The Crime Cafe

This week’s guest on the Crime Cafe podcast is historical crime writer Stephen Eoannou.

Check out our discussion about the creator of the Lone Ranger!

Grab a PDF copy of the transcript here!

Debbi: Hi, everyone. My guest today has published two novels with the third coming in May of next year. Along with novels, he has written at least one short screenplay. He lives and works in Buffalo, New York, which also provides the setting and inspiration for his work. It’s my pleasure to have with me today, the award-winning author Stephen Eoannou.

Stephen: There you go.

Debbi: Did I get that right?

Stephen: Yes.

Debbi: Awesome. Fantastic. So thank you for being with us today.

Stephen: Thank you for having me.

Debbi: I’m pleased to have you on. I really enjoyed your book Rook, your debut novel. That was a very interesting story. What inspired you to write about this particular man from the FBI’s Most Wanted List?

Stephen: Yeah. I had finished my first book Muscle Cars, which is a short story collection, and I was picking around trying to find an idea for the next project, and I can remember it vividly. It was a Sunday morning. I was standing in my kitchen and I was reading the newspaper. It was spread out on the kitchen table, and I saw an article, and the title of the article in the Buffalo News was “The Strange Tale of a Buffalo Bank Robber Turned Writer”, and that immediately caught my eye, thinking this maybe is another career avenue for myself. But I started reading this article about Al Nussbaum. I had never heard of the man before, and by the end of the article, I knew that I wanted to write about him.

I was standing in my kitchen and I was reading the newspaper. It was spread out on the kitchen table, and I saw an article, and the title of the article in the Buffalo News was “The Strange Tale of a Buffalo Bank Robber Turned Writer”

I wasn’t sure it was going to be a novel or a short story or what, but I knew I wanted to learn more about this man and write about him. And what fascinated me was not only was he this kind of cerebral bank robber who approached the robberies like chess matches – which he was an avid chess player – and he’s quoted as saying that robbing banks is like chess for cash prizes, which I think is a great quote. He became a writer when he was in prison, and he was a penny-a-word guy, Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock. He even was writing for Scholastic Books, if anyone’s old enough to remember Scholastic Books.

Debbi: Oh, I do

Stephen: Yeah, me too. I still have a few of them. So the man who was doing time in Leavenworth was also writing Scholastic Books. He was just a fascinating character, and he was a Buffalo guy. I had kind of decided after I completed Muscle Cars that really Buffalo, New York was going to kind of be my literary turf I was going to carve out for myself. Kind of what William Kennedy did for Albany and Richard Russo did for upstate New York, the Catskill areas. That’s what I was going to do. And so this just kind of fell in my lap and I just kind of really became intrigued with Al and his story.

Debbi: Interesting. Very interesting that you were able to find this in the local paper, right?

Stephen: Well, what it was his daughter, who’s just an infant in the novel, she was trying to do a Kickstarter campaign to gather up all her father’s short stories and anthologized them, and so the newspaper did a feature on it. And what was really great about this whole experience with Rook is that since the publication, I’ve become friends with her. She lives about two hours away. She’s a retired attorney, not a defense attorney or criminal lawyer. We’ve had coffee a few times and she’s come to a couple of my events when I’m in the Central New York region, telling me some fascinating stories about her dad that I wish I knew while I was working on the manuscript.

Debbi: Interesting. Because this is a fictionalized account of a true story, were there permissions involved in terms of using his name and so forth?

Stephen: No, and I figured the legal team at the publisher would worry about that. I just wrote it the way I wanted to write it, and no one said anything. So we’ll just keep it amongst ourselves.

Debbi: Hard to say. Hard to say what happened. Okay. Your second novel is also historical. I take it that you’re basically focused on historical writing most of the time?

