August 16, 2025 • 58 mins
Join Off The Shelf Books Podcast host Denise Turney as she talks with David Putnam, former law enforcement professional and author of 15+ crime novels, including The Bone Detective Series, The Misadventures of Imogene Taylor, and The Bruno Johnson Thrillers. Hear how real-life police work fuels his gripping stories, plus get a peek into his life growing organic California avocados with his wife and their three dogs. Tune in!
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
You're listening to the winning literary show Off the Shelf
Books Talk Radio Live with host Denise Turney, author of
the books Long Walk Up, Portia, Love, More Over Me,
Spiral Love Has Many Faces, and Rosetta us Great Hope.
Turn up your dial and get ready for a blast
of feature author interviews for one, one on book festivals,
(00:21):
writing conferences, and so much more. Ready let's go.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Oh we are going to kick it off. Good morning,
Good morning, good morning. Welcome to Author Shelf Books. And
I'm going to start with a quote this from Robert Schuler.
What would you attempt to do if you knew you
would not fail? And I've heard that says I think
from someone else as well, what would you attempt to
(00:50):
do if you knew you would not fail? That might
be the thing you really you really want to do.
But I want to welcome you again. I am. I
was thinking about this last night. It's August the sixteenth.
I said, oh my god, we are more than halfway
through August. This is something listeners that I always encourage you.
(01:12):
If there's something you want to do this year, particularly,
I would definitely do it now because we're way more
than halfway through the year. You know, it's just these
weeks I get by. Before we introduced this morning's guests,
I usually talk about one of my books, but I'm
encouraging you to just to support authors in general and
(01:35):
indie authors and independent bookstores. And I also encourage you
to drop by my website which is Chesstell dot com,
c h I S tw e l l dot com.
You can read free excerpts from the books, subscribe to
the book lovers having the free newsletter. Again, that's chist
do dot com, c h I, S t e l
(01:58):
l dot com. But I like the focus solely on
in the newsletter, I focus on another author or books
or indie bookstores and not myself. And also on this show,
I like to focus on another author. So let us
go and meet today's very special author. Shelf guests and
today's guest is David Putnam. And David is a former
(02:21):
law enforcement professional. I know we had another guy who
was a cop who was on here. He wrote this
cop series that was kind of had a little comedy
to it that did did well, and he is David
is the author of more than fifteen books, including standalone
novels and detective series such as The Bone Detective Series,
(02:44):
The Misadventures of Imaging Taylor, and the Bruno Johnson Thrillers.
And in addition to writing David and Joyce growing organic
California avocados and the Homie Shares with his wife and
their three dogs. I encourage you to visit David online
at David puttnambooks dot com. And it was a book
(03:05):
publisher with that name wants but it's d a v
I d p U N p U t n A
M b ooks dot com. And one more time, d
A v I d p U t n A M
b O o k s dot com. And here's a
(03:27):
great thing about Off the Shelf. You can go over
to his website and check out his website even as
you listen to today show again David Puttnambooks dot com. Welcome
to Off the Chef.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
David, thank you for having me.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Well, it's a pleasure to have you here with us.
The first two questions I asked every yest to give
our listeners some backstory before we start talking about their books.
So to kick off today's show, David, will you please
tell Off the Chelf listeners where you grew up and
what life was like for you growing up.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
Oh, that's kind of an in depth question. I was
born in Upland, southern California, and was raised in Ontario, California,
and came from a very I thought, unique background, went
to school in Ontario, and I became a cop initially
in Ontario, a cadet first. So I had an added
(04:25):
layer of conflict when I became a cop because I
was dealing with people that I grew up with. And so,
for example, my first year out in a marked unit
black and white, you get a call of a naked
man dancing in the front yard of his house. When
I pull up a very affluent house and there's a
naked man dancing in the front yard, and I look,
(04:46):
and it's my high school psyche teacher I had. So
I put those kind of stories in a fearsome moonlight black.
It's more of a memoir. But that's that's where I
grew up, and that's my background.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
Oh my goodness, that it's very any brothers sisters, Are
you an only child?
Speaker 3 (05:03):
No, there's six of us.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Oh, you got to become a big family. Then. I
know years ago that wouldn't be considered a big family,
but today people would think that was a big family.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
Now, as a kid, what did you want to be
when you grew up?
Speaker 3 (05:20):
Oh, you know, I wanted to be a writer right
from the beginning. I wrote my I tried to write
my first book in junior high school and it had
cowboys and aliens and monoliths in the desert, and I
had a lot of fun trying to write it. And
I tried to write two books in high school. And
then I became enamored in law enforcement, and I kind
of got diverted for a while, and I didn't go
back to writing until nineteen eighty nine, when I was
(05:43):
on a surveillance of a meth lab out in the
Cern Valley, and I kept novels in the backseat of
my car, and when we were at downtime, I got
paid to surveill bad guys and read novels. I mean,
it was the best of both worlds. So I was
I was down my last book in the back seat,
and the author's first book was an international bestseller and
(06:06):
I loved it. So I pick up the second book.
And what happened so often with an author is he'll
write and write and write on one book for ten years,
polishing it, rewrite, and then when he sells that first book,
he has one year to come out with the next book,
and many times the soft more effort isn't as good
as the first one. So this book that I started
(06:28):
reading was just a dog and I was a captive audience.
I read the whole thing, and I thought, you know,
I could do better than this, And so I penned
my first four novels on legal pads in the front
seat of my undercover car, and I quickly found out
that in the good writers, it's a lot more difficult
than it looks.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Yes, Yes, who inspired your love for writing books? You
said you knew as a kid you wanted to be
a writer. Where did that inspiration come from?
Speaker 3 (06:58):
You know, I think when I look back on it,
it was because my fifth grade teacher got me into reading.
And I started reading back in the fifth grade, and
I read everything. My mom was very good about it.
When the Scholastic books came out, she let me order
as many books as i'd want, and so I would
get seven eight books from the Scholastic readers, and I
(07:20):
started reading Robert Lewis Stevenson, and I started reading above
my grade level. And then I thought that I liked
reading so much, I thought, I want to try do
it myself.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
Okay, now is the obsessions of Harvey Usher? Is that
your first standalone novel? And why do you think you
didn't write a standalone novel sooner if it's not your first?
Speaker 3 (07:45):
Well, like I said before, I was a knuckle dragging
street cop and it took me a while to get
the craft down. So I started writing in nineteen eighty nine,
and I wrote, I quit counting my rejects at one
hundred and fifty six rejections. I've had six literary agents.
I was on my thirty eighth novel before I sold
(08:08):
my first novel. I wrote thirty eight manuscripts before I sold. Yeah,
I'm on number sixty eight right now. I sold my
first book in twenty thirteen, and I attribute that to
a shift in my craft and my structure. When I shifted,
I shortened the conflict and it made it more dynamic
(08:28):
entry into my books. So what I do is I write.
I try to write two books at a time, and
one book I call a hobby book, and one book
is a contract book. So Harvey Usher was a story
that I had percolating and it turned out to be
a hobby book, and because of the nature of the storyline,
(08:50):
it had to be a standalone.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
Ah, can you give us an overview of the obsessions
of Harvey Usher?
Speaker 3 (08:57):
So there's three ringers. I used to write a boo
and the one I write I like to enjoy the
most is I write. Instead of writing to the story,
I write to the structure. So I don't know what's
going to happen in the book. So I take an idea,
just one idea, and I just start writing it and
I use the five things the scene needs, the four
seas of the structure of our story arc. So when
(09:19):
Harvey Usher, I had this idea where this eighty year
old man wakes up one morning and there's a woman
in his house and she says that she's married to him,
been married to him for two years. And that only
idea that I had for the whole book. And then
I just let the story fall as it comes out.
So I fulfill the things the scene needs, the five things,
(09:40):
and that pulls me, puts pressure on the text and
pulls me to the next scene. And then I'd seen
sequence three scenes. Then I jump over to another plot
line that I've already developed in those three sequences.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
So what's happening in his story other than why what's
the title the obsessions? Though? What's the obsessed them out?
Where is that the title coming to play in the story.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
He's obsessed with the love of his life, which is
the woman that he had to rescue from the East coast.
And I don't want to give too many reveals away,
but his obsessions are uh, protecting, protecting his wife and
love and loving Sylvia. I think that's her name.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
Okay, okay, So tell us about He's in his eighties, right,
what's his personality like and what was his what was
his career field?
Speaker 3 (10:36):
Well, well, I try not to have a strict structure
that I stick to, and Usher was one of the
first books were when I alternated a timeline, so I
would I would write the current timeline and then skip
to the backstory. So in the current day, Harvey's trying to
(10:57):
uh find the mystery, what's happening to his life? What's
happening with this woman in his house? And then the
next chapter takes us all the way back fifty years
to where all this started, so that the genesis of
the story is alternating in chapters. So current day historical,
(11:19):
current day historical all the way through the book and
as I and I didn't know this was going to
happen until I started writing the book. So Harvey Usher,
that's not his real name, it hits an alias. But
he started as an accountant for the Italian mob on
the East coast and in the historical story, so that's
(11:44):
what got him into trouble. And he's actually eighty years old.
He thinks he might be have a little bit of dementia.
He doesn't. That's causing him to believe because this woman
has gaslighted him so perfectly that he's starting to believe
that maybe he did forget that he got married to her.
And the reader thinks that he's an unreliable narrator because
(12:05):
he's not even actually sure, but that the front story
starts to develop as the backstory is developing, and it
all collides at the end.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
This is what I love listening to Arthur interviews. There's
no way you can really describe the story. The more
you're talking about it, the more interesting. It's becoming to me.
Obsessions of Harvey Usher. So is the woman who shows
up and his life is this? The lady is her
name Rita.
Speaker 3 (12:36):
Is this Rita, Well, her name's not really Rita, but
she looks like Rita from Rita Hayworth. So that's why
he calls her reader. She has read hair and she's
a bombshell. And there's no way that he realizes that.
You know, she's thirty five forty years old and he's eighty,
and he knows there's there's something going on, so because
(13:00):
just because of the age difference, but he calls she
calls the cops right away and says, get this woman
out of the house. In the first chapter, I'm not
giving it away. And the cops show up and they said,
and a woman tells them, hey, you know he's he's
a little bit elderly. He's forgetting things. And the cop says,
will show me some identification, and she has a driver's
license with her name on it and the address that
(13:21):
that that she's his wife. So it's a very advanced
con that's going on. And the reader does is trying
to find out what's happening at the same time as
the backstory is developing and how he ends up in
hiding out in southern California.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Wow, can you introduce us to just a few other
major and minor characters who help to move this story forward.
Speaker 3 (13:47):
Ooh, well, his wife. It's a love story really because
he falls in love with this woman and then she
it's uh wrapped up in the mob and he has
the rescuer. So there's a attorney in the backstory that
(14:10):
is very prominent that is helping Harvey launder the money
for the mob. And then and then Harvey is a
is a very geeky, nerdish kind of guy, bespeckled numbers guy,
and he has to go up against the mob. He
has to figure out a way to rescue his the
(14:32):
love of his life from these hardened killers. So he
uses his brain power and there's a very interesting method
that he uses that I thought was interesting, and then
other readers have commented on it. So that's that's The
attorney is interesting, his girlfriend is interesting. The main mafia
(14:55):
guy is an interesting character, and then he flash forward.
