The Crime Cafe

My guest interview this week on the Crime Cafe podcast is with legal thriller author Amanda DuBois.

Among other things, we talk about how telling true stories persuasively can make you a better fiction writer.

Learn more about her novel, Unshackled, here.

For a PDF copy of the interview, just click here. It's there, somewhere. :)

Debbi (00:54): Hi everyone. My guest this week is the founder and managing partner of DuBois Levias Law Group, one of Washington State's longest standing woman-owned law firms before becoming a family law attorney, a field I learned to avoid like the plague, frankly, she was a labor and delivery nurse. She uses her medical and legal knowledge to address inequities in the legal system as an author of the Camille Delaney Mystery series, an award-winning book series. Her third and latest book is called Unshackled. She also founded an organization that helps formerly incarcerated people to reenter society. What a laudable goal. And I just finished reading the script for The Shawshank Redemption. What interesting timing. Anyway, I'm pleased to have with me today the author Amanda DuBois. Hi, Amanda. How are you doing?

Amanda (01:57): I'm doing awesome. I want a copy of that script. How interesting that would be.

Debbi (02:01): Oh, I can probably send you the link to where it was found. Or even a copy.

Amanda (02:05): Oh, fantastic. I didn't know you were reading that.

Debbi (02:09): Oh, it, it's kind of cool to read it, and I didn't have a chance to actually watch the movie. We were doing a discussion on it, and I hadn't had a chance to see it in a long time, but it seemed like there were scenes in there that might not have made it into the movie, which was interesting.

Amanda (02:24): Yeah, that's exactly right.

Debbi (02:26): It was very interesting to read, but I'm always pleased to have a lawyer on who has written crime fiction. I'm just pleased to see lawyers writing fiction, frankly, in general. And you have done some remarkable work starting your own law firm. How long have you had your own law firm?

Amanda (02:49): So I'm just this year celebrating 30 years.

Debbi (02:52): 30 years.

Amanda (02:53): And so that makes us one of Seattle's longest-standing women owned law firms.

Debbi (02:58): That's really awesome.

Amanda (02:59): We've been celebrating all year. We have a little pontoon boat outside our office. Our office is on a lake, and we just did this champagne thing. You cork the champagne off and yeah, we've been having a good time celebrating.

Debbi (03:11): That's awesome. That's fantastic. I think I can hazard a guess as to what led you from delivering babies to law, perhaps the absolutely broken healthcare system in this country that had something to do with it?

Amanda (03:26): Well, a little bit. Yeah. Mostly I just wanted to do something different and was, here's a really funny story. How I ended up in law is I wanted to get out of nursing and I thought I'd go to medical school. So I went, took all the super hard science classes and then I decided I didn't really like ... I took like two years of biochemistry and all that stuff. And then I thought, well, maybe I'll go get an MBA. And so I went to buy the MBA study guide book at the bookstore, and right next to that was the law school book. And I thought, well, I'll buy that. I'd never thought about law school. So I went home and I was doing the MBA study book, and it was all this math and calculus and it was really hard, and I thought, this is awful. So I got a beer and sat down and did the law school study book, and I'm like, oh, this is much easier.

(04:09): So my husband came home and I said, I'm going to go to law school. And he goes, what? I said, well, I'm not good at this MBA stuff. It's too much math, and I'm really good at this law school, so they must have a better idea about what would make a good lawyer. So I was totally the accidental lawyer. I had no interest really in being a lawyer at all, but I thought I had the aptitude. So anyway, I ended up in law school and ended up as a medical malpractice lawyer for the first seven years of my practice. So once I got into law school, I thought, okay, I got to work on this healthcare system. So you're right.

Debbi (04:40): Oh, wow. Well, that is really interesting. There are so many similarities between you and me in terms of background. I had this hard science background for a while and then the math killed me and I was like, oh, no, no, I can't do this. I was really interested in physics for some reason, and then it was just like--

Amanda (04:58): Me, too!

Debbi (04:58): Wow, how interesting.

Amanda (05:02): In my other life I want to be like an astrophysicist or somebody kind of like math genius or something, but it's not happening in this lifetime. So here we are.

Debbi (05:10): Here we are, yeah.

Amanda (05:10): Here are writing books.

Debbi (05:12): I'm a would be cosmologist. You're a would be astrophysicist. I want to know about the origins of the universe. How did this all start anyway?

Amanda (05:21): Right.

Debbi (05:25): So how would you describe your books? Are they kind of like crime fiction? Where are they in the spectrum of who-dunnit to stop the bad guy before it happens?

Amanda (05:35): So they're legal thrillers.

Debbi (05:37): Legal thrillers.

Amanda (05:38): And so the protagonist is a lawyer named Camille Delaney. And the reason I started, I wrote the first book was because I was a trial lawyer and I was super frustrated with how we value human lives in the legal system. If you're a young bank president and you die, you're worth millions of dollars. But if you're a 65-year-old retired person and you died because of malpractice, you're worth way less than that. And it bothered me because when I was a nurse, whoever comes into the hospital, they're important, you don't treat bank presidents different than you treat old people or vice versa. And every human life has the same amount of value in the medical system. So I end up in the legal system where people's value is basically based on what they can earn. And it really bothered me, and I was medical malpractice lawyer for many years and I wanted to write an article or inform people about this injustice, and I thought, nobody's going to read a dumb article about the value of human life in the legal system.

(06:37): Who's going to read that? And I thought, well, maybe I could write a fiction book and it's going to be about an old guy who dies, and it's going to be about the protagonist who is struggling with trying to communicate to the insurance company and the defendants that the widow deserves more money than just the amount of money you'd give to some old guy who died. So the whole purpose of the book was to sort of expose this really horrible way that the legal system has with dealing with human lives.

And then the next book was about a baby who died because they do the same thing to babies. They say, oh, you could always have another one. And it's like, what are you talking about? So the second book is about a baby who died, and it's a mystery, so you're trying to figure out, it's a fun mystery, but at the end of it, I'm hoping that the readers are like, wow, I never really thought about that before. So I use the legal thriller sort of genre to talk about inequities in the legal system.

And then the third book is about women in prison who have been separated from their children and the importance of reuniting women with their children when they're in prison and after they get out of prison. And so the whole and that book when you get finished with that it's like, oh my God, I had no idea the struggles and the impact on our society and our communities when we incarcerate moms.

(08:00): Their kids become at risk, and then those kids are more likely to get into trouble in the legal system in the future. And so this book, while it's a story about a kidnapped baby that the protagonist and her private detective have to find the baby all along the way, you're learning things about the criminal legal system and how messed up it is. So.

Debbi (08:20): Yeah, for sure.

Amanda (08:21): That's the high level what these books are about.

Debbi (08:25): Did you find that changing from writing legal briefs and documents to writing fiction required any kind of adjustment in the way you wrote or thought about writing?

Amanda (08:37): You know, not really, because I never really thought about this before, but if you're writing a good trial brief or a good motion, you have to convince the reader that it's true. And you have to write a, so I am a family law lawyer, so when I'm talking about, when I'm writing a motion or doing a trial, it's about a family and a child and money and finance and all these things that are kind of a little bit exciting. I mean, that sound kind of smutty and dramatic and emotional for most lawyers, but it's really pretty fun and you are writing this family's story to present it to a judge.

And so it's different in terms of, obviously you have a lot longer in a book, but it's very similar in the way of, I mean, having been a lawyer for so long, I think it makes me kind of a better writer because I've had to tell true people's stories to judges both in writing and verbally for the past 30 years. So it's a good question, but it's really, I'm sure if I was a lawyer for banks or Microsoft or something, I wouldn't have the same thing to say, but when I'm telling family stories, yeah, absolutely.

Debbi (09:43): That's true. That's very true. I was going to say, my tendency was to overexplain things at first. It's like, no, no, you don't have to explain that the sky is blue because of, I didn't do it that badly, but it was just.

Amanda (09:58): Yeah, it's a lot.

Debbi (09:59): Yeah. Gosh, I'm thinking like a lawyer, not like a fiction writer at this point. So I'm thinking--

Amanda (10:06): We're not exactly writing fiction,...

