The Howie Carr Radio Network

Meet the Experts: Michael Walsh

Have you ever thought of writing a book but never took the leap? This week's guest did just that. Howie sits down with Michael Walsh, a Massachusetts native, who has authored a compelling mystery series, called the Ocean Park Series, that is set in a fictionalized version of his hometown, Lynn. In this episode, Michael Walsh shares the depth of research it takes to craft a cohesive and believable story and the role luck can play in seeing success as an author.

Duration:: 25m
Broadcast on:: 19 Apr 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

[MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome to another episode of Meet the Experts with Howie Car, a new podcast featuring long-form interviews with guests who have a specialized field of expertise. Have you ever thought of writing a book but never took that leap? Today's guest did just that. Michael Walsh, a Massachusetts native, has authored a compelling mystery series set in a fictionalized version of his hometown, Lim. In this episode of Meet the Experts, Michael shares the depth of research it takes to craft a cohesive and gripping story, how authors repeatedly refine their work, and what role luck can play in seeing success in the writing business. Here's your host of Meet the Experts, Howie Car. [MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome to today's episode of Meet the Experts podcast. And our expert today is Michael Walsh. He is a native of Lin. He is a 40-year veteran of General Electric, and he now lives in Florida. And he is the author of the Ocean Park mystery series about a detective in Lin, or should I say Ocean Park. It's proposed name a few years back. He's got a new novel out this spring, and it's called This Wicked City. It already has Amazon's highest rating. His writing's been published in the US and the UK's won several awards, including the short story contest at the Jacksonville Writers Festival. Kirkus Reviews has said that Walsh successfully creates a vibrant setting in remarkable main players. His depiction of Ocean Park, also known as Lin, is strong and clear, quickly revealing a failing factory town that's desperately trying to reclaim its former glory. Amazon's Vine Voice calls this wicked city his newest book, the one we're going to talk about today. A must read for mystery lovers. Reviewers have called the book masterful. They caution readers to buckle up. Mike, tell us about Wicked City, and welcome to Meet the Experts. Thanks, Holly. And thank you for your support of Ocean Park mysteries from the very beginning. This Wicked City is about the murder of a young Haitian immigrant. An Ocean Park detective named Connolly is assigned to the case, and he infuriates his police force when he teams with a victim's friend, another Haitian immigrant, to solve the murder. The plot thickens when the force is hit with a pay freeze due to budget cuts. A clever love struck arsonist conspires with a real estate magnet to set ingenious fires. And detective Connolly's wife struggles with the city's growing crime problem. Heities in the news a lot these days, especially in Massachusetts. Why'd you pick the Haitians? Well, they're not sure. The Lynn community, the Everett community, there's a very established Haitian population. And they've got a lot of community outreach. They have churches, community organizations, schools, collaboration programs, et cetera. But they have a very interesting history, and that's what sold me on making that a big part of the plot. The culture and the history, they fit the mold that I was looking for in this wicked city, and they became a very rich part of that plot. Haiti was founded 400 years ago by the French, mainly to work sugar cane plantations. They got many slaves from Western Central Africa to work those plantations, and they would just work to death. They wouldn't give them any medical care, and they were cheap to replace, so they had no care at all. In the early 19th century, a hero slave by the name of Toussaint Louvertcher, he led a historic uprising. And the interesting thing is Haiti had the only successful slave revolt in the history of the world. Now, hundreds of years of unsuccessful rule followed that uprising and that revolt. And Haiti never got a break, and largely because of the mountainous landscape there, and they had regular earthquakes. They actually had 24 earthquakes, major earthquakes, since the inception of the country, and also the Wisconsin strife between dark-skinned slaves and also mulatto who were the progeny of the slave owners. The terrain is very mountainous, and in fact, Haiti means the land of mountains. I was there once in the island of Labadi, which is a very safe, sanitized resort, but I saw the treacherous landscape, and it was, it's really bad. And I met some very hard-working salespeople in