Tell us about your journey as an author

I’m a lifelong journalist. A friend and I started our junior high school newspaper when I was 12 and it seems like I’ve always been writing. I wrote my first novel “Angel Fire” while I was a daily newspaper editor, and my first true crime “The Darkest Night” after I returned from a reporting assignment in the Middle East after 9/11. It all springs from being a reader at a very early age. Eventually I began to wonder how somebody could move me to cry, laugh, or be afraid using little inky squiggles on a page. I wanted to be able to do that kind of magic.

Tell us something really interesting that’s happened to you!

Days after Sept. 11, 2001, I was dispatched by the Denver Post—where I was a senior writer—to the Middle East to cover the unfolding War on Terror. During that time, a slow epiphany took shape: That in that imperceptible moment between life and death is where we find our most necessary stories. A mystifying thing—a sort of ghost in the machine—happened on my long flight home, and I came home intently focused on writing “The Darkest Night,” about a horrifying 1973 Wyoming crime that changed my hometown overnight. It became a popular bestseller and the arc of my book-writing changed.

What is something unique/quirky about you?

I make wine. I live in the high desert of northern New Mexico, the last place you might expect to find a vineyard. But my wife and I tend our small vineyard—no small undertaking in the desert. It’s a relatively new amusement for us but winemaking has much in common with writing: It requires patience, things get messy, and eventually it must be shared to mean anything.

You’ve now written 19 books. Your first was a literary fiction, then a couple mysteries, then mostly true crime (except for one road-trip memoir). Why haven’t you stuck to one genre?

And journalism, screenplays, and a little poetry, too.  I have been fascinated by all the forms our stories can take ever since I read how F. Scott Fitzgerald had tried to capture the rhythms of jazz in his writing. Part of me feels that every story has a perfect form and as storytellers, we should try to find it. That’s not a knock on those who only write fiction or non-fiction (or songs, poems, news reports, etc.) I’m just fascinated by all the ways we can tell a tale, and a little knowledge about all story forms helps every writer.

It’s perilous. Every genre has its own conventions and you should know all the rules before you can effectively break them. Otherwise, you’re just an arrogant idiot. So you must invest in re-educating yourself every time you switch. Plus, it impacts your brand and income as a writer if you build a fan base with one kind of story, then move on to another kind of story. And that’s why there’s a long-standing debate among writers about whether one should write for the market or write whatever stories turn one on.

The insufferable know-it-alls in publishing will smugly advise would-be novelists to write what’s in their hearts, but publishing is a risk-averse business and they’re most interested in what has already succeeded for somebody else. Those same experts will sternly warn that there’s very little chance of publishing anything anyway … so it seems to me a writer should do what he wants to do and hope his agent is versatile and devoted. If I fail at publishing, at least I fail telling stories I want to tell. Publishing’s suits simply don’t understand true storytellers. I’ve been advised to select a genre and do nothing else. I won’t. I dreamed the basic plot for ‘The Deadline,’ for Pete’s sake. It was a mystery. What if I only wrote romances or seagoing adventures?

What intrigues us about crime stories?

The criminal mind has always fascinated us as humans. When an especially deviant crime happens, our rational minds want to put things back in order, to make sense out of something senseless. Since the beginning of mankind, we have wanted to understand threats, to feel safe, to avoid unnecessary death.

So, I don’t think our fascination has changed—our media has. We now have cable, movies, the Internet, audio books, 24/7 news, streaming channels, podcasts, social media … all feeding our primitive human desire to see our monsters coming.

It’s been a theme of my crime-writing—whether fiction or nonfiction—that the monsters look like us. We often think our monsters are easy to spot because they look like flying monkeys, boogeymen, or Manson. Now we know they live next door, have families, coach Little League, take vacations. They’re indiscernible from anybody else … and that scares the hell out of us.

You’ve written about serial killers but they sometimes feel like supporting characters in real stories about victims, survivors, and cops. Why?

Serial killers are freaks and we love freak shows. They occasionally creep into our nightmares, our mythology … our homes … and steal away something.  Security. Trust. Life.

But I’m not especially fascinated by serial killers in fact or fiction, except as the catalysts that set greater human stories in motion. I’m far more interested in the people who are splashed by this horror and those who must deal with it. I’m intrigued by ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. The greater the evil, the greater the hero. 

About Ron Franscell

A veteran journalist, Ron Franscell is the New York Times bestselling author of 18 books, including international bestsellers “The Darkest Night” and Edgar-nominated true crime “Morgue: A Life in Death.” His newest, “ShadowMan: An Elusive Psycho Killer and the Birth of FBI Profiling,” was released in March by Berkley/Penguin-Random House.

His atmospheric and muscular writing—hailed by Ann Rule, Vincent Bugliosi, William Least-Heat Moon, and others—has established him as one of the most provocative American voices in narrative nonfiction.

Ron’s first book, “Angel Fire,” was a USA Today bestselling literary novel listed by the San Francisco Chronicle among the 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century West. His later success grew from blending techniques of fiction-writing with his daily journalism. The result was dramatic, detailed, and utterly true storytelling.

Ron has established himself as a plucky reporter, too. As a senior writer at the Denver Post, he covered the evolution of the American West but shortly after 9/11, he was dispatched by the Post to cover the Middle East during the first months of the War on Terror. In 2004, he covered devastating Hurricane Rita from inside the storm.

His book reviews and essays have been widely published in many of America’s biggest and best newspapers, such as the Washington Post, Chicago Sun-Times, San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury-News, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and others. He has been a guest on CNN, Fox News, NPR, the Today Show, ABC News, and he appears regularly on crime documentaries at Investigation Discovery, Oxygen, History Channel, Reelz, and A&E.

He lives in northern New Mexico.

Connect with Ron on his Website | Facebook | Twitter | Bookbub | Amazon | Goodreads

Ron’s Latest Novel

Deaf Row by Ron Franscell

Genre: Mystery, Thriller, Crime Fiction

Retired from a big-city homicide beat to a small Colorado mountain town, ex-detective Woodrow “Mountain” Bell yearns only to fade away. He’s failed in so many ways as a father, a husband, friend, and cop that it might be too late for a meaningful life. When he stumbles across a long-forgotten, unsolved child murder, his first impulse is to let it lie … but he can’t. He’s drawn into the macabre mystery when he realizes the killer might still be near. Without help from ambivalent local cops, Bell must overcome the obstacles of time, age, and a lack of police resources by calling upon the unique skills of the end-of-the-road codgers he meets for coffee every morning—a club of old guys who call themselves Deaf Row. Soon, this mottled crew finds itself on a collision course with a serial butcher.

|DEAF ROW is more than a tense mystery novel, more than an unnerving psychological thriller drawn from Ron Franscell’s career as a bestselling true-crime writer and journalist. It is also a novel of men pushing back against time and death, trying not to disappear entirely. DEAF ROW is a moving, occasionally humorous, portrait of flawed people caught in a web of pain and regret. And although you might think you know where this ghastly case is headed, the climax will blindside you.

Purchase on Amazon | Audiobook | B&N | Goodreads

Click to watch the trailer.