John F Dobbyn Interview

Q: Let me start with asking you to tell us a little bit about yourself.
A. I was originally a Bostonian. After Harvard College, the Air Force, Boston College Law School, trial practice, and Harvard Law School, I taught law at Villanova Law School until graduation (retirement) three years ago. My fiction writing journey began with fifteen short stories in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and five in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. That was followed by six legal thriller novels in the Michael Knight/Lex Devlin series published by Oceanview Publishing – Neon Dragon, Frame Up, Black Diamond, Deadly Diamonds, Fatal Odds, and the last, High Stakes, published in October, 2019.

Q: When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?
A. Almost by accident. I took a creative writing course 28 years ago just to fill time while my wife took tennis lessons. For an assignment I wrote a short mystery story using a blind criminology professor to solve the crime. By the grace of God, it sold to Mike Shane’s Mystery Magazine. From then on, I was hooked.

Q: Could you give us the highlights of your professional writing career including how you got your first writing break?
A. My first break was a completely undeserved sale of a short story to a mystery magazine on my first attempt at fiction writing. That was followed by enough rejection slips over six years to paper our entire house. Finally, on one submission to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, the wonderful editor, Eleanor Sullivan, wrote in the margin of the rejection slip. “Don’t quit. You’re getting close.” She bought the next one, and the fourteen after that.

Q: Would you tell us about your current book release, High Stakes?
A: The clue to the location in Romania of the undiscovered treasure of the actual, human Prince Dracula is located in a Stradivarius violin that comes into the possession of Michael Knight, my first-person character. He is then in the crossfire of three organized crime gangs – Russian, Chinese, and Romanian – all after the same treasure.

Q: Where did you get your inspiration for High Stakes?
A: A Viking cruise took my wife and me into the heart of Romania with a tour of Transylvania and Dracula’s castle. I was intrigued by the stunning history of the human Vlad Dracula (Vlad The Impaler), perhaps the most famous and infamous ruler of the fifteenth century, who was actually the inspiration for the fictional vampire Dracula of Bram Stoker

Q: What is the main thing you hope readers remember from this story?
A: An entertaining and suspenseful story that leaves them with a new knowledge of a fascinating era in European history and an acquaintance with the equally fascinating Stradivarius violin.

Q: What inspires you to write?
A. The desire to grip the reader with an entertaining suspense that never slackens, under the suspense, the learning of a great deal about a subject that might fascinate them as much as it does me.

Q: Would you share with us what you are working on now?
A. While in its early stages, my current novel will give rise to a new central first-person character, a professor of criminal law who, like Michael Knight, finds himself drawn deeply into circumstances that threaten his life for the sake of saving others to whom he has given his word.

Q: When you’re not writing what do you like to do?
A. My wife, Lois, and I love to travel to the remote locations in the world that I enjoy bringing the reader to with authentic feeling in the novels.