the tourist market. Now, Voodoo, which is another big part of this wicked city, is still practiced in Haiti. Religions are not generally deemed totally autonomous. Many patients practice both Voodoo and Roman Catholicism with some type of Protestantism. And one of the jokes about Haiti is that the island's population is 85% Roman Catholic, 15% Protestant, and 100% Voodoo. - Now, arson is a very integral part of the book. - Yeah, how arson is a big part of this wicked city, simply because it's a fascinating subject, and it just made for a good subplot in the story. I did a lot of research on arson. There were thousands of arson fires across the country yearly, and according to the Lynn item, some of the country's busiest firehouses are located in Lynn. There used to be, when I was growing up, a group of teenagers, they called themselves the Sparkies, and they'd go to downtown Lynn every Friday and Saturday night, and they'd hang around at a parking lot, and they'd monitor the police and the fire station. And when they heard about a fire, they'd all jump in the car and they'd speed to the fire. Now, the 1981 Great Lynn fire was very historic. It started in a shoe factory and it spread very fast. And what was historic about it also, was it was the first time that the mutual aid system was used in Massachusetts. And they had 94 communities from Massachusetts were involved, New Hampshire firefighters showed up, and they had 900 firefighters in total in a lot of apparatus. And the guys from Rhode Island, the jakes from Rhode Island, came and they manned the many firehouses that had been vacated by the Massachusetts guys. And at that time, it was the largest collection ever of firefighters in the United States with the exception of California wildfires. Also, an interesting story was Ed King, who was Massachusetts governor at the time. He showed up in a state police helicopter to help out, and he lifted the Lynn Fire Chief up overhead, and what they did is they planned the attack. And when they get up there from what I understand, it looked like it was a hopeless cause. So what they did, the fire was getting out of control, and the Lynn Fire Chief just ordered all of the guys out of there, all of the firefighters and let it burn. The scene was described by the Lynn item as a war zone. - Yeah, Stanley Foreman, the great Boston Harold American photographer, won three Pulitzer Prizes, didn't work the channel five. He's got a book out, and a lot of the pictures are from the Lynn Fire. It was magnificent, another story when I was working in GE. We had the reps, the engine reps, were calling from all over the world. They had heard about the Lynn Fire, and they thought that the whole city had burnt down. That's why they were calling, but it was a good part of the city, but it got quite a lot of press. Another thing that was unique about it is the fire spread so rapidly to three buildings. It brought winds like a tornado, which they had never seen. When the heat was so intense that fire engines are actually burning up, and hoses were burning and burst in the street, and they had to set up a relay system because they were running out of water, so they had a relay system that was bringing salt water from Lynn Harbor to help put the fire out. - Arson is a big part of this wicked city, for the same reasons that Arson has traditionally been big. - Yes, as a result, 17 buildings were destroyed, 800 people homeless, thousands more jobless, and I researched Arson extensively. It's very interesting, and I borrowed some clever tricks from the pros, and I set ocean park ablaze in my book. - So you have a lot of three decker apartments in Ocean Park, just like Lynn is covered with three deckers, even to this day. - Yeah, yeah, I made the three deckers because there's so much history. I mean, they're iconic, and there's so much to them. I made them kind of what's called a controlling image in my book. By the way, they're also called triple deckers, stackers, and layer cakes. And the first three houses I lived in were three deckers, and I've probably been in 100 more in my time in Lynn. They were built in the late 19th and 20th centuries. The first one, supposedly, was built in Worcester, and as you know, many were built across New England. By the way, the reason that they're all on these long, narrow lots is that the utility costs were charged by frontage, so it was economical for them to do that. So in fact, one of the statements in my book is as they're walking down one of the alleys and it's one of the streets in Lynn, they look like giant dominoes in military precision. - Is there a love story in this wicked city? You know, most stories, police procedurals have some kind of love interest there. - Yeah, and one of the unique things, and I know this from being with a, I'm with a romance house as a publisher, and usually they have HEAs, which are