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

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

You can download a copy of the transcript here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Desmond Ryan (01:36): Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

Desmond Ryan (02:44): That's true.

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

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

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

Desmond Ryan (03:22): We will.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Desmond Ryan (10:27): Yes.

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

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

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

Desmond Ryan (11:58): I just thought that it's one of those things like once the ball gets going, originally I actually set it up as a five, but then became a six book story arc because I wanted to tell this long story, but I also wanted to talk about individual homicide investigations, and I didn't want to end up writing 400,000-word book. And as a writer, I just thought it was easier in terms of world building because once you create your characters,...

My guest interview this week on the Crime Cafe podcast is with thriller author Christina Kovac.

Get the bird's eye lowdown scoop inside story about her latest novel, Watch Us Fall!

For a copy of the transcript, click here.

Debbi (00:54): Hi everyone. My guest this week worked in television news covering crime and politics at Fox Five's 10 o'clock news in Washington DC. She went on to become a news producer and desk editor at the Washington Bureau of NBC News. She now writes psychological suspense thrillers set in DC. DC is one of my favorite places to talk about since I live near DC and worked in DC and well, I feel like a DC native almost. Her latest novel coming out in December is called Watch Us Fall. It's my pleasure to have with me. Christina Kovac. Hi, Christina. How are you doing today?

Christina (01:36): I'm doing great. Thanks for having me.

Debbi (01:38): It's my pleasure to have you on. Believe me, I'm always interested in talking to journalists and former journalists because you guys have such a difficult job. I mean, I know once upon the time I aspired to be a journalist, did freelance writing for a bit, but anyway, but I am intrigued by the description of your latest novel, which Alafair Burke described as, and I quote, "an insightful look at the complex dynamics of close female friendships and the lingering effects of trauma." Wow. Tell us more about what inspired you to create the story.

Christina (02:19): I started writing in the beginning, or I think it was in the beginning of the end of the pandemic, and a lot of people around me were coming out of the pandemic. It felt sort of traumatized. I think we all came out of our houses sort of stumbling. I don't know how to act anymore. I don't know how to with my friends anymore. I don't know how to hug people anymore. And it really struck me that being alone, being away from each other felt like a traumatic experience. I wasn't writing out of my own experience. But then I started thinking about what must that be like to have a kind of traumatic experience and then finally find a bunch of friends that you just want to hold onto and that you build this life around. And that was what these four female characters did.

(03:30): They met in college. They're Addie, Lucy, Penelope, and Estella, and they met at Georgetown and they became fast friends, and they were actually, when I was writing, I imagined that they started college during the pandemic like my daughter did, which was really a traumatic experience. They were stuck in their dorms. It was just a really horrible thing. They didn't get to know each other, but what they did was they kind of hung out, the group in their little quad. They hung out very tightly together, and they became just kind of forever friends. And so I thought that was really interesting. I wasn't writing out of my own traumatic experience, I will be honest. But at the time that I was writing, I was also very interested in the fact that misinformation had taken off.

(04:25): A lot of people were listening to lies on the Internet about COVID and all the rest of things, and I wondered why they were so open to things that were obvious lies and misinformation. And I started to wonder if there was a connection between being alone in COVID and feeling kind of traumatized by that and believing things that were the exact opposite of what their doctors were telling them and what made absolutely no sense to any sensible human being. Basically, why you would believe a lie. And that was really the beginning of my thinking about these people. So it's a bunch of disparate strands, strands, excuse me. It started in one place. It moved all over the place. That's kind of how I write. I don't know why. I wish I could just pick a lane and ride down the highway, but that's just not really how I roll.

Debbi (05:19): Yeah, yeah, I can appreciate that. It's funny how when you're writing, sometimes ideas come and stuff that you thought you were going to do change.

Christina (05:30): But the beginning idea to take these four best friends in college and have them living a post-grad life in Georgetown, that was kind of always there. I was thinking a lot about how I miss my friends during the lockdown. I really miss the kind of hugging and the whispering, the drinking together and just handing a book off and saying, Hey, this is, and so I really had this feeling of just really intense loneliness that I wanted to write about four friends who would just do anything for each other and who would protect each other no matter what. And that was actually the seed of it all, and I think it stemmed from loneliness, from the pandemic.

Debbi (06:26): Yeah, I can definitely believe that. It's very interesting. Yeah. What sort of writing schedule do you keep?

Christina (06:35): I write first thing in the morning.

Debbi (06:37): First thing in the morning.

Christina (06:38): I've trained myself. I used to be, when I worked in news, I worked nights. I did nightly news for, I worked in the Washington Bureau of NBC News and my shift was three o'clock in the afternoon, cover nightly news, and then do whatever The Today Show needed and then leave at 11. So that was kind of my thing, and I thought, I want my new life after I left TV to be very, very different from my writing life. So it's like, okay, we're just going to have to get used to being alone, not in a newsroom. We're going to have to get used to sitting in your office in this mess of an office all by yourself. So I just set my alarm every day for six o'clock. I get up and I make coffee. I sit at my desk, my cat starts meowing. That is occasionally annoying, but I try and write as long as I can.

Debbi (07:35): Morning writer. Yeah, I am with you there. I like writing in the morning. It's just really weird. At one point, the afternoons were always better for me. Then suddenly it's switched to morning. Like, it's kind of like brushing your teeth. It's kind of like that habit that you form and you just kind of keep at it because really you got to do it. You got to get those words out there.

Christina (08:00): And also the thing that I really got used to that I love so much is I make this huge pot of coffee, and then I just sit there and I just slam coffee and write and next thing I know, I am so caffeinated. I'm like, okay, now I have to get up and get away from the desk and go for a walk and hopefully come back.

Debbi (08:21): Oh, yeah, walking is important. I have learned that. Get up and walk away now. And then, what was it that made you choose to do standalone thrillers as opposed to say a series?

Christina (08:35): My first book, The Cutaway, actually could have been a thriller, and I thought about it, I'm sorry, could have been a series. And I actually thought about it because I thought Virginia was the main character, and I thought she was a really good character and she could carry it. I thought she could carry probably a trilogy. A lot of things happened after the contract that just made that sort of insupportable. I thought, I actually probably need to do standalones. My editor for one, was really interested in doing a different kind of novel, so you kind of get stuck a little bit with that.

I also was really obsessed with this idea of these four women living together and what their lives are like. And so I lost, I think the thing is you can only write what you're really obsessed with, and I really became obsessed with this female friendship thing, the dangers of being a woman, the dangers of walking around in a female body. And that was very different than the kind of novel that I was writing in the cutaway. So I talked to my agent about it and I said, I have this really kind of feel for this different novel that I'd like to do. And he said, I just think it sounds great. Let's do it.

Debbi (10:04): Yeah. You really do have to feel, I guess, almost passionate, I guess the word is the only word I can think of about what it is you're writing about.

Christina (10:15): Because you're getting up every day to write about it. I mean, it's every day for a year.

Debbi (10:20): It's a commitment. It's a commitment of time, commitment of effort. Were you still in journalism when you started writing fiction?

Christina (10:30): Yeah.

Debbi (10:34): That must have been tricky.

Christina (10:35): Yeah. I'm trying to remember exactly when I left. My husband and I, we have two kids. And he's also in journalism. He, he's a broadcast engineer, and we were really struggling with the idea of how to work our schedules around our family. It was just really a problem. And I had always loved, I was an English major and I had a dual major. I was English and journalism, and I had always loved this idea of working in the literary world, writing fiction. I really loved the scope of a novel.

One of the most frustrating things that I found in TV was, your story is basically 30 seconds or a minute, and you cannot get into the answers to questions that you need answered. You can barely get into who, what, don't even think about why. And to me, that's the most important thing there is why do people do this? What are the things in their world that are pressuring them? What makes a criminal? Are they born? What did they encounter in their world that made them this way? And journalism can't answer any of that. Or at least not TV.