Stephen: Yeah. And that wasn’t the plan; I just kind of … I’ve always enjoyed it, but you know how these things are. You kind of stumble from one … an idea finds you and next thing you know, you’ve written a story set in the early 1960s, and now there’s a story, Yesteryear, the second novel was set in the early 1930s, the book that’s coming out in May is set in 1942. The thirties and forties have always been an era that has really intrigued me primarily because of my parents, that’s when they were growing up. And so I kind of grew up listening to their stories about growing up in the Depression, the immigration experience from my father coming from Greece. Just growing up with those stories, watching old movies like The Maltese Falcon with my dad. He was 20 when The Maltese Falcon came out, so he remembers that from his youth. That was kind of my upbringing, if you will, listening to those stories and watching those movies. Next thing you know, fast forward 40 or so years, and I’m writing about those types of things now. So you never know what’s going to percolate up to the top when you’re in the creative mode.

The thirties and forties have always been an era that has really intrigued me primarily because of my parents, that’s when they were growing up. And so I kind of grew up listening to their stories about growing up in the Depression, the immigration experience from my father coming from Greece.

Debbi: Exactly. Yes, and that era is very inspiring. There’s so much from it that informs what we do today.

Stephen: Yeah, and my mom always said, she chastised me. She goes, you romanticize that period, but it was really hard. The Depression and World War. You romanticize it, and she was absolutely right. I do.

Debbi: Absolutely. I was fascinated by the subject of Yesteryear, which was a playwright that I had never known about who created the Lone Ranger. Tell us how you got interested in that.

Stephen: Another Buffalo boy, and I had never heard about him either. I was at a party or a bar somewhere where they were serving alcohol, and someone said to me, well, you know the guy who wrote the Lone Ranger is from Buffalo? And I said, no, he’s not. I would’ve known about that. I mean, Buffalo is very good about promoting any creative person who’s been successful, no matter what the connection. Mark Twain was the editor of the Courier Express newspaper for two years. He’s a Buffalo writer. We made him our own. So for someone who … because Fran wrote not only the Lone Ranger, but also the Green Hornet and Sergeant Prescott of the Yukon, so he has a huge influence on 20th century pop culture, and no one’s really heard of him.

I think because he sold the rights to the Lone Ranger for $10 before the Lone Ranger just exploded into this 90-year money making franchise. And to make matters worse, the man he sold it to for $10, George W. Trendle, who owned WXYZ radio in Detroit where the Lone Ranger was broadcast from, started claiming in the 1940s that he was the creator of the Lone Ranger, not Striker. So Fran kind of missed out on the fame as well as the fortune, because if you think about not only the radio and the TV show and the movies, think of the comic books that Fran wrote. There were a dozen or so hardback novels published in the thirties and forties that Striker wrote, the comic strips that appeared in over 200 newspapers, all the spinoff toys. The Lone Ranger is one of the first kind of crossover into marketing and spiffs and toys. So all the masks and hats and holsters and all that money bypassed Striker and went to Trendle.

I think because he sold the rights to the Lone Ranger for $10 before the Lone Ranger just exploded into this 90-year money making franchise.

When Trendle sold the rights in the mid-fifties, he sold the rights for $3 million, which was a record in the entertainment industry at that time. I think Fran was working for him up until that time as head writer at WXYZ, but he may have received a bonus from that 3 million, but certainly not the millions that Trendle made.

Debbi: Oh, my gosh. It just goes to show you the importance of owning the intellectual property.

Stephen: And you know? It’s a common story. You look at all these artists – visual artists, literary, musical. When it’s a new medium or something new like the early days of rock and roll, and you think of all the African-American early rock and rollers who were screwed terribly with their contracts and rights. It seems like every time there’s something new, a new medium, a new form, the artists are so desperate to get that work out there that they get taken advantage of.

Debbi: Yes, definitely. Yes. That is definitely true. It’s a shame. So your latest one coming out next May about the private eye named Nicholas Bishop. He has a background from World War I that he carries into the story, correct?

