An Interview With John Gaspard

by Grace Topping

One of the best things about a mystery is the magic the author creates in the story—the carefully woven plot, the hidden clues that help the main character (and perhaps the reader) solve the mystery, and the ta-da moment at the end when the main character reveals the identity of the murderer. It’s magical, like a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat. John Gaspard takes his Eli Marks Mystery Series to the next level by including another level of magic. Eli Marks is actually a working magician, who conjures magic tricks and solves murders. John reveals some of the secrets behind the magic of his long-running series.

The Ambitious Card

First in the Eli Marks Mystery Series

Back Cover Copy

The life of a magician isn’t all kiddie shows and card tricks. Sometimes it’s murder. Especially when magician Eli Marks very publicly debunks a famed psychic, and said psychic ends up dead. The evidence, including a bloody King of Diamonds playing card (one from Eli’s own Ambitious Card routine), directs the police right to Eli.

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Welcome, John, to Writers Who Kill.

Your Eli Marks Mystery Series features a working magician as the main character. What inspired this series?

John Gaspard

I wanted to write a continuing cozy series and was looking for a fun and interesting main character to base the series around. As I thought about it, I realized that I had a lot of friends who were professional, working magicians. 

I’m not sure why that’s the case, as most people probably don’t even know one professional magician. But I knew several and they are all intelligent and interesting and a little odd. So that seemed like a good starting point.

Are you a magician yourself?

I am not a magician, so I had to do a lot of research in order to write about the profession with any degree of realism.

How did you conduct that research?

The research took a lot of different forms. I read many, many books and magazines on the topic, as well as watching videos in which magicians talked about their work and explained their processes. When possible, I tried to see magicians performing live (which is hard to do in Minneapolis, as there are not a lot of places to see a performing magician besides a couple of restaurants.)

I also took lessons from a local magician. I knew from the beginning that the first book would be about a particular card trick (The Ambitious Card) and so I took lessons from a magician named Suzanne, who taught me that trick. 

While Suzanne lives here in the Minneapolis area, she is a nationally known and respected magician. You can watch Suzanne fooling Penn & Teller here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oe3oMC9U2eY

So, Suzanne taught me variations on doing The Ambitious Card trick. But just as much time during the lessons was spent talking about the process of being a professional magician: What is your day like, what keeps you up at night, how do you put your act together, and so on.

I continue to do research even today, listening to podcasts about magic and magicians and even attending magic conventions. My goal is to always make sure that the magic is presented properly, so any magician who reads one of the books won’t be annoyed if I don’t get the details right.

The greatest moment in the process so far has been an email I got from Teller (of Penn & Teller), telling me that he had read one of the books and that he enjoyed it. He wrote: “I especially liked the accurate behind-the-scenes aspect of it. Usually, magic detective stories don't really have a clue about the mentality and preoccupations of magicians. Yours is true to life.”

So that was pretty great!

Do you reveal any of the secrets or techniques behind the magic tricks?

I don’t. In fact, I go out of my way to make sure nothing is revealed. However, I do make sure that all the correct steps are followed in presenting a trick, but I don’t give away how it’s done. That would spoil the fun.

Eli Marks also appears in two short stories. Which came first, the novels or the short stories?

The novels came first. I find short stories much harder to write than novels. There’s no wiggle room in a short story. However, from a marketing standpoint, short stories are a great way to get readers interested in your series.

In The Linking Rings, you take Eli from his usual setting in Minneapolis on a trip to London. Was it a challenge setting the story in a place without your regular supporting characters?

Not really. It was fun coming up with a whole bunch of new magicians for Eli and his Uncle Harry to interact with. My wife and I have spent a lot of time in London (and at The Magic Circle, where a lot of the story takes place), so it was pretty easy to drop Eli into that setting and see what happens.

Your Eli Marks mysteries have a lot of humor. In your novel, The Ripperologists, in which a killer starts recreating the crimes of Jack the Ripper, you’ve gone darker. What prompted the change?

Actually, The Ripperologists was my first novel. The idea appeared, nearly fully formed, in my head, which never, ever happens. Originally it was going to be a screenplay (which I had a lot more experience writing), but as I started to dig into it, I realized that it would work better as a novel.

The Ripperologists does have a much more serious tone, as I think the subject matter demanded it. But it also has its own touches of wacky humor.

