Ed Protzel Interview

Q: Let me start with asking you to tell us a little bit about yourself.
A. Thanks for asking, Susan, and greetings to all of you suspense fans! My life had enough suspense to fill a library. I’ve lived in St. Louis most of my life, but it was a bumpy upbringing. To start with, I’m Jewish on my father’s side, part-Cherokee on my mother’s. My parents divorced when I was seven, and I was placed in an orphanage for a year until my father remarried. And that did not go so well, either. In my teens, I ran away from home several times before finishing high school. Necessity being the mother of invention, I managed to find a job, save, and put myself through college. Later I got my securities license so I could work in financial services to pay the bills.

Now, riding out the Coronavirus epidemic is the priority for my wife and me, as we FaceTime with our granddaughter far, far away in Portland, Oregon.

Q: When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?
A. I wanted to be a writer ever since high school, writing in my spare time. I got serious about it in college and churned out several scripts, one of which (“DarkHorse”) was honored by Missouri Association of Performing Playwrights. I even moved to L.A. for a time to write features. It was there where that same script was recognized by Twentieth Century Fox. But I was very unhappy in L.A., so within a year I moved back to St. Louis, where I returned to school to earn an M.A. in English/creative writing. That’s when I turned to novels, adapting my “DarkHorse” script into what would become my Southern Gothic DarkHorse Trilogy. That trilogy just concluded with the release of Something in Madness.

Q: What do you write and why this genre?
A. What I like about historical fiction (and sci-fi as well) is the flexibility, allowing me to utilize all sorts of literary devices to tell a story or follow a theme. It’s the how to express those themes that gives the writer so much discretion. Do I take a “serious” tone, presenting facts and realities? Or do I use a more creative approach, infusing the story with high drama, moments of pure joy, gut-wrenching tragedy, mystery, or humor? I use them all in my DarkHorse Trilogy, and keep the reader in suspense not knowing what’s coming.

Q: Do you base your characters on people you know or are they totally made up?
A: Every character I create is a composite of myself, people I’ve known, and made-up idealizations. All my characters — heroes and “non-heroes” alike (I seldom use pure villains) — possess a combination of qualities, good and bad, to make them human and relatable.

Here are the main characters you’ll meet in the DarkHorse Trilogy. Do their lives correspond to mine?

• Durksen (Durk) Hurst (aka DarkHorse): Part-Seminole; orphaned after the murder of his abolitionist father; raised by the Chickasaw. Grows up a visionary, idealistic schemer, who after befriending a group of escaped slaves in 1859, develops a grandiose plan to build their own plantation (which they call DarkHorse). But his flaws endanger them and himself.

• Antoinette DuVallier: A sophisticate from New Orleans and Durk’s romantic partner who he cannot marry (for reasons revealed in Something in Madness). A strong, intelligent, far-seeing woman who carries heavy burdens of past tragedies.

• Big Josh Tyler: Durk’s closest friend who had run his master’s plantation during slavery; the real leader of the DarkHorse partnership.

• The Frenches: The widow Mrs. Marie Brussard French and her heir, Devereau French, owners of the FrenchAcres Plantation. No spoilers here; that would be telling.

Q: Would you tell us about your current book release, SOMETHING IN MADNESS?
A: Absolutely! Here’s the story in a nutshell:

Something in Madness begins in 1865, with Durk and his friends returning home from war to a devastated Mississippi, the sole survivors of a Union colored cavalry regiment. But instead of peace, they find unregenerate Confederates who reject emancipation still in charge.

Undeterred, Durk opens a law practice to help disenfranchised freedmen — only to be threatened by powerful planters and nightriders. A black school is burned; a petition march to Jackson is terrorized. And when one of his friends goes missing, Durk is horrified to discover him being forced into brutal servitude. Clever Durk schemes to liberate them, but must contend with armed ruffians — and a rigged court system.

Q: Where did the idea for this story come from?
A. The storyline for Something in Madness evolved from the previous books in the trilogy. With book 1 taking place in the antebellum South and book 2 in Civil War Missouri, it was important for those who survived the war to return to Mississippi in book 3: there were loose ends to tie up, scores to settle, and justice to be ferreted out.

Plus, characters need obstacles to create a suspenseful story, and based on the research I’d done on Reconstruction, from Black Codes to vagrancy and anti-miscegenation laws, there were more than enough challenges for these characters. To find solutions to seemingly insurmountable problems, I had to invent plot twists, conspiracies, and a new villainous character. After all, the future of the country was a stake in what I viewed as a microcosm of the South at the time.

Q: Would you share with us what you are working on now?
A. Right now I’m working on a sci-fi thriller, Remembering Planet Earth, where in the not-so-distant future our world has become an offbeat tourist destination for advanced, wealthy aliens. Plenty of opportunities to have fun and expand my imagination!

My other venture outside the historical fiction genre was a futuristic suspense/thriller, The Antiquities Dealer, which was released in 2018. The story takes place in Israel and St. Louis, and involves the search by Muslim, Jewish, and Christian extremists for the surviving nail from the Crucifixion — which is tied to an attempt by a secret society to clone Jesus Christ. Murders, puzzles, and romance drive the suspense toward a surprising conclusion.

Q: Tell me three things about yourself that would surprise your readers.
A. I’m what my wife calls a “duo, right-left brain type” — part intellectual/cultural, part sports nut, part kid. I love Cardinals baseball and Blues hockey, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, and tense drama. I chuckle at British humor, Three Stooges, Ricky Gervais and Larry David. So guilty as charged!

Q: Milk or dark chocolate? Coffee or tea?
A. Milk chocolate! Dark is too bitter for my palette. Plus, caffeine is a problem for me, so I stick with water or decaf tea, coffee and soda.

Q: Favorite TV show or shows?
A. I watch a lot of PBS, nature and history programs (not surprisingly). You can’t beat a Ken Burns series. I’m hooked on old movies on TCM, including film noir from the forties and fifties, classics, even terrible old weird films, which my friends ridicule. 🙂