Stephen: He has got a lot of baggage that he carries. A lot of abandonment issues, alcoholism, he may or may not have stepped in front of a taxi cab on purpose that has left him with a limp and unable to serve in World War II. His alcoholism is out of control, and when the novel begins, he wakes up on the floor of a hotel room where he’s the house detective, because he has lost his private practice, he’s lost his secretary, who he has been in love with forever. He can’t find his car, and he wakes up on the floor after a five-day bender, can’t remember anything, and two shots were fired from his gun and the police are downstairs. They want to talk to him. And that’s how the novel begins.

His alcoholism is out of control, and when the novel begins … he wakes up on the floor after a five-day bender, can’t remember anything, and two shots were fired from his gun and the police are downstairs.

I call it my pandemic novel, even though it has nothing to do with any type of pandemic, except the one that we were going through when I wrote it. I started it right before the lockdown and finished it two years later, which is pretty quick for me because there was nothing to do except write, so that’s why it’s my pandemic novel. I was alone in a big house with a little one-eyed dog during the lockdown, and Nicholas Bishop has a one-eyed dog that he doesn’t know where it came from. He just woke up on the floor and it was there. He names the dog Jake, and finds out later it’s a female dog. So Bishop has all sorts of things going on in his life.

Debbi: Well, it sounds intriguing, I have to tell you. What kind of writing schedule do you keep?

Stephen: I’ve been pretty disciplined for a long time. I get up at five and I write from five to seven, every day. That’s my goal. Sometimes I can go longer. Sometimes after my day job, if I still have some creative energy, I’ll do some at night or some editing, and if I miss for whatever reason, I try to make that up on the weekend. So every morning, quarter to five, the alarm goes off or I wake up on my own, because I’ve been doing it for so long. And when I was about halfway through Rook, it was about this time of year, mid-October, early November. It was starting to get cold up here in Western New York and dark in the morning, and for like three days in a row, I just could not get out of bed and go up to my office to write. I was awake, but I just could not get out of bed. And of course, you beat yourself up about it.

And then I realized, smart guy that I am, I could just bring my laptop from my office downstairs and just put it next to my bed. And so at five o’clock, I just reach over and grab my laptop. So there’s no rituals, there’s no coffee, there’s no tea, there’s no candles, there’s no music. I just literally prop myself up on the pillows and write in bed. And that’s where I’ve been doing the majority of my writing, or splitting it up in my office.

So there’s no rituals, there’s no coffee, there’s no tea, there’s no candles, there’s no music. I just literally prop myself up on the pillows and write in bed.

Debbi: There’s a famous author that used to do that. I can’t think of his name now.

Stephen: Oh, it’s crazy stuff. Hemingway wrote standing up, Dalton Trumbo wrote in the bathtub. So for right now anyways, that’s my routine. I would like to wake up at seven, walk my little one-eyed dog and then start writing at eight, but that’s not possible right now with the day job.

Debbi: So you work around the day job. I’m impressed. Very. But how much research do you do when you write historical novels? I mean, what kind of research?

Stephen: A lot went into Yesteryear. Of the three novels, Yesteryear required the most research. Research on the early days of radio, research certainly on Fran Striker’s life, research on the Lone Ranger. I was very fortunate when Fran passed away in the early 1960s, the Striker Estate left all of his papers to the University of Buffalo, and I’m an alumni. There were about 14 cartons that they have in their special collections, and it is just a treasure trove – letters, telegraphs, handwritten manuscripts, typed manuscripts with notes on them. So I would go online – they had an inventory of the cartons – and I would put in my request that on Thursday, I would like to come in at 10 o’clock and review the contents of carton number 12. I would get to the special libraries collection at 10 o’clock, and there it would be waiting for me, and I’d put on my white gloves, and I would hold an original Lone Ranger radio script from 1932. It was just fascinating. So a lot of research went into that book. In the back of Yesteryear, there’s a bibliography, because a lot went into it.

I was very fortunate when Fran passed away in the early 1960s, the Striker Estate left all of his papers to the University of Buffalo, and I’m an alumni.

