wish I’d written that sentence.

The same holds for – of course, Elmore Leonard is dead, but the same holds for current writers. Ian Rankin, Lawrence Block, James Lee Burke, James Ellroy. Readers can’t go wrong. If you’re an aspiring detective writer, start with James Crumley. Start with A Kiss Before Dying and then go on.

Debbi: It’s been ages since I’ve read that, and I have to go back and look at it again, because boy, that name. James Crumley. I remember.

Leonard: In The Bone Field, I paid homage to him because I named the sheriff of a town in Wyoming after him. His name is Crumley.

Debbi: Oh, cool. Very cool. I love the way you said that the private eye novel, the hardboiled detective novel, is the perfect type of book to show the fault lines in the human condition. I think “fault lines in the human condition” has to be one of my favorite phrases.

Leonard: Right.

Debbi: That is so great.

Leonard: So if I could elaborate on that. My novels are classified as and we’re talking about them as murder mysteries, archeological thrillers, paleontological thrillers, and they fit the stereotype. There are murders committed, there are murders solved, there’s a private detective and so on. But the mystery classification is simplistic. For me – and I’m saying this for all your readers, all your listeners – for me, the best works in the mystery genre, Raymond Chandler, Elmore Leonard, I’ve talked about them before, James Crumley, Dorothy L. Sayers, they are much more than whodunits. They explore the fault lines in the human condition, and the best ones are as good as the classics in literature.

Mystery novels, private eye novels, they have the reputation of B-literature. I disagree with that entirely. It’s just like Humphrey Bogart films used to be called B-films, but now they’re rated just as classic as all the other classics. So the best mystery/private eye novels explore the same fault lines in the human condition as the classics in literature. The book of Job, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Tony Morrison’s Beloved, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Those all made impressions on me. So in the best mysteries, just like in the classics and literature, their characters are just as flawed, just as heroic. The relationships are just as conflicted. The seven deadly sins are just as deadly, and the stories expose the same gritty underbelly of life.

Debbi: Yes. It seems like your books, the scientific part of it can even border a little on philosophy there.

Leonard: Correct, correct.

Debbi: Quite a bit actually.

Leonard: Yes. There’s quite a bit of philosophy and I don’t hesitate to kind of throw a couple of philosophical thoughts in. For example, I can read a small portion of The Bone Field where Harry likens geology to the human condition. He’s standing in the Badlands and he’s thinking, he’s looking over them.

“Weathering was ceaseless. This endless war of attrition between earth and sun and wind and rain. The land trying to stay in equilibrium with the elements and failing. It was like the geology of a love affair, Harry thought. The silent abrasion of its intimate contours to a flat, monochromatic terrain. So in many ways, our life, human relationships are as much like the Grand Canyon, exposed to the elements, being eroded grain by grain, by grain, ultimately failing.”

Debbi: Ooh, that’s beautiful. Have you ever thought about doing voice acting or audiobook reading?

Leonard: I did record The Bone Field as an audiobook. It’s available as an audiobook, and I’ve also recorded The Body on the Bed, but it is not out yet.

Debbi: What a great voice!

Leonard: Thank you. Thank you.

Debbi: It’s beautiful. Beautiful writing, too.

Leonard: Thank you.

Debbi: What advice would you give to anyone who wants a writing career?

Leonard: That too is a great question. I would say rule number one: take chances. Art and science, the writing, the crafting of a novel, that art and the science of that art, art and science are subversive storytelling. They’re the risky search for uncomfortable truth, and that’s what those novels should explore. Uncomfortable truth. Writing a novel isn’t meant to be comfortable. I’m going to quote George Orwell. “Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.”

Debbi: I love that.

Leonard: And for me, what always happens … I think of the novel as an unbridled horse, a horse you cannot control. The novel is the wagon, and the horse is pulling the wagon, and you’re sitting on the wagon. Suddenly the horse goes down an alley that was unexpected, unexplored. Let your writing violate the storyboard if you use one. Go off the storyboard. I don’t use the storyboard. I let the horse and the wagon drag me where it does, and those alleys unexplored are the most rewarding moments of writing. Like many other authors would say, let your voice emerge naturally, unforced. Don’t try to imitate anybody else’s voice. Don’t worry about being off-key. You can always put it back into the key when you edit, but just let it flow.

Be smart, be scrupulous, be forthright. Like Steinbeck said, the discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty. Be honest. Don’t be stupid. Do your research. Write what you know, know what you write. Immerse yourself in the research that goes into the novel. My advice and one I try and follow for every writer, when you write your novel, make readers want to pause at every sentence or at most sentences and say to themselves, damn, I wish I’d written that sentence because every elegant sentence is for me, a novel’s literary heaven, because otherwise, as William Styron quipped, writing is hell.

Debbi: Well, on that note, I just want to say thank you, and is there anything else you’d like to add before we finish up?

Leonard: No. The act of writing is one of the most enjoyable and painful. Writing is hell, but writing is also heaven bound.

