Interview With Author Bruce Most
Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
I’ve been fortunate to write for a living most of my career, mainly as a freelance writer. My articles appeared in a variety of national magazines and I ghost wrote a self-help book. As an amateur photographer, I published pictures with some of my articles.
I’ve published six murder mystery novels along the way, both traditionally and independently, as well as crime short stories, some chosen for anthologies. Of course, I’ve written entire books that have never seen the light of day, and probably shouldn’t.
When I’m not writing, I play golf, take photographs, spend time with my grandkids, and travel all over the world with my wife.
What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
My most recent whodunit is titled No Time for Murder. It features a freelance writer and former investigative reporter who is pressured by the widow of his best friend to investigate whether her husband was actually murdered instead of committing suicide. As the title suggests, my protagonist is a harried family man and writer who has no time to investigate a crime he doesn’t believe happened. It is the most personal of my novels (though no friend, fortunately, committed suicide). The title came first, before the plot or characters, because I, like my protagonist, am swamped with all the chores and challenges of a busy life. Who has time for murder?
Do you have any unusual writing habits?
None that I will admit to. I plop my butt in my chair and try to write most days of the week. I work in my home office with music in the background. No laptop at a coffee shop. I confess I talk aloud to myself (or to my characters) when writing or brainstorming. I’ve never polled fellow writers if they do the same thing. Too embarrassed to ask.
What authors, or books have influenced you?
I grew up on Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen and other whodunit writers of the Golden Age. That’s why I write whodunits (though I end up in the parlor). All my mysteries follow their golden rule: let your reader in on all the clues and red herrings your sleuth uncovers and see if they can deduce the killer before the sleuth does.
I’m a huge fan of Raymand Chandler. My books Murder on the Tracks and The Big Dive, set in 1949 and 1951, are my homages to him. Of current writers, I’m a big fan of James Lee Burke, along with Michael Connelly, William Kent Kreuger, and others too numerous to name. Virtually every crime author I read influences me.
What are you working on now?
A whodunit set in 1939 New York City featuring a real person, Weegee, the famous crime photographer in NYC in the 1930s and 1940s. Weegee photographs a murder victim that changes his outlook on his life and his profession. I’ve had three Weegee short stories published, including one republished in an anthology of best private eye stories. He asked me (okay, from the grave) to feature him in an entire book.
What is your best method or website when it comes to promoting your books?
I wish I could name a best method, but my book promoting has never been very successful. My bi-monthly newsletter is the foundation of my promoting, along with periodic social media such as Facebook, X, and Instagram. The best website is my own. It offers a free crime novella (sign up for my newsletter) and provides opening chapters for all my novels, so I’m always trying to draw readers to it.
Do you have any advice for new authors?
Recognize up front that writing for publication is a tough tough business. Beyond talent, you have to be hungry to stick with it, even if you don’t intend it to be a career. With the emergence of eBooks twenty years ago, the market for books has become saturated (at a time fewer people are reading books). AI is making it worse.
In the light of this crowded field, you have to love writing for the sake of writing. If plotting, creating characters, writing scenes and setting, and in short, creating a story is drudgery, I’d think twice about pursuing writing even as a sideline. The riches go to few. I’ve not made anything close to a living as a fiction writer, but I still love love love sitting down and creating stories (with the hope they’ll find an audience).
Last advice: read 2-3 books very closely by 2-3 writers you love to read and would love to emulate, in whatever genre you want to write. How do they handle scenes, characters, plotting, the tropes they us? Take a scene, for example, and study exactly how they approached it. I learn so much from the authors I read. There also are many good books and articles on the craft of writing. Stephen King’s On Writing is one of the best.
And please, please, please don’t use AI to write your books. What’s the joy in that? Research, okay, but don’t have a machine write your books. It’s unfair to you, to readers, and to writers who use their own talents to write.
What is the best advice you have ever heard?
I’m not sure this is a life question or a writing question. I’ll go with writing. Put your butt in a chair and write. That’s it. Cliched advice but oh so true. Write as regularly as you can. Even if you don’t know exactly what you want to write that day. Don’t wait to be inspired. I find that some days I start a scene and I don’t exactly know how to proceed or what is going to happen. The words don’t come. But I try something. Sometimes I manage only a few sentences or paragraphs the first hour. But then things start to click, ideas begin to flow, and I finish my writing session in a flurry of words. This happens over and over for me. It can’t happen if you don’t first sit down and start.
As for a life question, I maintain that the act of writing keeps me alive!
What are you reading now?
Black Dahlia: Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood by William J Mann. A nonfiction book about the most infamous unsolved murder case in American history.
What’s next for you as a writer?
I have more whodunits in mind, and short stories. Along with a one-act play. Anything to keep me writing.
If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and allowed to take 3 or 4 books with you what books would you bring?
The longest novels I could find in case I’m there for a while, even if they’re genres I don’t normally read. Let’s say Les Misérables, War and Peace, Battlefield Earth, and Infinite Jest.
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