(11:56): Long form journalism is different, of course, I'm not. But a novel is where you get into the heart of people and into the mind of people. So I wanted to do that. So I said to my husband, look, we're really struggling with this family-work dynamic, balancing things. I mean, I think that we're doing okay. What if I just left TV and wrote a novel? And he said, well, do whatever you want. And in the back of my mind, I thought, how hard can writing a novel be? Oh my God, it's hilariously. It was so hard. And then publishing it is insane and every step of the way is just so,...

The Crime Cafe once again is pleased to bring another episode from the annals of Old Time Radio! With one of my favorite protagonists–Philip Marlowe! With Gerald Mohr in the title role!

Get early access to ad-free episodes and bonuses, when you become a Patron!

My guest interview this week on the Crime Cafe podcast is with the spy thriller novelist, Howard Kaplan.

He has a fascinating story or two in him, for sure.

For a PDF copy of the transcript, click here.

Debbi (00:12): Hi everyone. My guest today has a most interesting background in international affairs. I would like to talk to him more about that, actually. Let's just say his work was so interesting, he got picked up by the KGB and interrogated. Okay. A native of Los Angeles, he's lived in Israel and traveled throughout Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt. He's the author of the Jerusalem Spy Series, the latest of which is The Syrian Sunset. It's my pleasure to have with me Howard Kaplan. Hi Howard. How are you doing today?

Howard (01:32): I'm doing fine, thank you.

Debbi (01:34): Excellent. Good, good. Your background is just fascinating. At the age of 21, you actually were sent on a mission to smuggle out of Russia, a Soviet dissident's manuscript on microfilm to London?

Howard (01:47): Yes. I actually went to Russia twice to consecutive summers. It was right around my birthday's in July, so I think it was one right before I was 21, and right around the time I was 22. And it was old school stuff. These were before the technology era where at that time the KGB had a single agent who monitored every Xerox machine in the Soviet Union. They could do that because it was a crime to have unemployment. So they gave everybody a job and they used to have something called Samizdat, which was self-published, where people would go into a typewriter and type a manuscript with onion skin, which is very thin paper and carbon paper. Most people don't even know what these things are anymore.

Debbi: (02:51): I do.

Howard (02:52): And you would get several copies and they would be circulated underground. So I was not involved in how they transferred this manuscript to microfilm, however I was involved. When I met with them, I had, again, pre-digital age, lots of rolls of film in a camera bag, some exposed pictures I'd taken, some not. So we took a, this was prearranged, a fresh roll of film, slid open the box carefully so it could be reglued together, opened the Kodak yellow canister, removed the regular film, placed the microfilm in, taped a lead of film back in because they used to come with like six inches of film sticking out and glued the box together and threw it in the box. Wasn't somebody, I thought it was a very good idea and it was unchallenged on the way out.

Debbi (04:00): And it was much less conspicuous than a pumpkin.Howard (04:06): So I was bold and I thought, oh, this is easy. I can go back every year and do this kind of thing. And that turned out to be misconstrued because I went back the next year and I got arrested for meeting with dissidents. But fortunately, I'd actually transferred a different manuscript to the Dutch Embassy at that time because again, they're KGB agents. They would stand outside a little phone booth like a London booth, and Russians couldn't enter a foreign embassy. But when I was arrested, I didn't have anything incriminating on me, and they didn't know actually about any of these prior events. They didn't even know I'd been in Russia the year before. I had a new passport, still with my name, and they were just picking me up for meeting with dissidents, with people protesting the government.(05:06): And so they interrogated me for a few days. It was generally polite. Interestingly, in Moscow, the Russians have a great interest in Jack London, in the writer, I think because the Canadian Arctic, if that's a proper term, is reminiscent of the Soviet North, the Russian North and Siberia. And so they're very akin to his writings. He's one of the writers that's most sought after in Russia. Now they can get books. It's a different world. And they asked me a lot about Jack London novels, and I wondered if this was for a long time, meaning years. I wondered was this surreptitious? Were they trying to get me—this one interrogator who spoke perfect American English. Was he trying to relax me, so I gave up anything? But I concluded, I just read it in a novel, in one of the Martin Cruz Smith novels. Again about Jack London, the Gorky Park writer, and I concluded they just wanted to know about Jack London, and we had a lot of time because I wasn't going anywhere.

Debbi (06:26): That's fascinating. That really is. Let's see. Tell us about the Jerusalem Spy series and what inspired you to write it.

Howard (06:36): I did my junior abroad in Jerusalem. I got wedded for a taste of traveling, and then I had these, I went to the Arab countries rather than study for finals. Those days, again, I keep talking about like I'm old, but my son's getting married next week, so maybe I am a little bit, where security was less concerned. I was able to go to Cyprus to the American Embassy, and they issued me a new passport on the spot as long as I gave them my old passport, which had Israeli stamps in it for them to hold in the safe in the embassy in Nicosia. So for a number of years I had two active passports and it wasn't terribly special, but they only allowed me to have one in my possession. And I went to Lebanon the first time from Cyprus, and then I went to Syria, which became a passion of mine in my life. Up to this day, I'm helping Syrian refugees who've come to Los Angeles with adjusting, sometimes aiding them with financial for legal issues. Often they're about divorce and not about asylum and visas. So I wrote these five books. I think there are five. There's one that's not republished, so I'm always confused how many I have. You have to find it online.Debbi (08:30): I understand.

Howard (08:30): It's an old hardcover edition, it's not digital. About sort of moral ambiguity, gray issues I can say now because it's a current time in the Middle East. My parents were Holocaust survivors. My father lost his entire family in Poland. My mother was in Auschwitz. These things affected me and affected me maybe in a way that's popular with some and unpopular with others. I'm very unhappy, which is an understatement to see what Israel is doing in Gaza, starving people. My mother, illustrative of this point, she was a very attractive woman, Hungarian, blue-eyed blonde, and her identity was very much centered on her looks. That's what she cared about. And so she always was slim and whatever well about in her mid-eighties, early eighties, she got dementia and the first thing she said was—not the first thing, but very quickly—she said, I didn't eat for a year. I'm going to eat. Because she was referring to so many decades earlier to not being able to eat in Auschwitz. And she blew up about 60 pounds before everybody got a sort of control.

(10:03): She was still cooking then. Then later, she was put under a more restrictive diet. But for me to see Israelis, Jews starving a population in the way my mother and her family and my father's family, most of them died in Auschwitz too, is a shocking experience for me and incomprehensible and an unacceptable and an unforgiving experience. So I've been writing about the conundrum of these areas. I've written a lot, as I said about Syria, and even now we have my Syrian friends tell me my latest book, The Syrian Sunset deals with the period of Bashar al-Assad and chemical weapons. Now, there's been a new regime come in, and I have scenes in the novel about Sednaya Prison, which was an awful place in some detail. And the prison has been liberated for the first time in decades, and everybody's out, it's closed and the horrors revealed.

(11:20): However, the new government in Syria is greatly fundamentalist. They want women to ride in the back of the bus separately. They've closed the great music school in Aleppo in northern Syria because music distracts from piety and study of religion in Islam for fundamentalists, not for your average wonderful Muslim, but for these fundamentalists. So now you have more ambiguity. You have people who threw out the murderous Bashar, but they're suppressing women's rights, killing in their own right, and they want to stop co-ed education. And as his friend of mine said, even in Tehran in Iran at the university, men and women study together, but in Syria, they want to stop it. So these are the kinds of things I'm writing about in the series of novels, historical novels.

Debbi (12:21): Well, these are very, very timely and important topics. I'm really glad you're doing this. I noticed you're on a website called We Are Not Numbers. As a big fan of the old TV show, The Prisoner, I couldn't help but be intrigued by that particular line.

Howard (12:45): I don't remember how I got started with them even. It's been a few years, it's not happening now because of the war in Gaza. But before this last war, this group, I used to mentor writers in the Gaza Strip via Zoom and Facebook with their stories, which were invariably autobiographical.