Rita is in the story very prominently in the current story,
so she is a very unique character because she ends
up being complex in what she's doing. I'm trying to
keep from giving too many reveals, but.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
Sometimes you don't want to do too much, but it
can make it the reader wants to read a story more.
So you say, Harvey, now you're going back in the past,
and then you go crerent time. I'm thinking eighty years old,
and I'm wondering how many other office shelf listeners are
thinking this as well. He is he able to drive still?
Is he able to walk? Is he like bedridden? What
(15:40):
is he at his eighties?
Speaker 3 (15:43):
He's ambulatory and he can drive. He has And I
think his neighbor, his neighbor was good friends with his wife,
the one that was rescued from the mob and hiding out,
and they became very good friends. And so she is
kind of a hidden love interest. She has a love
for Harvey that I think Harvey is unaware of. So
(16:05):
she jumps jumps into the game too to help him,
and they hire a private investigator. And so between the neighbor,
the private investigator, and Harvey, they go looking for the
truth about Riata in the current Oh.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
My god, see this. The more you talk about the story,
the more, oh my god, I gotta I gotta know
what's happening. So that story sounds incredibly interesting to me.
What have readers been saying to you about the obsessions
of Harvey Us. And why do you call that a
hobby book?
Speaker 3 (16:41):
Because I write two books at a time, and it's
so I had to have my main focus on a
contract book for the for a publisher. I okay, you see,
so I'm on a deadline for the contract book and
that keeps my interest very high. But I also have enough,
(17:02):
uh curiosity that I want to have a second project going.
So it's like a relief. So I need like a
relief from my contract book. And it's it's like going
to play a game of cards while your your mind
is percolating on the current story, and it's like taking
ginger at sushi to clear Palette is my hobby book,
(17:25):
and so Harvey Usher is my heart. My Harvey was
my hobby book.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
Oh well, this is a very good hobby book. What
have reader has been saying to you about.
Speaker 3 (17:37):
Interesting exposition? Uh the neck Galley That there's a lot
of people just raving about it and even on good Reads,
Uh that they just I think that they really like it.
Some people they thought that the shifting in time periods,
and I knew it was going to be a speed
(17:57):
bump for some readers where you're you're getting with the
current day and then all of a sudden you get
shifted and swung over to the fifty years earlier because
it bursts the fictive dream. And I'm big about maintaining
the fictive dream and all my writing, I'm very careful
about it with a cadence with the transitions. But this book,
(18:19):
I kind of broke my own rule because I needed
to tell that backstory and I didn't want to do it,
and I want to do it in flashback instead of backstory.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
Okay, now, as we switched gears, just who is Imo
Jean Taylor?
Speaker 3 (18:35):
Okay, Imagene Taylor. So that's another thing I try to
challenge myself on my writing. So Bruno Johnson was more
like what I would have been if I was a
cop and I could do what I wanted without just
chasing the bad guys. That's what that's Bruno Johnson. So
(18:58):
Imagen Taylor is a sixty five year old woman who
goes to prison for murdering her husband. She doesn't think
she murdered him, so she goes to prison and she's
in there for ten years, and as soon as she
gets there, her cellmate says, hey, you got too much
built up angst you have to get rid of that
(19:18):
angst or she's gonna eat you alive in here. And
she goes, well, I don't know who to blame, and
so Jean Taylor, while she's in prison, because he's a
kindly old lady, she decides to blame the President the
United States. So she starts sending in threatening letters. So
(19:39):
the Secret Service comes and does a threat assessment. And
I worked on a swat team, so I was involved
in some of these threat assessment kind of things, so
I know how it works. So the Secret Service aation
falls kind of in love with this kindly old woman,
and he ends up giving her more information than he gets.
(20:00):
So Mateen Taylor, while she's in prison, she writes a
book called Peekaboo Potus and it's it's he takes the
information and writes a fictionalized story on how to assassinate
a sitting president. So now she gets out of prison.
She's seventy five years old, and she has this hardcore
parle agent and she has to stay out of prison.
She has to have a job, so she has to
(20:23):
find a job, and she has to navigate this new
world at seventy five years old, and all this stuff
starts happening to her. She's works, She's working at a
dent co. It's a store where this guy that owns
the store contracts with grocery stores and he gets the
dented can goods and they sell them for a discount
(20:43):
of price. So she sits buying this counter. And when
the book opens, she's sitting by this counter selling as
a clerk, the only clerk in the store. And this
mafia guy comes in and says, you'll give me two
hundred dollars a week, I'm going to fire bomb your store.
And this is Imma gen Taylor. She's you know, she
doesn't she's not familiar with this world. So that's the
(21:04):
way that the book takes off. And I wrote it
based on my grandmother because my crad I lived, I
had a kind of a not a rough child, but
an abnormal child. I didn't live my grandmother for two years.
Well I was I think I was sixteen or seventeen,
(21:26):
and she would sit on her couch and she called
a divan in front of this big picture window and
she would smoke two packs of Marboro cigarettes a day,
drink slit smoke liquor, and she would talk about the neighbors.
See that neighbor across the street. I know he's getting
the cart and I and he's stepping out on his wife.
And she would she would spin all these crazy conspiracies,
(21:49):
and I would just sit there, just enthralled with her imagination.
Where is she coming up with this stuff? So I
actually put those conspiracies that she told me in this book.
So the first one is called The Blind Devotion of
Imaging Taylor. The second one is called Imageing's Grand Fiasco,
(22:11):
and I'm on contract right. The third one is going
to be Peekaboo Imaging.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
Oh my gosh. Where and when do these stories take place?
And why did you choose the settings? What city is
it in? What time period? Is the first already story
set in the.
Speaker 3 (22:29):
Imaging Taylor books. I set them in the time period
that I lived it, so it's historical. It's set in
nineteen seventy three, I think, okay, And she drives amc Grimlin,
a red Grimlin that my grandmother does. I described the
house that my grandmother lived in. I mean, everything, the streets,
(22:51):
everything is exactly the way I lived it. As far
as that goes. I just used conspiracies and brought them
to life, and I used her voice because she was
crotchety and funny the things she would say. And people
email me. I've had multiple people have emailed me. One
woman said, I bought your book and I took it
on a plane and people were asking me what I
(23:13):
was laughing about, because.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
Oh god, oh my god, that's a good good tee.
Back now she's seventy five, and then I'm going back
up here to mister Harvey, who's in his eighties. This
is when I was researching for your interview. That jumped
out at me and I it's different, and I appreciate it.
I think I only had one other author on who's
(23:38):
done this. Why did you choose to make older characters
the star of the show in your novels?
Speaker 3 (23:45):
Well, that was planned because I still look for and
you know, historically, because I've been writing since going to
book conferences and you know, studying the craft for thirty
or more than thirty years now, since nineteen eighty nine.
And they always told me you never write to the
market because the market changes. But overall, generally there are
(24:07):
more readers that are older now. The baby boomers are
bigger readers than the younger generation. So I thought that
if I want to pander to that market, I need
to have my characters something that those readers can relate to,
and so I purposely made them that age.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
Ah, very interesting. I never heard that before. Very interesting.
Now I don't I don't know. You can't give it away.
I'll ask you if Ima Jean really did kill her husband,
But you know you're not going to answer that. But
is she Is she a calculating, cold hearted person? How
would you describe I'm a gene imaging.
Speaker 3 (24:50):
There is some backstory with imaging too, because she was
deeply in love with her husband and she the the
character evolves, so in order for her to survive this
new world, she has to evolve because all kinds of
stuff happens in the first book and in the second
book too. The second book is a totally another story,
(25:12):
but in the first book there's another storyline. So in
this in this method of writing, I took my grandmother
and as the main character, and then I started with
two storylines. So what I do is I I start
with one storyline, and I do three scene sequences, and
(25:33):
I jump over to another storyline sequence three. Then I
jump back and forth across these three plot lines. The
one plot line that I used in the first Imaging
book was something that happened to me when I was
out working as a supervisor in the high Desert chuck
A Valley, and this guy garage caught on fire. By
(25:55):
the time we got there in the fire department put
it out, he had shot himself in the head. I think,
I think he committed said And when they started going
through the rubbish of his garage, they found a crate
with a dead woman in it and killed this woman,
killed his wife, Orange County and put her in a crate,
(26:17):
and then he moved from Orange County Yucka Valley. He
kept her in this crate in then. So, yeah, it
was it was a horrible thing, but I thought it
was it was a unique kind of story. So Imaging
is friends with the neighbor's who's very young, I think
she's in her twenty fives, and her and her father
(26:38):
passes away. So Imagine goes next door and helps her
clear out all their father's stuff in the garage and
there's a big pyramid of just junk and are going
through it, and they get down to the bottom of
this pyramid and there's a crate and they opened a
crate and there's a dead woman in it.
Speaker 2 (26:54):
Oh my gosh.
Speaker 3 (26:56):
Imageing's on parole and she can't call the cops because
she's pull over murder. Yeah so that yeah, So those
I continually layer in things like that as the story
goes along.
Speaker 2 (27:10):
You keep it interesting. Who is Cigar and you come
up with some names. Who is Cigar? And how and
why do Imma Jean and Cigar across paths?
Speaker 3 (27:19):
Well, Cigar is the guy that walks into the dentco.
He's the he's the mafia guy and a unique situation
with with Dentko. I had a lot of fun writing
this book because I wrote it about uh an intersection
in Fontana where I worked as a patrol sergeant and
a detective sergeant. And it was a it's a strip center.
(27:41):
There's a liquor store anchor on the corner, and then
there's an l shaped strip center, and there's the Dent COO.
There's a massage parlor, there's a warehouse. And I wrote it.
I described it just the way it is in real life.
So this massage parlor is right next door the Dent COO.
And imaging interacts with these women who are in the
(28:06):
sex trade, and there was a lot. There's a lot
of funny stuff that happens with Imaging in that one too.
So the cigar walks into the walks into the donut
shop in the strip center too. He walks into each
one of the businesses and said, demands money to be
paid weekly or he's going to burn the place down.
So Imaging gets together with everybody in the strip center says,
(28:28):
we got to do something about this. So I took
that those places are real, and my grandmother was real,
and some of the stories that are in the book.
At the end of each one each of my books,
I put an author's note and explains what I took
from my experiences, what happened, and explained it's not real.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
Okay, I wasn't going to ask you this, but now
I'm listening to Your stories are very intriguing, very interesting,
and there's a lot going on to capture and maintain
the reader's interest. Did you how much working as a
police officer? I can only imagine how much did working
(29:11):
as a cop? Do you think gives you all this
rich material to use as a novelist. How much do
you think your job affected your ability to come up
with concept these stories.
Speaker 3 (29:23):
Well, I had a pretty wild career. I mean I
thought everybody was having the same kind of career I
was until I started talking to him and telling stories.
But I specialized most of my career. I chased murder
suspects across three states. I was cross warns the US Marshall.
