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This episode of the Crime Cafe features my interview with international banking expert and crime fiction writer Carl Vonderau.
You can access a copy of the transcript here.
Debbi (00:54): Hi everyone. My guest today had a career in international banking before turning to crime writing. He’s also interviewed crime—
Carl (01:03): Why wouldn’t you?
Debbi (01:08): One naturally leads to the other.
Debbi (01:12): Certainly. He’s also interviewed true crime authors to explore the effects of crime on the lives who may be tangential to that of the crime itself. I believe it was “behind every crime, there’s a family.”
Carl (01:29): Yes, that’s right. That’s sort of my motto when I write.
Debbi (01:33): I like that a lot. His interviews appear on a show called Person of Interest, part of the Authors on the Air Network. And he lives in one of my favorite cities, San Francisco.
Carl (01:46): No, San Diego. San Diego.
Debbi (01:48): Oh, you’re in San Diego because San Francisco was what was in your bio.
Carl (01:55): Oh, I got to fix that.
Debbi (01:55): Oh my God. Good heavens. So much for my questions about San Francisco. Well, San Diego is an awesome city, I have to say. I love San Diego. I’ve been there once and it’s like, oh man, this place is awesome.
Carl (02:10): Oh, well think of this. Before that I lived for 15 years in Montreal, right? In Montreal, there’s like six weeks of summer and it rains most of the time. So can you compare that to San Diego? I mean, somebody at my old bank asked, “Well, when your wife got an offer to teach here, how long did it take you to decide that? About three nanoseconds?”
Debbi (02:38): Seriously. No kidding. That is like, whoa. That’s where I’d go if I could. Yeah. Great place. Well, I’m just glad you’re with us today. Carl Vanderau And I think I got that right. Even the second time.
Debbi (02:55): All right. So awesome. So how are things in San Diego today?
Carl (03:04): Yeah. It’s getting down into the 60s.
Debbi (03:08): Well, good grief. That’s just freezing.
Carl (03:10): That’s tough. I may have to put on a sweater.
Debbi (03:14): Oh my word. Well, stay warm. I urge you to stay warm. Keep that sweater on. We don’t want you to catch your death or anything. Let’s see. I see that you were in banking and you specialized in anti-money laundering.
Carl (03:35): Well, that’s what’s on the back of the book.
Debbi (03:38): That’s what’s on the back of the book.
Carl (03:41): I didn’t really specialize so much yet in banking. I took some courses on money laundering and I was involved with some people that tried to do some money laundering with me. And then I did a lot of international trade and I think it’s something like 7% of international trade is actually money laundering.
Debbi (04:04): I can believe it. There’s a lot of that going on.
Debbi (04:09): Yeah. Was there a reason in particular that you decided to start writing crime fiction?
Carl (04:16): Well, write what you know.
Debbi (04:21): I followed the same kind of advice. Yeah.
Carl (04:25): No, for some reason I thought that would be the easiest way to get published, but then I found that I tend to write about dysfunctional families and there’s nothing that makes a family more dysfunctional than crime and the possibility of wealth. So that’s what I found. I think it amplifies all the conflicts that are already there in these characters.
Debbi (04:57): That’s interesting. I know what you mean about focusing on dysfunctional families. I have a tendency to do that myself. Sometimes I wonder if the concept of family can extend to things like workplaces or communities.
Carl (05:17): Well, that’s an interesting question because quite often I worked at banks and one bank in particularly and they call it a family. We’re all a family here. We treat each other like a family. Some companies do that, but when the numbers go bad, that kind of disappears. When they have a down year, you may be family, but you got to go.
Debbi (05:42): That’s right. Profits get thicker than blood, something like that.
Debbi (05:50): There’s no blood there to thicken. It’s all about money. Yeah, it is unfortunate when things like that happen. So how would you describe your writing style then? Do you feel it’s very realistic or psychological suspense?
Carl (06:10): I think it’s more psychological suspense. I’m most interested in the characters, but I love a good plot, so the two really have to go together and they’re categorized as thrillers, so it has to start off strong. It’s interesting in this book, Saving Myles, which was the last book out, it’s about a family who has a very difficult son. So they sent him to a residential treatment center against his will, and when he comes back, he seems totally changed. And then he sneaks off to Mexico to try and do a drug deal and gets kidnapped. Now, the father is one of these high test bankers, a very prominent banker, and the only way he can save him the second time is to become involved in money laundering. And when I originally wrote that book, I started it out with that someone shows up at the father’s condo and your son’s been kidnapped.