Debbi: I hate to write, but I love to have written, as Dorothy Parker once put it. Well, I just want to thank you again for being here. It was great talking to you. I could talk to you for hours, probably about this whole subject.

Leonard: Thank you very much. Thank you for this podcast. I really appreciate it.

Debbi: It’s my pleasure, believe me. So everybody, if you enjoyed the episode, please leave a review if you would on Apple or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you are a regular listener, check out our Patreon page. My work is up there. I’ve got samples of my work, ad-free episodes, and bonus episodes as well. So with that, I will just say, until next time, I’ll be seeing you and take care. Enjoy a good book. Happy reading and talk to you later.

*****

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This week’s episode of the Crime Cafe features another story from The Adventures of Philip Marlowe.

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The following is an unedited AI-generated transcript. Does an awesome job, huh? 🙂

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But first, let me remind you that the podcast offers membership benefits on Patreon.

Check out Patreon today. After you buy your toothpaste.

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This week’s episode of the Crime Cafe podcast features my interview with crime writer Tom Fowler.

Check out our discussion of his Baltimore-based crime fiction.

Click here for a PDF copy of the transcript.

Debbi (00:55): Hi everyone. My guest today is the USA Today bestselling indie author of the John Tyler thrillers and the CT Ferguson crime fiction series. Born in Baltimore, he now lives in the Maryland suburbs of DC, a place that I know well, or at least I used to know it well. It’s my pleasure to have with me Tom Fowler. Hey, Tom. How are you doing today?

Tom (01:21): Good, Debbi. Thanks for having me on.

Debbi (01:23): Excellent. My pleasure. I was particularly intrigued by the fact that you are writing hardboiled mysteries that take place in Baltimore. You’re originally from Baltimore and you’ve also written a whole lot of those books. How many books do you have in the CT Ferguson series?

Tom (01:44): Sixteen currently. Just put up the pre-order for number 17. My hope is to have it out a little before Christmas.

Debbi (01:56): Well, I got to tell you, I love a hardboiled mystery, and I love the idea of the setting in Baltimore. How many books do you plan to write for the series? What’s your plan for the series in general?

Tom (02:09): Yeah, I don’t have any plan to end it. I think it’s common in the genre to have these kind of open-ended series, and we look at the Spencer series. Robert B. Parker wrote 40 or 41 before he died, and there’s been another 11 or 12, I think since his passing. Ace Atkins wrote the first nine or 10, and now Mike Lupica has taken over. So Jack Reacher was more of a thriller character, I would say, than mystery, but that’s a 27 or 28. And again, there’s an author transition happening there too. So I think it’s very common to see these series just keep going, and as long as people are interested in reading them, I’m certainly interested in writing them. I have a lot of fun with these books.

Debbi (02:56): That’s cool. I’ve noticed they tend to be on the short side. Is that intentional? Is it just the way you write?

Tom (03:04): I guess it’s just the way I write. They’re usually 70 to 75,000 words. The more recent ones have been closer to 70, so I’d say most mysteries are probably somewhere in the 75 to 80 range. So I hope I’m not writing too short, but it’s the right length for the story. I don’t want to pad the word count unnecessarily. They’re first-person stories, so there’s not a lot of side quests, if you will, happening that the other characters are going on, so.

Debbi (03:34): Exactly. Yeah, and personally, I like short reads, so I mean, that just really appeals to me.

Tom (03:41): Yeah.

Debbi (03:44): What prompted you to write that series?

Tom (03:49): A few things. I’ve mentioned before, I think I have a longer bio that mentions I wrote a “murder mystery” (in air quotes for those who can’t see me) when I was about seven years old in which no one actually died, so no murder. And I named the, I guess I can’t really call him the killer, but the person who stabbed people, the stabber, like in the first paragraph. So not a mystery either. Oh for two, but it’s because I was at my grandparents’ house a lot, and they would watch shows like The Rockford Files. This was probably the early eighties, and they were probably in syndication by then, but Columbo, shows like that where you had a cop or a PI, someone solving a mystery, and I’ve read a lot of different genres over the years, but I wanted to, at some point in the late two thousands to 2010, I wanted to write my own, and I really started writing that book.

(04:52): I know I had a finished draft of the first book, The Reluctant Detective, around November, December of 2010. I wouldn’t publish it until October of 2017. So the process took me about seven years, but I wanted to do, I like the crime genre a lot. I was big into shows like Monk and Psych and things like that at the time, but I didn’t want to do the photographic memory. I felt like that was overdone. So I had to put my own spin on it a little bit, but I really wanted to write something in that space because I’ve been a fan of it, even going back to my childhood watching those shows at my grandparents’ house.

Debbi (05:27): Absolutely. Yeah, those shows are great too. I loved The Rockford Files. Oh my gosh, he was just perfect. I also noticed that you have a protagonist in John Tyler thrillers who’s a military veteran. What inspired you to write that character?