I chased bank robbers. I mean, I had a fun
time my entire career until I promoted a sergeant. I
(29:46):
had to supervise people like me. But in the Bruno books,
those are almost exclusively true stories that I was actually
involved in. And The Sinister, so each book, each one
of the Bruna books is like a snapshot of my career. So, uh,
The Sinister is a unique kidnapping that I had never
(30:07):
come across. I thought about it and invented this story.
But The Sinister got a star review and publishes weekly.
It's difficult to get into published weekly, let alone get
a star review. It was chosen as best Mystery by
The Mystery out of Amazon, and thank you, and then
Denzel Washington's movie crew has to look at it, so
(30:29):
he's still there.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
Hello.
Speaker 3 (30:32):
Okay, So The Heartless was a story of when I
was working by crimes. Two women went into our jail
and Sam Bernardino for visiting. They had these big purses
and they had a third woman that distracted the guard
and they pulled out Cordiner's drills. They drilled the window
(30:53):
out of visiting and six homicide suspects escaped in real life. Wow,
I helped chase them down. So I put that story
in one of the Bruno books. So The Reckless is
the story when I was working bank robbery, chasing bank
robbers around, and I put three of the actual bank
robbers that bank robberies that I was involved in in
that book. So each book has a different kind of atmosphere,
(31:19):
different story, but it's still Bruno Johnson champion and writes
of children and women in all the books.
Speaker 2 (31:25):
Okay, and we're going to get to Bruno next. But
I love your book covers. Who designed the covers and
how much input did you have on the cover design.
Speaker 3 (31:35):
The first cover if you look at the original cover
hardcover of the Disposables. I had this agent for fifteen years,
one agent, and we could. He marketed every one of
my books to a standstill. I love this guy, but
I ultimately sold my first book my wife sold it.
(31:58):
Actually her best friend. She was in Toastmasters with this
woman named Karen, and Karen read one of my books,
or a couple of my books, and she was skin
diving in Bora Bora and she was with a skin
diving with another with a whole boat of people, and
there was two people in the book. They started talking
about reading and writing, and it happened to be the
(32:18):
owners of Oceanva Publishing, and so Karen says, well, you
need to read this guy. So that's how we got
home as a phone message. And I was working on
book number thirty eight, and Karen said, well, send this
person the book. And I said, yeah, yeah, because this
hapened before, so I thought I'll send them book number
thirty six. I just randomly my back I just sent
(32:39):
them book thirty six and they loved it. I mean
they really loved it. And that was called the Other
Side of Forever. But the publisher said that sounds too
much like a romance and it's more gritty than she wanted.
And so the publisher was just excellent. He said, give
us five of the titles that she that you like.
(33:01):
So I sent them some titles and they picked the disposables.
So then they give us a phone call. We have
a three way phone call with the cover artist, with
the publisher, with the publishing manager, and my wife and I.
So they asked me what my concept was. I mean,
this was really great because it's one of the people
(33:22):
I talked to. They don't get this kind of books.
So I said, because the books, the first book, the
cops were acting like a click, like a gang click.
I thought it would be interesting to show the side
of a house at night in the headlights and there's
graffiti on the wall, and the graffiti depicts what happens
(33:42):
in the books through through street language. So I thought
was I thought it would be a unique kind of thing.
So at the end of the at the end of
the conversation, everybody liked the idea of the concept. I
asked the cover guy on the phone, I said, so,
are you going to take some pic and send to me?
Look at He goes, no, why don't you take some
pictures and send to me? You know, And I think
(34:05):
he was getting paid more for the cover than I
was getting from my first advance of the book. So,
so my wife is very artistic and she she uses
her artistic vent on all kinds of stuff around the house.
Sometimes uh too crazy all the stuff. She took a
can of spray paint, went out to the side of
(34:25):
her house and sprayed at the graffiti on our wall.
And then we waited till dark. We put the headlights
on it, took the pictures and sent it to them
and they loved it, and they put it on the
first cover of our books. Well up the hardcover and
look at the cover you'll see. And so we we
(34:46):
live in a wine country. We had people over for
a wine party and they were just they pulled up
this graffiti on our house. So after that they started
And I've heard another couple of publishers do this where
(35:07):
where they do a study, a test study, because you
could change the covers around, interchange them on Amazon and
see which the sales are better or increase. So they
thought that my covers weren't depicting the true the tone
of the books. So they hired a guy named Christian Storm.
And this guy is great. He did He redid all
(35:31):
the Bruno covers if you look at him, and I
love the covers. So then when I shifted to the
Dave Becka books, I wanted to have branding for my
for my so anybody picks up my book, oh this
is day put in the book just based on the
same right. So I hired Level Best. Let me hire
Christian Storm to do the to do the covers, and
(35:53):
I think it was critical. I think it was very
important to do that. So if you look and you
put the Day Becka books close to the the Bruno books,
you'll see the difference. You also see even though Immagen
is a little bit lighter in mood and tone, there's
still the font that is similar to the Bruno and
the Dave Beckap books. He also did the standalone Obsessions
(36:16):
of Harvey Usher, and if you go on that galley,
you'll see that people just brave about that cover. They
just love it.
Speaker 2 (36:24):
Yes, and that's a big part of book sales for sure.
Now to introduce us to Bruno Johnson, can you tell
us who he is and why does his life get
the world?
Speaker 3 (36:37):
Bruno Johnson is, He's got a big heart and he
loves to protect children and women. But the tagline for
that series is Bruno Johnson's an ex cop, ex con
who rescues children from toxic homes. He couldn't do it
when he's a cop, because there's too many rules and regulations. Now,
he goes outside the law to rescue the children. Him
(36:59):
and his wife Marie, and his father have a makeshift
orphanage down in Costa Rica where they continue to gather
these children and keep them safe. So each book, even
though it's a snapshot of my career, he continues to
pull people from hazard situations and take them someplace safe.
And that's that's the whole uh line, the log line
(37:20):
of the series.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
Now, why does Robbie Wicks pressure Bruno to solve a
high profile crime?
Speaker 3 (37:30):
Robbie Bruno Johnson was on a violent crimes team just
like I was. So his boss wanted, well, I don't
want to give the I don't give too much Oblave.
He wants to control the investigation, so he brings Bruno
into it because he knows that Bruno's not a cop
and that Bruno will do what needs to be done
(37:50):
to take care of what's right. This might not be
legally right, but it's morally right, and so he Robbie
Wicks thought that he can control Bruno. And then once
Bruno his got with of what's going on, Robbie Wicks
did not like what happened at the end.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
Now tell us where when these the books in the
series take place, and how old is Bruno in this series?
Speaker 3 (38:16):
Okay? So I wrote the first book, Disposables, and sold it,
and then once I was like I said, I sent
him number thirty six. I was writing number thirty eight
when they bought Disposables. I stopped writing number thirty eight
because I knew that that sequels have a better chance
of a second for a second book sale, so I
(38:37):
started writing the Replacements. The Replacements is a story of
the most dangerous person I ever dealt with in my career.
I thought he was very interesting to write about. His
name in real life was James Lawless. And he was
tattooed from his chin. Every inch of his skin was
(38:59):
tattooed from his chin all the way down to his toes.
And he had the tattoo of a ram on his
pelvic area, a ram horn on each hip, and the
snout of the ram was his penis, and it was
tattooed in this snow. So he had committed, he had killed,
He had murdered. Somebody went to prison, got twenty five
(39:20):
to life, got out in twelve years, killed somebody got
twenty five to life, did twelve years, got out again.
So they thought that he was a threat to public safety.
So they put my team on him to follow and
make sure he didn't kill somebody else. So I dealt
with him personally. I masqueraded as a prole officer, so
I had contact with him every day. And he was
(39:42):
just just a chilling person to deal with. So when
you write a hero, you have to give a hero
flaws otherwise he turns into a caricature, right, same thing
with a bad guy. This guy was so bad that
I couldn't write him just the way it was because
he would turn into a character so nobody, but no
(40:04):
one would believe what I was writing about this guy.
So in order to make him plausible real, I had
to give him a flaw. And that flaw for a
bad guy is just this midgeon of humanity. I had
to give him a little bit of humanity as a
flaw for the bad guy. You fell what I'm saying.
So I put him in book two. And I didn't
(40:29):
like this guy, I mean I really he was despicable.
So in book three, because they picked up they bought
the book two, they loved it. I started writing book
three and the next book in the series, and I
didn't like this guy and his name is Carl Drego
in the in the first book, and because I changed
the name, and so I killed him very very violently
(40:49):
in the third book. And the publisher says, oh, we
liked the book, but we like Callin Dregel. You can't
kill him the public because of that smidgeon of humanity,
and I gave him too much. I went overboard. So
they rejected it in November, and the book was due
(41:11):
in February. So they didn't like a female API agent.
They didn't like me killing Drego. So I scrapped the
whole book and I wrote from November to February. I
wrote another book, and I kept Grego alive. I turned
and she goes the publish and goes, this is a
great rewrite, and I kept the title. That's all I kept.
(41:33):
Rewrite it fully new book, so that the third book
was The Squandern, which is a story I wanted to
write about Lapd forda mont Velis where they were hitmen
as detectives. They were Lapd detectives and they were actually
hit men, and they were discovered and prosecuted, and you
(41:54):
can look it up on Google. And then I also
layered in the story about how the CIA hooked the
Inner City on rock cocaine on purpose so they could
fund the contrasts the Contra Debacle, and that I did.
That's the only book I ever did research on because
I wanted to get it right. And there's a guy
(42:14):
that won a Pulitzer Prize for telling that story. So
I layered those two stories together for The Squandered. The
fourth book, The Vanquished, I took it from my time
in criminal intelligence where I was falling a Hale's angels
around and these people were the most despicable people as
a group that I ever dealt with. So Bruno got
(42:38):
at think of the book. He was emotionally crushed. He
was shot and run over. I mean this guy, And
the publisher goes, this is a great book, but I
don't know how you're gonna come back. How are you
gonna bring Bruno back from this? The publisher said that
it kind of scared me. So it challenged my eyes.
I should have, but it challenged my my confidence. So
(43:00):
I stopped what I was doing and I went back
and I wrote prequels so I wrote four prequels. The
first one is The Innocence and it's nineteen eighty three
I think, and it's Bruno's first day as a detective.
So those prequels explain how Bruno gets to where he
is in the first book. So technically I wrote four
(43:20):
books in the current day. Then I wrote four prequels,
and I wrapped it back around and started the current
day continued on. So I read. I read a lot
of I read a lot of books. I mean a
lot of books, and a lot of authors they don't.
They let the age each year gain on the character,
(43:42):
and it kind of ruined some series for me because
the characters got too old to be doing the stuff
that they're doing. So in law Enforce they call it
X stepping when you extect somebody. I just leave Bruno
at the same age. He's just at the same age,
and all this stuff happens to him, like you know, session,
And that's it's probably not the reader if it pays
(44:05):
attention and sees that, it might not like it. But
I prefer to have the envisioned Bruno the same age,
doing the same things, And it's easier for me to
write that way, and I think it's more dynamic that way.