Here’s an interesting side note: a major character in The Ripperologists (retired British police detective Henry McHugh) is also a major character in one of the Eli Marks mysteries, The Linking Rings. 

And for eagle-eyed readers, there is also another connection between The Ripperologists and the Eli Marks mystery series, although I don’t think anyone has spotted it yet. That’s an Easter egg just waiting to be found.

A lot of your readers may not know that in addition to being a writer, you’ve also directed some low-budget feature films and written books on filmmaking. How did you get into filmmaking?

I started making movies as a teenager (on Super 8mm film) and graduated to 16mm and then to the new digital media for the last couple of features. 

It’s a fun way to tell stories and, unlike novel writing, you get to hang out and work with a lot of creative people while making a feature film. Novel writing is a pretty solitary endeavor.

Even the two filmmaking books I wrote weren’t as lonely as novel writing, as they both involved conducting a lot of interviews with filmmakers, like Steven Soderbergh, Jon Favreau, and Roger Corman.

Did you also write the scripts for your films? If so, as a novel writer, how different was it writing scripts?

I wrote or co-wrote just about every movie I made. 

The process of creating the story for a screenplay or a novel is very similar. The part that’s radically different is that novels require a lot more detail about the characters and the situations.

Are the films available online for viewing?

Yes. If any of your readers have Amazon Prime, they can see one of my more recent features there. It’s called Ghost Light (but be careful – there are two movies on Amazon Prime with the name Ghost Light. Look for the one directed by John Gaspard).

In The Greyhound of the Baskervilles, you retell Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic mystery. How did that book come about?

That book was pretty much just a lark, and I’m surprised at how successful it has become. 

My wife and I have owned several greyhounds as pets over the years; these are retired racers, rescued from the track. They’re just great dogs, quirky, and a lot of fun to have around.

One morning I woke up and the title just popped into my head: The Greyhound of the Baskervilles. It just struck me as funny.

I then went on-line and found that the original book was in the public domain. I re-read it and realized right away that the POV of the book could easily be changed from Dr. Watson to a pet greyhound.

So, I went ahead and re-wrote it from this new perspective. The book is, essentially, the same book as before, except that it’s now narrated by a dog (Holmes’s pet greyhound, Septimus). 

I made the book a little shorter and trimmed some of the dialogue. I also gave Septimus the role of the hero in the climactic battle with the hound of the Baskervilles. 

The audiobook version is coming out soon and the producer/narrator on that project (Steve Hendrickson) did a really outstanding job on it.

All the books in the Eli Marks mystery series have recently been reissued with great new covers. Have you taken control of your publishing career?

I have. I own all the rights to that series and have also started a second series: The Como Lake Players mystery series, written under the pseudonym, Bobbie Raymond.

The first book in that series, Acting Can Be Murder, came out last year (and the audiobook version was just released this month). The second book in the series, Dying to Audition, will be out this summer.

As a big fan of audiobooks, I was pleased to see that your Eli Marks series is available in audio. Jim Cunningham does a terrific job on the narration. Were you involved in the production of the audio versions? Did you select Jim to do the narration?

I owe the creation of The Ripperologists and the Eli Marks mystery series to Jim Cunningham. He inspired me on both those projects. We’ve been friends for about 30 years, and he was the one who sparked my interest in Jack the Ripper and also sparked my interest in magic and magicians.

Jim is a professional narrator and it was his idea that we should produce the audiobooks of the Eli Marks mystery series. It’s a partnership: he does the reading, and I do all the editing and production for the books. And we have a great time doing it. He also recently finished narrating my two filmmaking books as well.

Will we be seeing more of your Eli Marks mysteries?

I’m plotting book #7 in the series and hope to have time to work on it later this summer, once the second Como Lake Players mystery, Dying to Audition, is finished. 

Thank you, John.

For more information about John and his books we didn't cover here, visit www.johngaspard.com

If you are interested in reading one of the Eli Marks short stories, here’s a free link to “The Invisible Assistant.”

https://bookhip.com/RLJQGX

And here’s a free link to the other short story, “The Last Customer.”

https://bookhip.com/TXSQS

Here are free links to audiobook versions of each of the short stories.

“The Invisible Assistant”

https://bookhip.com/GGHJVS

“The Last Customer”

https://bookhip.com/NCPKGD