happily ever after endings, but this wicked city has two love stories, and both of them are troubled, but that's endemic of crime, fiction, and mysteries in general. They usually don't end well. For instance, in Robert Parker, who's one of the great late Boston author in his book, A Savage Place, Spencer's private detective, is protecting LA investigative reporter Candy Sloan, and they have a brief affair. Spencer's already in a relationship, though. And then, when it becomes evident that Candy is also open in her relationship, Spencer, all of a sudden, is disturbed, but he stays professional. So, it's a good example of Parker creating a brilliant Shakespearean situation that ends in yet another transformation for Spencer, which doesn't end well. And Lahain does the same thing, Patrick and Angie, who were his two protagonists in books like Gone Baby Gone and That Series. They have a simmering attraction early in the series. Finally, turns into a love affair, but the dream is not what they imagined. So, if that were a romance book, it'd be an HEA, but in Boston Crime Fiction, it's non-HEA. - You get good mentions in the reviews for your character's dialogue, and a lot of Boston writers are known for their dialogue. What's the secret for you and other Boston writers, do you think? - Well, I call it Boston Speak, how of which you were the Grand Master, in fact. I know that you're very familiar with that, and use it often. Basically, it's a witty sarcasm and clever, a rape party. In real life, people don't usually speak directly to each other. If you pick up a book, and it's hello, how are you this morning, or whatever. That's not the way people speak. What they do is they redirect, they obfuscate, they defend themselves. Sometimes they humiliate, they retaliate. - Talk about that growing up in Len. You know, I used to stay at the State House. I used to cover Tommy McGhee, the speaker. I'm sure you-- - I knew Tommy McGhee very well. In fact, I and my family, we campaigned for him quite a bit, and Tommy rewarded me with a state scholarship to Boston University, too. In fact, I know his son's very well, too. - The mayor, the former mayor now. - Yes, yes, and also Sean, I coached with. And yeah, the McGhee is a very famous family. They left quite a legacy. - They're the quintessential political Len people, but tell us about your background in Len. - Well, first of all, Len is a great community, and I feel very lucky to have grown up there. Physically, it's got a great, a long, clean beach. It's got one of the country's largest city-owned reservations in Len Woods. It's got a lot going for it. It's called the city of first, and I know that first hand because working from GE, we built the first American jet engine right in Len, Massachusetts. It's got a lot of other things, first fire engine, first night baseball game. And what I say in the description of my book is this wicked city is a story powered by its character's struggles with love, loyalty, and sacrifice. And to me, those values describe the people of Len, and I still consider myself, even though I'm living in Jacksonville, Florida, a loyal and grateful Lenner, and I have a lot of friends and family there. And Len has a share of crime, but I attribute the city's reputation more to alcohol and testosterone, alcohol in particular. Len has a drinking problem. And my grandma's school, for instance, in St. Michael's grandma's school in West Len, it was surrounded by six bars. And I remember the names of South Seas, Flamingo, Kennedy's, the 595, the Somerset, the White Eagle. In fact, Len has so many bars that they ran out of names, and they just started slapping street numbers on the front of the bars. So the 595 was at 595 Summer Street. The 797 was 797 West on Avenue. So they had an alcohol problem for a long time. And add to that, it has very dense population. There are hundreds of three decades as we talked about, several housing projects. And there's also a strong honor culture, especially among a lot of the immigrants and the second generation immigrants, too. But I mean, Len has changed a lot. The population is very different than when you were there. Very different. When I was there, it was mostly Irish, Polish, Greek, Italian, French, Canadian. It was funny because the city was roughly divided into ethnic areas. And mostly, it was everybody stuck together. But today, the immigrants are mostly Caribbean, Asian, and Central or South American. And the economy seems stable. They've got a great mayor. And now, Jared Nicholson, who I was just texting with this morning, who made friends with him. And he's doing a super job. The crime, really, comparatively in Massachusetts, isn't that high. The crime rate isn't that high. But they still have some problems. And they have gangs. They have bloods, crypts, black shadows, and Asian boys. Not much different than most cities. Why