Speaker 2 (44:18):
Okay, let's talk about mister David Beckett as we come
down to, like the last fifteen minutes of the show is,
can you give us an overview of a Fearsome moon
Light Black and tell us a little bit more about
David Beckett.
Speaker 3 (44:33):
David Beckett, I wanted to write a like. Like I said,
I had a lot of fun in my career and
I wanted to write a memoir. So I started writing
this book and I ended up the first part, the
first half the book ended up being my first year
in the job. Everything I've wrote in the first half
of of a Fearsome moon Lie Black happened just the
(44:53):
way it happened to me. And I had stuff happened
to me, murder, officer involved shooting. I got into some
crazy stuff as a brand new cop. I was young, innocent,
I had no idea what I was doing, so I
put that in there just the way it happened. I
couldn't get the story arc to work, so the second
half of the book is fictionalized to make it work.
(45:15):
So that story I told you about my psych teacher,
I put that in there. I did my first manslaughter
investigation was just a horrendous deal with evidence place, and
I'm in the street trying to I'm handcuffing the guy
and I'm arguing my supervisor about arresting him, and it
was just a huge problem. And I hear somebody on
(45:36):
the cornyoned David Wayne and look over and it's my mom.
She's said in the corner and she was run off
the road by the guy that I'm arrested. She crashed
her car from the same guy, from the same incident.
So yeah, I'm telling you, I had a wild time.
And so I put these stories in the book. And
(45:59):
at the same time, I was looking violent crimes and
I wanted to add this one in, so I pulled
it in as a as a secondary plot line. I
was walking out of this liquor store one day and
this girl was standing outside like a seven to eleven,
and I was when I was working violent crimes or
(46:19):
chasing bankcroppers, I would work playing clothes and I wore
work shirts. I went to a uniform store and I said,
you got any shirts that weren't picked up? And they
had like eighteen eight of these shirts that and I
had them put patches on Grace trucking, and I put Carl.
I put Carl on the shirt, and my captain even
started calling me Carl. He wouldn't call me Dave anymore.
(46:42):
So I was wearing my Carl shirt, wearing Levi's sunglass.
I walk out of the store and this woman who
is just she looked like she was probably twenty years
older than she was, says Hi Dave. And I walked over,
I said, do I know you? And she was a
girl that I went to high school with. Wow, And
(47:03):
this was shocking to me. And so once she told
me who she was, I was like stunned. And what
happened was she was with this guy in high school
and they were just always lovey dovey, I mean, just
totally in love with each other. And I lost track
because you know how every goes their separate ways. He
disappeared one day, He's up and disappeared, and she if
(47:28):
she didn't understand what happened. He got a good job,
I mean he was making more money than than he
was making a huge amount of money, and they made
a missing person's report. He was never they never surfaced.
They don't know what happened to him. Then she's telling
me this and she totally wrecked her life because this
(47:50):
was the love of her life and she just went downhill.
And what happened was, I'm standard talking to her. Somebody
found his call our off Glendora Ridge route. He was driving.
He went for a drive one night and he drove
off the cliff and went up the trees and they
found him like twenty five years later.
Speaker 2 (48:11):
Oh my gosh.
Speaker 3 (48:13):
So I fold that story into the Dave Beckett series.
The first Dave beck At the first of Moonlight Black.
So the first the first book is half memoir in
the second half. So then I go up to the
high desert when I when I first get the patrol,
and so he wants to Dave Beckam wants to work homicide.
So a second book, A Lonesome Blood Red Sun, It
(48:36):
starts with him working patrol, but then he goes to
work on homicide. And Samuel County is twenty thousand square miles.
It's the largest geographics county in the United States. There's
I forgot how many one hundred and eighty miles from
Victorviille to Vegas of straight Highway, and homicide detectives say
that if all the dead bodies buried on both sides
(48:58):
of the freeway stood up at once, it would look
like a forest. So there's my ex wife works as
worked as a supervising coroner, and she gave me some
information there. At the time of the writing of this book,
there was two hundred and fifty six open bone cases.
So I thought, what better storyline. I mean, it's like
(49:20):
a for I can't think of the word now, motivational
ideas of all these dead people that are out in
the desert, you can just have story after story. So
the Bone Detective, which is the bone Dick is short
for bone Detective. He becomes the bone Dick for Sambino County.
And so the second book deals with the murder that
(49:43):
I was involved in. So in real life and it
doesn't happen the way it does in movies and books.
So a homicide team is highly trained, highly schooled. They
don't they investigate the crime, they get the warrant, they
don't chase the guy down because they go to the
next homicide. They hand the warrant to what's called the
(50:04):
dog team. The dog team chases him down. Well I
was I was on the dog team. I chased the
violent guys. So they handed me in this one case.
And I don't want to give this one away, but
I was stunned at how this murder was revealed, how
this murder came to light, it is shocking. And so
I started chasing this crook, and as it turns out,
(50:25):
I caught the crook a mile and a half from
where my kids were living. So that's a unique, unique
story too. So that's a Lonesome Blood red Son. And
so I put in a pursuit, I put in Rob
Robbie's I was involved in. I ruled them just the
way they happened in the Hye Desert. So that is
more of a memoir too. So here's some one Lie
(50:46):
Black and Lonesome Blood red Son is closer to a
memoir than Bruno Johnson is. And I just I just
turned in the third book, the A Cadavers, A Cadavers
Gray Dawn. That's I had a lot of fun. That
book really came together great. And I just started writing
the fourth book and I'm still working on the title.
(51:08):
So I'm working well ahead.
Speaker 2 (51:10):
Do readers have out of your book? Sounds so interesting?
Do readers have if breaders have followed each of your
characters in the different series do they have. How are
they telling you they have a favorite? Is it Imageen?
Is it David? Is it is it who? Who? Who
is Bruno? Who's their favorite? That they're like this, this
is the.
Speaker 3 (51:29):
Character there's different And because they're so they're so diverse.
Some people say they like Dave Beckett. Some people say
they like Imagen because it hits different people. You know,
I was talking earlier about how I started selling books.
I made my bones, I learned my craft, and I
go to bars and Nobles. At least I still do
(51:50):
signings at bars and Nobles once or twice a month
every month, and I sell a lot of Disposables the
first book in the series, because I'll call somebody over
and I said, all you have to do is read
the first half page of this book and you will
be hooked. And if I get them to the table,
and I was keeping track, I have a like a
sixty five percent sale rate if I get them to
(52:10):
read that half page. So if you go online and
go pull up disposables, go into read a sample and
read that first page, you'll see exactly what I'm talking about.
Speaker 2 (52:20):
Okay, can you shay? As we start to close down
Today's so, and you've been a very engaging, very good
I guess here on office shelf, can you share three
to four steps that you've taken, David, that you have
personally found to be effective at getting the word out
about your books.
Speaker 3 (52:40):
Yeah. You know, I'm a writer. I love to write
the marketing aspect of it. It's it's not me because
you know, you've got to be a little bit of recluse.
And I was very outgoing when I'm during my career.
But I have to say for best bang for your
buck is going to be the good Reads give away.
(53:02):
You know, it's a six's either five ninety nine or
six ninety nine, and it's a it's a focused market.
You know, you're you're you're engaging mystery readers. You're getting
their attention to a specific genre, a specific book. So
for that amount of money, so we give away. My
wife and I give away. We used to do a
hundred books. We're down to fifty because I'm publishing two
(53:24):
books a year. So I'll give We'll give away fifty
books on a on a good Reads giveaway, and then
that really gives a jump start on on the on
the sales of the books. And then it was hard
to break into Barnes and Noble, and that was just
a nacity. It took me two years. But now my
average sales at every book signing is fifty books at
(53:44):
book at Barns and Nobles.
Speaker 2 (53:46):
Very good. Yeah, yeah, that's good at a book signing.
Where can off the shelf listeners get a copy of
your books, David?
Speaker 3 (53:55):
They could get anywhere books are sold, Amazon, Barnes and Noble,
local independent bookstores. I just recently bought the rights back
to Bruno Johnson and we're still trying to get those
converted over to Putnam Publishing, so they might be a
little delay in picking those books up. But you can
(54:15):
start off with Dave Beckett right now, get Fears of
Moonlight Black or get the first Imaging Book, and I'm
telling you you'll you'll love both of those books.
Speaker 2 (54:23):
Are there any plans to turn your books into a series.
I'm thinking of Colombo, although these are nothing like a Colombo.
But do you invention that or is that something new
would even consider?
Speaker 3 (54:35):
The Bruner books are all options for movies now.
Speaker 2 (54:38):
Okay, but a TV series like a TV series.
Speaker 3 (54:43):
Yeah, they're options, but like and I've heard this and
I think it's true. Ninety percent of options are never made.
Only three percent of the options are ever made. So
I'm not holding my breath that they're going to make
a streaming series out of it. You know, it could
happen down the road. But I'm an author. I like
writing books people.
Speaker 2 (55:02):
Now, do you have any upcoming speaking engagements our listeners?
You're a very engaging guest if our listeners wanted to
catch you on another interview or radio TV podcast, Do
you have any upcoming speaking engagements you could share with us.
Speaker 3 (55:18):
I've got a couple that are that are not inked yet.
I do a lot of talks at book conferences and
writers conferences in fact a a I'm happy to teach
a class on how to write a novel. I developed
my own system, and every time I give it to
writers groups, they just they brave about it. It's called
writing by the Numbers, and it's a system that I developed.
(55:42):
You can also get on my newsletter on my website.
I put out a new a newsletter every two weeks
and I do a story of my life and I'm
at sixty thousand words on that already, because each each
week I put in I write a five hundred word
story and people email me about how much they like
(56:03):
those stories on my newsletter. So if anybody wants me
to come and talk and give my talk, it thinks
about an hour and a half to give on how
to write a novel class, and I go over the
things I touch more deeply on the things I've already
touched on in this conversation.
Speaker 2 (56:19):
Okay, and then lastly, if you're on any social media,
could you let us know if people want to keep
up with you on social media.
Speaker 3 (56:28):
I'm not I'm not big. I hit Facebook once in
a while, but I'm not. I'm a writer.
Speaker 2 (56:35):
Okay, So now big, and that's awesome. That's awesome. You
have been an amazing guest, and we want to thank
our Off the Shelf listeners and David for taking time
out of his day to be here with us on
Off the Shelf Books. And if you came in midstream
or late, there's no worries. After the show finished the streaming,
you could listen to it as many times as you
(56:56):
like and share it with book lovers all over the
world so they can get to know David Puttnham and
his books. He is online at David Puttnam Books dot com.
And that's D A B I D P U T
N A M B O O K S dot com
again David Puttnam books dot com. If you listen to
(57:16):
the show, you know his books are also mean. He's
a great guest, so I encourage you to visit him online.
And he said he has his newsletters to get subscribe
to his newsletter again through his website, David Puttnam books
dot com. Thank you so much, David for being here
with us. And your books are itself so so incredibly
(57:37):
interested and I hope they do get picked up for
a TV series because I think they will be very
very interesting. Thank you for being here with us today.
As I tell our listeners all the time, you are incredible.
You're absolutely amazing. Please go out and create a fabulous
day for yourself today and I see you back here
(58:00):
next week on all the shelfs Books. David. I'll send
you a link to the show when it finishes streaming.