(13:14): And their line was, we are people, we are not numbers. And one in particular that I've talked about and written about, a young woman's story, and I had mostly women. I had all women in fact, because for some reason the men weren't doing it. The women, maybe they felt more open, maybe they felt freer, maybe they weren't worried about saving face. But she talks about her really close friend who got very ill, couldn't be accommodated in the hospitals in Gaza. So she got flown to Jerusalem to attend, to be taken care of in the Israeli Hadassah hospital, and she got to walk around and see the city. And the author who's writing this autobiographical story is talking about how her whole life, she lives in this strip of 25 by five miles and she's never been out and she's not allowed to leave. It's blockaded by Egypt on the south and by Israel on the north and on the seas by the Israelis. And she says she wished she could get deathly ill so that she could be taken to Jerusalem and see this wonderful city that's

My guest this week on the Crime Cafe podcast is the award-winning author of the Detective Parrott and Quinn McFarland Mystery Series, Saralyn Richard!

Check out our discussion about her latest work, including the Quinn McFarland novels and a new historical novel in the works, inspired by her grandparents, about the 1900 Storm in Galveston, Texas.

Treat yourself to a PDF copy of the transcript.

Debbi (00:54): Hi everyone. My guest today is the award-winning author of the Detective Parrot Mysteries and the Quinn McFarland Mysteries, as well as other books. Her laudable goal is to change the world one book at a time, which I think is a great, great goal. It's my pleasure to introduce today's guest, Saralyn. Richard. Hi, Saralyn. How are you doing? It's been a long time.

Saralyn (01:19): I'm good. It's wonderful to be back with you, Debbi.

Debbi (01:23): It's wonderful to have you on. Thank you. Before we delve into the world of Quinn McFarland, I have to ask about good old Detective Parrott. Do you plan to continue that series?

Saralyn (01:37): I do. I do.

Debbi (01:39): Awesome.

Saralyn (01:40): But I generally give him a rest and he gives me a rest after a book just to have some time to regroup and have some new things happen in his life. New things happen in my life. So I kind of alternate between Detective Parrott books and other books.

Debbi (02:04): That's a great approach actually. That way you don't get burnt on doing the same sort of thing. It adds a little variety.

Saralyn (02:14): And he doesn't get burned with me asking a million questions. I like it when he comes to me and he whispers in my ear and I don't have to beg and plead for, give me a new story.

Debbi (02:31): That's great. I like that. That's absolutely a wonderful approach. What inspired you to write about a woman who works in her family's mortuary?

Saralyn (02:43): Well, Quinn is more than that. She works in that mortuary because she is kind of withdrawn from society. She had a very bad experience when she was young in high school, and she doesn't really trust people. She really just kind of resorts to her family business, which happens to be a mortuary, and there she can be herself. She doesn't have to worry because dead people don't hurt you and they don't talk about you and they don't tell lies about you and things like that. So she's gotten very comfortable in that life and in the first book, which was Bad Blood Sisters, she was just about to turn 30, and it was a big aha moment for her that life is passing her by and she's not accomplishing any of her goals. Originally, she wanted to be in the medical profession, and she is an embalmer, so that is considered the medical profession, but she wanted to be on the living side of things, and she hasn't done that.

(04:17): She hasn't gotten married, she hasn't had a family. She hasn't really made friends since high school. And so she's uncomfortable with the place that she's in in her life, and boom, suddenly she's thrown into solving a mystery and she becomes an amateur sleuth, and that's Bad Blood Sisters. And by the end of Bad Blood Sisters, she is getting herself more on track. When the second book begins, which is Mrs. Oliver's Twist, she has foresworn police matters and crime. She doesn't want to have anything to do with that anymore, and she actually wants to leave the mortuary business and become a physician's assistant. And she's applied to that school and she's about to get in and she's feeling a little guilty that she's leaving her family in the lurch, but she's ready to move on and she's promised, well, she's now got a husband. That's a bit of a spoiler, but she's promised him and she's promised her parents no more criminal activity, no more searching for perpetrators.

(05:41): And then suddenly she is thrown into another mystery because her very favorite teacher from high school who helped her get through that rough period in high school turns up dead, and she's in the morgue and the police come to ask her to identify the body, and so she feels that she can't turn her back on this woman who helped her so much. So she gets involved and that's the second book. But to answer your question, the mortuary is really an important part of every community. The service that's provided by the people who work there is so important, and it's something that most people don't want to have anything to do with because most people are uncomfortable about death. My experience, and I've interviewed a lot of people who work in funeral homes because I write mysteries, and so I have opportunity to talk to them. My experience is that they're all very kind, very loving people who really want to take care of their customers, their clients, and Quinn is like that. And so I really wanted to shine a light on that industry a little bit, and it also is a perfect place to put somebody who's going to get involved with crimes because dead people end up in mortuaries. So it all worked out.

Debbi (07:25): That's true. That's quite a concept too. I like the way you've set up that character with a backstory like that, and then the realization that, oops, life is passing by. I got to do something. How much research did you do on mortuaries or anything else in terms, when you wrote these novels?

Saralyn (07:50): I'm a big research person. It's really one of my favorite parts of being an author because I love learning new things. I love meeting new people. I love interviewing them. I love going to see how things work. And so I did quite a bit of research and I've had lots of encounters with people in funeral homes, but because of the book, I've had to get pretty detailed. I've had to go through an autopsy, go through an embalming process, what does it look like? What does it smell like, what does the room look like? Because I want my book to be as authentic as possible. At the same time, I don't want to gross out my readers and tell them more detail than they really need to know for the story. So there's finding that right balance, but the research is a lot of fun, and I found almost everybody that I ever talked to, so willing to help and help with a book and be mentioned in a book or have their job mentioned in a book. They're flattered and they're very forthcoming with information, and that's what I love about doing the research. It gives me an entree into a whole different world.

Debbi (09:32): It's kind of the same impetus that a journalist would have, to find out more, to learn. Let's see. Do you have an arc for this character? Do you have an endpoint in mind? I'm not saying you have to tell us what it is.

Saralyn (09:52): Yes and no. I have ideas about where she's going to end up, but I'm a pantser. I'm really not a plotter. And I have experimented with being a plotter. I've listened to webinars by very famous writers who say, you must, you must outline.

Debbi (10:22): Banish that word from all this.

Saralyn (10:25): I tried. I've tried. I've tried to sit down and write an outline, but it frustrates me to do that because it takes away the creativity that is so much of the joy of writing. And I myself do not want to know the ending. When I start a book, I want to surprise myself. I want to entertain myself. I want to puzzle myself. I want to put myself in the role of a reader. I feel like if I'm writing with a lot of expectation and joy, then the reader is going to read it with that same emotion. Exactly. It gets across in the prose. So I really don't plan too far ahead for my characters. I do have ideas, though.

Debbi (11:35): I myself have a tendency to plot things, but I don't always end up following that thing that I wrote out ahead of time. It's kind of like, I don't know, after say the midpoint, anything could happen, really. I might end up in almost the same place that I had imagined at the beginning, but who knows?

(11:56): It just seems to be the right place to end it. Something like that. I don't know what it is. It's like a kind of a hybrid approach I want to plot, but I can't do it completely. I can't just write everything out.

Saralyn (12:10): Well, it's like real life because you may have a plan for yourself, and something happens to hijack that plan that turns out to be even better than what you had planned. So in real life that happens. And in books, that happens too.

Debbi (12:33): Very true. Very true. What are you currently working on?

Saralyn (12:41): Well, I have to smile over this because when I was 15 years old, I wanted to write a book about Galveston, Texas during the 1900 Storm, which Galveston is my hometown. My grandparents were here for the 1900 Storm. I've always been fascinated by it. And at the time when I was 15, there wasn't that much written about it. So I started doing research in the library. I researched for 10 years. I read everything that they had in the library about the 1900 Storm. I had extensive notes. I had my plot in mind. I had everything ready to go, but I didn't write the book. I started writing the book in the 1980s on a Macintosh computer. Do you remember those, little screen?

Debbi (13:46): Oh, yeah.

Saralyn (13:49): And I had about a hundred pages written, and every time I sat down to write though, I had to reread what I had written. And pretty soon I was spending all my time reading and not having time to write. So I didn't get that far into the book. And then that computer crashed, so I lost that manuscript, and that was my first manuscript. Well, in the meantime, many people have written books about the 1900 Storm and great books. So one of them is Isaac's Storm, and one of them is The Promise by a friend of mine, Ann Weisgarber. And so I feel like a lot of books have been written about that time period, but not about the rebuilding of Galveston after the storm.