Tom (05:47): Well, I’ve never been to the military myself, but I’ve worked for the Army and the DOD as a civilian for–I’m not in that space anymore, but I was there for about 16 years or so. So I met a lot of people who were in the military, and I wanted to do a different series, and I wanted to do more of a thriller style, like a military action thriller, and obviously the 800 pound gorilla in that space is Jack Reacher. So to be clear, I very much enjoy the Jack Reacher books. I’m not trying to bag on Jack Reacher, but I wanted to do something a little bit different than Jack Reacher. So I still wanted someone who’s been in the service and seen and done his share, but a different character in a lot of ways, I think. And in the series, Tyler has PTSD and lives with it and manages it. He has a teenage daughter who lives with him. As the series opens, she later goes to college. So there are a lot of differences, I think, between a character like Reacher or the more loner types that you normally see in this genre. But I wanted to ground him a little bit differently and tells stories. A character like Reacher, he rolls into a town, raises hell, shoots people and leaves, and he’s pretty much the same guy in the next book, and that’s fun. But I wanted someone who has been affected by what he’s done and continues to be affected by the things he does.

Debbi (07:12): Yeah, I hear that. Actually. I write about a female Marine veteran who also has PTSD and an opioid addiction.

Tom (07:21): Oh, wow.

Debbi (07:22): Who is trying to function as a private eye essentially. So that’s an interesting thing to deal with.

Tom (07:29): I read about something for people with traumatic brain injuries. It was like a therapeutic painting program,

(07:35): And I talked to someone I know who’s a psychologist, and I said, could something like this be adapted for people who were trying to manage PTSD? And she said, yes. So in the books, Tyler has this painting program that he does. He has watercolors and he has an easel, and he just gets these things out of his head. And interestingly, one of my readers teaches art and teaches watercolors. So he actually gave me some advice about these are the kinds of things he should buy, and this is how someone who’s not an artist, because Tyler certainly wouldn’t be an artist, this is how someone who’s an amateur would do a painting and they would do this part first and then this. So I think my descriptions of him sitting at the easel and doing his painting has gotten a little more accurate over time just because someone who reads my books happens to have that experience and said, Hey, you can have him do it this way.

Debbi (08:31): Wow, that’s really interesting. I like the idea of the art therapy as something to use to manage traumatic brain injury. Fascinating. So how largely does Baltimore as a setting figure in your stories?

Tom (08:51): Pretty prominently. Most of the stories, I mean, they all take place, at least partially there. Some of them are entirely contained in the city, but there’s also some stories that go into the county or other parts of the state. A couple of the Tyler books actually, some of the action takes place in nearby states, but they always usually start and end In Baltimore, which is my city. It’s the city I know. It’s the city I love. I know it doesn’t always have the best reputation, but it’s more than just The Wire, and it’s more than just what you see on the news.

Debbi (09:25): Exactly.

Tom (09:26): Yeah, it really is. It’s a great city, and I want it to feature in there. And yeah, I’m writing crime stories, so yes, people are dying in Baltimore and these stories. People die in every city, every day around the world. But I really want it to feature in there, and I get emails from people, not just people who lived in Baltimore, but someone who says, oh, I came to Baltimore for a conference 10 years ago, and we ate at the restaurant, and you wrote about it in your book, and just little things like that. So when you ground your series in any real city, even Baltimore in this case, you’re going to have people who know the landmarks, who have driven on those streets and who have been in neighborhoods, and it creates a real setting for people.

Debbi (10:10): Yeah, definitely. So you’re an indie author like myself. What has your experience been like as an indie author and was it what you expected?

Tom (10:22): No, it was not. It’s a lot more than what I expected, and I love it, don’t get me wrong, but there are days it really feels like a second job. There are days, it feels like a tied for first job maybe. I really kind of envisioned it as, okay, I’m going to write these books. I’m going to put them up there. And yeah, I wasn’t expecting to get rich or anything, and I haven’t gotten rich from writing books, but man, there’s a lot that goes on. You have to get your books in front of people, so you have to have an email list and oh, now you need to be on social media, and here’s these Amazon ads and Facebook ads and things like that. It’s like, man, I want to write. I don’t want to do all this stuff. And I think a lot of people are in that boat.

(11:11): We get into this, I think, because we’re creatives and we want to write and we have stories, and then the businessy aspects of it is where we kind of throw up our hands a little bit, and I’ve certainly done that in some areas. But yeah, I try to carve out time before the workday. After the workday, on the weekends at lunch. I don’t do my writing work during, I have a day job. I don’t write during my day job. That’s my day job hours, but before and after on the weekends, things like that, that’s when I carve out my time. But yeah, it’s great. I love it. I wouldn’t trade it, but it is more than I thought I was signing up for. Absolutely.

Debbi (11:53): I think the technology has made it so, as well as the proliferation of social media, and I’m not sure that social media is nearly as important as a lot of people think it is.

Tom (12:06): I think if you have to pick social media or doing an email list, a hundred percent always, pick email.

Debbi (12:13): Absolutely. And I think you have to be careful about which social media you decide to use too, because some just seem to lend themselves to people better than others. I hear it all the time. Use something that you’re comfortable with as opposed to trying to wrap your mind around every single one out there.

