Readers, welcome to Interview Alley published on DonnellAnnbell.com. My interview today is with Colorado Author Bruce Most, recipient of the 2022 Colorado Author League’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Mr. Most has written a novel with the apt title, “No Time for Murder.” I found his mystery highly relatable, educational, and a pleasure to read. As always, I wanted to know the story behind the story. Shall we find out?
Donnell: Welcome Bruce. As your title No Time for Murder, suggests, David Dartman is one busy guy. A wife, two kids, he is also a freelance writer, and if he’s not carting one kid to violin lessons, he’s coaching the other in soccer. Like any busy guy, David keeps a considerable “to-do” list. At first as I read, I thought I might be reading about an amateur sleuth. I quickly learned that David possesses a skill his neighbors revere but isn’t nearly as appreciated by law enforcement. David is an investigative reporter. I read from your bio that you were once a freelance writer as well as a fiction author. Does your resume include investigative reporting?
No Time for Murder Author Bruce Most
Bruce Most: While I worked briefly on a newspaper fresh out of college, and a long career as a freelance writer, I was never an investigative reporter. Thankfully, unlike my protagonist, I’ve also never been asked to look into the suspicious death of a close friend. But I do have one thing in common with David: I’m the poster child for our society’s rat-race life. A compulsive maker of lists. Always harried with too much to do or too many things I want to do. Lousy at relaxing. Shuttling my kids to lessons and sports when they were young, eating on the run. Can’t stop myself from taking on new projects.
And I did sorta stick my family into the book, much to their mortification. After my son read a draft, he said with dismay in his voice, you wrote about us. My family is probably hoping for terrible sales so few people will see our family life pressed in the pages.
Donnell: My sympathies to your son, I don’t see a lack of sales in your future. 🙂 When in David’s point of view, I learned you have a brilliant first-person voice. Then you introduce Detective Watts in third-person and I discovered the crime writer alive and well. Watts is the lead detective and a fascinating character who plays both foil and support as David unravels clue after clue. Your knowledge of police procedure is impressive. Have you completed any specialized training to write crime fiction?
Bruce Most: “Brilliant” is not an adjective I associate with my writing, but thank you for the compliment. All of my mysteries have involved law enforcement officers, or former LEOs, to one degree or another, either as main or secondary characters. However, I have no law enforcement background or specialized training. I once did a ride-along in a patrol car in downtown Denver. Nothing more unsettling than having the officer show me how to pull his shotgun out of its rack in the event he was incapacitated and I needed it to defend myself. What I know is mostly from research, research, research from people who do know about law enforcement. Like any good writer. And with my background as a journalist and freelance writer, I’m pretty fussy about sticking as close to the facts and procedures of law enforcement as possible.
Donnell: I get it. One sergeant on a ride-along instructed me on how to use the radio in case he didn’t come back! Your story takes place in or about 2006 when America was reeling from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and the brutal effects on our soldiers coming home. Is No Time for Murder a story you’ve been updating for some time? Or is it something you felt compelled to write years later?
Bruce Most: The germ of ideas for most of my mysteries start with character or plot. For example, my first published mysteries, about Ruby Dark, a bail bond 
agent in Denver, grew out of a local article about a woman bail bond agent. Her character grabbed immediately. The plots came later. In the case of No Time for Murder, however, the idea literally started with the title years ago. In short, theme first. How many of us are so entangled in the petty busyness of our lives we lose sight of what’s really important: family, friends, our own well-being. Lives that are too structured, too full of activities, with no time take a deep breath and think about what we’re really doing and what we want to be doing—says the author who is the poster child of such busyness.
In my forward, I cite quotes about busyness. One is Thoreau’s famous lines:
It’s not enough to be busy;
So are the ants.
The question is:
What are we busy about?
And there is Jane Austen’s line from one of her books, Life is just a quick succession of busy nothings.
That’s my whole book right there.
Only after the theme emerged and stuck in my creative soul did I go hunting for characters and plot. Character was rather easy: a main character and family loosely drawn from my own. Developing the plot took longer. I knew I wanted a crime or crimes that factored into the death of David’s best friend. I toyed with multiple plot ideas before settling on the Iraq and Afghanistan war and corruption. The war wasn’t so much a theme as a device that gave my characters plenty to wrestle with and expose their secrets and fears—and their to-do lists.
