“Kim Brady, third generation NYPD, returns to the job after her father's
recent suicide and catches a career-making case–a mass shooting in Manhattan's
Meatpacking District.
There is one eyewitness, Leanne, but she
can't come forward because she's transgender and she fears coming out. Kim
resists her lieutenant's demands to force Leanne's cooperation for personal
reasons. She's also being undermined by someone inside the department who is
tampering with evidence, threatening the other witness, stalking Leanne…”
-Part of the synopsis for Past Grief, a Kim Brady novel.
This
month, we wander closer to home. Alright, much
closer to home as we profile fellow Queens native Ed Leahy. Ed spent many years
as a tax accountant before our numbers guy turned to letters by trying his hand
at fiction.
15) Ed, did your
years spent as a tax accountant prepare you for a career writing thriller
novels?
Not directly, no. But it did provide me with an
insight into interrogation and fact-finding techniques, especially my years
working for the IRS. And I’m always startled when some tidbit of my work
experience raises its head in one of my stories.
14) So, what
gave you the idea to create your protagonist, NYPD Detective Kim Brady? Is she
based on a detective that you know, an amalgam of them or is she purely a work
of invention?
As I was developing the idea for Past Grief,
I wanted to create a detective faced with a situation in which typical police
interrogation techniques wouldn’t work. That led to the idea of a lone
eyewitness who couldn’t be forced to come forward and who had a compelling
reason to stay hidden. Enter Leanne. And I decided my hero detective needed to
be a woman who could relate to Leanne’s fears. So, in a very real sense, Kim
and Leanne created each other.
13) So, what
motivates Kim Brady? What makes her tick? What makes her such a compelling
detective?
Kim is driven, virtually unstoppable once she is on
to something. At the same time, she has serious vulnerabilities beneath the
surface, mostly a product of a rocky childhood—divorced parents, difficult
mother, and a father who spent much of his time as a detective outside the
lines.
12) What do you
consider to be Kim’s strengths and weaknesses?
Kim has a passion for the law (people often tell her
she should have been a lawyer, a sentiment that annoys her) and for seeing
cases to their conclusion. She has excellent instincts and a nose for facts.
She also has made a number of friends at her various posts of duty that she can
rely on when she needs to pull a favor. And she stands up for herself, a trait
that often alienates supervising officers, something she needs to keep a close
eye on. Her childhood experiences have left her skittish about marriage and
child-rearing, subjects which cause her to turn inward rather than outward.
11) When you
were a boy growing up, who were some of the authors you read and had any of
them gone on to inspire your work?
The
first author to make a serious impact on me was Ernest Hemingway, when I had to
read The Old Man and the Sea the summer before my freshman year in high
school. Later in my teens, I read James A. Michener’s Tales of the South
Pacific, and later went on to read most of his novels as well as nearly
everything he wrote about writing and publishing. I loved how Michener always
made the setting almost a character in his stories, and I suspect my tendency
to do the same with New York City stems from that.
10) Describe
your happy writing place.
I tend to be an early riser, and my wife is not. So,
I prefer writing in the morning when things are quiet in our Jackson Heights
apartment. If I’m rushing to meet a deadline, I may work at different times of
the day, but then I always have headphones on—usually classical, preferably
Mozart or Bach. Although, when I was writing Enemies of All, the first
novel in my new series about Kim’s grandfather, Dan Brady which is set in the
early 1940s, I listened to a lot of swing, regardless of the time of day.
9) You’d written
on your Amazon author page that the restaurants you and your wife dine at often
pop up in your novels. What are some examples?
One is Tournesol, a French Bistro on Vernon
Boulevard in Hunters Point (Queens), around the corner from the locale I used
for Leanne’s apartment in Past Grief. We’ve been there many times and
have never been disappointed. We were glad to see it survived the pandemic. Two
other restaurants mentioned in Past Grief, El Puerto de Acapulco in
Corona, and the Dorian Café, just down the block from Tournesol, did not. In Enemies
of All, I use Gallagher’s Steakhouse on 52nd Street in Manhattan
as a favorite locale. It’s still there, and my wife and I enjoy it.
