The Crime Cafe

This week’s episode of the Crime Cafe podcast features my interview with paleontologist and crime writer Leonard “Kris” Krystalka.

Check out his reading from The Bone Field!

Grab a PDF copy of the transcript here!

Debbi: Hi everyone. My guest today is both a professional paleontologist and a novelist. He writes the Henry Przewalski – is that correct, I hope? Przewalski?

Leonard: Literally, it reads as Przewalski but it’s actually a Russian-Polish name, named for the discoverer of Przewalski’s horse, that small kind of dwarfish horse that lives wild on the Asian steppes. So it’s pronounced in the Russian sense.

Debbi: Got it. All right. I’ll try to remember that. It’s my pleasure to have him with me today. It’s Leonard Krystalka, who goes by Kris. Like Kris Kristofferson, may he rest in peace.

Leonard: May he rest in peace. A terrific person.

Debbi: Indeed. Yes.

Leonard: Yes. Wonderful artist.

Debbi: He was, yes. I want to thank you for being here so much. It’s good to have you on. Tell us about Harry Przewalski. I almost screwed that up again. How much did you draw from your own experiences in creating him?

Leonard: A great deal. I named Harry Przewalski as a homage to the study of the life of the past and the study of present biodiversity. So, Przewalski’s horse is this miniature horse that roams wild on the steppes of Asia. It almost became extinct by over hunting, and in World War II, the German soldiers ate what is reputed to be some of the last Przewalski’s horses in a zoo in Poland. But enough were saved to repopulate the wild steppes of Asia.

Przewalski’s horse is this miniature horse that roams wild on the steppes of Asia. It almost became extinct by over hunting, and in World War II, the German soldiers ate what is reputed to be some of the last Przewalski’s horses in a zoo in Poland.

Debbi: Interesting. Did you choose that name deliberately?

Leonard: I did. I chose it deliberately, although it’s hard to pronounce, and as a homage to the paleontological studies of the evolutionary history of life on Earth, the three billion year history of life on Earth.

Debbi: That is so cool. How many books do you have in the series, and how many do you plan to write? Or do you have a plan for the series?

Leonard: There are four books now in the Harry Przewalski series. There’s THE BONE FIELD, DEATH SPOKE, THE CAMEL DRIVER, and the newest one just published this year called NATIVE BLOOD. I have a fifth novel, which is not in that series. It’s a historical fiction of a murder that occurred in Lawrence, Kansas in 1871. A doctor accused of murdering his patient because he was having an affair with the patient’s wife. The doctor was arrested and the resulting trial was equivalent to … imagine the OJ Simpson trial in 1871 in Kansas. You have sex, you have murder, you have adultery.

It attracted reporters of every single newspaper in the country from San Francisco, from Chicago, from St. Louis, from New York, Washington, Detroit, and so forth. This is 1871 Kansas. It’s only six years after the end of the Civil War. So the trial was a national sensation, and one of the Lawrence women becomes the heroine. She talks the editor of one of the Lawrence newspapers into hiring her as the first woman correspondent west of the Mississippi. She covers the trial and solves the murder.

Debbi: Wow.

Leonard: She also fights for women’s rights. She fights for suffrage for women and blacks. Yeah, she’s quite a woman.

Debbi: And which book is this again?

Leonard: This is called THE BODY ON THE BED. I could hold it up for viewers to see.

Debbi: That’s very cool. I noticed that book was outside the series.

Leonard: Yeah, it is. I’m writing the sequel to that now. It’s called The Body on the Bricks. She is the heroine of that book as well. But your original question was about the Przewalski series of which there are now four, and yes, there may well be a fifth.

Debbi: Fantastic. Do you see yourself ending this series in a particular way, or do you just think you’re going to keep writing them?

Leonard: That’s a really good question. Yeah, I do see myself ending the Przewalski series in a way that does poetic justice to Harry’s character, how he thinks, how he acts, and when he would take off his gun and put it away somewhere and say, I’m going to do something else.

I do see myself ending the Przewalski series in a way that does poetic justice to Harry’s character, how he thinks, how he acts, and when he would take off his gun and put it away somewhere and say, I’m going to do something else.

Debbi: Yeah. So putting up the guns and retiring at some point.

Leonard: Correct.

Debbi: In what ways does your protagonist differ from you?