Thank you so much.
Speaker 3 (58:09):
Thank you for having me. You had a great time.
Speaker 2 (58:11):
Thank you bye for now, Hike
You're listening to the winning literary show Off the Shelf
Books Talk Radio Live with host Denise Turney, author of
the books Long Walk Up, Portia, Love, More Over Me,
Spiral Love Has Many Faces, and Rosetta us Great Hope.
Turn up your dial and get ready for a blast
of feature author interviews for one, one on book festivals,
(00:21):
writing conferences, and so much more. Ready let's go.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Oh we are going to kick it off. Good morning,
Good morning, good morning. Welcome to Author Shelf Books. And
I'm going to start with a quote this from Robert Schuler.
What would you attempt to do if you knew you
would not fail? And I've heard that says I think
from someone else as well, what would you attempt to
(00:50):
do if you knew you would not fail? That might
be the thing you really you really want to do.
But I want to welcome you again. I am. I
was thinking about this last night. It's August the sixteenth.
I said, oh my god, we are more than halfway
through August. This is something listeners that I always encourage you.
(01:12):
If there's something you want to do this year, particularly,
I would definitely do it now because we're way more
than halfway through the year. You know, it's just these
weeks I get by. Before we introduced this morning's guests,
I usually talk about one of my books, but I'm
encouraging you to just to support authors in general and
(01:35):
indie authors and independent bookstores. And I also encourage you
to drop by my website which is Chesstell dot com,
c h I S tw e l l dot com.
You can read free excerpts from the books, subscribe to
the book lovers having the free newsletter. Again, that's chist
do dot com, c h I, S t e l
(01:58):
l dot com. But I like the focus solely on
in the newsletter, I focus on another author or books
or indie bookstores and not myself. And also on this show,
I like to focus on another author. So let us
go and meet today's very special author. Shelf guests and
today's guest is David Putnam. And David is a former
(02:21):
law enforcement professional. I know we had another guy who
was a cop who was on here. He wrote this
cop series that was kind of had a little comedy
to it that did did well, and he is David
is the author of more than fifteen books, including standalone
novels and detective series such as The Bone Detective Series,
(02:44):
The Misadventures of Imaging Taylor, and the Bruno Johnson Thrillers.
And in addition to writing David and Joyce growing organic
California avocados and the Homie Shares with his wife and
their three dogs. I encourage you to visit David online
at David puttnambooks dot com. And it was a book
(03:05):
publisher with that name wants but it's d a v
I d p U N p U t n A
M b ooks dot com. And one more time, d
A v I d p U t n A M
b O o k s dot com. And here's a
(03:27):
great thing about Off the Shelf. You can go over
to his website and check out his website even as
you listen to today show again David Puttnambooks dot com. Welcome
to Off the Chef.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
David, thank you for having me.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Well, it's a pleasure to have you here with us.
The first two questions I asked every yest to give
our listeners some backstory before we start talking about their books.
So to kick off today's show, David, will you please
tell Off the Chelf listeners where you grew up and
what life was like for you growing up.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
Oh, that's kind of an in depth question. I was
born in Upland, southern California, and was raised in Ontario, California,
and came from a very I thought, unique background, went
to school in Ontario, and I became a cop initially
in Ontario, a cadet first. So I had an added
(04:25):
layer of conflict when I became a cop because I
was dealing with people that I grew up with. And so,
for example, my first year out in a marked unit
black and white, you get a call of a naked
man dancing in the front yard of his house. When
I pull up a very affluent house and there's a
naked man dancing in the front yard, and I look,
(04:46):
and it's my high school psyche teacher I had. So
I put those kind of stories in a fearsome moonlight black.
It's more of a memoir. But that's that's where I
grew up, and that's my background.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
Oh my goodness, that it's very any brothers sisters, Are
you an only child?
Speaker 3 (05:03):
No, there's six of us.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Oh, you got to become a big family. Then. I
know years ago that wouldn't be considered a big family,
but today people would think that was a big family.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
Now, as a kid, what did you want to be
when you grew up?
Speaker 3 (05:20):
Oh, you know, I wanted to be a writer right
from the beginning. I wrote my I tried to write
my first book in junior high school and it had
cowboys and aliens and monoliths in the desert, and I
had a lot of fun trying to write it. And
I tried to write two books in high school. And
then I became enamored in law enforcement, and I kind
of got diverted for a while, and I didn't go
back to writing until nineteen eighty nine, when I was
(05:43):
on a surveillance of a meth lab out in the
Cern Valley, and I kept novels in the backseat of
my car, and when we were at downtime, I got
paid to surveill bad guys and read novels. I mean,
it was the best of both worlds. So I was
I was down my last book in the back seat,
and the author's first book was an international bestseller and
(06:06):
I loved it. So I pick up the second book.
And what happened so often with an author is he'll
write and write and write on one book for ten years,
polishing it, rewrite, and then when he sells that first book,
he has one year to come out with the next book,
and many times the soft more effort isn't as good
as the first one. So this book that I started
(06:28):
reading was just a dog and I was a captive audience.
I read the whole thing, and I thought, you know,
I could do better than this, And so I penned
my first four novels on legal pads in the front
seat of my undercover car, and I quickly found out
that in the good writers, it's a lot more difficult
than it looks.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Yes, Yes, who inspired your love for writing books? You
said you knew as a kid you wanted to be
a writer. Where did that inspiration come from?
Speaker 3 (06:58):
You know, I think when I look back on it,
it was because my fifth grade teacher got me into reading.
And I started reading back in the fifth grade, and
I read everything. My mom was very good about it.
When the Scholastic books came out, she let me order
as many books as i'd want, and so I would
get seven eight books from the Scholastic readers, and I
(07:20):
started reading Robert Lewis Stevenson, and I started reading above
my grade level. And then I thought that I liked
reading so much, I thought, I want to try do
it myself.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
Okay, now is the obsessions of Harvey Usher? Is that
your first standalone novel? And why do you think you
didn't write a standalone novel sooner if it's not your first?
Speaker 3 (07:45):
Well, like I said before, I was a knuckle dragging
street cop and it took me a while to get
the craft down. So I started writing in nineteen eighty nine,
and I wrote, I quit counting my rejects at one
hundred and fifty six rejections. I've had six literary agents.
I was on my thirty eighth novel before I sold
(08:08):
my first novel. I wrote thirty eight manuscripts before I sold. Yeah,
I'm on number sixty eight right now. I sold my
first book in twenty thirteen, and I attribute that to
a shift in my craft and my structure. When I shifted,
I shortened the conflict and it made it more dynamic
(08:28):
entry into my books. So what I do is I write.
I try to write two books at a time, and
one book I call a hobby book, and one book
is a contract book. So Harvey Usher was a story
that I had percolating and it turned out to be
a hobby book, and because of the nature of the storyline,
(08:50):
it had to be a standalone.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
Ah, can you give us an overview of the obsessions
of Harvey Usher?
Speaker 3 (08:57):
So there's three ringers. I used to write a boo
and the one I write I like to enjoy the
most is I write. Instead of writing to the story,
I write to the structure. So I don't know what's
going to happen in the book. So I take an idea,
just one idea, and I just start writing it and
I use the five things the scene needs, the four
seas of the structure of our story arc. So when
(09:19):
Harvey Usher, I had this idea where this eighty year
old man wakes up one morning and there's a woman
in his house and she says that she's married to him,
been married to him for two years. And that only
idea that I had for the whole book. And then
I just let the story fall as it comes out.
So I fulfill the things the scene needs, the five things,
(09:40):
and that pulls me, puts pressure on the text and
pulls me to the next scene. And then I'd seen
sequence three scenes. Then I jump over to another plot
line that I've already developed in those three sequences.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
So what's happening in his story other than why what's
the title the obsessions? Though? What's the obsessed them out?
Where is that the title coming to play in the story.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
He's obsessed with the love of his life, which is
the woman that he had to rescue from the East coast.
And I don't want to give too many reveals away,
but his obsessions are uh, protecting, protecting his wife and
love and loving Sylvia. I think that's her name.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
Okay, okay, So tell us about He's in his eighties, right,
what's his personality like and what was his what was
his career field?
Speaker 3 (10:36):
Well, well, I try not to have a strict structure
that I stick to, and Usher was one of the
first books were when I alternated a timeline, so I
would I would write the current timeline and then skip
to the backstory. So in the current day, Harvey's trying to
(10:57):
uh find the mystery, what's happening to his life? What's
happening with this woman in his house? And then the
next chapter takes us all the way back fifty years
to where all this started, so that the genesis of
the story is alternating in chapters. So current day historical,
(11:19):
current day historical all the way through the book and
as I and I didn't know this was going to
happen until I started writing the book. So Harvey Usher,
that's not his real name, it hits an alias. But
he started as an accountant for the Italian mob on
the East coast and in the historical story, so that's
(11:44):
what got him into trouble. And he's actually eighty years old.
He thinks he might be have a little bit of dementia.
He doesn't. That's causing him to believe because this woman
has gaslighted him so perfectly that he's starting to believe
that maybe he did forget that he got married to her.
And the reader thinks that he's an unreliable narrator because
(12:05):
he's not even actually sure, but that the front story
starts to develop as the backstory is developing, and it
all collides at the end.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
This is what I love listening to Arthur interviews. There's
no way you can really describe the story. The more
you're talking about it, the more interesting. It's becoming to me.
Obsessions of Harvey Usher. So is the woman who shows
up and his life is this? The lady is her
name Rita.
Speaker 3 (12:36):
Is this Rita, Well, her name's not really Rita, but
she looks like Rita from Rita Hayworth. So that's why
he calls her reader. She has read hair and she's
a bombshell. And there's no way that he realizes that.
You know, she's thirty five forty years old and he's eighty,
and he knows there's there's something going on, so because
(13:00):
just because of the age difference, but he calls she
calls the cops right away and says, get this woman
out of the house. In the first chapter, I'm not
giving it away. And the cops show up and they said,
and a woman tells them, hey, you know he's he's
a little bit elderly. He's forgetting things. And the cop says,
will show me some identification, and she has a driver's
license with her name on it and the address that
(13:21):
that that she's his wife. So it's a very advanced
con that's going on. And the reader does is trying
to find out what's happening at the same time as
the backstory is developing and how he ends up in
hiding out in southern California.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Wow, can you introduce us to just a few other
major and minor characters who help to move this story forward.
Speaker 3 (13:47):
Ooh, well, his wife. It's a love story really because
he falls in love with this woman and then she
it's uh wrapped up in the mob and he has
the rescuer. So there's a attorney in the backstory that
(14:10):
is very prominent that is helping Harvey launder the money
for the mob. And then and then Harvey is a
is a very geeky, nerdish kind of guy, bespeckled numbers guy,
and he has to go up against the mob. He
has to figure out a way to rescue his the
(14:32):
love of his life from these hardened killers. So he
uses his brain power and there's a very interesting method
that he uses that I thought was interesting, and then
other readers have commented on it. So that's that's The
attorney is interesting, his girlfriend is interesting. The main mafia
(14:55):
guy is an interesting character, and then he flash forward.