Tom (12:33): Right. The advice I used to hear, I know Mark Dawson mentioned this at some point, but I don’t know if he’s the originator of the advice, but it was always for social media platforms, pick two, and one of them should be Facebook simply because you can run Facebook ads. That’s probably still true, but you should also go where your audience is. Not everybody’s audience is on Facebook.

Debbi (12:54): Absolutely. I agree. Totally. So what kind of marketing do you do and how much of it?

Tom (13:06): As little as possible.

Debbi (13:07): I know the feeling,

Tom (13:11): Yeah. I do have a Facebook ad, two Facebook ads that run one to The Mechanic, which is the first Tyler book, and one to a box set on my direct store, my Shopify store. There’s another aspect of indie authoring that I didn’t think I would have to get involved in, selling my books directly. I have an Amazon ad. It’s a defensive ad, I guess, targeting me and my books, and that’s really, in terms of advertising, that’s all I do, and that doesn’t work out to be a great amount of money. Every month I have a newsletter that I send every two weeks. I do things like BookBub, FreeBooksy, those kind of newsletter promos. Periodically. I am on social media, but I don’t talk about my books a ton. I feel like all those “buy my book” posters, most of ’em are very tacky, and I don’t want to do that.

Debbi (14:04): Yeah, they are

Tom (14:05): I want to engage with people and not just hit them over the head with a book. I don’t think that’s the point of it. So that’s really what I do. I think most, unless you’re doing a ton of marketing, you can probably do most of this in an hour or two a week.

Debbi (14:25): I think you’re right. Frankly,

Tom (14:27): Maybe a little more on the weeks I write a newsletter. That always takes a little bit of time, but for the most part, I think a lot of it can be an hour or two a week. And if I were starting over, I think I would only send my newsletter once a month instead of every two weeks. But now I’m locked into that cadence and I’ve told people this is how often I’m going to send. So that’s what I do. But if I were starting over, it would probably be once a month. Yeah,

Debbi (14:46): I was going to say, you’re allowed to change your mind as long as you tell your readers. Sure. Let’s see. Do you do book signings? Just out of curiosity?

Tom (14:57): I haven’t yet. I was going to start doing them, and then Covid happened and people weren’t going to bookstores and all that. That’s something I’d like to start doing. I did one in 2019, I did a talk at a library in, oh God, Charles County, I think, and sold some books and did a signing afterwards. That’s something I’d like to get more into. There’s a lot of bookstores near me. There’s a few Barnes and Nobles. There’s some independent bookstores that are in the area or within, say, an hour’s drive because Columbia, Baltimore, DC, all those places are within an hour’s drive for me. So there’s a lot of possibilities there. So that’s something I’d like to start doing, but I haven’t done a lot of yet.

Debbi (15:41): Yeah, I’ve done a couple since the pandemic, or actually I’ve done one since the Pandemic, and I did one right before the Pandemic, and it’s like, I feel like I should do more. I feel like I should be out there more just meeting people. Have you ever considered crowdfunding your books?

Tom (16:04): I have, and I’ve done two Kickstarters so far. For me, they’re more, I don’t know that I would do. I wouldn’t do one all the time for every release. I think that’s too much. I think they’re more for special, more special projects, but it’s certainly a viable way to release a book. The one caveat I would offer, the first one I ran, I tried to do it specifically for an audiobook, and there’s a large segment of people out there who just do not care about audiobooks. It is a growing market, but more people read either eBooks or physical books than read audiobooks. So if you’re going to do a Kickstarter and you’re trying to fund an audiobook, that’s fine. Just don’t say, this is from my audiobook. You’re immediately going to turn off 80% of the people who might be interested in it. Offer audiobook as a reward certainly, but also make sure you have ebook, print, other stuff in there.

(17:05): There’s a few books out there on how to set up a Kickstarter. I think Monica Leonelle and Russell P. Nohelty have the best one I’ve seen so far. I think it’s called Get Your Book Selling on Kickstarter. Has some really good advice in there. That’s what I’ve used. So my first campaign was audiobook centric and did not fund. My second one did. I have not yet run a third. I haven’t found the right project yet. I don’t want to do it just like, oh, here’s thriller number eight. Let’s do a Kickstarter. It doesn’t seem special enough to me. That’s just a normal release, but if I had something different or something special I was putting out, I would absolutely do it again.

Debbi (17:42): Yeah, it’s not a bad thing to do. If nothing else, you can get people on board with what it is you’re writing, the kind of thing you write. It’s like you attract the right people to yourself by doing that, I think.

Tom (18:01): Yes.

Debbi (18:03): And have you, just out of curiosity, thought of using either Substack or Patreon?

Tom (18:09): I’ve thought about it. It’s a function of time more than anything. Do I think I could reach people on those platforms? Yeah. They’re not really discovery platforms though, so I think you kind of have to bring an audience with you or send people to those places. And for what I would be providing there is the time outlay worth it. I don’t know. There are people who absolutely do well on substack, Patreon, other subscription based platforms. It is a second job for me. I don’t need it to be a first. I don’t want it to be my first job. So a lot of that is a function of, I don’t know if I have the time to do this or to do it really the way I would want to do it.