(14:41): And that's really where my grandparents' story takes place. Anyway, so I still hadn't written it and hadn't written it, and finally I decided,...

My guest for this episode of the Crime Cafe podcast is clinical psychotherapist and crime writer Harper Kincaid.

Learn more about the challenges and joys of the writing life, along with the inspiration for her books and advice for anyone who wants to write.

Download a copy of the transcript here.

Debbi (00:54): Hi everyone. My guest today is the USA Today bestselling author of the books in the Bookbinder Mystery series, Bookbinding Mystery series. Her work has been published in a variety of publications including Writer's Digest Magazine and CrimeReads, and many, many others. It's my pleasure to have with me today, Harper Kincaid. Hi Harper.

Harper (01:19): Hey, Deb. To everybody here. Such a fabulous treat to be able to meet with you today and talk.

Debbi (01:26): Awesome. Yeah, it's great to meet you too. And I love your name, Harper. You weren't named for Harper Lee, were you?

Harper (01:32): No, and honestly, it's a pen name because I'm also a licensed clinical psychotherapist, and so I try to keep, I don't really keep the streams very separate anymore, but when I first started writing, I was doing child and adolescent social work and I was writing dirty romance and people getting killed. So maybe you want to not have that come up in the same Google search for that kind of thing.

Debbi (02:03): Understandable. Yes, very much so. Let's see. You were born in California and raised in Florida. Then—I love this quote—"moved like a nomad with a bounty" on your head.

Harper (02:15): I did.

Debbi (02:17): Where are you living now?

Harper (02:19): So I have lived right outside of Washington DC in a town, Vienna, Virginia, Northern Virginia. Actually, the Bookbinding series is based there and in the series we're not going to talk too much about it, but it's a combination of places and people and businesses that are really there and some that I've made up. And a girlfriend of mine said it's Vienna zhuzhed up in the books. So I've been there for almost 20 years at this point. But it's true. I lived in New Orleans, I lived all over South Florida. I lived in Northern California, but we're East Coasters and we are there in the DC area, which is an interesting time to be there, to say the least.

Debbi (03:04): Well, cool. I'm glad you're relatively close to where I am.

Harper (03:10): And where are you based? Remind me.

Debbi (03:10): I'm in Columbia, Maryland.

Harper (03:13): Oh, I'm going to wave. *waving*

Debbi (03:16): Hey! *waving* Right across the river. Hey, there, across the river, Vienna and all that. Wow.

Harper (03:24): It's nice. It's funny, when I first came to the area, I did not understand this demarcation between Maryland and Virginia that people, like Virginia people did not really go over to Maryland, vice versa. And I was like, it's not that far. What's the big deal? And I don't know if that's ever been your experience, but that was something I found really strange.

Debbi (03:47): I have found a little peculiar myself when I first came here because I'm originally from New York and I've lived in all these different places too, like California, Pennsylvania, and then back DC for one summer. I mean, it's just here, there and everywhere. Indeed. So when you encounter something like that, you're kind like, what?

Harper (04:11): Yeah, every region, I guess.

Debbi (04:13): And then there's the traffic.

Harper (04:13): Oh, the traffic is never going to get better.

Debbi (04:18): Oh, it is outrageous around here. It really is, and it always makes its way into my books somehow. I mean, I write about around here and one of the things I always write about is traffic. The traffic is terrible.

Harper (04:30): It's true. Everyone can relate to that for sure.

Debbi (04:32): For sure. Yeah, and anytime I've been in Los Angeles, everybody there is so polite by comparison to here, yet people complain about the traffic there and I just don't understand it.

Harper (04:44): Every region has its little peccadillos, right?

Debbi (04:47): I suppose so, yeah. I guess if I were living in LA, I would have my peccadillos about the traffic there.

Harper (04:54): You absolutely would.

Debbi (04:55): Yes, absolutely. For sure. What was it that inspired you to write the Bookbinder Mysteries? Why a bookbinder in a bookstore?

I wanted to learn the book business. So I ended up getting a job at my local independent bookseller Bards Alley in Vienna. And I just loved all the characters and the people that would come in.

Harper (05:05): Right. Well, it was art imitating life a little bit because I had finished my graduate education for clinical psychotherapy, but I was writing more full-time and I wanted to learn the book business. So I ended up getting a job at my local independent bookseller Bards Alley in Vienna. And I just loved all the characters and the people that would come in. And it was around that time when I was making the switch from romance to mysteries, cozy mysteries, and my agent Jill Marsal from Marsal Lyon, she said, I've been talking with a couple of editors, and they would really love something that's based in a bookstore in a southern town, but it's a feminist and maybe you could throw some nuns and a German Shepherd in there. It was really specific and weird. And the irony of that was that I did do that.

(06:07): I put the proposal together, and the one other editor who really wanted all of those things was the first to reject it. And in the meantime, I had a couple of others who accepted it and then they got to battle it out. And then I was writing that. And so that's where it came from. It was this, when you're in genre fiction, oftentimes it is this collaboration. I mean, sure, it can be just from the author and puts her, his or her or their pitch in there, but sometimes it is like you have these relationships with your agent or other editors and they're like, this is what we're looking for. What do you think? And that's how I got into the romance gig, what I ended up writing got published by one, but then another publisher said, well, that isn't right for us, but we like your voice. Will you write this? So it has more of that collaboration sort of a feel to it. I mean, versus maybe literary or memoir or something like that. So that's how I got into it. And the people of my town really, they love to see who's who. They all want you to figure out who the villain was. I always give a very PC answer. I say, if you like the character, it's based on you, and if you don't like it, it's something I made up. It's just a way to keep the peace. It's a good way to keep the piece, for sure.

[W]hat I ended up writing got published by one, but then another publisher said, well, that isn't right for us, but we like your voice. Will you write this? So it has more of that collaboration sort of a feel to it.

Debbi (07:30): Absolutely. Yeah. Never tell 'em it's based on real life.

Harper (07:34): No, no, for sure. Although real life can sometimes be even more interesting.

Debbi (07:39): Oh yeah, certainly.

Harper (07:41): For sure. Yeah.

Debbi (07:42): I mean it's like you can't make it up.

Harper (07:44): That's true.

Debbi (07:44): It's real.

Harper (07:45): That's right.

Debbi (07:47): Let's see. So your second book in that series had a Shakespearean theme. I couldn't help noticing. Does the play itself work its way into the plot, or is it just a play on words?

Harper (07:58): It's more of the play on words. There are Shakespearean elements for sure, and there is the, every chapter begins with a Shakespeare quote, not always from Midsummer Night's Dream, but from any of them. But then that's sort of your clue of what the theme of the chapter's going to be. So it's a nice little homage and a way for me to share my love for theater. I love any kind of musical theater, plays, whether it's Shakespeare, whether it's comedy of errors or things like that. So that's where that came from. And it could have gone a lot deeper into the whole really playing out the Shakespearean themes, but I was on a short deadline, so we were like, okay, let's just bang this out. And it was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun.

So it's a nice little homage and a way for me to share my love for theater. I love any kind of musical theater, plays, whether it's Shakespeare, whether it's comedy of errors or things like that.

Debbi (08:50): Do you have background in the theater, just out of curiosity?

Harper (08:54): I did some acting back in 1912 when I was a teenager in college, but it was always an avocation, never the main thing. Then my oldest daughter sort of was doing the same thing again in her teenage years, and then we made a right turn into something else. But I absolutely adore the theater. I am fortunate enough, I'll drive up to the city, New York, and I'll see things off-Broadway or Broadway and someday I'll write a play. I haven't gotten there yet, but right now I just, I'm a super fan.

Debbi (09:32): Well, that's really cool. I think it's cool that you would like to write a play someday.

Harper (09:39): People always probably ask you this too. Oh, where do you get the ideas? And you're like, that's not the problem. I have so many ideas. What am I going to commit to take the time? Right. So

Debbi (09:53): Absolutely

Harper (09:54): On the list,

Debbi (09:56): And it takes some time to break into something like playwriting or screenwriting, I got to tell you.