There wasn’t as much written about Al Nussbaum, but it was fun research, tracking down on eBay the young adult novels that he wrote for Scholastic books and buying those, and researching the newspapers about his career in crime and then his arrest. Just really fascinating stuff. So a lot of time spent at the downtown library going through microfiches for that novel. With After Pearl, it wasn’t as extensive. This isn’t based on any historical figure like the first two novels were, so much of the research was just about what it was life like in 1942 Buffalo, New York. What did a carton of Chesterfields cost or a gallon of gas? What nightclubs were around? I knew a few of them from my parents’ stories, but where might he hang out? So that again, was reading old newspapers, not looking for anything in particular, but just going and reading the advertisements from the department stores of that time to see what they were selling. And what was really fascinating, you read the front page from 1942, and it’s not much different than what’s going on today. The same countries, the same stories, the same local corruption. It is really kind of disheartening in that regard.

And what was really fascinating, you read the front page from 1942, and it’s not much different than what’s going on today. The same countries, the same stories, the same local corruption. It is really kind of disheartening in that regard.

Debbi: Yes. Everything old is new again, or something like that. So have you ever thought of writing a series?

Stephen: Well, it’s a funny story. So I finished After Pearl, and I had my little writing group of these wonderful women I met in grad school at the Queens University of Charlotte. So there’s Ashley Warlick who wrote The Arrangement, a great crime novelist, Carla Damron who wrote The Orchid Tattoo, her latest. Beth Johnson and Araminta Hall. And so that’s my writing group. We’ve been together forever. I sent it to Carla first and I said, Hey, can you take a look at this? And she read it, and the first question she asked was, is this a series? I said, no, it’s a standalone. I just wrote it during the lockdown. She made some suggestions. I made my corrections, sent it out to Ashley. First question she asks, is this a series? I said, no, I just wrote it during the pandemic. It’s a standalone. Going to move on to something else. I sent it to my publisher, and he comes back and says, is this a series? Because I think Netflix might like something like this.

Debbi: Oh yes!

Stephen: I said, yes, it’s a series with no idea what the second book is going to be about. But I said, absolutely. It’s a series.

Debbi: Of course it is

Stephen: And so now I’m working on the second book in the Nicholas Bishop series

Debbi: On the subject of Netflix, now that you’ve mentioned it, what about this award-winning short screenplay of yours? How did you get into screenwriting?

Stephen: It was funny. That screenplay is called Slip Kid, and it’s based on a short story. It’s kind of the centerpiece to my short story collection Muscle Cars, but originally that was going to be my first novel. It dealt with a true story. When I was 16, my parish priest was murdered in a botched robbery at the local Greek church here, and they didn’t catch the killers for a few months so it was always in the news. It turns out that they were just teenagers, 17, 18 years old that made some terrible, awful choices with huge ramifications. The novel didn’t work so I cut it down to a long short story. I still wasn’t finished with it yet. It still wouldn’t leave me.

I was, at the time, just graduating from Queens, and I had a lot of friends who were in the screenwriting program, and they were always talking about writing screenplays and what they’re working on and the challenges. I said, well, I’m going to try that, and so I bought the software and hopefully it was going to be a feature, but I couldn’t make it into a feature. It was only a short, and then I finished it, I go, well, now what do I do with it? And they said, well, just submit it for some prizes. The Denver Film Festival was having a contest and one of the categories was original short film. So I submitted it and kind of forgot about it, to be honest with you, and the next thing I know, I’m getting this email that I won. So it was a shock, but a lot of fun.

They flew me out to Denver. I got to walk the red carpet. I went to all the screenings. I’d never been to a film festival before. Andy Garcia was there.

They flew me out to Denver. I got to walk the red carpet. I went to all the screenings. I’d never been to a film festival before. Andy Garcia was there. It was just a ton of fun and something that normally would not happen to me, but it was a great thrill. I’ve written one or two screenplays since, but I haven’t done anything with them. I really see myself in it. I’ve always seen myself as a novelist, and that’s really my main pursuit right now.