Debbi (19:01): Yeah. So what is your profession, your day job?

Tom (19:07): Yeah. I work in IT for the federal government.

Debbi (19:11): Ah, which agency?

Tom (19:13): FDA.

Debbi (19:16): Oh, my goodness. I’m a former Fed myself. Used to work with the EPA for a while.

Tom (19:22): Oh, nice.

Debbi (19:23): Yeah, it was a living, I suppose. Which is more than I can say for my writing career at this point. What advice would you give to anyone who is interested in a writing career?

Tom (19:37): Oh boy. There’s probably a lot of things that I could say there. I think the biggest one would be to know why you want to do it or what you want to get out of it. You might want to, maybe you’re a hobbyist who just wants to put up the book you’ve had in your head for 20 years, or your poetry collection or whatever, or your grandmother’s life story is particularly inspiring and you want to write about that and get it in the hands of family and friends, and you don’t really care if anybody else reads it or maybe you want to do this full time. Those are very different goals. They’re all very fine goals in and of themselves, but they’re very different. And the amount of time and other resources you may have to commit to them is going to vary wildly. So know why you want to do it and have those expectations set accordingly.

Debbi (20:34): That is very, very good advice, knowing your why are you doing this?

Tom (20:40): Yes.

Debbi (20:41): Because a lot of people don’t care if they make a bestseller list or even make a living off their writing. They want to get published, they want to express themselves, whatever.

Tom (20:56): Yeah.

Debbi (20:56): I think sometimes we lose that joy of getting what you want to say out there or in service to something else. We’re so worried about making money from it that we can’t think about the joy of doing it as much. So what I really like to focus on is the joy of doing it.

Tom (21:19): Yeah.

Debbi (21:19): It’s very important.

Tom (21:20): If you don’t enjoy it, then you’re doing wrong. If you’re not enjoying this.

Debbi (21:23): Yeah. I mean, there’s so much involved. There’s so much work involved. Why would you do it unless you enjoyed it?

Tom (21:30): Right.

Debbi (21:30): So yeah.

Tom (21:32): The only piece of advice I would definitely have, and this is more of a avoiding scams thing, is money should always flow to the author. If you were traditionally published, that will come in the form of either an advance or some royalties that your publisher sends you. If you are self-published, you collect the money from Amazon, Kobo, whoever, do not pay anyone to publish your book.

Debbi (21:57): Thank you for saying that, because too often I hear about people paying to get published, too often. It amazes me because you are the owner of this intellectual property and you are licensing it to a publisher or to whoever, whether Amazon or whatever platform you’re putting it up on. It’s a license for them to distribute it. So don’t pay to get published, period. Do not. Well, thank you so much for being here and telling us about your books and about your writing and the fact that you’re doing this while working is to me, amazing. So many books too. So you must write really fast.

Tom (22:43): Yeah. The first one took me over seven years to go from starting it to getting it published, made a few process improvements, I guess you could say in the time since. But now I can pretty much turn around a first draft in six or seven weeks-ish, and I send to my editor in chunks and he sends them back to me. So at first, I would just send him the whole book when I was done, and it would take him several weeks to get it back to me. But now I just send six chapters, six chapters, whatever, and this way he finishes a week after I do, and things are ready to go much faster.

Debbi (23:22): Wow. That’s a nice arrangement. Well, again, thanks for being here. I really appreciate it and absolutely stick around afterward, we’ll do a bonus episode together.

Tom (23:34): Sure. Thanks for having me.

Debbi (23:35): Sure thing. It was my pleasure. I would like to thank everyone also for listening, and if you enjoyed the episode, please leave a review and check us out on Patreon where you can get access to bonus episodes as well as chapters from my work that I post there. Next time, my guest will be Pablo Trincia. I believe that’s how it’s pronounced. He’s the author of All the Lies They Did Not Tell, which is quite a story about a big scandal in Italy. Until then, take care and happy reading.

*****

Check us out on Patreon!

This week’s episode of the Crime Cafe podcast features my interview with crime writer Catherine Rymsha.

Check out our discussion about leadership skills and crime fiction writing.

You can download a PDF of the transcript here.

Debbi: Hi everyone. My guest today has a career in workplace communication and management. She teaches leadership skills and has a nonfiction book called The Leadership Decision which she published before her crime novel. Her crime novel is Stunning. It’s called Stunning, and in addition, she has given a TED Talk on the importance of listening, so listen up. You might learn something. It’s my great pleasure to have with me today, Catherine Rymsha. I hope I’m pronouncing that correctly.

Catherine: You are. Thank you. Yes, you are.

Debbi: Excellent. Wonderful.

Catherine: So happy to be here.

Debbi: I was going to ask you about that, and I’d completely forgotten, in the big hubbub of trying to get connected.