(07:15): And then people said to me, “Well, why do we care about these characters?” But that’s the way you’re supposed to start a thriller, right? You either start it with a body or some danger or some kind of fight or something because that’s the way thrillers start. And then I though of Dennis Lahane’s Mystic River. You read that? It’s a wonderful book, but it doesn’t start off with the crime that takes place during most of the book. It starts off with 12-year-old boys and their father’s work for the candy factory, and one of them gets kidnapped and sexually abused, and that is what really resonates throughout the whole book. It causes everything or all the character interactions. And I thought, in this family, what would resonate like that, that colors everything else? Well, when they have to forcefully send their son off to a residential treatment center, when they have to hire two strangers to come and basically kidnap their son and bring him to the treatment center.
(08:19): So I though, well, I’m really taking a chance here, but it worked, so what can I say?
Debbi (08:26): It does. I read the first two chapters of your book.
Debbi (08:31): They are a powerful opening.
Carl (08:34): Yeah, thank you. Thank you.
Debbi (08:36): They are. They really are.
Carl (08:39): Yeah. Well, thanks. Thanks. But that’s what plays throughout the whole book, how that both destroys a family and helps to bring them together.
Debbi (08:51): That is quite a topic to tackle in fiction, but very brave, I think, and good on your part. How much –
Carl (08:59): Well, I’m not going to get fired now.
Carl (09:06): Yeah. I mean, I’m not selling any books, but I’m not going to get fired. Well, when I was in banking, I’ve been writing for over 20 years, but I never told anybody in banking that that’s what I did, because then they wouldn’t think I was really very serious about my career. But then toward the end, I sort of let things slide a little bit and some people started to guess it and then, well, now they all know.
Debbi (09:40): Hey, I know lawyers who practice and write books under their own names, so I figure why not?
Debbi (09:50): Let’s see. Some of them don’t, of course. So some people are more, I guess, precious with their identities in terms of they don’t feel like being that exposed or something.
Carl (10:02): Yeah. Well, and I don’t talk about my own family very much publicly because they prefer that. But I do admit some things. I mean, we did go through this with one of my sons more than 20 years ago, and it was a very difficult experience.
Carl (10:22): Most difficult thing in my life. But what a parent realizes, and everybody knows this, you just have to say it, is that if you have the choice between sending your son away forcefully and he’ll hate you forever and saving his life, what will you do? If that will save his life, what will you do? Well, you’ll save his life. You have to. And so that’s what these parents believed, and that’s what a lot of parents believe when they have to send their kids to one of these residential treatment centers.
Debbi (10:55): Yeah. Yeah. It’s a sobering thought. How much research did you do during the process of writing your books?
Carl (11:09): Let’s see. Well, the first book, Murderabilia, is about the son of a serial killer, and nobody knows this about him until he’s accused of the same crime, and it all comes out that he’s the son of this man in prison in Illinois. And so I had to do a lot of research on serial killers and children of serial killers, and they lead very, very tough lives. I mean, not many people know that Charlie Manson had three, actually, I think it’s four sons now, I think. But when originally did the book, there were three, and one disappeared. Nobody knows who he is or where he is, like the character in my book. Another, they knew and he was bullied throughout school, and a third one committed suicide, this trauma of having this evil person as a father, and how can you ever live down that stigma?
(12:04): So that’s what I explored in that book, and I had to do that kind of research, which was tough because you really had to get into the heads of serial killers. Now, in Saving Myles, it’s set in both San Diego as well as in Tijuana. So I had to do some research in Tijuana about, particularly on settings, where could this take place there? And I was on the board of one of the branches of the YMCA here, and we had people we knew in the YMCA in Tijuana, so one of these guys showed me around. Where could a kidnapping take place?