do you call it Ocean Park rather than Len? I mean, at the Herald, we always make jokes for years about Ocean Park, trying to change the name. Well, partially because of this, Len has it in its infamous poem, which goes back over 100 years. And this is how it goes. Len, Len, city of sin. You never come out the way you came in. That's what we all know. Now comes the forgotten verses. You ask for water, but they give you gin. The girls say no, yet they always give in. What looks like gold is really tinned. If you're not bad, they won't let you in. It's the damnedest city I've ever lived in. Len, Len, the city of sin. So in 1997, getting back to Len in Ocean Park, the Len city solicitor, his name was Michael Barry, he went to the city council. And he suggested that the city distance themselves from the poem, I guess, and from the reputation mostly, and that they rename the city Ocean Park. And they immediately said no. And they were mocked by the city, by a whole bunch. They mocked so today. By me. That you, today, by the Elsa. By everybody. By everybody they're mocked. And so what happened is, though, give him credit, Len is came up with a new poem, Ocean Park, Ocean Park. Better get out before it gets dark. So the name Ocean Park seemed to be doomed, but I brought it back. What writers inspired you? Boston writers, in particular. Dennis Lahain is a strong influence. He's the master of what's called the Boston-Dwaj honor. Gone, baby, gone, and Mystic River. I love him. They're classics in Robert Parker, who I actually lived a few houses from in Linfield. He lived there for a while. And one day he invited me in, and we watched a baseball, a Red Sox game together. We had a long conversation about writing. Very good, supportive guy. And he was supportive to my writing efforts, too. Also, non-Bostonian Stephen King. When I say he's a non-Bostonian, though, I think we got to make him an honorary Bostonian, Howie, because he lived in Maldon, for a while. Did he? Was very good, though, though. Yeah, he had a tough family situation. They were pretty poor, and his mother moved him to Maldon, I think, because relatives were nearby. John D. MacDonald, who I know you're a fan of, too, I read that in Paper Boy. And I love him. The Travis McGee novels. I reread them. Michael Connolly. And I really love reading non-fiction writers Sebastian Younger, who wrote a perfect stunt. Now, because I think he's the one guy who can take-- who can write non-fiction like it's fiction. He can really put you there. When did you decide to become a writer, Michael Walsh? Well, I can tell you the very moment, Howie. And since I was very young, my parents started to teach me how to read, and then the nuns took over in first grade, and I started pretty early there. So I read voraciously since I was very young. And then at eighth grade graduation, which was in the now gone St. Michael's Church, I won both the English Award and the Polish Legion of American Veterans Essay Contest. And from then on, the die was cast, and I was a writer. I was becoming a writer. So I graduated from St. John's Prep in Danvers, where I got an important education in classic literature, and I took Latin, public speaking, writing, and so forth. And from there, I went on to Boston University. Like most writers, as you said, I needed a vocation to accompany my application, and I had my long career at the GE, by the way. That's what it's called in Latin. It's not General Electric, it's the third GE, which I kid them about. And it's funny, because when I kid people about that in Latin, they say to me, what's the problem? It's the GE. So you went to BU College of Communication. So what was that like, as if I don't know, having taught there for three years myself? Well, I attended at a very important time, and I met a lot of notable famous people. They kind of feel like Forrest Gump sometimes going through BU with all the people that I ran into. But the first day, in fact, controversial dean and future gubernatorial candidate, John Silber, and I started, we started together in the very first day. On my freshman year, I watched political science professor Howard Zinn, a famous activist and professor, encouraging students with a bullhorn and Bay State road to take over the administration building and disrupt Marine recruiters there. This was during the Vietnam War. Until 50 riot police arrived on a bus, and they made arrests, and they took care of that. Right up the street, a new band named Aerosmith lived, and they were poor, strung like artists at the time. And I watched them often on the lawn in front of the Student Union, and I found out just a couple of years ago that the reason they were doing that is they had zero money for food, and the deal was that they could eat in the West Campus cafeteria if they played for an hour or so. So I got a degree in journalism, and Howard Stern