Rita is in the story very prominently in the current story,
so she is a very unique character because she ends
up being complex in what she's doing. I'm trying to
keep from giving too many reveals, but.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
Sometimes you don't want to do too much, but it
can make it the reader wants to read a story more.
So you say, Harvey, now you're going back in the past,
and then you go crerent time. I'm thinking eighty years old,
and I'm wondering how many other office shelf listeners are
thinking this as well. He is he able to drive still?
Is he able to walk? Is he like bedridden? What
(15:40):
is he at his eighties?
Speaker 3 (15:43):
He's ambulatory and he can drive. He has And I
think his neighbor, his neighbor was good friends with his wife,
the one that was rescued from the mob and hiding out,
and they became very good friends. And so she is
kind of a hidden love interest. She has a love
for Harvey that I think Harvey is unaware of. So
(16:05):
she jumps jumps into the game too to help him,
and they hire a private investigator. And so between the neighbor,
the private investigator, and Harvey, they go looking for the
truth about Riata in the current Oh.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
My god, see this. The more you talk about the story,
the more, oh my god, I gotta I gotta know
what's happening. So that story sounds incredibly interesting to me.
What have readers been saying to you about the obsessions
of Harvey Us. And why do you call that a
hobby book?
Speaker 3 (16:41):
Because I write two books at a time, and it's
so I had to have my main focus on a
contract book for the for a publisher. I okay, you see,
so I'm on a deadline for the contract book and
that keeps my interest very high. But I also have enough,
(17:02):
uh curiosity that I want to have a second project going.
So it's like a relief. So I need like a
relief from my contract book. And it's it's like going
to play a game of cards while your your mind
is percolating on the current story, and it's like taking
ginger at sushi to clear Palette is my hobby book,
(17:25):
and so Harvey Usher is my heart. My Harvey was
my hobby book.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
Oh well, this is a very good hobby book. What
have reader has been saying to you about.
Speaker 3 (17:37):
Interesting exposition? Uh the neck Galley That there's a lot
of people just raving about it and even on good Reads,
Uh that they just I think that they really like it.
Some people they thought that the shifting in time periods,
and I knew it was going to be a speed
(17:57):
bump for some readers where you're you're getting with the
current day and then all of a sudden you get
shifted and swung over to the fifty years earlier because
it bursts the fictive dream. And I'm big about maintaining
the fictive dream and all my writing, I'm very careful
about it with a cadence with the transitions. But this book,
(18:19):
I kind of broke my own rule because I needed
to tell that backstory and I didn't want to do it,
and I want to do it in flashback instead of backstory.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
Okay, now, as we switched gears, just who is Imo
Jean Taylor?
Speaker 3 (18:35):
Okay, Imagene Taylor. So that's another thing I try to
challenge myself on my writing. So Bruno Johnson was more
like what I would have been if I was a
cop and I could do what I wanted without just
chasing the bad guys. That's what that's Bruno Johnson. So
(18:58):
Imagen Taylor is a sixty five year old woman who
goes to prison for murdering her husband. She doesn't think
she murdered him, so she goes to prison and she's
in there for ten years, and as soon as she
gets there, her cellmate says, hey, you got too much
built up angst you have to get rid of that
(19:18):
angst or she's gonna eat you alive in here. And
she goes, well, I don't know who to blame, and
so Jean Taylor, while she's in prison, because he's a
kindly old lady, she decides to blame the President the
United States. So she starts sending in threatening letters. So
(19:39):
the Secret Service comes and does a threat assessment. And
I worked on a swat team, so I was involved
in some of these threat assessment kind of things, so
I know how it works. So the Secret Service aation
falls kind of in love with this kindly old woman,
and he ends up giving her more information than he gets.
(20:00):
So Mateen Taylor, while she's in prison, she writes a
book called Peekaboo Potus and it's it's he takes the
information and writes a fictionalized story on how to assassinate
a sitting president. So now she gets out of prison.
She's seventy five years old, and she has this hardcore
parle agent and she has to stay out of prison.
She has to have a job, so she has to
(20:23):
find a job, and she has to navigate this new
world at seventy five years old, and all this stuff
starts happening to her. She's works, She's working at a
dent co. It's a store where this guy that owns
the store contracts with grocery stores and he gets the
dented can goods and they sell them for a discount
(20:43):
of price. So she sits buying this counter. And when
the book opens, she's sitting by this counter selling as
a clerk, the only clerk in the store. And this
mafia guy comes in and says, you'll give me two
hundred dollars a week, I'm going to fire bomb your store.
And this is Imma gen Taylor. She's you know, she
doesn't she's not familiar with this world. So that's the
(21:04):
way that the book takes off. And I wrote it
based on my grandmother because my crad I lived, I
had a kind of a not a rough child, but
an abnormal child. I didn't live my grandmother for two years.
Well I was I think I was sixteen or seventeen,
(21:26):
and she would sit on her couch and she called
a divan in front of this big picture window and
she would smoke two packs of Marboro cigarettes a day,
drink slit smoke liquor, and she would talk about the neighbors.
See that neighbor across the street. I know he's getting
the cart and I and he's stepping out on his wife.
And she would she would spin all these crazy conspiracies,
(21:49):
and I would just sit there, just enthralled with her imagination.
Where is she coming up with this stuff? So I
actually put those conspiracies that she told me in this book.
So the first one is called The Blind Devotion of
Imaging Taylor. The second one is called Imageing's Grand Fiasco,
(22:11):
and I'm on contract right. The third one is going
to be Peekaboo Imaging.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
Oh my gosh. Where and when do these stories take place?
And why did you choose the settings? What city is
it in? What time period? Is the first already story
set in the.
Speaker 3 (22:29):
Imaging Taylor books. I set them in the time period
that I lived it, so it's historical. It's set in
nineteen seventy three, I think, okay, And she drives amc Grimlin,
a red Grimlin that my grandmother does. I described the
house that my grandmother lived in. I mean, everything, the streets,
(22:51):
everything is exactly the way I lived it. As far
as that goes. I just used conspiracies and brought them
to life, and I used her voice because she was
crotchety and funny the things she would say. And people
email me. I've had multiple people have emailed me. One
woman said, I bought your book and I took it
on a plane and people were asking me what I
(23:13):
was laughing about, because.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
Oh god, oh my god, that's a good good tee.
Back now she's seventy five, and then I'm going back
up here to mister Harvey, who's in his eighties. This
is when I was researching for your interview. That jumped
out at me and I it's different, and I appreciate it.
I think I only had one other author on who's
(23:38):
done this. Why did you choose to make older characters
the star of the show in your novels?
Speaker 3 (23:45):
Well, that was planned because I still look for and
you know, historically, because I've been writing since going to
book conferences and you know, studying the craft for thirty
or more than thirty years now, since nineteen eighty nine.
And they always told me you never write to the
market because the market changes. But overall, generally there are
(24:07):
more readers that are older now. The baby boomers are
bigger readers than the younger generation. So I thought that
if I want to pander to that market, I need
to have my characters something that those readers can relate to,
and so I purposely made them that age.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
Ah, very interesting. I never heard that before. Very interesting.
Now I don't I don't know. You can't give it away.
I'll ask you if Ima Jean really did kill her husband,
But you know you're not going to answer that. But
is she Is she a calculating, cold hearted person? How
would you describe I'm a gene imaging.
Speaker 3 (24:50):
There is some backstory with imaging too, because she was
deeply in love with her husband and she the the
character evolves, so in order for her to survive this
new world, she has to evolve because all kinds of
stuff happens in the first book and in the second
book too. The second book is a totally another story,
(25:12):
but in the first book there's another storyline. So in
this in this method of writing, I took my grandmother
and as the main character, and then I started with
two storylines. So what I do is I I start
with one storyline, and I do three scene sequences, and
(25:33):
I jump over to another storyline sequence three. Then I
jump back and forth across these three plot lines. The
one plot line that I used in the first Imaging
book was something that happened to me when I was
out working as a supervisor in the high Desert chuck
A Valley, and this guy garage caught on fire. By
(25:55):
the time we got there in the fire department put
it out, he had shot himself in the head. I think,
I think he committed said And when they started going
through the rubbish of his garage, they found a crate
with a dead woman in it and killed this woman,
killed his wife, Orange County and put her in a crate,
(26:17):
and then he moved from Orange County Yucka Valley. He
kept her in this crate in then. So, yeah, it
was it was a horrible thing, but I thought it
was it was a unique kind of story. So Imaging
is friends with the neighbor's who's very young, I think
she's in her twenty fives, and her and her father
(26:38):
passes away. So Imagine goes next door and helps her
clear out all their father's stuff in the garage and
there's a big pyramid of just junk and are going
through it, and they get down to the bottom of
this pyramid and there's a crate and they opened a
crate and there's a dead woman in it.
Speaker 2 (26:54):
Oh my gosh.
Speaker 3 (26:56):
Imageing's on parole and she can't call the cops because
she's pull over murder. Yeah so that yeah, So those
I continually layer in things like that as the story
goes along.
Speaker 2 (27:10):
You keep it interesting. Who is Cigar and you come
up with some names. Who is Cigar? And how and
why do Imma Jean and Cigar across paths?
Speaker 3 (27:19):
Well, Cigar is the guy that walks into the dentco.
He's the he's the mafia guy and a unique situation
with with Dentko. I had a lot of fun writing
this book because I wrote it about uh an intersection
in Fontana where I worked as a patrol sergeant and
a detective sergeant. And it was a it's a strip center.
(27:41):
There's a liquor store anchor on the corner, and then
there's an l shaped strip center, and there's the Dent COO.
There's a massage parlor, there's a warehouse. And I wrote it.
I described it just the way it is in real life.
So this massage parlor is right next door the Dent COO.
And imaging interacts with these women who are in the
(28:06):
sex trade, and there was a lot. There's a lot
of funny stuff that happens with Imaging in that one too.
So the cigar walks into the walks into the donut
shop in the strip center too. He walks into each
one of the businesses and said, demands money to be
paid weekly or he's going to burn the place down.
So Imaging gets together with everybody in the strip center says,
(28:28):
we got to do something about this. So I took
that those places are real, and my grandmother was real,
and some of the stories that are in the book.
At the end of each one each of my books,
I put an author's note and explains what I took
from my experiences, what happened, and explained it's not real.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
Okay, I wasn't going to ask you this, but now
I'm listening to Your stories are very intriguing, very interesting,
and there's a lot going on to capture and maintain
the reader's interest. Did you how much working as a
police officer? I can only imagine how much did working
(29:11):
as a cop? Do you think gives you all this
rich material to use as a novelist. How much do
you think your job affected your ability to come up
with concept these stories.
Speaker 3 (29:23):
Well, I had a pretty wild career. I mean I
thought everybody was having the same kind of career I
was until I started talking to him and telling stories.
But I specialized most of my career. I chased murder
suspects across three states. I was cross warns the US Marshall.
I chased bank robbers. I mean, I had a fun
time my entire career until I promoted a sergeant. I
(29:46):
had to supervise people like me. But in the Bruno books,
those are almost exclusively true stories that I was actually
involved in. And The Sinister, so each book, each one
of the Bruna books is like a snapshot of my career. So, uh,
The Sinister is a unique kidnapping that I had never
(30:07):
come across. I thought about it and invented this story.