Leonard: Well, Harry is not me. Of course, as with any writer, there are parts of you that you cannot help but insert into characters – experience, emotions, the way one thinks, senses of humor, senses of tragedy. In all of those ways, yes, there are parts of Harry that come from my life and my experience. But there’s a great deal to Harry that isn’t like me. So, for example, Harry was a student of paleontology and quit when his fiancé, who was a social worker, was brutally raped and murdered by a social misfit. He left his studies. He went to volunteer for a war in Iraq. He came back with a gun and a license to detect. That’s not me.

Debbi: So he’s a veteran.

Leonard: Yes.

Debbi: Wow. Yeah. That will have an effect on you.

Leonard: And he uses his skills that he learned by thinking as a paleontologist about those scarce clues, about a bone here, a tooth there or a skull there, to piece together the evolution of life on earth. He uses those skills of piecing together clues from different spheres to solve murder mysteries, which are all wrapped inside science intrigues as well.

He uses those skills of piecing together clues from different spheres to solve murder mysteries, which are all wrapped inside science intrigues as well.

So for example, The Bone Field investigates a paleontologist who is murdered for scientific glory, for fame, for one of the fault lines in the human condition that I like to write about. I think the job of every novelist is to explore the fault lines in the human condition, and the mystery genre, the hardboiled mystery genre, is a perfect vehicle for exploring those fault lines. So in The Bone Field, I quote John Wolcott, a Scottish satirist who wrote “the rage for fame infects both great and small! Better be damned than mentioned not at all.” That infects a great deal of science intrigues. So there’s a great deal of paleontological intrigue, geological intrigue, and of course, murder and betrayal in The Bone Field.

In the second book, in Death Spoke, the scientific intrigue is the archeology of prehistoric art. Who painted the spectacular bison and deer and horses and mammoths and the caves of France 12,000 to 34,000 years ago? And why didn’t they paint in those caves? Why didn’t they paint the outside environment? Sky, clouds, trees, grass, water, lakes, streams? There is an answer to that, which you will not hear in archeology class, but if your audience wants to read Death Spoke, they’ll find out the answer to that question.

Debbi: Fascinating. That really is fascinating. I’m intrigued by the science here. How much scientific detail do you include in your books?

Leonard: A great deal, but the trick in writing the scientific parts is interweaving the murder story, the detective story with the scientific mystery, so that the two are inseparable and both of them are page turners.

Debbi: Exactly. Yeah.

Leonard: So that one compliments the other. So in what I just mentioned about the novel Death Spoke, the solution to the mystery of who were the artists and why did they paint art in the deepest recesses of the caves, and why only those four animals in almost 99% of the caves, that mystery is interwoven with solving the murder mystery.

Debbi: That is really cool. That is so cool. Have you ever thought of writing a mystery with dinosaur bones for kids?

Leonard: That’s a really good question. I used to make up stories for my kids and not read it, but relate it at bedtime. And they loved those stories. I wish I’d written them down, and they did have dinosaurs. Yes.

Debbi: Oh my gosh, because kids seem to love dinosaurs, and I thought right away that you’d be a natural at telling that kind of story.

Leonard: Yes, they do.

Debbi: Wow. Do you work full-time as a paleontologist?

Leonard: I did work full-time as a paleontologist. I don’t anymore. I go into the field once in a while, still excavating dinosaurs and other fossils in Montana, but I am not a professional paleontologist any longer in terms of publishing in the field, writing scientific articles and so forth. I’ve switched from that to writing about paleontology and archeology especially, in my mystery novels.

Debbi: That’s really interesting and cool. What kind of writing schedule do you keep?

Leonard: I don’t, and I wish I was disciplined enough to keep a writing schedule, then I would finish a novel in six months or a year, rather than take two years to write a novel. It’s easy to procrastinate. It’s easy to do other things that one enjoys. Reading. I’m an avid cyclist, so I do a great deal of cycling that takes a great deal of time. I like to camp and so on.

Debbi: That’s great. That’s wonderful actually. What was it that drew you to the field of paleontology?

Leonard: Say that again.

Debbi: What was it that drew you to the field of paleontology?

