CALEB NICKERSON

SHAWVILLE July 1, 2020

A local author has been hard at work over the past year and will be releasing his fifth novel later this month.

Luke Murphy’s latest, entitled Red Zone is . . .

a little different from his previous works, in that his two fictional protagonists will be teaming up for the first time.

“It’s my first book featuring both Calvin Watters and Charlene Taylor working together, which I’m pretty excited about, [it’s something] my readers seem to be looking forward to,” he said.

Murphy explained that that the plot centres around the murder of a cheerleader at the University of Southern California, which is Calvin’s alma mater.

“The equipment manager of the football team calls Calvin because he knows he’s a private investigator now and calls him to try to find out what happened and of course, USC being in LA, it’s Detective Taylor’s case so she’s assigned to the homicide investigation,” he said. “Eventually they meet up, Calvin and Charlene, and they form kind of a team to try and investigate and find out what really happened to the woman.”

He said that merging the canon of his two series hadn’t been something he had envisioned from the get go, it was something he had been mulling over since his previous novel Rock-a-bye Baby. Since the Calvin Watters storylines were centred in Las Vegas, and Charlene is a homicide detective with the LAPD, Murphy needed a believable reason for the two to cross paths.

“I always thought it would be cool, I just never knew how I could make it happen,” Murphy said. “When this idea came in, it did make sense because it’s Calvin’s former school, so it gives him a reason to go to LA, with Charlene already being there on the investigation. It’s a good way for them to meet. I couldn’t really think of a way to get Charlene to Vegas unless she was on vacation or gambling or something.”

He said that with some experience under his belt, the writing process has been getting smoother with each book published.

“I’m getting a routine down, and I kind of know my characters now, so I don’t have to create as much back story,” he said. “This book I think probably took … I think, three to four months for a first draft.”

As a teacher at Pontiac High School, Murphy said he’s getting into a rhythm of writing during the summer months when he has more free time, and editing during the winter when he’s back at his day job.

“My perfect scenario would be to get a draft done in 3-4 months and then spend the winter editing,” he said. “Working with my editors, working on cover designs and things like that, now that I’m self-publishing books on my own, instead of going the traditional route through a publisher.”

This is the second book that Murphy has self-published, and he said that while it is more time-consuming to do everything himself, the experience has been rewarding.

“I love being a part of everything, I helped with the cover design, I came up with the back cover text, I came up with everything that goes inside,” he said. “I reached out to authors on my own to get quotes and stuff, I had a blast being involved in 100 per cent of what went on … In the long run, will I continue to self-publish? I don’t know, we’ll see how it goes, but I had some success with Rock-a-bye Baby, so I decided to do it again with Red Zone.”

Growing up with the Hardy Boys series, Murphy said that he enjoys writing mysteries and crime thrillers because they’re the genre he likes to read the most.

“You might as well write something that you enjoy reading and it helps me because I kind of write like I’m a reader,” he said. “What would I as a reader want to hear or want to think? So I have that benefit of being able to be a bit of a reader as I write my book.”

He added that he had considered branching out into other genres, but said that is a task that would require some research.

“I attempted a middle grade book one time and I just found that I was writing to an adult audience all of a sudden … I think I’d have to read a few books in the genre, I’d want to before I got a chance to do it,” he said. “I always joke to people saying I wanted to write another 50 Shades of Grey, but my wife wouldn’t let me research.”

Pre-orders will be available on Amazon starting July 1, and the e-book version will be available July 15. Audio books are also available for all of Murphy’s work. For the old-fashioned folks who want to get their hands on a paperback copy, Murphy said there would be some uncertainty as to when they would actually arrive.

“With the paperback, it’s getting tricky because everything is taking so long to ship. For local people, I supply the local stores … so once I order copies to get them in, it could take a month to get them because Amazon is so backed up right now,” he said. “There’s so many people ordering things, I tried to order a proof copy of my paperback and they wouldn’t even ship it to Canada, they weren’t shipping proof copies.”