Jeff Carson – For Baldacci Fans

The Joys of Binge Reading

Jeff Carson – For Baldacci Fans

July 02, 2024

Jeff Carson is the Amazon-Bestselling author of the David Wolf series, thrillers set in the high country of Colorado, chock-full of action, mystery, thrills, and suspense.

With millions of copies sold internationally, he’s regularly recommended as suitable for fans of David Baldacci and Daniel Silva.

Hi I’m your host Jenny Wheeler and today on the Binge Reading show Jeff Carson talks about how he turned a year-long stay in Italy into a fulltime writing career, and his new series, a big change to David Wolf, featuring Italian woman police officer Ali Flavia, set against the backdrop of Italian culture, ancient walled towns, tourist mayhem and fabulous food and wine.

Two Free Book Giveaways

We’ve got two book offers this week, and the first books in my two series are on offer. The Thriller and Mystery series Giveaway has Sadie’s Vow, #1 in the Home At Last series on offer.

download free books

https://books.bookfunnel.com/thrillingfreebies-jul/4h2xrdstd8

The Kobo Editor’s Pick’s promotion has the Of Gold & Blood book set – #1 and #4.

Kobo Editor’s Pick

kobo free books selection

Visit the following link(s) to see the promotion: https://www.kobo.com/p/free-ebooks! If you live in a country that isn’t included in this promotion, you may have trouble accessing the sale link. If this happens, change the flag at the top of the Kobo homepage to one of the included countries to see the sale link properly.

This is one of the last shows I’ll be doing for a while on The Joys of Binge Reading. I’m taking a break after two more episodes, but I’ll be posting many of the past interviews on YouTube so if you’ve missed them, you’ll find them there.

Links to things mentioned in the show

Carabinieri: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carabinieri

Disc Golf: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_golf

MHZ.com: https://www.mhz.com/

Ali Falco: https://www.jeffcarson.co/ali-falco-series

What Jeff is reading now:

Lincoln Child: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Child

https://lincolnchild.com

Agent Prendergast series: https://www.prestonchild.com/

Douglas Preston: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/12577.Douglas_Preston

Marko Kloos: https://www.markokloos.com/

Where to find Jeff online

Website: www.jeffcarson.co

Or his Amazon books site:

https://www.amazon.com/Books-Jeff-Carson/s?rh=n%3A283155%2Cp_27%3AJeff+Carson

Introducing Jeff Carson, thriller author

Jeff Carson – thriller author of David Wolf Colorado Mountain series

But now, here’s Jeff.

Hello there Jeff and welcome to the show, it’s great to have you with us.

It’s great to have you with us.

Jeff Carson: Nice to be here. Thanks for having me.

Jenny Wheeler: You are somewhere in Colorado and I’m in Auckland, so that’s a good long reach between us. You’ve got this Amazon hit on your hands. It’s obviously not a surprise because you’ve written 17 in the series now. David Wolfe, a small-town, Colorado mountain sheriff. Tell us about David. How did he come to life for you?

Jeff Carson: Yes, you’ve got that right. He is a small-town Colorado Sheriff. My wife is from Italy. I guess it was like 2012, 2011? We were visiting Italy for a year because we had a son, and my wife wanted to go to Italy and be with our young son there and to be with her mom and dad and get some support with the young son and stuff.

And I was at a crossroads in my professional life. I did not like what I was doing and I got this idea that I was going to start writing fiction.

Long story short, I got looking into these self-published authors and all, I was just like, I didn’t even understand that existed until when we got to Italy.

And then I realized in the drop of a hat. I’m going to be a fiction writer. My wife was nice enough to not disown me or leave me after that.

But I decided to start writing books. I’m in Italy, in this country where I don’t know, in the area, nobody speaks English whatsoever, and I didn’t really speak Italian that well.

A brain storm in Italy

I felt very isolated, but I just got this idea to start writing. I knew you’re supposed to write about what you know, and I knew Colorado and I knew that I missed Colorado.

That was the first thing that came up into my mind of the guy. It was actually the second idea I had, but whatever the first that stuck was like having a cop in the mountains of Colorado.

I missed the mountains of Colorado. I decided to make this series about the mountains of Colorado, about this cop. So that’s how it came about.