8) When it comes
to your thriller fiction, what are your dos and don’ts?
I
try to keep both my characters and their problems believable and relatable for
the reader. I like to have challenges pile upon challenges, and to have twists
that are both unexpected and inevitable. Keeping the writing lean is important
to me, and so I often combine action and dialogue, with dialogue tags at a
minimum. I avoid long, narrative passages.
7) Are there any
plans to write another series entirely or a spinoff series that’s part of the
Kim Brady universe?
Enemies
of All,
the first novel in a new series about Kim’s grandfather, Dan Brady, will be
released on May 18, 2023. Dan pioneers cooperation with other police
departments and the FBI in two cases, one involving a serial rapist who murders
a Sunday School teacher in the Bronx, and the involving a suspected ring of
Nazi sympathizers who may be behind a string of anti-Semitic crimes across the
city and who may be involved with a German effort to land saboteurs on American
soil. Both cases are inspired by historic events.
6) Plotter,
pantser or plantser?
I
sometimes refer to my “picnic table method”. I set out the basic concept of the
story—a beginning, and ending, and a few details in the middle, perhaps a
subplot or two. Then I start writing. But as I progress, I learn new things
about my characters that influence the events that surround them, and I get new
ideas about the events of the story that have significant implications for my
characters. In some cases, entire new subplots occur to me, and at that point,
I stop writing, go back, and make changes to the basic concept document. But
everything remains nice and loose until I’m ready to lock it all in, just like
when you build a backyard picnic table and don’t tighten any of the bolts until
you’re ready to tighten all of them.
5) Have you ever
thought about writing in another genre and/or something in a different, more
exotic setting? Or does murder in New York City do it for you?
I
actually wrote a historical novel about Cuba before I ever decided to write
crime thrillers. But I couldn’t get anyone interested in it, and, looking back,
it really wasn’t ready for publication. I was at a writer’s conference when I
decided to change direction, and it was the best thing I could have done. One
of my beta readers occasionally urges me to go back to the Cuba novel, and at
some point I probably will.
4) Scandi Noir
was big even before Stieg Larsson came on the scene. What lessons do you think
Scandinavian authors have to teach that their American counterparts ought to
learn?
I
haven’t read any Scandi Noir. I suppose now I must!
3) Describe your
typical writing day. Do you draft in blank journals, a laptop, both and do you
set word goals? If so, what are they?
I
don’t set word goals, per se. I typically pursue writing activities for three
or four hours in the morning. That could be researching, editing, planning, or
writing. If I’m editing, I keep a notepad handy and for keeping track of what
needs to be done, and I usually print out the first draft of a work to mark up.
I also read through aloud to review, as well as using WORD’s read-aloud
function. My project concept document is on WORD, and I keep various lists
(e.g. characters) on EXCEL spreadsheets. All of this is on my desktop in our
living room, but I back files up to OneDrive so I can access them on my laptop
if necessary. I don’t set word count goals. I remember reading that Joseph
Wambaugh made certain he wrote 1,000 words every day, regardless of quality,
but I can’t work that way. I usually don’t even pay attention to daily word
count, although an exception was when I wrote the latest book in the Kim Brady
series, Proving a Villain, in which everything came so fast I was
writing 3,000 words per day, sometimes more, and I finished the first draft in
6 weeks, a record for me.
2) I noticed you
use a photograph of old New York as a cover photo on your Twitter account. Are
you thinking of trying your hand at historical fiction?
Historical
fiction was my first love.
1) What’s next
for Ed Leahy?
After the new Dan Brady book is
launched, the fourth book in the Kim Brady series, Judgment of Beasts, a
political thriller, will be released in November of 2023. I’m also working on a
second Dan Brady novel.
If
you’re interested in learning more about Mr. Leahy’s work, please follow the
links below.
Facebook
Twitter
Amazon Author Page
Past Grief: A Kim Brady
novel
