Colin Conway, the Brain Behind The 509

 Colin Conway is a force of nature, though you wouldn’t know it to look at him. Author, editor, publisher, not to mention a list of side hustles I can’t kee straight. Writes not only police procedurals and dark crime stories, but his own unique brand of cozies. Top that off with his easy-going personality and you’ve got someone you’d do well to seek out at a conference. I’m lucky to be able to call him friend.

 

Colin’s newest effort is an anthology titled Back Road Bobby and His Friends, the tired of a series of anthologies set in Colin’s 509 uniuverse. I could explain to you what the 509 is, but we’d all rather hear it from Colin, so…

 

One Bite at a Time: Before we get into talking about the book itself, it’s billed as “509 Crime

Anthology.” What’s the deal with the 509?

 

Colin Conway: Hi, Dana! Thank you for having me on OBAAT.

The 509 area code covers two-thirds of Washington State, essentially everything east of the Cascade Mountains. Of the twenty-one counties served, Spokane County is the largest with a population just over 500,000.

On the west side of the mountain range, there are five area codes for cities like Seattle, Tacoma, and Olympia. That region gets hyped due to its professional sports, Starbucks, and Microsoft but we’ve got four seasons and a better quality of life.

My flagship series is the 509 Crime Stories. Most novels occur in the Spokane Police Department, but I’ve also featured the Spokane County and Whitman County Sheriff’s Offices.

 

OBAAT: Back Road Bobby and His Friends is the third 509 anthology, following The Eviction of Hope, (in which I was delighted to participate), and A Bag of Dick’s. Catch us up on the premises and themes of them all. Are they related other than by the 509 universe?

 

CC: Each anthology had a central premise to which the authors were required to adhere.

In The Eviction of Hope, the residents of a low-income apartment were being evicted to make way for a condominium redevelopment. The contributing authors wrote stories from different residents’ perspectives—each of whom waited until the last day(s) to leave the building. The collection turned out fantastic.

In A Bag of Dick’s, a detective from my flagship series gave a drug addict an opportunity to wipe his slate clean. Unfortunately, the addict couldn’t keep a secret and told everyone he knew about the break. The anthology was based upon the childhood game of telephone—where one person tells another something, and the phrase gets passed around a room until the original intent is lost. A Bag of Dick’s resulted in a wild bunch of stories.  

Back Road Bobby and His Friends centered around a legendary driver on his deathbed. The stories included feature tales of some who want to pay their respects to the man while others seek a taste of revenge before he dies.

Initially, the only connection I planned with the anthologies was setting them in my 509 universe. However, some authors used a few of my reoccurring characters in The Eviction of Hope, so it tightened the link. In both the second and third anthologies, I used (with permission) a couple of characters created by Joe Clifford and Tom Pitts, the Peanut Butter & Jelly of Crime Fiction. That added another layer of depth to the series.

With A Bag of Dick’s, I added a prologue to set the anthology in motion. It worked so well that I did it again with Back Road Bobby. However, an epilogue was needed to provide a proper conclusion in that third collection.

Each anthology reads like a book rather than a collection of short stories.

 

OBAAT: Who are the writers in Back Road Bobby?

 

CC: In alphabetical order – Trey R. Barker, Eric Beetner, Nikki Dolson, Spencer Fleury, Greg Levin, Rob Pierce, Kevin R. Tipple, Gabriel Valjan, Susan Wingate, TG Wolff, Frank Zafiro, and Dave Zeltserman.

I mention this in the Back Road Bobby introduction, but I look at anthologies like a short story buffet. We don’t have to connect with everything we read, but hopefully, there’s something we do like. That’s when we go back for seconds by reading more works from that selected author.

 

OBAAT: You supplied several pages of guidelines for The Eviction of Hope: characters we could use (as well as sketches to tell us what kinds of people they were), dates and settings, things we couldn’t do, such as kill off a character someone else might be using. How much information did the Back Road Bobby writers receive?