was in a lot of my classes. Although I can't say I knew him, or that I ever spoke to him, but he was only memorable because at six foot five, he towered over everyone. And he was a disc jockey at WTBU, but he got fired by his boss on the air for being outrageous, which was some foreshadowing there. I worked at BU's Daily Free Press, and also Bill O'Reilly happened to be working there at the same time. He was a graduate student in the School of Communication at BU, and he worked at the Free. So I got some bylines, and I got a lot of experience, and Bill also, besides working at the Free Press, he was out doing freelance, and he sold some freelance reporting from a Fannie Fox interview down at the Combat Zone that he did. So after I graduated, when I initially graduated before GE, I got a job writing ad copy for a lot of the Route 1 restaurants, the ship, the Continental, the hilltop. And then GE hired me, and a lot of people find it interesting. They hired me to edit and to write Gen-Engine manuals, which I did for a little while, and I did some script writing for training videos and manufacturing courses. And then, as you say, I had a long career. I get over into the repair business pretty much after that. That's where the money was. Tell us about Ocean Parks and Journey. It's tough to get published. But what did you do to get published? Well, I sent out hundreds of queries. I mean, and I'd been sending out queries before we had a lot of laptops and computers. I mean, people thought I was insane. That's the operative word, is you have to be insanely persistent, because it's real discouraging. It's only about half of them are ever even answered, even electronically now in email. And sometimes you'll get one response in a year, or even more than a year I've got responses. So I had some close calls, and that's the tough thing about it, how he could get disappointed. You think something's going to happen, and it doesn't happen. But I had a kid by the name of Jacob Roundy, who was a reader. I remember that name. He was very interested, and he kept emailing me when he saw the first chapter or so. And finally, they requested the whole manuscript from my publisher, which I'm still with. The name is the Wild Rose Press, and they were a very successful romance publisher in New York. And they expanded, they decided to expand into mysteries. So they were looking for mysteries, and I was in the right place at the right time after hundreds, if not thousands of queries, and all of a sudden they asked for the manuscript. And I've been with them. They've been very great and professional, and I have the benefit of their large romance marketing and support organization. We're talking to Michael Walsh. He's got a new novel out this Wicked City. It's part of the Ocean Park series. It's about a Lynn detective and his work. And this is the latest one, this Wicked City. So what would your advice be to anyone who wants to get published? My advice, I read a lot of writing books. I took some courses at BU, but the way to really learn writing is to join a writing group. That's how you learn the craft. In Jacksonville, Florida, we had a great writing group. It was called The Bard Society. And it had some very experienced writers, thriller author Steve Berry, who sold 22 million copies of his thriller work. And novelist David Poir were both members of the group. The way that works is, is every week we would meet, and the leader of the group, would anonymously read one of a member's piece to the whole group. It would be a book chapter or a short story. And then we'd just attack it brutally. And that trial by fire process of giving and receiving criticism, that's what taught us all how to write. We even had our own acronyms to use in critique. RUE is resist the urge to explain. POV means inconsistency in a character's point of view. We also use terms like head hopping and butt writing to point out weak parts. And then what happens is slowly the writer becomes the re-writer. But I've seen also, I'll give you some of the funny series of critiques. There was, for instance, a cab driver, a person who really didn't use cabs. And they had a cab driver, seen about a cab driver. And the guy befriended the other guy, and the guy tried to give him a tip. He says, "That's okay, I don't need it." And everybody's like, "What cab driver says no to a tip? This doesn't make sense. This isn't real." So how is publishing and book promotion changed? Well, self-publishing has grown exponentially, as you mentioned. Overall, readership has gone down in both fiction and non-fiction. Social media has replaced it. I mean, people look at Instagram reels, Facebook posts, streaming, other online content. So what happens right now is that book publishers, what they want is they want what's called social proof. So they want a guy who's maybe published a lot of books or have a big