Interview with Dan Flanigan – S. 10, Ep. 12

This week’s episode of the Crime Cafe podcast features my interview with lawyer and crime writer Dan Flanigan.

Dan started off writing poetry. Check out the story of how his writing journey began.

To download a copy of the transcript, just click here.

Debbi: Hi, everyone. My guest today is a lawyer, author, playwright, and poet, who among other things, has taught legal history and jurisprudence and practiced civil rights law, as well as worked in financial services, so he has an impressive resume. His written work includes the Peter O’Keefe hardboiled crime series, which has earned praise and awards. He has also written stage plays and short stories. His novella Dewdrops was adapted from a play. It’s my pleasure to have with me a lawyer and acclaimed author, Dan Flanigan. Hi, Dan. How are you doing today?

Dan: Good enough, thank you. As I said, better than I deserve I’m doing.

Debbi: Oh, dear me. Oh, I’d hate to think that. You always wanted to write a novel but ended up going to law school. How did that come about?

Dan: Well, I’m not sure.

Debbi: I know the feeling.

Dan: I wanted to be a writer from the time I was a sophomore in high school, and found many ways to avoid or evade it. When I look back on it, I punished myself a whole lot all those years, and unfortunately punished my wife as well for selling out, not doing what I was supposed to do. But when I look back on it now, I wonder if I really had anything to write and you’ve lived your whole life. You have had a lot happen to you.

Debbi: There’s a lot to be said for waiting before you start writing, because then you have more content to draw from.

Dan: In any event, I never thought it would, but it worked out well.

Debbi: Absolutely. Yeah. What was it that started you? You started with poetry, correct?

Dan: Yes. I had written in sort of spurts occasionally over a long period of time, between my sophomore year in high school and when I really started writing in earnest, and I had a period in the 1980s when I was on kind of a two-year break from practicing law and I wrote several plays. I wrote some poetry, a couple short stories, and I wrote a novel. One thing led to another. For example, I had an agent, I had a publisher for the novel. The publisher went bankrupt, and I had a stage reading of a play in New York. I thought I was going to be on top of the world for about five seconds. Where do you go eventually with any of that? So I decided I’m going to quit punishing myself and have nothing to do with writing.

And about 20 years later, if you got something like that in you, I guess it stays in you. My wife died in 2011, and I thought I’d do a kind of tribute, I guess – she might not think so – to her with a book called Tenebrae, which is a book of poems, mostly focused on her last illness and death. That sort of broke the dam, if you will, and sort of led me back into writing in a very serious way, and I really kept to it since.

Debbi: What inspired you to create Peter O’Keefe, this character? What kind of a person is he and what do you draw on to create stories about him?

Dan: The way I ended up there is odd, but I had no thought of ever writing crime fiction or detective fiction or anything else. I had read some of it over the course of my life, but never was steeped in it in any way, and the first two books, one was poetry and one was a short story collection, Dewdrops that I guess – not to be pretentious – but you might call literary fiction. But then I wanted to write this novel, sort of a fall in reparation sort of thing. I thought I want to make this more interesting than just navel gazing, and so I said, you know, I’m going to try to put it in this sort of private detective format and see how it goes. And that was the book that I wrote, and got accepted by a publisher.

I had no thought of ever writing crime fiction or detective fiction or anything else. I had read some of it over the course of my life, but never was steeped in it in any way …

But in the course of … I’m now in 2013 – in the course of writing the book of poetry, I pulled that book out of the box and said, you know, this is okay. This ought to be. So I rewrote it very extensively, and that’s Mink Eyes, the first in this series. Then I thought, oh, that’s one book, and I’ll go onto something else. But then I had this notion of doing it as a series. The first book was set in 1986. I thought it would be interesting to take this group of characters and deal with serious “literary” kinds of subjects, but in a more interesting format, and move it along as much as possible, and do the history of our times.

This guy starts out, he’s a Vietnam vet. Like everybody else, he’s a recovering cocaine guy and an alcoholic and has PTSD, although he won’t acknowledge it or do anything about it. He’s divorced, has a daughter who’s 9 years old in the first book, and he’s really at the bottom. His childhood buddy, who’s a big time lawyer named Mike Harrigan sort of plucks him out of jail, gets him a deal with the cops to be free of it if he goes straight and narrow. I’m going to make a private detective out of you, and that’s the start, the origin story, if you will.

The books attempt to be standalone, but one theme in the first three is him struggling and dealing with the Mafia, and it’s also about really the decline and disappearance really of the traditional Mafia in that period of time through RICO prosecutions and wiretaps and all that.

The first several books are really him trying to come to terms with being a new person. As he describes it, a more useful person, and then there’s a whole theme. He gets crossways with the Mafia in the first book. The books attempt to be standalone, but one theme in the first three is him struggling and dealing with the Mafia, and it’s also about really the decline and disappearance really of the traditional Mafia in that period of time through RICO prosecutions and wiretaps and all that.

Debbi: Interesting. Where is the series set and how much does the setting play in the book?

Dan: It’s different in different books. When people ask this question, I say a place like Kansas City. That’s where I’m from, and we had quite a Mafia group in town, too. But I don’t ever say it’s Kansas City, because I don’t want to be tied down to streets and I want to be able to do something purely fictional if I want to, so I never say that, but people would recognize it as that if they knew Kansas City and it’s a whole Midwestern thing. And then down in southern Missouri and northern Arkansas, not far from us, it’s the Ozarks. The first book Mink Eyes is in fact about a Ponzi mink farm scheme down in the Ozarks and all kinds of other crazy stuff. The latest book, An American Tragedy … no, pardon me… the book I’m working on right now is another kind of Ozark-set book, where a lot of hate groups and fundamentalist Christian survivalist kind of stuff was going on in the 80s and 90s. So I make use of all that but without ever saying. I call it the Lake Country instead of just saying it’s the Ozarks.

Debbi: Well, that’s interesting. I noticed in an article about you that it says you described the 80s as not being a golden era where everything was just so much better than it is today, and with more hairspray.

Dan: Yeah. And that’s not me. That was the author of the article.

Debbi: I noticed that. Yeah, it wasn’t exactly an exact quote.

Dan: Right. And she’s very young, and I think she probably had this exalted view of the 1980s.

Debbi: I find that very fascinating. I think we have a tendency to do that. Go back 20 years and say, oh, gee, things were so much better then.

Dan: With a whole lot of things. And I never thought so, even though it was in a lot of ways good to me, financially but it was fairly rotten in its heart, you know?

Debbi: Oh, yeah. I mean, there was some really bad stuff going on in the 80s, and don’t even get me started about the 60s. Talk about an overrated decade! Okay, moving on. You’re still practicing law, so where do you find the time to do the writing?

Dan: Well, luckily we have this great sabbatical program in my firm where every five or six years, you take three months off if you want to, and that let me sort of jumpstart this series business. And, then also, I do a lot less law practice than I did at one time, and I’m sort of … let’s call it moving toward the horizon.

[W]e have this great sabbatical program in my firm where every five or six years, you take three months off if you want to, and that let me sort of jumpstart this series business.

Debbi: Yes, I know the feeling.

Dan: So I have more time, but I think maybe in that article, I don’t know, somebody asked me, how do you do all that? I said, well, it helps start out being a workaholic and …

Debbi: And living for a while.

Dan: A very helpful thing in certain ways anyway.

Debbi: I think that lawyers tend to be a bit workaholic generally.

Dan: Yeah, right and so that could carry over, although I don’t have the same discipline writing that