The Crime Cafe

By: Debbi Mack
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  • Interviews and entertainment for crime fiction, suspense and thriller fans.
    © 2015 - 2021 Debbi Mack
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Art Literary History & Criticism Social Sciences
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Episodes
  • Interview with Dan Flanigan – S. 10, Ep. 12

    Interview with Dan Flanigan – S. 10, Ep. 12
    Nov 17 2024
    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. 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,
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  • Interview with Stephen Eoannou – S. 10, Ep. 11

    Interview with Stephen Eoannou – S. 10, Ep. 11
    Oct 27 2024
    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 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” 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,
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  • Interview with Leonard “Kris” Krystalka – S. 10, Ep. 10

    Interview with Leonard “Kris” Krystalka – S. 10, Ep. 10
    Oct 13 2024
    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. 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. 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.
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