S. 3, Ep. 6: A Chat with Crime Fiction Author Dave White

Debbi Mack interviews crime fiction author Dave White on the Crime Cafe podcast. The transcript is below, if you’d like to read it. Debbi: Hi! This is the Crime Cafe. Your podcasting source of great crime, suspense and thriller writing. I am your host, Debbi Mack. Before I bring on my guest, I’ll just remind you that The Crime Cafe 9 Book Set and The Crime Cafe Anthology are on sale at all major online retailers for $1.99 and $.99 respectively. So, just go to my website debbimack.com. That’s debbimack.com and click on Crime Cafe and you’ll find the links for the books, as well as how to subscribe to this podcast. And with that, I’d like to introduce now, it is with great pleasure that I introduce now my guest, Dave White; the highly acclaimed Dave White. Dave: Hello. Debbi: Thanks for being here Dave. It’s great to have you on. Dave: Thank you. Thanks for having me. I’ve been looking forward to this for a while. We’ve been talking about this for a while, so this is nice. Debbi: This is awesome! I’m so glad you could be here because I’ve seen you so often at conferences and I’m such a shy person, I don’t know why I didn’t just walk up to you and say, “Hi Dave, I’m Debbi”. Dave: I’m shy too. It takes a lot for me to introduce myself to people, so I get it. I understand. Hi Debbi! Debbi: Hi Dave! And you’re from New Jersey. I am originally from New York, so that’s all the more reason why would should know each other. Dave: Exactly, exactly. Debbi: So, you’re the author of the sixth book so far series, correct? The Jackson Donne books. Dave: Right, there are five Jackson Donne books and one standalone called Witness to Death. Debbi: Oh, Okay! That’s a Jackson Donne also then? Dave: No, Witness to Death is a stand….wait, now I gotta count my books. There are six books total and five Donne. Debbi: Ok, five Donne done. Dave: Yes, exactly! Debbi: So, tell me a little bit more about the character Jackson Donne. Dave: Jackson Donne is a, we can go through a long history here. He’s a former private investigator. In the first novel, When One Man Dies, he was a private investigator, mourning the death of his fiancé and asked to solve a hit-and-run where one of his close drinking buddies was killed. And from there, the series kind of grew because Donne clashed with his former cop partner, Bill Martin, several times throughout the series and Martin kind of became an arch enemy for a couple of the books. Since then, Martin took Donne’s private eye license, got it taken away, Donne kind of became a freelancer and tried to go back to college and he was very much like, you know they pull me back in. Every time he thinks he’s out of the private eye or the crime business he gets pulled back in. He’s been on the run to Vermont at one point. He was in prison. He’s had quite the five-book life. Debbi: Oh my goodness! I was going to ask you about his journey as a character. It sounds like he’s had a rather rough one. Dave: Yeah! Debbi: I think of this right away. His fractious relationship with the police. What was it that caused that rift between himself and the police? Dave: In the books, Donne was a narcotics agent with…there was a New Brunswick police narcotics committee I guess you would call it as part of the police force and they were corrupt. They were stealing drugs, they were doing drugs, they were skimming money off the top anytime they busted someone up and what Donne finally realized was he was going down this dark hole, he became a drug addict (that sort of thing), so he turned in the narcotics force; everybody except his partner, Bill Martin, who he kind of let off easy. He kind of destroyed the narcotics force, but Martin was able to keep his job. The rest of them went to prison and Donne left and become a private investigator. So that’s kind of what started it because now all the cops kind of hate him for turning in these guys and Martin really holds a grudge because...