Catherine: That’s fine.

Debbi: You wouldn’t believe, people. Anyway, thank you so much for being here. What is it that made you decide to write a novel, and a mystery at that?

Catherine: I love murders.

Debbi: Who doesn’t?

Catherine: It’s so odd saying that, but I’m talking to an audience who understands that. I love crime, I love murder. Even as a kid, I was reading like the Fear Street books and R.L. Stein and Goosebumps, and then ventured into Stephen King and then started to watch everything on ID, and 20/20 and Dateline, and all of those shows that dig into it. When I was a kid, I always wanted to write and I fell into leadership and wrote a ton about leadership, which for some, that’s not the most thrilling topic in the world, which I understand totally. But then, I was pregnant when I wrote Stunning. It was a dream. It was based on a dream that I had, and I kept having the dream, and I thought maybe I should write this down and I just started writing. I would write before bed and just write, write, write when I had time and I wasn’t sleeping or working a real job, and that’s how it came about. It just felt like it needed to get out of my brain.

Debbi: Interesting. So do you picture writing more books, or is this like your one shot ?

Catherine: I just came out with a textbook, also not as thrilling, very academic, but I want to get back into writing murder and crime and even if I could do something based on real life murder or crime. I think those are things that are interesting to me to explore next. But I do want to start getting into it and I keep saying that, and I thought all summer I’ll write another book. And now summer has come and gone and the book is not written. So I’m thinking, well, maybe in the fall. I say that and I laugh because I don’t know if it’s going to happen that quickly, but it’s more fun than writing leadership. I mean, leadership is important but crime and murder and making things up is way more fun.

Debbi: Making things up is fun.

Catherine: Yes.

Debbi: It’s its own form of work, but at the same time it’s fun work.

Catherine: It is fun work.

Debbi: Yeah. Your books – do you have a traditional, hybrid or are you self-published?

Catherine: I am self-published with my first two, but the textbook, I did work with a publishing company, so that was interesting too, to have that experience after doing two on my own and working with editors and beta readers and that whole spiel.

Debbi: The whole shebang, yes.

Catherine: The whole team.

Debbi: I was going to ask you about your publishing journey. What has it been like for you? Has it been what you expected?

Catherine: With the first one, it was a learning curve, because I wanted to find an editor and I found an excellent editor named Sandy. She was so great at walking me through the entire process because she’s very experienced and does a lot of writing herself and writes books for authors trying to get published for the first time, and she is just brilliant at everything she does. So with having her, that was amazing. I can’t quite remember how I found her. I think I just found her through an online platform or a Google search or something, but she was a huge help. So even though I found it a little overwhelming at times and expensive at times, she really made it feel worth it. And then with the second book, it felt like a breeze because I knew what to expect and it just went a lot quicker.

But I would say there’s so many tools out there, as you know, for authors to use and to benefit from and to get their work out there that it’s no longer … I can look back now and think it’s not as bad as what I thought it was going to be. It can be expensive and you sell books but I haven’t kind of broken even with it yet. So that’s been interesting too.

Debbi: It does add up. Everything out there does add up. It’s incredible. So what is your writing schedule like then?

Catherine: I write at night. I have two twin boys who are two now. Like I said, I was pregnant with them when I was writing the book and publishing it. But now it’s trying to fit it in when I can. So whether it’s before bed, between classes at UMass or early in the morning if I wake up before my kids, then those are the times that I try to fit it in. I wish I had more time, which I know everybody says, to write, but I think it’s just that matter of discipline, committing to a schedule.

Debbi: It’s a matter of discipline. Yes, very much so. It sounds like you have a plan that involves catching time periods where you can, how you can pretty much.

Catherine: Yes. I was listening to another one of your podcasts about writing in the airport and even just having that pen and paper, and I think that’s the thing. I take voice memos and then I take a screenshot of what the voice memo picked up, because if I don’t remember this thought or idea, I’m going to lose it. I don’t often have pencils and paper around these days.

Debbi: Yes. That’s true. I’ve done that myself actually. I find all sorts of things I wrote years ago that I forgot about. It’s interesting. What authors have most inspired you to write in this genre?

Catherine: I think it’s going back to that R.L. Stein starting as a kid. I think those Fear Street books, Goosebumps books really caught my attention. Also then in high school, I started reading Stephen King, as most high schoolers start to do. I shouldn’t say most high schoolers. I think at the time a lot of my colleagues and peers and friends were. I don’t know if Stephen King is as popular now with the younger demographic, although I want to make sure. I assume he is, but I think folks like that who were pretty mainstream and out there and being published and seen as real authors were the ones that got me kind of hungry to write, and now many years later, writing in this particular genre.

Debbi: Yes. I have to read those Goosebumps books sometime because I keep hearing about them. It’s a period that I didn’t because I didn’t have kids so there are all these children’s books that sound so intriguing to me that I don’t know about.

Catherine: I look back and I think – I didn’t mean to interrupt you – but I’m like, oh my gosh, I was reading some of this at 12, 13. 10 I think I started with some of these books, and they got their hooks in me, I guess.