But The Sinister got a star review and publishes weekly.
It's difficult to get into published weekly, let alone get
a star review. It was chosen as best Mystery by
The Mystery out of Amazon, and thank you, and then
Denzel Washington's movie crew has to look at it, so
(30:29):
he's still there.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
Hello.
Speaker 3 (30:32):
Okay, So The Heartless was a story of when I
was working by crimes. Two women went into our jail
and Sam Bernardino for visiting. They had these big purses
and they had a third woman that distracted the guard
and they pulled out Cordiner's drills. They drilled the window
(30:53):
out of visiting and six homicide suspects escaped in real life. Wow,
I helped chase them down. So I put that story
in one of the Bruno books. So The Reckless is
the story when I was working bank robbery, chasing bank
robbers around, and I put three of the actual bank
robbers that bank robberies that I was involved in in
that book. So each book has a different kind of atmosphere,
(31:19):
different story, but it's still Bruno Johnson champion and writes
of children and women in all the books.
Speaker 2 (31:25):
Okay, and we're going to get to Bruno next. But
I love your book covers. Who designed the covers and
how much input did you have on the cover design.
Speaker 3 (31:35):
The first cover if you look at the original cover
hardcover of the Disposables. I had this agent for fifteen years,
one agent, and we could. He marketed every one of
my books to a standstill. I love this guy, but
I ultimately sold my first book my wife sold it.
(31:58):
Actually her best friend. She was in Toastmasters with this
woman named Karen, and Karen read one of my books,
or a couple of my books, and she was skin
diving in Bora Bora and she was with a skin
diving with another with a whole boat of people, and
there was two people in the book. They started talking
about reading and writing, and it happened to be the
(32:18):
owners of Oceanva Publishing, and so Karen says, well, you
need to read this guy. So that's how we got
home as a phone message. And I was working on
book number thirty eight, and Karen said, well, send this
person the book. And I said, yeah, yeah, because this
hapened before, so I thought I'll send them book number
thirty six. I just randomly my back I just sent
(32:39):
them book thirty six and they loved it. I mean
they really loved it. And that was called the Other
Side of Forever. But the publisher said that sounds too
much like a romance and it's more gritty than she wanted.
And so the publisher was just excellent. He said, give
us five of the titles that she that you like.
(33:01):
So I sent them some titles and they picked the disposables.
So then they give us a phone call. We have
a three way phone call with the cover artist, with
the publisher, with the publishing manager, and my wife and I.
So they asked me what my concept was. I mean,
this was really great because it's one of the people
(33:22):
I talked to. They don't get this kind of books.
So I said, because the books, the first book, the
cops were acting like a click, like a gang click.
I thought it would be interesting to show the side
of a house at night in the headlights and there's
graffiti on the wall, and the graffiti depicts what happens
(33:42):
in the books through through street language. So I thought
was I thought it would be a unique kind of thing.
So at the end of the at the end of
the conversation, everybody liked the idea of the concept. I
asked the cover guy on the phone, I said, so,
are you going to take some pic and send to me?
Look at He goes, no, why don't you take some
pictures and send to me? You know, And I think
(34:05):
he was getting paid more for the cover than I
was getting from my first advance of the book. So,
so my wife is very artistic and she she uses
her artistic vent on all kinds of stuff around the house.
Sometimes uh too crazy all the stuff. She took a
can of spray paint, went out to the side of
(34:25):
her house and sprayed at the graffiti on our wall.
And then we waited till dark. We put the headlights
on it, took the pictures and sent it to them
and they loved it, and they put it on the
first cover of our books. Well up the hardcover and
look at the cover you'll see. And so we we
(34:46):
live in a wine country. We had people over for
a wine party and they were just they pulled up
this graffiti on our house. So after that they started
And I've heard another couple of publishers do this where
(35:07):
where they do a study, a test study, because you
could change the covers around, interchange them on Amazon and
see which the sales are better or increase. So they
thought that my covers weren't depicting the true the tone
of the books. So they hired a guy named Christian Storm.
And this guy is great. He did He redid all
(35:31):
the Bruno covers if you look at him, and I
love the covers. So then when I shifted to the
Dave Becka books, I wanted to have branding for my
for my so anybody picks up my book, oh this
is day put in the book just based on the
same right. So I hired Level Best. Let me hire
Christian Storm to do the to do the covers, and
(35:53):
I think it was critical. I think it was very
important to do that. So if you look and you
put the Day Becka books close to the the Bruno books,
you'll see the difference. You also see even though Immagen
is a little bit lighter in mood and tone, there's
still the font that is similar to the Bruno and
the Dave Beckap books. He also did the standalone Obsessions
(36:16):
of Harvey Usher, and if you go on that galley,
you'll see that people just brave about that cover. They
just love it.
Speaker 2 (36:24):
Yes, and that's a big part of book sales for sure.
Now to introduce us to Bruno Johnson, can you tell
us who he is and why does his life get
the world?
Speaker 3 (36:37):
Bruno Johnson is, He's got a big heart and he
loves to protect children and women. But the tagline for
that series is Bruno Johnson's an ex cop, ex con
who rescues children from toxic homes. He couldn't do it
when he's a cop, because there's too many rules and regulations. Now,
he goes outside the law to rescue the children. Him
(36:59):
and his wife Marie, and his father have a makeshift
orphanage down in Costa Rica where they continue to gather
these children and keep them safe. So each book, even
though it's a snapshot of my career, he continues to
pull people from hazard situations and take them someplace safe.
And that's that's the whole uh line, the log line
(37:20):
of the series.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
Now, why does Robbie Wicks pressure Bruno to solve a
high profile crime?
Speaker 3 (37:30):
Robbie Bruno Johnson was on a violent crimes team just
like I was. So his boss wanted, well, I don't
want to give the I don't give too much Oblave.
He wants to control the investigation, so he brings Bruno
into it because he knows that Bruno's not a cop
and that Bruno will do what needs to be done
(37:50):
to take care of what's right. This might not be
legally right, but it's morally right, and so he Robbie
Wicks thought that he can control Bruno. And then once
Bruno his got with of what's going on, Robbie Wicks
did not like what happened at the end.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
Now tell us where when these the books in the
series take place, and how old is Bruno in this series?
Speaker 3 (38:16):
Okay? So I wrote the first book, Disposables, and sold it,
and then once I was like I said, I sent
him number thirty six. I was writing number thirty eight
when they bought Disposables. I stopped writing number thirty eight
because I knew that that sequels have a better chance
of a second for a second book sale, so I
(38:37):
started writing the Replacements. The Replacements is a story of
the most dangerous person I ever dealt with in my career.
I thought he was very interesting to write about. His
name in real life was James Lawless. And he was
tattooed from his chin. Every inch of his skin was
(38:59):
tattooed from his chin all the way down to his toes.
And he had the tattoo of a ram on his
pelvic area, a ram horn on each hip, and the
snout of the ram was his penis, and it was
tattooed in this snow. So he had committed, he had killed,
He had murdered. Somebody went to prison, got twenty five
(39:20):
to life, got out in twelve years, killed somebody got
twenty five to life, did twelve years, got out again.
So they thought that he was a threat to public safety.
So they put my team on him to follow and
make sure he didn't kill somebody else. So I dealt
with him personally. I masqueraded as a prole officer, so
I had contact with him every day. And he was
(39:42):
just just a chilling person to deal with. So when
you write a hero, you have to give a hero
flaws otherwise he turns into a caricature, right, same thing
with a bad guy. This guy was so bad that
I couldn't write him just the way it was because
he would turn into a character so nobody, but no
(40:04):
one would believe what I was writing about this guy.
So in order to make him plausible real, I had
to give him a flaw. And that flaw for a
bad guy is just this midgeon of humanity. I had
to give him a little bit of humanity as a
flaw for the bad guy. You fell what I'm saying.
So I put him in book two. And I didn't
(40:29):
like this guy, I mean I really he was despicable.
So in book three, because they picked up they bought
the book two, they loved it. I started writing book
three and the next book in the series, and I
didn't like this guy and his name is Carl Drego
in the in the first book, and because I changed
the name, and so I killed him very very violently
(40:49):
in the third book. And the publisher says, oh, we
liked the book, but we like Callin Dregel. You can't
kill him the public because of that smidgeon of humanity,
and I gave him too much. I went overboard. So
they rejected it in November, and the book was due
(41:11):
in February. So they didn't like a female API agent.
They didn't like me killing Drego. So I scrapped the
whole book and I wrote from November to February. I
wrote another book, and I kept Grego alive. I turned
and she goes the publish and goes, this is a
great rewrite, and I kept the title. That's all I kept.
(41:33):
Rewrite it fully new book, so that the third book
was The Squandern, which is a story I wanted to
write about Lapd forda mont Velis where they were hitmen
as detectives. They were Lapd detectives and they were actually
hit men, and they were discovered and prosecuted, and you
(41:54):
can look it up on Google. And then I also
layered in the story about how the CIA hooked the
Inner City on rock cocaine on purpose so they could
fund the contrasts the Contra Debacle, and that I did.
That's the only book I ever did research on because
I wanted to get it right. And there's a guy
(42:14):
that won a Pulitzer Prize for telling that story. So
I layered those two stories together for The Squandered. The
fourth book, The Vanquished, I took it from my time
in criminal intelligence where I was falling a Hale's angels
around and these people were the most despicable people as
a group that I ever dealt with. So Bruno got
(42:38):
at think of the book. He was emotionally crushed. He
was shot and run over. I mean this guy, And
the publisher goes, this is a great book, but I
don't know how you're gonna come back. How are you
gonna bring Bruno back from this? The publisher said that
it kind of scared me. So it challenged my eyes.
I should have, but it challenged my my confidence. So
(43:00):
I stopped what I was doing and I went back
and I wrote prequels so I wrote four prequels. The
first one is The Innocence and it's nineteen eighty three
I think, and it's Bruno's first day as a detective.
So those prequels explain how Bruno gets to where he
is in the first book. So technically I wrote four
(43:20):
books in the current day. Then I wrote four prequels,
and I wrapped it back around and started the current
day continued on. So I read. I read a lot
of I read a lot of books. I mean a
lot of books, and a lot of authors they don't.
They let the age each year gain on the character,
(43:42):
and it kind of ruined some series for me because
the characters got too old to be doing the stuff
that they're doing. So in law Enforce they call it
X stepping when you extect somebody. I just leave Bruno
at the same age. He's just at the same age,
and all this stuff happens to him, like you know, session,
And that's it's probably not the reader if it pays
(44:05):
attention and sees that, it might not like it. But
I prefer to have the envisioned Bruno the same age,
doing the same things, And it's easier for me to
write that way, and I think it's more dynamic that way.
Speaker 2 (44:18):
Okay, let's talk about mister David Beckett as we come
down to, like the last fifteen minutes of the show is,
can you give us an overview of a Fearsome moon
Light Black and tell us a little bit more about
David Beckett.
