S. 3, Ep. 18: A Chat with Mystery Author Richard Helms

Debbi Mack interviews mystery author Richard Helms. To buy any of the books displayed, just click on the cover. The interview transcript is below, if you’d like to read it. Or download the PDF copy and read it later. Debbi: Hi everybody. This is the Crime Cafe. Your podcasting source of great crime, suspense and thriller writing. I’m your host, Debbi Mack. Before I introduce my guest, I’d like to remind you to please check out the Crime Cafe Nine Book Set and the Crime Cafe Short Story Anthology. Both publications you can find on my website, debbimack.com when you click on the link Crime Cafe. You can also find the podcast subscription buttons there, as well as Crime Cafe merch. And with that, I would like to introduce my good friend and a great writer who also happens to be a multi-award winning author, a retired clinical forensic psychologist, and a retired college professor, Richard Helms. Do you go by Rick or Richard? Richard: I go by Rick. Debbi: Yes, I always call you Rick [laughs]. So, very cool, Rick. Thanks for being here. I’m so glad you could be here. Richard: Well, I’m happy to be here. I appreciate you having me today. Debbi: Well, it’s my pleasure and at this point, you said you have 19 published novels? Richard: Well, yeah. I have 19 that have been published. I think three of them are still in print. So, a bunch of them are available as ebooks, but most of my novels right now are out-of-print for any of a number of reasons. My own publishing company folded up back in 2011 and several of the books were on that, and Five Star (I’m one of the Five Star orphans). Some of you may not be familiar with Five Star. It was a division of Cengage Learning, which used to be Houghton Mifflin. It was Thomson-Shore and all these other, but anyway, they folded their mystery thriller line, I guess January of 2015 and I got the message on my birthday that my book publisher was going out of business. Not only that, but my books were going to be going out of print. So, the books that I had with Five Star are largely out-of-print at this point, but I have had 19 published up to this point beginning all the way back in 1980, which is probably before a lot of people watching this were born, when I had my first couple of novels published by World Karting Magazine. I was a go-cart racer back then when I was in college and Anne Bazzoli-Kugler with World Karting Magazine talked me into writing a series of stories about a driver named Karl Geary and the two books, Geary’s Year and Geary’s Gold were serialized over the course of about four years in World Karting Magazine. I immediately got to work and started writing an adult style thriller. At the time I was really reading a lot of Robert Ludlum and Ken Follett and David Morrell and so I decided I was going to write a Ludlum-style thriller called, The Valentine Profile because obviously getting published was so incredibly easy that all I had to do was dash it out and send it off and people would pay to publish it. I didn’t see another book in print for almost 20 years [laughs]. So… Debbi: This is not a place to look for overnight success. Richard: Well, most of the overnight successes I know have been doing this for about 20 years [laughs]. Debbi: Exactly! Exactly! Richard: At one level or another. I mean [Robert] Crais was writing for TV for years; Lee Goldberg, too. You know people who’ve been slaving away in the salt mines of writing in the back rooms of the story-runner rooms, and a lot of them are now coming out as novelists and doing a really great job. Debbi: That’s correct. That’s true. I was going to ask you about stock car racing and if you’d ever considered writing a NASCAR novel. Richard: Well, I wrote a novella, which is currently…I have a book of short stories that’s currently with my new book publisher. It’s Clay Stafford Books out of Nashville, Tennessee. But I’ve sent them a short story compilation that includes an unpublis...