Debbi: I think they can be equally entertaining for adults.

Catherine: Oh, totally.

Debbi: I like that. I love stuff like that, just to go off and read a middle grade or a child’s book or a teenage, a young adult just for something different, to get away from the adults for a while.

Catherine: Oh, a hundred percent. Gives you a new perspective.

Debbi: Yes. Your book is set in New England, correct? Which is where you are.

Catherine: Yes. I’m in Massachusetts in the greater Newburyport area, so if you’re looking at a map, right on the New Hampshire/Massachusetts line, and my book kind of bounces around with perspective. So it’s thinking about some activities happening years ago in Boston or even at Amherst, and some events happening here in Newburyport, and then some bouncing up to Mount Katahdin in Maine, and really just having some fun with playing around with locations and perspective and time. That’s where I tried to weave some of that into Stunning.

Debbi: That sounds like fun. I love when a book gives you a sense of the place where it’s set, and it sounds like it’s set in some pretty interesting places. I’ve been to Mount Katahdin. [Correction: It was actually Cadillac Mountain.] It’s really nice. We went camping there and I remember the shoreline reminded me of California.

Catherine: Yes. Beautiful

Debbi: The rocky shoreline.

Catherine: It’s beautiful. I mean, Maine’s got so many great spots, but that Mount Katahdin is breathtaking.

Debbi: Yeah. Wow. If there’s one trait or theme that tends to come out in your writing, what do you think it would … the most major theme or device or whatever you use in your work, what would it be?

Catherine: I think it’s perspective. When I teach, and like I said, I teach leadership and management, and I talk often about perspective that people can look at a leader and somebody can think they’re amazing and excellent, and some people can think they’re a complete dud, and it’s always the debate of who’s right or who’s wrong. And this is where, when I wrote Stunning, I talked so much about perception is reality, and how do you understand behavior from a business and management standpoint that I wanted to incorporate some of that into Stunning of like, okay, here’s the perception of one person and how they’re thinking and seeing a situation. Here’s the perspective and thoughts of another person who is going to see that situation in a very different and unique way. And if you’re trying to think about peoples’ sides to stories and making your own assumptions and conclusions and your own perception of what’s going on or what’s happening, I think that was one thing that I try to get across in leadership is that there are different sides and different perceptions. That was one thing that when I wrote Stunning, I wanted to be kind of factual of dates and times, because I just tend to think like that. But it was also the matter too, of thinking, Hey, this is how this person is seeing something that’s going to come up with a murder, and this is how this other person’s going to see and experience it, and how do you as the reader make your own conclusions in starting to think about what’s happening or what’s going to unfold.

Debbi: Yes. It’s interesting playing with peoples’ perspectives and perceptions. It’s key to writing a mystery, really.

Catherine: It totally is.

Debbi: It’s exploring peoples’ psychology at the same time that you’re telling the story. Pretty cool.

Catherine: And I think for some of the books and even the crime shows or murder shows that I watch or listen to and what have you, I think the ones that have characters that have opinions or perspective and you feel like you can relate to them or that you would be their friend in “real life” are the ones that really do resonate with me the most, so trying to think about what that looks like for my own writing .

Debbi: Absolutely. Really. What advice would you give to somebody who would like to write for a living?

Catherine: I would say find a good editor. Like I said, my editor Sandy Wendell has been absolutely phenomenal. She’s just an expert in this, and I think if I hadn’t met her, I don’t think I would’ve done more. I still work with her. I beta read for a lot of other folks that she’s editing for, and I have a great relationship with her. I think it’s a matter of finding an editor and doing your research, because I did use one website and I found an editor for my fiction book, and the editor on there charged me an incredible amount of money to edit it and they didn’t edit the book. It was a bit of a nightmare and thinking of saying to this editor, you didn’t edit it. Oh yes, I did. And you have to then go through line by line and try to …

Debbi: Oh my God!

Catherine: Self-edit and then try to talk to the company that joined the two of you together by saying hey, I just spent $2000 or $1800, whatever it was at the time, to have somebody look at this.

Debbi: Oh, my gosh.

Catherine: And I thought it was a nightmare. They did side with me because there was so much not done in the book, which would’ve been very embarrassing to put out there. But I would say if somebody’s thinking about getting into this, find a good editor or find another author as a peer or a mentor to walk you through the process, and then it doesn’t seem as bad or scary.

Debbi: Have you ever considered joining a writer’s group?

Catherine: I have. And I did it more when I was, I say younger in writing, maybe in my college, early twenties when I was writing a lot, but not really doing anything with it. I am involved with a writers’ group now on Facebook, although I hate to admit that I don’t really do much with it, but I can see the people’s conversations and comments and what have you, and gatherings and things that they do. And I think, gosh, I really should do more of this because this could be of a huge value and then I just don’t. But I would say that those types of groups and support, to your point, can be incredibly beneficial in trying to navigate this and understand it, especially like the marketing of books after it’s all said and done because that’s its whole other monster.