Debbi: Have you ever considered writing a scripted podcast?

Stephen: I never have, but that might be interesting.

Debbi: Because that’s something I’ve considered.

Stephen: Yeah. I’ve never done that, but that’s something to think about.

Debbi: Hmm. Cool. Keep thinking about it.

Stephen: Yes, while I try to come up with the third Nicholas Bishop novel.

Debbi: Maybe Nicholas Bishop would make a great radio show, so to speak.

Stephen: Yes, absolutely.

Debbi: “So to speak”, yes because that’s what scripted podcasts basically are.

Stephen: Right, right.

Debbi: What advice would you give to anyone who’s interested in writing for a living or just having a writing career?

Stephen: Don’t give up. It’s not original, but it took me 30 years to get my first book published. I went the traditional route because when I started out wanting to be a writer in the mid-eighties, there really wasn’t … self-publishing really was frowned upon. Right. It was a vanity press.

Don’t give up. It’s not original, but it took me 30 years to get my first book published.

Debbi: Oh boy, was it!

Stephen: It had a stigma attached to it, it was cheating, so that was never really a consideration for me. So I took the traditional route. And about that time, in the mid to late eighties, that’s when all these American novelists all around 30 were getting their first books published. Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis, Bret Lott, Michael Chabon, all those guys. They’re a little bit older than me. They were probably around 30, I was in my mid-twenties. I said, well, that’s going to be me. I’m in grad school, I’ll have my first novel when I’m 30. I was sure of it, and then my 30th birthday came, and then my 40th birthday came, and then my 50th birthday came.

Debbi: I know that feeling.

Stephen: I think Muscle Cars came out in 2015 when I was 52, so I was not an overnight sensation. But I was trying all those years, writing poorly, getting a lot of rejections, trying to get better at my craft. Something happened when I went to Queens, not that getting an MFA is the answer for a writing career, but I think what it was, was for the first time I was surrounded by a group of writers and I found my group that you could share work with and get feedback and give feedback in an honest and constructive way. And like I said, that group that I’ve been together with, those women I mentioned earlier, it’s been over 10 years now that we’ve been doing this. That I think made a huge difference, having that network which I never had.

I tried to get into different writing groups throughout the years, but usually I was the one who took it the most seriously. Most of them were there for the food and the wine, which I enjoyed, but when you tell me I wrote this story on the bus ride this morning, how good is it going to be? Or how valuable is your critique going to be if you just did it on the ride over to the workshop or meeting? So it took me a long time to find my network, my group, and once I did that, and plus you do anything for 30 years, you get better eventually. So I think the two all came together at Queens and that really kind of set me on this path that I’m on. So the last 10 years have just been for me, an explosion of creativity and productivity.

Debbi: That’s fantastic. Is there anything else you’d like to add before we finish up?

Stephen: No, except maybe go to my website, which is SGeoannou.com. There’s a ton of information about that, about my books and my bio and appearances. But I always say the most important part of my webpage is the final tab, and that’s the contact page, so any readers out there who want to have me come to their book club, or if they just want to ask me questions or just drop me a note, I answer all of them. It’s the best part really when you get an email from someone who’s curious about your work and what you’re doing. I love that. So I encourage everyone to go out there.

Debbi: That’s excellent. Wonderful. Thank you so much.

Stephen: Oh, thank you. I had fun.

Debbi: It was a pleasure talking to you. Thank you.

Stephen: Oh, it was great.

Debbi: Thanks. With that, I will just say thank you for listening and, if you would, if you enjoyed the episode, please leave a review. They help with the algorithms. It’s so nice to be judged by bits and bytes of data, isn’t it? Anyway, these things do help so please leave a review if you enjoyed the episode. And we also have a Patreon page with benefits for patrons, so please check it out. Until next time, when our guest will be Dan Flanagan, take care and happy reading.

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