Leonard: That’s a good question. There are two passions that made me a paleontologist. First was the passion of ideas, and in many ways, my novels are about those ideas. Paleontology asks ultimate questions. What triggered the myriad explosions and extinctions of life on the planet during the past 3 billion years? That’s an ultimate question. Hundreds of millions of species came and went on land and in the waters, from the tiny one celled algae, all the way to the dinosaur that everybody knows – Tyrannosaurus Rex. So basal to that answer is the tree of life. And as a paleontologist I try to decipher that 3 billion year tree of life on Earth.

The other answer was the passion of place. The Badlands, where the rocks are preserved in a row, wrote all the answers to the ultimate questions that paleontology asks. It’s only in the Badlands that you find all those fossils. And for me, the Badlands are primeval. Those canyons, stark rubble strewn, the buttes rising in stacked layers of red and gray and blue, much like people would see in the Grand Canyon. Every time you find a fossil, you can imagine that the earth itself has bled from the red rocks. As a city kid – I was born and raised in Montreal in Canada – so as a city kid, when I first saw the Badlands, I was seduced by their beauty. And for me, it was a beauty so terrible that it hurt the heart.

Debbi: I know the feeling. I am originally from New York City, and then I moved to Fresno, California, and it was like, oh, look at this place. No big tall buildings. I feel like I’m out in the open at last.

Leonard: Right, right.

Debbi: Yeah. It’s almost a shock, almost a culture shock to go from that to Fresno, California. What authors do you like to read, and what authors have inspired your writing?

Leonard: That is a great question. Let’s see. I actually have a list because I don’t want to leave anybody out. Who do I like to read? I grew up on Rex Stout and his Nero Wolfe mysteries. I used to reread them every few years. The stories are entertaining. They’re almost mannered. They’re set in New York where you’re from, but what stayed with me when I read them was Rex Stout’s craft as a writer, as a storyteller. I also read all of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James Cain. They introduced me to that streetwise, hard-boiled detective. The private eye, the simple short, declarative sentence. Ernest Hemingway introduced me to that as well, the wisecrack. And it also revealed how the gritty alleys of Los Angeles and other cities are perfect settings to fester the strands of human rot, and to tell the story of the gritty underbelly of human life and the human condition. This is why the detective story is so perfect.

I continued reading Ross Macdonald, James Crumley, whose prose is unmatched. For readers out there, the best dialogue, the absolute master of dialogue is Elmore Leonard. Boy, he paints his characters, their plots, the emotions, their psyches. He paints it with their words, how they speak, their expressions, their syncopation. When I read these authors, I find myself envious saying, damn, I wish I’d written that sentence.

The same holds for – of course, Elmore Leonard is dead, but the same holds for current writers. Ian Rankin, Lawrence Block, James Lee Burke, James Ellroy. Readers can’t go wrong. If you’re an aspiring detective writer, start with James Crumley. Start with A Kiss Before Dying and then go on.

Debbi: It’s been ages since I’ve read that, and I have to go back and look at it again, because boy, that name. James Crumley. I remember.

Leonard: In The Bone Field, I paid homage to him because I named the sheriff of a town in Wyoming after him. His name is Crumley.

Debbi: Oh, cool. Very cool. I love the way you said that the private eye novel, the hardboiled detective novel, is the perfect type of book to show the fault lines in the human condition. I think “fault lines in the human condition” has to be one of my favorite phrases.

Leonard: Right.

Debbi: That is so great.

Leonard: So if I could elaborate on that. My novels are classified as and we’re talking about them as murder mysteries, archeological thrillers, paleontological thrillers, and they fit the stereotype. There are murders committed, there are murders solved, there’s a private detective and so on. But the mystery classification is simplistic. For me – and I’m saying this for all your readers, all your listeners – for me, the best works in the mystery genre, Raymond Chandler, Elmore Leonard, I’ve talked about them before, James Crumley, Dorothy L. Sayers, they are much more than whodunits. They explore the fault lines in the human condition, and the best ones are as good as the classics in literature.

[F]or me, the best works in the mystery genre, Raymond Chandler, Elmore Leonard, I’ve talked about them before, James Crumley, Dorothy L. Sayers, they are much more than whodunits. They explore the fault lines in the human condition, and the best ones are as good as the classics in literature.