Jenny Wheeler: On your website you have got quite a funny blog post about that experience and you describe it as “firing first, aiming later.”

How much research did you do before you started out? You are compared with people like David Baldacci and Michael Crichton, real top of the line popular fiction authors who were very much in the mainstream.

Did you aim to settle yourself there right from the beginning?

Jeff Carson: Yeah. I was so like rock bottom with what I was trying that I was just like, ‘what the hell?’

Why would I not try to be just the best I could? I loved all those authors I. was reading them at that time. And I wanted to be precisely like them, make my covers like them and make my books just as compelling as theirs were.

I read a bunch how to write fiction books. Just devouring them, like one per day because I was in such a hurry to make this thing work. I knew it wouldn’t. probably work for years, but I had definitely a fire lit under me.

I learned the basics of what it takes to write fiction, or, maybe not the basics, but how complex it is. And then after I read like three of those books, I was like, ‘Okay. Come on. They’re saying the same things. I’m gonna have to try it now.’

Cliffhanger endings – a No No!!

I made every mistake under the sun at first; my first book had a cliffhanger ending. It pretty much ended in mid-sentence, so you would buy the second book, because I knew I was going to write a series.

And that was the business plan also, as well as just the fiction plan, the story, arc plan. There was no aiming for the first couple books.

It was just try to make a great, and then I had to go back and rewrite everything, knowing that if I was going to keep doing this, nobody’s going to read the first book and continue on reading the other books.

It doesn’t matter how many books I write, if that first one could really turn some people off. I had to go back and really hone those first couple books.

Jenny Wheeler: I think cliff hangers are interesting because I think some people still believe that they’re really necessary. You’ve decided perhaps that they’re not the best way to go.

Jeff Carson: No, there’re actively terrible ways to go if someone’s thinking about it. There’s a certain nuance to it. If you’re going to leave certain storylines unresolved, the main storyline better be super resolved.

Sub storylines? I have kept them unresolved just because wolf is constantly growing as a person.

His love life, his family life, his professional life. But as far as if there’s a murder, the murder’s got to be solved by the end of the book. If you’re going to throw a ball up in the beginning of the book, it’s got to be caught and dealt with by the end of the book.

People get very angry, if you don’t.

Jeff Carson learned from his mistakes

Jenny Wheeler: Did you have readers who gave you that sort of feedback at the beginning?

Jeff Carson: Yes. I was getting one star reviews right off the bat and they were saying like, ‘I’ll never read anything he writes ever again. I don’t care how much I like the story,’

I’m like, wait a minute. That’s okay. That’s some anger right there. But yet they liked the story like, oh no, what? What did I do? And then I realized, yeah, you can’t do that.

Jenny Wheeler: It’s interesting that you mention about the development of family because the other thing about doing series, especially if you have a child in it, is that it’s hard to fudge the timeframe, the timeline thing.

And you do have David having a son who’s 12, I think, when series begins. I haven’t read right through the whole thing, but I did wonder how you’ve managed to let his son develop in a realistic way, but also keep a kind of father son relationship going. Did you find out a bit of a challenge and where are we up to with the son now?

Jeff Carson: Oh yeah, it’s super difficult. Because I didn’t want every book to just be the next day, all of a sudden another crime happens.

It’s like just the murder capital of the world, the middle of the mountains, in Colorado, So there’s time lapse in between each book, at least usually seven months, nine months, a year.

And then possibly even a more between a couple books. So now his son in one of the books is having his own son. Wolf’s son was freaking out about that and Wolf had to help him through that. And it’s tough yet to how to gauge the speed at which you’re going to go through this timeline of their lives, because precisely what age is Wolf?

Even I still don’t know. I don’t want to admit it, but I don’t even know. He’s probably early fifties, mid-fifties or something, and every new book, you have to gauge I and think, okay, what’s going on here?

Where is everybody? What are their ages? What are their kids’ ages? I actually had a reader help me go through all my books and give me the names of all the characters and what their relative relations are and when they showed up and, because it’s really a big deal,

Jenny Wheeler: Amazing. That is what they call, a Series Bible. And I was going to ask you if you had one of those. It’s often helpful not to be too specific about those things, isn’t it?

Because then a few books up the track, you find yourself trapped. You can’t have somebody being, oh, suddenly they’re 23 when two or three books ago, they were 22. That sort of thing.