name or has some background behind them. Well, they want something that's called high concept. That's how Steve Berry, the guy in my writing group, could have discovered what happened. It's when the DaVinci Code came out, he happened to be putting out a book called The Temple of Legacy. Random House, all of a sudden saw that, and they said, "We want to peer this because nobody knows anything about Templars at the time with DaVinci Code." And he ended up, Steve Berry ended up selling 5 million copies of The Temple of Legacy just because he hooked on to the DaVinci Code. So luck is a big part of the whole thing. Romance still dominates fiction sales. In fact, the New York Times bestseller list, they limit the romances that they put on there. If they put down the romance sales, they would take all of the top 10 spots, would all be romance, which is not what people are looking for in the New York Times bestseller list. So it's still dominant. The problem is even if you do get that big contract because even the big publishers are hurting, you probably won't get the advertising budget. And that's why there's a huge business right now in book self-promotion. Tell us, this is the third, this Wicked City is the third in your Ocean Park series. So tell us briefly about the first two Oak Park and Gypsy. Sure, the first one is Ocean Park about a murder in a Catholic church that's about to close. And what happens is detective Connolly and his partner, they arrive to investigate. They discover a young Cambodian girl hiding under a statue of St. Mary that seems to be crying tears of blood. Now Connolly's already got a whole bunch of other issues. He's dealing with crooked cops, gangs, a sex club and a very suspect miracle. And on top of that, the Massachusetts state police come to take over. The protocol in Massachusetts is that the district attorney will decide who takes over a murder investigation because if you have a small town, they may not have a murder squad and they'll give it over to the state. So that's part of the conflict also. That situation is unfolding in Canton right now. Yes. Much to the chugran of just about everybody concerned. So what's next? Are you working on any more Ocean Park series or is this at? No, no, no. Two more books in the middle. The Ocean Park series continues howie and also because I've been in the South now for about 19 years, I think it is. I'm starting another mystery series that's set in the South. Do you have any names yet for the new Ocean Park? Well, I was, I was actually, I grew up when I was born, I lived in the Brickyard section of West Lynn and that had a nickname of Knuckle City because all the Irish men were always fighting there. So Knuckle City, I don't know. I think that's too over the top. I look forward to reading this Wicked City, the latest in your Ocean Park series. The other ones have been fantastic and I recommend them highly. Where can people buy any of the Ocean Park series, but particularly the new one, this Wicked City? Well, the print and ebooks, all of it of the entire series, Ocean Park, Gypsy and this Wicked City are available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble's Nook, Cobo, Apple Books and Google Books. Now, the print books are available at the Lazy Dog Sports Bar. Remember that name that's owned by my good friend Tom Dil and it's located in Lynn, of course, at 328A Broadway. Now, the Lazy Dog just has a great menu and they were just named the number one sports bar in Massachusetts by Boston, 25 News and Google Reviews and the number 29 in the country. So check them out. You can eat there and buy one of my books. Now if you're into the Sanibel or Fort Myers area, you can buy print copies at Sanibel Chiropractic which is located at 1680 McGregor Boulevard and Fort Myers. Sanibel Chiropractic is owned by my son Greg Walsh and his wife Jacqueline. Now they're both Chiropractic and they've supported my writing since the beginning. Now also I can be emailed at author Michael Walsh at gmail.com or I can be contacted on Facebook on my author page at author Michael Walsh and I'm available to speak for book clubs, writing groups and book signings and I always bring free stuff. Michael Walsh, we appreciate you being with us and again, I recommend this book highly. This Wicked City, it's part of the Ocean Park series by Michael Walsh. Michael, good luck with your writing career and thanks for following me all these years to invest everybody in Lynn, Lynn, the city of Sanibel where you never go out the way you came in. Thanks. Thanks, Michael Walsh. Thank you, Harvey. Thanks for joining us on this episode of Meet the Experts with Howie Car. We'll be back soon with even more interesting guests you're sure to learn a great deal from. [music] of the world. of the world. of the world. I'll see you in the next video. Thanks for joining us. [music] [BLANK_AUDIO]