Donnell: Fascinating to find such memorable quotes to sum up your book. Readers familiar with Denver and its surroundings will witness the author’s firsthand knowledge as he talks about LODO, the Denver Press Club, Colfax, Castlerock, hiking trails, and more. I believe David’s suburban community, its feuding homeowners association, as well as the police precinct he deals with are fictitious. Am I correct? Here’s a chicken vs. the egg question: Do you establish setting before characters or vice versa? The scenes you create were so exact, I wondered if you revisited them before writing.
Bruce Most: Yes, the community, the HOA, the dive bar, and the police department are fictitious—though feuding HOAs and their rather unrestrained power are very real in America. As for the actual landmarks, I didn’t revisit them. I’ve been in the Press Club enough, for example, I didn’t need to revisit.
As to your chicken vs. the egg question, I rarely start with setting. For me, setting serves the characters and plot. In No Time, for the theme and plot, I knew I wanted a suburban setting. Not that people in the core of big cities or in rural America don’t have harried lives. But the suburbs felt more right, and as I’ve lived my life in suburbia, it seemed a natural fit—running off to soccer games and music lessons and everything else David deals with. The story would feel at home in almost any suburban setting in the country, but naturally as I live in Denver it was easier to set it there.
The only book of mine where setting played an early key role in the development of the plot and characters was Rope Burn, a standalone whodunit involving a former big city detective caught up in cattle rustling and murder in modern-day Wyoming. My wife has family who lives on a cattle ranch in Wyoming, so I knew the area and the people well (which I borrowed but disguised). I even wrote articles on cattle rustling in my freelance days (yes, there is still cattle rustling in these modern times). In the book, the setting itself, the land and its cattle, is a character, a character that drives the other characters and plot.
Donnell: Sounds like something out of Yellowstone. Speaking of characters, you have a long cast of secondaries. Each is so memorable, not just in their physical description, but in their hobbies. For example, David’s wife Poppy is a career woman who plays in a band. Katherine, the wife of David’s best friend and the impetus for David pursuing the closed case, is an elected official. Another character is an avid Buick collector, complete with a rented warehouse. Another an ardent fisherman who invests his money in a rock garden koi pond. A homeless veteran wounded in Afghanistan who carries a secret—the list goes on.
How much time and effort would you say go into creating your characters? Do you create character charts?
Bruce Most: I may sketch out notes for characters, but I don’t do in-depth profiles or character Bibles in advance. Feels like too much work for characters I don’t know well when I’m starting out. I knew David and my family characters pretty well before I started. I’ve lived with a version of them. Character details usually get layered on as I write and rewrite. In the case of No Time, without giving anything away, Buick collecting and fishing figure into the plot, though I didn’t know that when I started. David’s wife Poppy is a high-powered business executive and a classic busy mother. But during drafting, I thought it would be fun to have her play in a cover band just to give her one more thing to do in her hectic life (who knows where these ideas come from). I even added a scene of her playing in a dive bar. In some ways, she’s busier than David, but she handles it far better than he does.
One reason I don’t do in-depth profiles is that I’m not a detailed plotter—nor a pantser. Something in between. I like to have a rough idea of key characters and 
the general direction of plot before I begin drafting, but I don’t plot out every scene. I prefer discovery along the way. In my second Ruby Dark novel, I had this vague idea of who my killer was. But during drafting, when a minor character stepped into a scene, I said to myself, “There’s my killer!” In another book, I drafted a scene with a character whose sole purpose was to provide information to my sleuth. A one-time appearance. In the middle of writing, I got this idea to put the character in a wheelchair, for no particular reason at the time. But I started wondering, why stick him in a wheelchair? My imagination ran, and suddenly the character went from minor to major and sparked a huge plot change.
Donnell: You have command of story pacing and are continually upping the conflict. While David discovers clues and crosses off his burgeoning to-do list, Detective Watts and his colleague uncover body after body. You mentioned to me that you yourself have a “To-Do” list. Do you brainstorm with others? Write scenes out of order? Have perfectionist tendencies? Write several drafts? I know I’m curious; perhaps others might be as well.