(12:46): So for instance, he shows me this Plaza Fiesta there, and they’re like 20 bars and all different kinds of music coming from each one swirling into each other like a wave and drunks weaving around. Oh, they’re open all the time. It’s just a huge place of entertainment. So we go in there and I’m looking around and I’m thinking, well, this is too crowded. A kidnapping could never occur here. So then we go outside to the parking lot and there were guards in the parking lot, and then we saw this underground entrance to an underground parking, and I went under there, and it was damp and mildewy. It smelled. There was puddles on the floor, chunks of concrete had fallen from the ceiling. There were cars there and nobody was in there. And so you can imagine what I though, perfect, perfect. So that’s what I used.
(13:43): And in another case, we were interviewing people that had been kidnapped in Mexico, and so he brought me to the owner of this taco chain. I don’t know, they had three or four restaurants, and this man had been kidnapped before. And what was it like? He said, “Well, the kidnappers were actually in the same barrio where I grew up. I knew who they were, and they kept me, and my family was delaying too much to pay, so they cut off one of my toes and sent it to them.” These are people he knew. And you get these kinds of details that really evoke a whole setting as much as anything can do.
Carl (14:35): Yeah. And then the rich people with these houses with these huge yards behind barricades and bulletproof glass and guards and cars on the street.
Debbi (14:48): Straight out of something like Breaking Bad.
Carl (14:51): Yeah. Yeah. And then I had to do research on money laundering because I was a banker and I knew something about money laundering, but I wasn’t an expert. So I signed up for this group called the Association for Certified Anti-Money Laundering Experts.
Debbi (15:11): So now you are certified.
Carl (15:14): So I took some courses and I went to some seminars they had here. As it turns out, when banks screw up, they get sued for hundreds of millions of dollars, so they had to make sure all their bankers were trained, and the treasury department and the FBI would send people to this. So I go there and people are going, “Well, what bank do you work for?” “Well, I’m a writer.” And they’re going, “Hmm. That could be true, or maybe you’re just trying to get to up your chops.”
Debbi (15:57): So what kind of writing routine do you keep?
Carl (16:02): I’m writing or marketing, you have to do them all.
Carl (16:06): Yeah, seven days a week.
Debbi (16:09): When do you find the time to write, I guess?
Carl (16:12): Yeah. Well, I write various points in the day. I like to write in the morning, and I do do some outlining before I write, and of course the outlines change. I use Plotter to diagram some of the stuff. But my first draft is always by hand. So I will write on a legal pad, this kind of paper.
Debbi (16:40): I remember that.
Carl (16:41): And I’ll let my mind just flow into it, and I’ll write as fast as I can for that first draft of a scene. And I’ll leave out things like the setting, I’ll leave out gestures, I’ll leave out a lot of things, a lot of description, just write, get the conflict of the scene down. And when I get to four or five pages, I start to feel good. And when I get to 10 pages, then I know I’ve got a scene. And then I go back and I try the same day or the next to put that into the computer. And it’s sort of your first round of editing there where you fill in some of these things you left out, or maybe the scene begins farther into the page than it was supposed to, or maybe it ends earlier than you thought. So then you’ve got the first draft of the scene and you move on.
(17:31): That’s kind of the way I do it. And then I just keep going. It takes me six months to a year to write a draft, sometimes more than that, and then I just revise like crazy. Murderabilia, I revised 23 times. Saving Myles, I don’t know, it was 12 or 15 times. Just that’s the way I work because I get better ideas and things start to come together more.
(18:01): What’s the arc? How’s that coming together? Who are the main characters? What characters can I take out? What do I need to expand? What additional scenes do I need to do? Have I developed that conflict enough? So then I’ll write and then at the end I start reducing again. I think the book is with my agent now was originally 89,000 words and now it’s down to 76. So that’s how much you cut out.
Debbi (18:36): Yeah. It’s amazing how much air you can take out of one’s writing. I’ve discovered through screenwriting just how much air I tend to add. I didn’t even realize it. It’s like I pride myself on concise writing, but get into screenwriting and suddenly, no, no, no, you need to get there faster.
Carl (18:59): Yeah. Yeah. Well, they say in writing, cut out adverbs. Well, in screenwriting, there are no adverbs.
Debbi (19:06): No, it’s all action. Everything’s action. Action and dialogue. Stuff happens, people talk, now and then, or grunt or shrug.
Carl (19:16): Or grunt. But here’s something else that I think is probably important in screenwriting, but I’ve come to learn is really important in novels, and that’s the use of objects.