Harper (10:01): Really. Absolutely. Well, you know, so.

Debbi (10:06): Oh boy. Yes, indeed. I know.

Harper (10:09): I would love to hear about that another time.

Debbi (10:11): Yeah, we can talk about that. Were you always interested in writing as a child?

Harper (10:20): That was always something since I was four years old, and then I kind of dabbled with it on and off to be a writer, even if you're writing fiction, there is an act of bravery to it. There's an unveiling of yourself....

My guest for this episode of the Crime Cafe podcast is journalist and crime writer Jonathan Whitelaw.

Wherein we discuss important topics like treating your writing career like a business. Along with really great topics, like Doctor Who, James Bond, and Terry Pratchett. Just sayin'. :)

You can download a PDF of the transcript here.

Debbi (00:54): Hi everyone. My guest today is an award-winning journalist and author. He once worked in Scottish politics, then moved into journalism where he covered a wide variety of topics for major publications. He appears on the Bloody Brothers Podcast and the Bloody Scotland Book Club. His novel, The Concert Hall Killer, was recently shortlisted for the Whodunnit Award for Best Traditional Mystery by the Crime Writers of Canada. Originally from Scotland, from Glasgow, he is now living in Canada in Alberta. It's my pleasure to have with me Jonathan Whitelaw. Hi, Jonathan. How are you doing?

Jonathan (01:37): Hi there. I'm very well, thank you, Debbi. Thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Debbi (01:42): Oh, it is a pleasure to have you on, and I love your accent. It is so beautiful and musical.

Jonathan (01:49): Thank you very much. It's the only one I have.

Debbi (01:51): I love it. I love it. It's great.

Jonathan (01:54): Very kind.

Debbi (01:55): What was it that took you from Glasgow to Alberta?

Jonathan (02:00): My wife. Short and sweet and simple answer, much like her, except the simple part, obviously far from it, she's the brains of the operation and I often say that I always like to try to think that I'm the eye candy of the operation, but I'm not even that, so she's that as well. So yeah, my wife's a doctor, so a few years ago it was pre-pandemic actually. She was at a conference and she got chatting to an expat doctor who's working in a place called North Battleford in Saskatchewan, and he was there promoting Western Canada. And him and my wife got chatting and he effectively offered her a job, but of course, with the pandemic and then my wife completing their training and stuff like that, I was having a baby. Everything got kicked into the very, very long grass for a couple of years, and the job was no longer there when we were ready for it. So by that point, we'd really talked ourselves into it and we'd explored all the options and stuff like that about coming over and visas and permanent residency and things and citizenship beyond that. And we found that there was a job opening in Alberta. A place called Grand Prairie, which is about an hour's flight northwest from Calgary. And that was it. We up sticks and moved wagons west in May 2022, and we haven't looked back since.

[W]e found that there was a job opening in Alberta. A place called Grand Prairie, which is about an hour's flight northwest from Calgary. And that was it. We up sticks and moved wagons west in May 2022, and we haven't looked back since.

Debbi (03:29): Wow. That's really something.

Jonathan (03:31): Yeah

Debbi (03:32): You can write from anywhere, so that's cool.

Jonathan (03:35): Exactly right. Well, I was a journalist as your very, very kind intro mentioned there. I was a journalist, but I write full-time now. I've been able to go full-time writing since we moved to Canada, so it's over three years that I've been a full-time writer. And it was a mixture of circumstances. It was a mixture of where we were going and what we're going to be doing and stuff like that, and The Bingo Hall Detectives as a series sort of picking up. So yeah, it's been a great adventure. We've been made to feel very, very welcome here in Alberta and Canada in general.

Debbi (04:13): It's fantastic.

Jonathan (04:14): And I get to go back to the UK all the time for work. I go back for festivals and stuff like that, and it's only one flight from Calgary, which is great. So it's just a red eye there, and then you're back during the day. So it is good fun, and it's a wonderful part of the world.

Debbi (04:29): That's awesome. Yeah, I know as an American, we tend to look upon Canadians as being really nice people. Do you find that they're very nice?

Jonathan (04:40): Oh, yes. Oh yeah. Very much. Very, very welcoming. And I think a lot of the reasons that we are so comfortable here is that we have been welcomed with open arms everywhere and anywhere we've gone. We've lived, in the three and a bit years that we've been here, we've stayed in three major cities in Alberta. Grand Prairie, Edmonton, and now Calgary and everywhere we go, we've been welcomed with open arms and been made to feel so at home. And it is home now, right? That's the thing. When I go back to the UK, if I'm doing work, if I'm doing festivals and events and stuff like that, when I get back on the plane to fly across the Atlantic, I say it and I feel it. That's me heading home. And we're all very, very grateful as a family. We're very, very grateful for that welcoming. And it's made what has been quite a big life altering transition, so much more easier and so much more pleasant to do. So that's fantastic. We're delighted. We're delighted. We're delighted to be home.

I think a lot of the reasons that we are so comfortable here is that we have been welcomed with open arms everywhere and anywhere we've gone.

Debbi (05:44): Well. You chose the right country on the North American continent.

Jonathan (05:49): Yes.

Debbi (05:49): I think they have their own political problems, but they don't have a tyrant in control, I think. (Ahem!)

Jonathan (05:55): That's very, very true. Very, very true.

Debbi (05:57): I'll try not to say anything more. Things get a little dicey around here.

Jonathan (06:03): Nothing more needed. Nothing more needed. Yeah, absolutely.

Debbi (06:05): No more need be said. Yes, no words. I just read the first chapter of The Garden Club Murders, by the way. And I think your writing is just awesome and can be hilarious at times.

Jonathan (06:18): Thank you very much.

Debbi (06:18): It's just outright hilarious. Your characters are wonderful. Has anyone ever approached you about making a TV show out of your books?

Jonathan (06:27): Oh, you're not allowed to ask that one, Debbi. That's all pretty much on the wraps at the moment. You always ask it, right? You're allowed to ask it. You should never tell a journalist what questions they can and can't ask, as I famously did for over a decade, but I'm just not allowed to answer. So there we go. Mum's the word, mum's the word. What I will say is that it's been a very, very exciting last couple of months, and that's all you're getting.

Debbi (07:00): Oh, wow. Well, I will look forward to seeing something that you wrote up on the telly.

Jonathan (07:05): Thank you very much.

Debbi (07:06): I certainly hope so. Your books are set in Cumbia.

Jonathan (07:11): Yes.

Debbi (07:12): Now I've heard of Cumbia, but I never knew where it was until now. So tell us about Cumbia. What is it like and how does it inform your fiction?

Jonathan (07:21): Yeah, it's a county in England, northwest England. In fact, it's the most Northwesterly county in England. It borders Scotland, it's northern border borders Scotland, and it's home to the Lake District, which as the name suggests is a huge, big national park filled with, I can never remember the amount of it, but it's hundreds and hundreds of lakes. Biggest one's Windermere. Ullswater's another one, where the action takes place in the first book, and it's acres and acres and acres, thousands of acres of this kind of unkempt, uninterrupted countryside, rolling hills, mountains, and you've got little pockets of humanity in there as well. So you've got Carlisle, which is a city, it was a fairly big city, but you've also got places like Kendal and Penrith where most of the action series takes place, and they're all separated by these huge big swathes of open countryside.

So you've got Carlisle, which is a city, it was a fairly big city, but you've also got places like Kendal and Penrith where most of the action series takes place, and they're all separated by these huge big swathes of open countryside.

(08:23): And it's a place, it's a place I know very, very well. I'd holiday there growing up. And when I was grown up, if you can call me grown up, I don't know if a lot of people would argue that I've never grown up, me being one of them. But when you live in Scotland, when you grow up in Scotland, you live in Scotland, Cumbria as a region is always one of these places that you blink and you miss because you're on the train. If you're going down to, say, Manchester, Liverpool, London, or what have you. And it's strangely underrepresented in fiction, modern fiction anyway. And certainly in crime and mystery fiction where you'll maybe find fiction. Obviously you've got your big, big cities across the world, your Londons, your Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Toronto, all these big, big cities have got dozens and dozens and dozens of crime and mystery novels set in them.