Echoes Fade, No 17 in David Wolf series

Jeff Carson: Exactly right. And the timeline didn’t work out. Yeah. So you gotta be vague, but that’s fine to most people, I think, unless it’s like a super specific thing that needs to be part of the story, like it’s his 21st birthday or something. Who cares precisely how old this person is?

Jenny Wheeler: Number 17 in the series just published is called Echoes Fade, and it starts with a rare attack by a mountain lion on some people who are camping in a caravan park.

The series has got a very strong feeling of the natural environment, the mountain location, the temperatures, the weather, the way it’s so changeable.

Is all of that part of the living in Colorado important to you?

Jeff Carson: Yeah, that’s exactly what I love about Colorado. The natural beauty and going up to the mountains, it just seems to escalate.

You’ll be on a hike and if lightning strikes you’re all of a sudden freaked out, you’re not just ‘ooh, there’s some thunder.’

You’re like, ‘oh crap, we gotta get off this mountain.’

I love the nature of this place. I’m looking outside right now and there’s clouds building in the west, and we know there’s gonna be some thunderstorms this afternoon, and that’ll be fun when they hit.

I like to look out and be like yeah, it’s hailing now, or whatever. I just love it. It’s very important to

me.

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What Jeff Carson loves about Colorado

Jenny Wheeler: Are you into hiking, camping, rafting? Outdoor stuff?

Jeff Carson: Yeah. I like to hike a lot. In the winter we ski. I think I used to do a lot more when I was younger. Mountain bike and all those things that now that I have young kids, I’ve changed.

I’m not interested in flying down a mountain on my bike. It’s not something I’m interested in. I play disc golf. I don’t even know if you’ve ever heard of that, but it’s golf with Frisbees.

That’s a major part of my life now because it’s very outdoorsy and you’re in the woods all the time. But the answer is yes. I love the outdoors and I do a lot of stuff outdoors.

Jenny Wheeler: Wolf is also a former Army ranger, and this sometimes comes into it, in terms of relating to guns, but also he gets flashbacks of his experiences when he was a soldier. Is that also something that you share?

Jeff Carson: It is not, no, it’s not. I made a choice at the very beginning. I made a lot of interesting choices at the very beginning. And it was funny. When I started writing I remember thinking, should I write like science fiction?

And I remember thinking like, oh, that’s too nuanced. I’m going to have people. emailing me about what I got wrong for this and wrong for that.

And then I ended up choosing like the most intensely scrutinized thing ever, police procedurals with law. And he’s ex-army, a former army ranger and people are coming out of the woodwork talking about military procedure and all that.

It’s funny that I chose those directions, but it’s nothing that I had any. experience with it. I just found that interesting in a character, and that’s what I went with.

The army ranger trope in thriller fiction

Jenny Wheeler: It is almost trope in this adventure fiction now, that those men often like to retire into very quiet corners of the world, isn’t it? And get some peace and space around them after the experiences they’ve had.

Jeff Carson: Exactly. It was a trope, at the beginning. It was like, okay, he’s he’s got to be skilled. So, he is ex-army, he is a former army ranger

Jenny Wheeler: So, then did you have to seek out some friends or colleagues or acquaintances who had those experiences? How did you research that aspect of it?

Jeff Carson: Yes. I had some former high school friends that I went and talked to and took copious notes and read some nonfiction books. Then, you have to just be super specific and thorough with your Google searches when they’re not there.

When you’re in the act of writing and you can’t just have someone sitting next to you looking over your shoulder for that stuff. I talked to a lot of people about that.

Jenny Wheeler: The other thing that is mentioned is that he’s got Navajo blood. I’ve read a number of the series, but I haven’t come across one yet where that particularly comes to the fore. Have you exploited that side of it yet very much?

Jeff Carson: Not very much beyond the second and third book, I think. Other than exposition about that. It never is an essential theme that’s going on in his life in the story.

Jenny Wheeler: It’s definitely one that you could introduce in the continuing series if you wanted to isn’t it?

Jeff Carson: Exactly.

Ali Falco, the woman carabinieri

Jenny Wheeler: As well as Wolf, you’ve got another series, which you’ve just started set in an extremely contrasting location, but the sense of location is just as strong as with Wolf.