Mystery novels, private eye novels, they have the reputation of B-literature. I disagree with that entirely. It’s just like Humphrey Bogart films used to be called B-films, but now they’re rated just as classic as all the other classics. So the best mystery/private eye novels explore the same fault lines in the human condition as the classics in literature. The book of Job, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Tony Morrison’s Beloved, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Those all made impressions on me. So in the best mysteries, just like in the classics and literature, their characters are just as flawed, just as heroic. The relationships are just as conflicted. The seven deadly sins are just as deadly, and the stories expose the same gritty underbelly of life.

Debbi: Yes. It seems like your books, the scientific part of it can even border a little on philosophy there.

Leonard: Correct, correct.

Debbi: Quite a bit actually.

Leonard: Yes. There’s quite a bit of philosophy and I don’t hesitate to kind of throw a couple of philosophical thoughts in. For example, I can read a small portion of The Bone Field where Harry likens geology to the human condition. He’s standing in the Badlands and he’s thinking, he’s looking over them.

There’s quite a bit of philosophy and I don’t hesitate to kind of throw a couple of philosophical thoughts in.

“Weathering was ceaseless. This endless war of attrition between earth and sun and wind and rain. The land trying to stay in equilibrium with the elements and failing. It was like the geology of a love affair, Harry thought. The silent abrasion of its intimate contours to a flat, monochromatic terrain. So in many ways, our life, human relationships are as much like the Grand Canyon, exposed to the elements, being eroded grain by grain, by grain, ultimately failing.”

Debbi: Ooh, that’s beautiful. Have you ever thought about doing voice acting or audiobook reading?

Leonard: I did record The Bone Field as an audiobook. It’s available as an audiobook, and I’ve also recorded The Body on the Bed, but it is not out yet.

Debbi: What a great voice!

Leonard: Thank you. Thank you.

Debbi: It’s beautiful. Beautiful writing, too.

Leonard: Thank you.

Debbi: What advice would you give to anyone who wants a writing career?

Leonard: That too is a great question. I would say rule number one: take chances. Art and science, the writing, the crafting of a novel, that art and the science of that art, art and science are subversive storytelling. They’re the risky search for uncomfortable truth, and that’s what those novels should explore. Uncomfortable truth. Writing a novel isn’t meant to be comfortable. I’m going to quote George Orwell. “Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.”

Debbi: I love that.

Leonard: And for me, what always happens … I think of the novel as an unbridled horse, a horse you cannot control. The novel is the wagon, and the horse is pulling the wagon, and you’re sitting on the wagon. Suddenly the horse goes down an alley that was unexpected, unexplored. Let your writing violate the storyboard if you use one. Go off the storyboard. I don’t use the storyboard. I let the horse and the wagon drag me where it does, and those alleys unexplored are the most rewarding moments of writing. Like many other authors would say, let your voice emerge naturally, unforced. Don’t try to imitate anybody else’s voice. Don’t worry about being off-key. You can always put it back into the key when you edit, but just let it flow.

I think of the novel as an unbridled horse, a horse you cannot control. The novel is the wagon, and the horse is pulling the wagon, and you’re sitting on the wagon.

Be smart, be scrupulous, be forthright. Like Steinbeck said, the discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty. Be honest. Don’t be stupid. Do your research. Write what you know, know what you write. Immerse yourself in the research that goes into the novel. My advice and one I try and follow for every writer, when you write your novel, make readers want to pause at every sentence or at most sentences and say to themselves, damn, I wish I’d written that sentence because every elegant sentence is for me, a novel’s literary heaven, because otherwise, as William Styron quipped, writing is hell.

Debbi: Well, on that note, I just want to say thank you, and is there anything else you’d like to add before we finish up?

Leonard: No. The act of writing is one of the most enjoyable and painful. Writing is hell, but writing is also heaven bound.

Debbi: I hate to write, but I love to have written, as Dorothy Parker once put it. Well, I just want to thank you again for being here. It was great talking to you. I could talk to you for hours, probably about this whole subject.

Leonard: Thank you very much. Thank you for this podcast. I really appreciate it.

Debbi: It’s my pleasure, believe me. So everybody, if you enjoyed the episode, please leave a review if you would on Apple or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you are a regular listener, check out our Patreon page. My work is up there. I’ve got samples of my work, ad-free episodes, and bonus episodes as well. So with that, I will just say, until next time, I’ll be seeing you and take care. Enjoy a good book. Happy reading and talk to you later.

*****

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