Bruce Most: Thanks for the praise of my pacing. I do work hard at it, though I think pacing is difficult for writers when we’re so deep in our story. I don’t use a to-do list for brainstorming a book, but I’m awash in personal to-do lists. To-do lists for my writing needs (you know, all that marketing stuff). Personal tasks. Shopping lists. Lists breaking down a single major task into manageable steps, much like David does when he decides to investigate his friend’s death. Short lists, long lists, long-term lists, and random pieces of paper with a single task on it. Lists of everything but “lists of lists.” I think I’m responsible for the destruction of a small forest.
I scribble notes with ideas for my books and short stories, though I wouldn’t call them to-do lists. My best tool for brainstorming characters and plot is a small digital recorder which I take in the car or on walks. It doesn’t kill trees and I can rattle on for a long time. I once drove from Wyoming ranch country back to Denver and dictated what would become an early outline for Rope Burn. The other day I brainstormed into it on a 30-minute drive home trying to figure out the key points of a short story I was stuck on. Success! A marvelous tool every writer should use.
I don’t write scenes out of order, but I do write multiple drafts. Too many, says my wife. She bought me a t-shirt recently that says, “Hold on. Let me overthink this.” I’m rarely fully satisfied, so in that regard I’m something of a perfectionist. Which drives me to the write the best book I can for my talents. It also makes me an appallingly slow writer. So slow, I swear, I start out writing a contemporary novel and by the time I finish it’s a historical novel.
Donnell: Well, maybe not that slow. 🙂 I believe more than one theme runs through your novel. Without giving too much away, I think truth and justice are prevalent, and the story includes more than one heady message. As our interview comes to an end, I’ll close with, I think your protagonist is one of the finest examples of character growth I’ve read in a long time. No Time for Murder is a mystery reader’s delight. What’s more, I believe the last line in this novel will have readers cheering.
Thanks for joining me, Bruce. Readers, have I exhausted the questions, or do you have more?
About the Book:
WHEN DEATH DOESN’T FIT INTO YOUR SCHEDULE
David Dartman is the poster child for America’s rat-race life. He’s overwhelmed with to-do lists and crowded calendars: kids to chauffer, a corporate history book to write, a soccer team to coach, lost socks to find . . . So when the widow of his best friend demands he convince the police that her husband’s suicide was in fact murder, David’s first response is he doesn’t have time for murder. Moreover, he believes his friend, suffering PTSD from a military tour in Afghanistan, most certainly killed himself.
Yet . . . remorseful for not being there for his troubled friend in his last days because he “was too busy,” the former investigative journalist and crime writer reluctantly starts poking around. The more David pokes—all while juggling his personal and professional obligations—the more he discovers that his friend’s death is more than a simple suicide.
His investigative skills, and a string of bizarre, brutal killings, unearth uncomfortable truths about his friend’s death—truths that jeopardize David’s marriage and force him to recognize that life is more than one long to-do list.
Good morning all! Special welcome to Author Bruce Most. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel.
Thanks for having me, Donnell. The questions were fun to answer. And I’m glad you enjoyed the book. Music to a writer’s ear.
Totally can relate to the list making and the difficulty saying no to new projects. Great interview!
Great to see you today, Marie! Thanks for stopping by.
I’m so looking forward to reading Bruce’s new novel. Bruce, I laughed out loud at the tee your wife got you. I have a writer friend who always tells me that when it comes to whatever book I’m writing, I’m overthinking it. The entire interview was fascinating. Thank you!
I’m thinking, perhaps overthinking, that’s what makes a great writer 🙂 Thanks for stopping by. I loved the book and of course I love interviewing.
Thanks, Barbara.
Sounds like a great book. I love stories which cost the protagonist and change them. I looks forward to reading it!
Ann, in No Time for Murder, Bruce W. Most shows us how it’s done.
Sounds like you’ve got your writing process down, Bruce. Good luck with your writing.
Thanks, for stopping by, Mike. You have an amazing writing process yourself, sir.