That is an Italian series. You mentioned that your wife’s Italian, you’ve got very close links with the country and you’ve got now a female cop in a small town in Italy, Ali Falco, and that one is very much urban; ancient walled towns, food and wine, very much Italian focused.

Tell us a bit about Ali and why did you introduce the second series?

Jeff Carson: It was a matter of sitting down and continuing to write the Wolf series, although I love it and it’s comfortable. It was almost too comfortable, every time I sat down to write it.

I knew that I wanted to do something else and completely different. I decided to do female and our family has spent a lot of time over in Europe and in Italy specifically because my parents, my wife’s parents live over there,

It was natural to me to, every time I were over there, imagine this would be a great scene. I’m always daydreaming about scenes that would happen in these places, and I loved Tuscany the most.

When we were, whenever we go there, I just love it there. The rolling hills and then these little towns you can get stuck in and the wine and the food and everything about it.

It was natural to me to make it a series that took place there. Then as far as storywise it definitely was very difficult too, because it’s one thing to be say oh, this scenery’s great and everything.

You got to still make a nice compelling story. To convince readers that this is a real person, with a real history who grew up in Italy and this and that.

It’s very interesting and it’s very fun contrast to me. I used to always watch these PBS type specials that are set in rural England or something or Italian, or whatever.

International TV thrillers a favorite watch

I watch those shows on a website called mhz.com. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of that. It’s got like all the international shows. Subtitled.

I’ll watch a bunch of those. I like international mystery thriller or international mysteries. I’ve always been intrigued by those, so I just wanted to write some of those, Now I have two Ali books.

Jenny Wheeler: How did you go about getting inside the Italian carabinieri, and all of ways in which they operate? Did you have a mate there who’s a police officer?

Jeff Carson: No, I don’t. The way I got some of the insider information and some ideas was through my wife’s father. He has a lot of life experience and he loves to tell these stories and a lot of his stories intrigued me and he gave me some good tips on, how the structure, the rank, and so forth, because everybody has to do military service when they’re younger in Italy, and so he has a lot of friends in those places.

I read a lot and Googled a lot there. And would love to find yeah, carabinieri or a police officer over there that speaks very good English that I could hang out with, I have not found someone like that in real life over there yet.

Jenny Wheeler: Looping back to the very start of our conversation and you saying how you had a year off in Italy and you just became possessed by this idea of writing fiction.

Had it always been something you dreamt about or did it somehow just captivate you when you had a little bit of spare time?

Jeff Carson: I think that I realized I had always been dreaming about it in a flash, and I just didn’t have anybody telling me, or giving me permission to do this thing.

I had a creative writing class that I did in college. I remember that the teacher loved my story and she made me get up and tell it.

That was a very fulfilling thing, a validating thing that happened to me with all around writing.

Being a novelist ‘coolest thing ever’

And I remember telling my father one day when we were driving cross country. I remember saying to him it would be so cool. It would be the coolest thing ever to be a novelist.

But nothing ever clicked in my mind that’s what you could do. I thought you had to be a millionaire. A multimillionaire, retired. Then you write.

Then I realized in Italy that time, that was when Kindle came out and people were actually writing and making like a living with this thing.

And I was like, ‘Wait a minute. What? Wait, I’m doing this.’ It clicked. Wow, it’s actually possible to write, to be a writer. Like you don’t have to, do something else. Yeah. Retire.

Yeah, it just clicked in my mind that’s what I’ve always wanted to do, and I’ve never looked back from that moment.

Jenny Wheeler: What was the biggest challenge in setting yourself up as an indie author at that time?

Jeff Carson: You had to have… it’s still the same challenges now. You can’t just write one good book. You have to write many good books. I don’t know if it’s ever really changed, in the history of all authors. Look at Agatha Christie with all her Miss Marple books and with the Poirot books.

And you’ve got the Hardy Boys books. I don’t even know how many of those books are, they’re like 75 or something, there the series and if you have one book in a series, then it’s not really a series and nobody’s finding it, and I knew that I needed to have three to five books to really tell myself, I’m making a true go at it.

I even told myself I’m going to write 10 books. I just came up with this audacious goal because I wanted it to work so bad, that I was like, all right, I’ll do it.

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