(09:19): But in the UK it tends to be either Scotland as a whole or London. Sometimes you get something in Manchester, Birmingham, sort of Midlands and stuff like that. But in terms of Cumbia as a whole, I think I'm one of maybe two or three mystery writers operating in the moment who use that as their back door, which I always thought before I started writing the first book, I always thought, that's madness. It's such a beautiful part of the world, beautiful part of the country, and it's ready made for mystery. It's these little pockets of humanity surrounded by endless countryside. And I always say that, I always say, you can always use some countryside when you're a murder mystery writer because it's a good place to hide a body.

It's such a beautiful part of the world, beautiful part of the country, and it's ready made for mystery. It's these little pockets of humanity surrounded by endless countryside....

My guest for this episode of the Crime Cafe podcast is crime writer and media entrepreneur, Clay Stafford.

Don't miss our discussion of the ways the publishing and filmmaking worlds collide, so to speak. :)

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

Debbi (00:54): Hi everyone. We are back with a new season of the show, which is starting its 11th year. I can't believe I've been doing it this long. And once again, I have with me one of the crime genre's most multimedia and multihyphenate entrepreneurs out there. His business, American Blackguard, does film and television production as well as publishing. He's also the organizer and promoter for the Killer Nashville Conference, which will be coming up later this year. It's my pleasure to introduce my guest, Clay Stafford. Hi, Clay. How are you doing?

Clay (01:34): Hi, Debbi,

Debbi (01:34): Gotta get you on camera. There we go.

Clay (01:38): Hey, how are you?

Debbi (01:39): I'm fine, thank you. How are you?

Clay (01:41): Eleven years.

Debbi (01:42): Eleven freaking years. Can you freaking believe?

Clay (01:45): Stamina. Stamina.

Debbi (01:47): It's insane. There's stamina. Yeah, I'm mustering up the stamina to keep it going. Yeah.

Clay (01:56): Well, for Killer Nashville, we're coming up on 20 years.

Debbi (01:59): Wow, that's impressive.

Clay (02:02): Yeah, so ... stamina.

Debbi (02:06): Amen to that, man. Amen. I hear you. Apart from getting ready for the conference, what projects are you currently working on? What's on your front burner, so to speak?

Clay (02:17): I've actually got three projects that I'm working on right now. One is a nonfiction book and the other is a memoir. And because I come from a very eclectic kind of Appalachian background, and then Country Boy went to the city, and so there's some things to discuss there. And then I'm working on a novel now, the first in his series, and it's got a few short stories and poems and stuff like that out and some essays, but those are the long-term projects that I'm working on right now.

Debbi (02:58): Very cool. It's funny you should say you were a country boy who found the city. I was a city girl who ended up in the country. Briefly.

Clay (03:10): Yeah. So I sort of came back. I was a New York guy, a Los Angeles guy, and a Miami guy, and went back and forth from place to place in those areas, but ended up in Nashville. So I don't know if I'll actually, we can call Nashville the country, but it's back towards home where I'm from in Tennessee.

Debbi (03:38): It's not quite as country as say, Bakersfield, California.

Clay (03:43): No, I've been to Bakersfield. I love Bakersfield. But no, it's still, we've got our family farm back in east Tennessee, and so I've still got roots in that area and spend a lot of time in north Georgia and areas like that. So I get out in the tick country, so.

Debbi (04:10): Excellent, excellent. Very good. Nashville is also a big place for music, correct?

Clay (04:16): Yeah, they do a little bit of music here,

Debbi (04:20): A little bit of music, just a little,

Clay (04:26): Yeah. And the little community I live in is replete with country music and gospel pop performers, writers, producers and stuff. And so we have these tour buses that come by all the time, and I never thought I would live in an area where tour buses come by to point at houses and things and say, so and so lives there, so-and-so lives there, but it's just, yeah, Nashville's got its charm, that's for sure.

Debbi (05:00): My goodness, that must be quite a thing. Having tour buses come through your neighborhood. Things have changed so fast in terms of the publishing industry and the movie industry and the television industry that I see them kind of coming together. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Clay (05:24): Well, I think that they're definitely tied together now because we are in a position where we're doing IP, intellectual property more. That's what I focus on more right now. I used to say that I was a writer or a filmmaker, but right now I would say that I'm an IP creator. And because so many, it's different. It's no different than you take a book and then make an audiobook and make a ebook from it. It's the same property that's being construed in multiple media. And so I think yes, they all come together because it's the way people are digesting the entertainment and information right now, so it is becoming one. But for me, with my eclectic life as a filmmaker and a writer and all of that, for me it has always been one. So for me, it's almost like, oh, the world is coming full circle back to where I've always been, which was create something and then just decide what plate we want to serve the meal on.

I used to say that I was a writer or a filmmaker, but right now I would say that I'm an IP creator.

(06:40): And that's what all these different medias are, just the plate that you're serving the meal on. And some people want to eat out of a hardcover book and some people want to eat out of a movie theater. And so really you're just satisfying the needs and the options and choices, the wonderful options and choices because there are people who are auditory, people who are visual and being able to read and comprehend. All of those are strengths, and we're all wired differently. And more and more we're finding psychologically that each of us learns differently and processes differently. And creating all these avenues for single stories is to me, like all progress for me. I love progress. I love technology, I love innovation. And so for me, I think that it's an incredible time to be in.

Debbi (07:43): It is definitely. People are doing things out there that are just amazing, but sometimes it's a matter of being seen, being visible. Do you have any thoughts on what authors can do to make themselves more visible in a way that's not simply saying, Hey, buy my book. Buy my book?

Clay (08:05): Yeah, I think just being authentic. I think we are really in a position where writers used to have this hallowed place as these intellectual people who lived in ivory towers and produce tomes that everyone loved to read. And I think even the noir authors were romanticized to a great degree because we know what writing is. It's sitting there and typing on a keyboard and watching the cursor go across the screen. It's very exciting. I think that there's been a change in our society, just like there is a change in technology that we just talked about in the previous paragraph where you don't even have to have, you're going to get hate mail for this maybe, but you don't even have to have any talent. You don't have to have skills, you don't have to have whatever to be a celebrity. You just have to be on TV.

(09:28): I mean, you can take this any way you want, but you can be anybody in America that you want, as long as you've been on TV and have had no experience at all, you can be anything you want because you've been on TV. So in terms of that, I say that writers have come to a point that they can't rely on their intellectual laurels. They can't rely on their talent and skills anymore. They have to become visual. And that means being on TV. Well, even in our lifetime, that whole concept has changed. It's no longer TV, but what in the world is TV? Everything's a streaming something. So I think the way to get out there and people have become, I think you've got to get out of your head in terms of being and thinking, looking at it from your side out, and instead look from the other side towards you.

(10:39): And what they really, really are looking for is some truth and reality. They're fascinated by people's lives. That's why you have so many reality TV shows and reality programs and even reality forensic files, reality, whatever, because people are really interested in other people's lives. Some fancy and glamorous and some just strange and crazy, but all of them seem to be like a train wreck. You watch, I don't want to say that your life, writers, needs to become a train wreck, but I would say that getting your story, getting your personality out there and in a way, becoming your own celebrity, because even posting on everybody used to put on post on social media, even just posting on social media now with the algorithms, you're completely lost on that. I think you should do things that you can control,

(11:50): Have your own, if you have a YouTube channel or you have your own newsletter list or you have your own something that you can control and something that you own as opposed to social media and things that you have no control over their algorithms. That's the things that writers need to do in terms of building a platform. And then I'd say build it on authenticity, not fluff, not buy my product. But I mean on social media, I guess some of my greatest likes and positive comments when I'm sitting there with my Doberman lap dogs sitting in my lap because people, they respond to things that are real. And so I think, in that, people get to know you, not because you're pushing it on them, but because of their natural curiosity of, oh, Debbi Mack seems very interesting. What does she do? Oh, she does that. Well, that's interesting. I'll take a look at that. And I think you let the, we are at a place now where the consumer, the reader is the one who will follow the breadcrumbs if they choose to follow the breadcrumbs, but we no longer sell anything. And I think writers, many of the writers that I know and meet and talk with are wanting to sell something. We no longer sell anything anymore.

