S. 3, Ep. 3: A Chat with Thriller Author Lawrence Kelter

Debbi Mack interviews thriller author Lawrence Kelter on the Crime Cafe podcast. The transcript is below, if you'd like to read it. Debbi: Hello, everyone this is the Crime Cafe, your podcasting source of great crime, suspense and thriller writing. I'm your host Debbi Mack. Before I introduce this week's awesome guest, I'll just remind you that the Crime Cafe boxed set—that’s nine books in the boxed set—and the Crime Cafe Short Story Anthology can be purchased online at any online retailer for the very reasonable price of $1.99 for the boxed and $0.99 for the anthology. You can get it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple, whatever. The buy links are on my website debbimack.com. And with that said I'm thrilled to introduce my guest Lawrence Kelter, a fellow New Yorker and thriller author. it's great to have you on Larry. Lawrence: It's great to be here. Please, let's stick with Larry. Debbi: Larry. [laughs] Lawrence: If I get Lawrence you know, I'm gonna assume that I've done something wrong or I'm in big trouble. Larry works just fine. Debbi: I know what you mean cause when people call me Deborah, I always think of my mother. Deborah! Lawrence: Exactly. Debbi: Exactly. I first got to know your work through the Stephanie Chalice thrillers and I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. Lawrence: You're about the only one who does pronounce it correctly. Debbi: Stephanie Chalice. I like that. What a great protagonist she is. What inspired you to go with that series—to write it? Lawrence: I was a big and I still am, a big fan of Nelson DeMille and I got sucked in by his John Corey character. At the time, he only had a couple books in that series, but now he's up to, I guess about seven or eight in the Corey series. And what I liked about him was he had this ascerbic personality and he's always making smart-ass comments. And I like the punch of having a smile when I read. You know, there’s a lot of great authors and you know I can't take anything away from them, but they're very, very dry and they'll just go through pages and pages of description. How he approached the crime circle and there was an inner circle and outer circle and the third circle and it's like, it takes you four pages to get through the crime circle. And it’s “What the …”, you know? I really like DeMille’s character, and I said you know I'd like to do something like that. I hadn't written at the time. And I can't copy John Corey. So I kinda borrowed some of his personality traits and I imbued them in a woman, so to speak. Debbi: Excellent. Lawrence: Yeah, so Chalice is supposed to be fun, quirky, a little too savvy for her own good, a little too smart-alecky for her own good, but I think that makes the character memorable and fun. Debbi: Yes, absolutely and it underscores how she's a human being, she's not like a .... I don't know, a stereotypical woman or whatever you wanna call it right. Lawrence: Right. Debbi: I like the fact that you can write that. So, much is said about men writing women and women writing men. Lawrence: Right. Debbi: I don't see why men can't write women as authentically as women can. Lawrence: Well, I'm several books into it now. You know, when I first started out there were some comments saying that she wasn't a real woman, that she was too much of a man's vision of a woman and some of that I think was real or right. I think I kinda absorbed those comments and refined her personality as I went along, and she’s seven whole books and three novellas into the series at this point. So, yeah, she's gone through a lot of changes and you know there's a lot of work involved. She starts out as a single gal detective and then she gets a partner that she falls in love with and, by the seventh book, she's got a child, she's married and has a child, so you know she's gone through an evolution, so to speak. Debbi: And do you picture writing more of that series and where do you think sh...