Debbi: Oh, yes. I don’t think people really have a sense of how much work authors do in terms of marketing their books. It’s just incredible. And especially now when there’s just so much to choose from, it’s almost like you’ve got the paradox of choice at work here. It’s like okay, which one of these things is really best for me?

Catherine: Right, right, right.

Debbi: I suspect what it comes down to is you have to pick something that you think works for you and is actually making connections or something to that effect. That’s just my theory.

Catherine: I think it’s a good one. It’s a good theory to have.

Debbi: It’s all I can ever suggest to anybody. Find something that seems to work for you and lean into that. Is there anything else you’d like to add before we finish up about your books, about what your plans are? Anything?

Catherine: So, again, ready to go back to teach in a couple weeks with school just around the corner. Like I said, I don’t think I’m ever going to write a textbook again, but I would say that’s been a pretty thrilling experience. But the one thing that I’ve noticed, especially since I do a lot of I’ll say beta reading for people who are working with Sandy, is that so many people have so many great book ideas, and they put so much into their books. Some of the books that I’ve beta read for her have been brilliant. And then sometimes you get these books from people trying to write and publish their first book and kind of check that off their “bucket list”. And it seems like people try to – and I hate this expression but I’m going to use it – boil the ocean.

People with that first book. I think they’re trying to get everything in it in order to have it be representative of them and their life and their writing and their expertise and how brilliant they are. I get it because people have lives. They want to share that. I mean, the point of being a writer is thinking about those connections and considering how you can change the world or bring value or whatever that might look like to someone’s noble cause in doing this. The reason I bring that up is because I think for people who are considering writing or even other writers, it’s just a matter of understanding. You don’t have to do it all in one book. You can write another, and there’s nothing wrong with writing articles. It doesn’t always have to be a book. I think that’s one thing that I’m thinking about a lot is that you don’t have to always write a book to be a writer. There are other ways to write too.

Debbi: Absolutely correct. Absolutely. I just did a book review for a local newspaper for the first time in, I don’t know how many years. It’s been a long, long time. So it was really kind of a cool experience to do that. Just to be able to do that

Catherine: That’s cool. That’s awesome.

Debbi: Well, it’s been a pleasure talking to you. Before we go, I just want to ask, do you think it would help authors to take leadership courses or to learn more about leadership in general?

Catherine: Ooh, that’s a great question. I never thought about that. I think everyone can benefit from a leadership class, and it doesn’t necessarily need to be like an MBA level seminar of struggling through 12, 8, 16, whatever the week amount is. There’s so many great podcasts and webinars on leadership out there that people can benefit from. But I think even where an intro course can be beneficial is trying to help people think about their own behavior and how they are perceived, like we’ve been talking about, but also trying to understand where they could make small tweaks in how they interact with others that can make them more effective. People always say I want to be a better communicator. Well, that too is this huge loaded word. Well, what does that look like? I think this is where authors can think about how they show up when they talk or represent their book or on social media, and how are they seen as leaders themselves? So I think there’s benefits in understanding how you want to be perceived and what you want your own brand to look like.

One thing that I talk about with my students a lot is what’s your leadership brand? Some consultants and academics call it a leadership legacy. I like the idea of a brand. How do you want people to define the value that you bring? And to your question, I think that lens can be applied to writing and being an author. What do you want people to feel when they read what you write? How do you want to be perceived? How do you want people to talk about you when you’re not there? I think those can be all important parts of leadership, but also in being an author.

Debbi: That’s great what you’re saying. You’re reading my mind a little bit.

Catherine: Oh, good. Perfect.

Debbi: We’re kind of vibing here. I definitely get what you’re saying and it’s really good advice.

Catherine: Oh, good. Hope it helps.

Debbi: Oh, I think everybody could benefit from learning about leadership skills and how to take responsibility for your own career. Learn to use your strengths, lean into your strengths rather than trying to do everything, all that kind of stuff, delegating when necessary.

Catherine: Yes. All those loaded things.

Debbi: Yes. All those things, but I want to thank you so much for being here and talking with us today. Thank you for sharing your expertise now with us. Everybody should watch your Ted Talk

Catherine: My pleasure. Thank you.

Debbi: What’s it called again?

Catherine: Want to become a better leader? Here’s how. Just listen. So a little play on words there.

Debbi: Just listen. Yeah, just listen. Always good to listen.

Catherine: Yes.

Debbi: So I’ll just put in a quick plug while we’re at it for my fundraiser. I’ve started a team to raise funds for the Dystonia Medical Research Foundation. I have dystonia, so I know what it’s like. I know that there should be more research done to find a cure for this condition. I will include a link with the show notes and hopefully, it’s free to join the team. You don’t have to pay anything, but if you can join the team, it helps show support for raising money for this condition that people don’t know about. A lot of people don’t know about it. It’s a movement disorder, in case you were wondering. So in any case, on that note, I will just finish up by saying that our next guest will be Tom Fowler. And until then, take care and happy reading.

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