Carl (19:29): Because I mean, it can sort of blend into the background in a movie and you might not realize it, but in a book, an object carries so much weight and the best objects are both positive and negative. Well, here’s an example. Little Women, you’ve read that book, right? Everybody’s read that. So Little Women, there’s a mysterious character named Mr. Lawrence, who he’s cold and he doesn’t interact, but Beth is a musician and she’s shy, and so she interacts with him and he allows her to play his piano in his place. And then it comes out that he gives her his piano, and then you find out that the piano had belonged to his daughter who had died long ago. So you know how the stages of the object work all the way through.
Debbi (20:34): Yeah. Getting to know the characters, that’s part of the process of revising. No doubt you get to know the characters better as well.
Carl (20:43): You do. You do. You do. Or he would never do that.
Debbi (20:49): Exactly. It’s like, what was I thinking? No, no, no. She goes this way.
Carl (20:53): Yeah. Oh, I was just trying to tie up a plot there.
Debbi (20:56): That’s right. I was trying to get to the end.
Carl (20:58): Yeah. Yeah. I had to get them from here to there.
Debbi (21:02): Yes. There’s some places in between I can probably fill out a bit more. Yeah.
Debbi (21:09): And what advice would you give to anyone who’s interested in a writing career?
Carl (21:14): I would say write every day, even if it’s only for 15 minutes, and then gradually it’ll get longer, but you’d be surprised what you can do in 15 minutes. When I was in Montreal, I used to go to a coffee house between when I got off work and when the bus came and I’d have half an hour and I’d just write like crazy. So if that’s what you got, that’s what you do. And the other thing is don’t be in too much of a hurry to send off your manuscript, work on it till it’s polished. And of course, beginning writers, we all think it’s brilliant. Well, the way you find out is you get some outside opinion on the writing. That could be a writer’s group or it could be a developmental editor that tells you what’s working and what’s not working. You really need that to do that revision, and you need to revise that until it gets to a point where the revision makes it worse, and that’s the hardest thing to figure out.
(22:20): So those are some of the things that I’ve learned.
Debbi (22:24): Yeah. Yeah. It’s a tough business and hard to know when to stop on certain things.
Debbi (22:33): When to just trust your instincts, that kind of thing.
Carl (22:36): You make it worse.
Debbi (22:38): Yeah. Yeah. And is there anything else you’d like to add before we finish up?
Carl (22:45): No, I don’t think so. Just if anybody’s interested in my podcast, it’s called Person of Interest, and I interview true crime writers, and I’ve gotten to interview some really fascinating people like Bernadine Dorn, who was one of the rebels that… Well, let’s see. The movie was, what was the name of the movie? Well, it won all the Oscars. Anyway, this was based on someone in her life. I got to interview her son. I’ve gotten to interviews, people that worked for the FBI undercover for 20 years and so forth. So that’s on the Authors on the Air Network.
Debbi (23:33): Well, that’s great. Thank you so much for sharing that, and I will just say thanks for being here.
Carl (23:43): I appreciate your time. Thank you so much.
Debbi (23:44): It was my pleasure.
Carl (23:46): Thank you so much for chatting with me.
Debbi (23:47): It was my pleasure. It was enjoyable listening to what you write about and why it’s important. I love it. Thanks again for being here, and thank you to everyone who is listening. I hope you’ve enjoyed the episode or learned a new thing maybe. And if you would, please leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts. And for early access to ad-free episodes plus serialized versions of my work, book reviews, and more, check out my Patreon page or my Substack newsletter. You can also buy my latest novel, Past Imperfect, as an ebook. It’s the third book in my Erica Jensen mystery series, and you don’t have to read the first two to understand it, but it doesn’t hurt either. On that note, I’ll be back. I’m a real salesperson here. Talk about a sales pitch, right?
Carl (24:49): Well, I just gave one, so you’re certainly entitled to.
Debbi (24:53): I’m so heavy-handed. Yeah, I’m practically like a used car salesperson here. Buy my book. What will it take for you to get into this book today? What will it take for me to get you into this book today?
Carl (25:03): So shall we negotiate the price now?
Debbi (25:06): It comes with extras, you know?
Debbi (25:09): All sorts of extras. Yeah. If I can think of what those are, I’ll let you know. I’ll be back with another episode in November or Noirvember, if you want to call it that. In any case, happy reading and I’ll be seeing you! Take care.
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