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,