Interview with Ed Leahy

“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 52^nd 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.

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Past Grief: A Kim Brady novel