Have your own, if you have a YouTube channel or you have your own newsletter list or you have your own something that you can control and something that you own as opposed to social media and things that you have no control over their algorithms.

Debbi (13:36): Exactly.

Clay (13:38): We show up, we be ourselves, and we attract the people just like friends....

My guest for this episode of the Crime Cafe podcast is crime writer J.D. Barker.

Don't miss our discussion on writing across different genres and the benefits of collaborative writing.

You can download a copy of transcript here.

Debbi (00:52): Hi everyone. My guest today is a New York Times and international bestselling author whose work has been broadly described as suspense thrillers, often incorporating elements of horror, crime mystery, science fiction and supernatural. That's quite a bit. His debut novel Forsaken was a finalist for the Bram Stroker Award in 2014. Several of his works have been optioned for adaptation to motion pictures. It's my pleasure to have with me my guest, JD Barker. Hi, JD. How you doing today?

J.D. (01:32): I'm doing great, Debbi. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Debbi (01:34): Well, it's my pleasure to have you on, believe me. I'm glad you're here. I love that you have no problem with mixing genres in your work. I think that's awesome. Would you say that there's any particular genre that tends to be dominant in your writing?

J.D. (01:51): Well, it's funny. I grew up, I've been writing my entire life, but I worked behind the scenes for about 20 some years. I worked as a book doctor and a ghost writer, basically helping other people get published, and one of the things I saw over and over again is an author would write a particular book and it would hit, and then all of a sudden they had to write that same book, but different for the next 20 books. The publisher just wanted that same book but different, and honestly, that scared me. I didn't want to get caught in that kind of hole, so I made a conscious effort from the very beginning. I'm a huge fan of horror. I'm a huge fan of thrillers, so I basically bounced back and forth, and I think my Wikipedia page probably sums it up the best. I think that's what you were reading from, but I describe it as a suspense novel as the common thread with little elements of horror, of sci-fi of this, of that and what that allows me to do. As long as I keep that thriller-suspense framework in place, I can branch out a little bit and the readers come along for the ride. It's not so different that it frightens 'em off.

As long as I keep that thriller-suspense framework in place, I can branch out a little bit and the readers come along for the ride. It's not so different that it frightens 'em off.

Debbi (02:51): That's really cool. That's great. So it gives you more flexibility

J.D. (02:54): And agents hate it, and publishers hate it because again, they want you to write that same book, but different. But I'm finding that the fans, they actually enjoy it because I'm not giving them the same book every single time. I think it gets old as a reader too, so it allows me to mix it up and just keep it fresh.

Debbi (03:12): Totally, I agree. Yeah, so you're directly reaching the readership as opposed to going through what a publisher thinks this should work, which is something I've advocated a long time.

J.D. (03:27): Everybody approaches this from different angles, which is something else I picked up on over time. As a business model, publishers really only care about selling that book, the one they have in front of 'em, the one they signed you for. That's really their only priority. But you as an author, you really need to look at your business, your model, your brand, and approach it from that standpoint. And you can really see the stark differences. If you walk into a major bookstore, you walk into a Barnes & Noble and you're going to see pretty much the title of every book is huge. The author name is tiny little print at the top or the bottom. It's an afterthought because the publisher knows they have to put it on there, but they just want to sell that one title. But if you look around that same bookstore at the brand name authors, the ones that we all know, the household names, you see Stephen King, Nora Roberts, James Patterson, John Grisham, their names are huge, and the title is nice and small, and they've obviously built up to that over time. But I think as an author, you really need to keep that in mind from the get go. And if you're with a traditional publisher, push to have your name as large as it possibly can, and if you're indie publishing do the same. I mean, there's no reason not to.

Debbi (04:34): Wow, that's great advice. Excellent. I agree with you. I have to say, you are definitely an example of a successful indie author. What did you do to develop a readership?

J.D. (04:52): I did a lot of different things. I wish I could pin it down to one in particular. I fell into being an indie author. It wasn't actually my goal when I was working as a book doctor and a ghostwriter, that was all for traditional publishers, so I had fully intended to go that route. But when I finished up my first novel, it was called Forsaken. I went to query agents, and even though I worked in publishing, I had no idea how to actually query an agent. I never had to do it before, so I did it all wrong. I bought a list of agents, I think there were 200 of 'em on an Excel spreadsheet. I wrote a form letter literally to whom it may concern, and I sent every single one of 'em the exact same email. I sent them the first three chapters of my book as a PDF file, as an attachment.

(05:31): And for the most part, most of them ignored it because agents are very particular in what they want, and they'll list the specs on their website. They want to see the first chapter, they want to see the first three. They want it in an Arial font. They want it in Times New Roman font. Every agent's got their own little quirky little thing, and if you don't do that quirky little thing the second you end up in their inbox and they catch it, they just hit the delete key. So I basically queried all wrong. I didn't get any real responses, and I decided to indie publish. But I made a conscious effort when I did that to basically come out with something that was on par with something coming out of a traditional publisher. So I hired professionals across the board for editing, for formatting, for cover design. Ultimately, we released a hard cover and audiobook and an ebook on the same day with plans to put out the paperback six months later, which was the traditional model at the time. And I basically made it as indistinguishable from something coming out of Random House, and that worked back then in 2014. It allowed me to get in front of a lot of places that I probably wouldn't have if people knew that I was an indie author, and I basically hit the ground running.

I decided to indie publish. But I made a conscious effort when I did that to basically come out with something that was on par with something coming out of a traditional publisher.

Debbi (06:35): Yeah, it's funny you have the same kind of story that I had. I also fell into indie publishing. It's like I had a contract with a publisher. The publisher went out of business nine months later, and it's like, I can't sell a series that has been published and then gone out of print nine months later. It just doesn't happen.

J.D. (06:58): No, that's a whole other animal.

Debbi (07:00): It was very frustrating. What year did you make the Times list?

J.D. (07:07): I've been on there a bunch of times now. I think the first time, let's see, we're in 2025. It was probably around 2020. It was with The Coast to Coast Murders, and I wrote it with James Patterson. We hit number two.

Debbi (07:18): Oh, wow.

J.D. (07:18): And I've hit number two a couple of times now. I just did it again with our latest book. It's called The Writer. We got stuck behind Rebecca Yarros. She was number one. We hit at number two, and I really had hoped to hit number one with this one just because you can't put number two New York Times bestseller across the top of your book. It just doesn't look right. But Rebecca Yarros, she is a powerhouse. We weren't able to knock her off that spot.

Debbi (07:44): Oh, well. I knew somebody who was second to JK Rowling, and I said, Hey, as far as I'm concerned, it makes you number one. So as far as I'm concerned, you may as well be number one. That is amazing. That really is amazing. Can you talk a little bit about what steps you took that took you from being indie author to having your work optioned by producers or whoever?

J.D. (08:13): Yeah. Well, I've had a lot of crazy things happen in my career, and basically I call it capturing lightning in a bottle. I've done it a bunch of different times. So with the very first book Forsaken, when I wrote it, I had to explain where the wife buys a journal and just to get the book done, I wrote that she walked into Needful Things, Stephen King's store from his book and bought it there. I fully expected to have to change that because you can't do that sort of thing without a bunch of lawyers knocking on your door. But my wife read it and she said, you know what? Before you change it, let's see if we can get King's permission to use it. So that's essentially what we did. We found out he had a house in Florida. It was about 10 minutes from my mom's house.

(08:49): So when we were visiting my mom, we printed up the manuscript, we hopped in the car and we figured, well, we'll go over to Stephen King's house. We'll hope to catch him outside. Maybe he's gardening or something. We'll hand him the manuscript, he'll give us a big thumbs up and we'll be on our way. It didn't work out that way. He lives on a little island off the coast of Florida called Casey Key. You go over this tiny little bridge, and if you make a left, you go to the public portion of the island where the restaurants and bars and hotels and stuff are, and if you make a right, you go to the entire half of the island that Stephen King owns. There's immediately a no trespassing sign. Another sign there was a gate, and then another gate. We got about halfway to his house,...