Speaker 3 (44:33):
David Beckett, I wanted to write a like. Like I said,
I had a lot of fun in my career and
I wanted to write a memoir. So I started writing
this book and I ended up the first part, the
first half the book ended up being my first year
in the job. Everything I've wrote in the first half
of of a Fearsome moon Lie Black happened just the
(44:53):
way it happened to me. And I had stuff happened
to me, murder, officer involved shooting. I got into some
crazy stuff as a brand new cop. I was young, innocent,
I had no idea what I was doing, so I
put that in there just the way it happened. I
couldn't get the story arc to work, so the second
half of the book is fictionalized to make it work.
(45:15):
So that story I told you about my psych teacher,
I put that in there. I did my first manslaughter
investigation was just a horrendous deal with evidence place, and
I'm in the street trying to I'm handcuffing the guy
and I'm arguing my supervisor about arresting him, and it
was just a huge problem. And I hear somebody on
(45:36):
the cornyoned David Wayne and look over and it's my mom.
She's said in the corner and she was run off
the road by the guy that I'm arrested. She crashed
her car from the same guy, from the same incident.
So yeah, I'm telling you, I had a wild time.
And so I put these stories in the book. And
(45:59):
at the same time, I was looking violent crimes and
I wanted to add this one in, so I pulled
it in as a as a secondary plot line. I
was walking out of this liquor store one day and
this girl was standing outside like a seven to eleven,
and I was when I was working violent crimes or
(46:19):
chasing bankcroppers, I would work playing clothes and I wore
work shirts. I went to a uniform store and I said,
you got any shirts that weren't picked up? And they
had like eighteen eight of these shirts that and I
had them put patches on Grace trucking, and I put Carl.
I put Carl on the shirt, and my captain even
started calling me Carl. He wouldn't call me Dave anymore.
(46:42):
So I was wearing my Carl shirt, wearing Levi's sunglass.
I walk out of the store and this woman who
is just she looked like she was probably twenty years
older than she was, says Hi Dave. And I walked over,
I said, do I know you? And she was a
girl that I went to high school with. Wow, And
(47:03):
this was shocking to me. And so once she told
me who she was, I was like stunned. And what
happened was she was with this guy in high school
and they were just always lovey dovey, I mean, just
totally in love with each other. And I lost track
because you know how every goes their separate ways. He
disappeared one day, He's up and disappeared, and she if
(47:28):
she didn't understand what happened. He got a good job,
I mean he was making more money than than he
was making a huge amount of money, and they made
a missing person's report. He was never they never surfaced.
They don't know what happened to him. Then she's telling
me this and she totally wrecked her life because this
(47:50):
was the love of her life and she just went downhill.
And what happened was, I'm standard talking to her. Somebody
found his call our off Glendora Ridge route. He was driving.
He went for a drive one night and he drove
off the cliff and went up the trees and they
found him like twenty five years later.
Speaker 2 (48:11):
Oh my gosh.
Speaker 3 (48:13):
So I fold that story into the Dave Beckett series.
The first Dave beck At the first of Moonlight Black.
So the first the first book is half memoir in
the second half. So then I go up to the
high desert when I when I first get the patrol,
and so he wants to Dave Beckam wants to work homicide.
So a second book, A Lonesome Blood Red Sun, It
(48:36):
starts with him working patrol, but then he goes to
work on homicide. And Samuel County is twenty thousand square miles.
It's the largest geographics county in the United States. There's
I forgot how many one hundred and eighty miles from
Victorviille to Vegas of straight Highway, and homicide detectives say
that if all the dead bodies buried on both sides
(48:58):
of the freeway stood up at once, it would look
like a forest. So there's my ex wife works as
worked as a supervising coroner, and she gave me some
information there. At the time of the writing of this book,
there was two hundred and fifty six open bone cases.
So I thought, what better storyline. I mean, it's like
(49:20):
a for I can't think of the word now, motivational
ideas of all these dead people that are out in
the desert, you can just have story after story. So
the Bone Detective, which is the bone Dick is short
for bone Detective. He becomes the bone Dick for Sambino County.
And so the second book deals with the murder that
(49:43):
I was involved in. So in real life and it
doesn't happen the way it does in movies and books.
So a homicide team is highly trained, highly schooled. They
don't they investigate the crime, they get the warrant, they
don't chase the guy down because they go to the
next homicide. They hand the warrant to what's called the
(50:04):
dog team. The dog team chases him down. Well I
was I was on the dog team. I chased the
violent guys. So they handed me in this one case.
And I don't want to give this one away, but
I was stunned at how this murder was revealed, how
this murder came to light, it is shocking. And so
I started chasing this crook, and as it turns out,
(50:25):
I caught the crook a mile and a half from
where my kids were living. So that's a unique, unique
story too. So that's a Lonesome Blood red Son. And
so I put in a pursuit, I put in Rob
Robbie's I was involved in. I ruled them just the
way they happened in the Hye Desert. So that is
more of a memoir too. So here's some one Lie
(50:46):
Black and Lonesome Blood red Son is closer to a
memoir than Bruno Johnson is. And I just I just
turned in the third book, the A Cadavers, A Cadavers
Gray Dawn. That's I had a lot of fun. That
book really came together great. And I just started writing
the fourth book and I'm still working on the title.
(51:08):
So I'm working well ahead.
Speaker 2 (51:10):
Do readers have out of your book? Sounds so interesting?
Do readers have if breaders have followed each of your
characters in the different series do they have. How are
they telling you they have a favorite? Is it Imageen?
Is it David? Is it is it who? Who? Who
is Bruno? Who's their favorite? That they're like this, this
is the.
Speaker 3 (51:29):
Character there's different And because they're so they're so diverse.
Some people say they like Dave Beckett. Some people say
they like Imagen because it hits different people. You know,
I was talking earlier about how I started selling books.
I made my bones, I learned my craft, and I
go to bars and Nobles. At least I still do
(51:50):
signings at bars and Nobles once or twice a month
every month, and I sell a lot of Disposables the
first book in the series, because I'll call somebody over
and I said, all you have to do is read
the first half page of this book and you will
be hooked. And if I get them to the table,
and I was keeping track, I have a like a
sixty five percent sale rate if I get them to
(52:10):
read that half page. So if you go online and
go pull up disposables, go into read a sample and
read that first page, you'll see exactly what I'm talking about.
Speaker 2 (52:20):
Okay, can you shay? As we start to close down
Today's so, and you've been a very engaging, very good
I guess here on office shelf, can you share three
to four steps that you've taken, David, that you have
personally found to be effective at getting the word out
about your books.
Speaker 3 (52:40):
Yeah. You know, I'm a writer. I love to write
the marketing aspect of it. It's it's not me because
you know, you've got to be a little bit of recluse.
And I was very outgoing when I'm during my career.
But I have to say for best bang for your
buck is going to be the good Reads give away.
(53:02):
You know, it's a six's either five ninety nine or
six ninety nine, and it's a it's a focused market.
You know, you're you're you're engaging mystery readers. You're getting
their attention to a specific genre, a specific book. So
for that amount of money, so we give away. My
wife and I give away. We used to do a
hundred books. We're down to fifty because I'm publishing two
(53:24):
books a year. So I'll give We'll give away fifty
books on a on a good Reads giveaway, and then
that really gives a jump start on on the on
the sales of the books. And then it was hard
to break into Barnes and Noble, and that was just
a nacity. It took me two years. But now my
average sales at every book signing is fifty books at
(53:44):
book at Barns and Nobles.
Speaker 2 (53:46):
Very good. Yeah, yeah, that's good at a book signing.
Where can off the shelf listeners get a copy of
your books, David?
Speaker 3 (53:55):
They could get anywhere books are sold, Amazon, Barnes and Noble,
local independent bookstores. I just recently bought the rights back
to Bruno Johnson and we're still trying to get those
converted over to Putnam Publishing, so they might be a
little delay in picking those books up. But you can
(54:15):
start off with Dave Beckett right now, get Fears of
Moonlight Black or get the first Imaging Book, and I'm
telling you you'll you'll love both of those books.
Speaker 2 (54:23):
Are there any plans to turn your books into a series.
I'm thinking of Colombo, although these are nothing like a Colombo.
But do you invention that or is that something new
would even consider?
Speaker 3 (54:35):
The Bruner books are all options for movies now.
Speaker 2 (54:38):
Okay, but a TV series like a TV series.
Speaker 3 (54:43):
Yeah, they're options, but like and I've heard this and
I think it's true. Ninety percent of options are never made.
Only three percent of the options are ever made. So
I'm not holding my breath that they're going to make
a streaming series out of it. You know, it could
happen down the road. But I'm an author. I like
writing books people.
Speaker 2 (55:02):
Now, do you have any upcoming speaking engagements our listeners?
You're a very engaging guest if our listeners wanted to
catch you on another interview or radio TV podcast, Do
you have any upcoming speaking engagements you could share with us.
Speaker 3 (55:18):
I've got a couple that are that are not inked yet.
I do a lot of talks at book conferences and
writers conferences in fact a a I'm happy to teach
a class on how to write a novel. I developed
my own system, and every time I give it to
writers groups, they just they brave about it. It's called
writing by the Numbers, and it's a system that I developed.
(55:42):
You can also get on my newsletter on my website.
I put out a new a newsletter every two weeks
and I do a story of my life and I'm
at sixty thousand words on that already, because each each
week I put in I write a five hundred word
story and people email me about how much they like
(56:03):
those stories on my newsletter. So if anybody wants me
to come and talk and give my talk, it thinks
about an hour and a half to give on how
to write a novel class, and I go over the
things I touch more deeply on the things I've already
touched on in this conversation.
Speaker 2 (56:19):
Okay, and then lastly, if you're on any social media,
could you let us know if people want to keep
up with you on social media.
Speaker 3 (56:28):
I'm not I'm not big. I hit Facebook once in
a while, but I'm not. I'm a writer.
Speaker 2 (56:35):
Okay, So now big, and that's awesome. That's awesome. You
have been an amazing guest, and we want to thank
our Off the Shelf listeners and David for taking time
out of his day to be here with us on
Off the Shelf Books. And if you came in midstream
or late, there's no worries. After the show finished the streaming,
you could listen to it as many times as you
(56:56):
like and share it with book lovers all over the
world so they can get to know David Puttnham and
his books. He is online at David Puttnam Books dot com.
And that's D A B I D P U T
N A M B O O K S dot com
again David Puttnam books dot com. If you listen to
(57:16):
the show, you know his books are also mean. He's
a great guest, so I encourage you to visit him online.
And he said he has his newsletters to get subscribe
to his newsletter again through his website, David Puttnam books
dot com. Thank you so much, David for being here
with us. And your books are itself so so incredibly
(57:37):
interested and I hope they do get picked up for
a TV series because I think they will be very
very interesting. Thank you for being here with us today.
As I tell our listeners all the time, you are incredible.
You're absolutely amazing. Please go out and create a fabulous
day for yourself today and I see you back here
(58:00):
next week on all the shelfs Books. David. I'll send
you a link to the show when it finishes streaming.
Thank you so much.
Speaker 3 (58:09):
Thank you for having me. You had a great time.
Speaker 2 (58:11):
Thank you bye for now, Hike
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