 

CC: I provided a three-page treatment for the Back Road Bobby anthology. Not only did I have the collection to think about, but I needed to consider the 509 Crime Stories. I couldn’t have a major character killed off or a vital location permanently destroyed.

The contributing authors were given ‘bumper rails’ about what they could and couldn’t do. I even specified what day the anthology took place—last Friday in May, which was sunny and mildly warm.

This might sound restrictive to someone who hasn’t participated, but once those rails are in place, you’d be amazed at what an author can create.

My favorite guideline for the latest anthology was that every author had to create a character with a nickname that had to appear in the story title. This was the ‘and His Friends’ portion of the anthology.

For example, Frank Zafiro shared “The Escape of Jimmy the Saint,” and Dave Zeltersman offered “Robbing Banks with Gator Wilson.”

 

 

OBAAT: That nickname bit is outstanding. I remember being a little surprised when I got the guidelines for The Eviction of Hope, but they actually turned out to be helpful by restricting me a lktitle. Then hardest things for me to overcome is staring at a blank page or screen. You spred me that. Given the restrctions you gave the authors, what kinds of stories can readers expect to find in Back Road Bobby?

 

CC: This anthology centered around Hardy Fry, a legendary driver who is not expected to make it through the weekend. Every story featured a driver from Hardy’s lineage—either directly or trained by someone Hardy taught. As you can imagine, there are some car chases—Spencer Fleury took it to a delightful extreme with “Larry the Bag Man.”

Nikki Dolson and Gabriel Valjan shared a couple of beautifully told stories among some hard-hitting tales from authors like Eric Beetner and Greg Levin.

This collection has so much variety that readers will easily find something in the buffet to enjoy!

 

OBAAT: Tell us a little about Original Ink Press.

 

CC: Original Ink Press is the imprint I created. I’m an independently published author by choice. I love that decision for a variety of reasons which I don’t need to go into here. Creating OIP added a layer of professionalism to my craft.

 

 

OBAAT: You, in conjunction with your frequent co-author Frank Zafiro, put out more books than I can keep up with while editing anthologies, posting a blog, and doing all your own marketing. How do you keep up such a pace?

 

CC: Coffee. Lots and lots of coffee.

I also get up every morning at 4:30 to start writing. I average 1,500 words a day, and I can do better than that on the weekends. I don’t give myself any breaks for holidays or birthdays either. Even when I travel, I wake up early to write.

Thank you for mentioning my blog, by the way. I didn’t do much with it for years, and it withered. Recently, I realized there was an opportunity to share additional long-form ideas that would never make it into a book. These thoughts weren’t a good fit for the temporary world of social media. This year I set a goal of writing one blog post a week. It has turned out to be a wonderful experience and a way for me to take a quick break from the books. I only write the blog posts at night so that it won’t impact my routine.

 

 

OBAAT: What’s next?

 

CC: In June, the fourth John Cutler book will come out. Cutler’s Cases is a collection of short stories. The final tale sets up the fifth book which is written and in the publication chute.

The Only Death That Matters is the seventh book in the 509 Crime Stories, and it will drop in late August. The eighth book in that series is also finished and going through edits now.

And in the Cozy Up series, I’m working on the sixth book with plans for the seventh and eighth to follow quickly.

Recently, Frank Zafiro and I started discussions for the sixth book in the Charlie-316 series. We’ll outline it soon, but the writing won’t begin until early 2023.

Thanks for the chance to chat, Dana! I genuinely appreciate it.

Favorite Reads of 2020, Part One

I can’t read nearly as fast or as much as I used to, so I’m pickier about what I do read. Books get far fewer pages than before to prove their worth. Lucky me that I’ve already read five I was sorry to see end.

The Fifth Risk, Michael Lewis. I planned not to read any books about the trump administration, but this was Michael Lewis. The germ of the narrative is how the trump team handled the transition from the Obama Administration, or, more to the point, didn’t handle it. What begins as an examination of how power changes hands spins through a description of the expertise that resides in government and then into a parable about being careful what you ask for. It’s brilliant, Lewis’s finest work, and that’s saying a lot.

Cold in July, Joe Lansdale. I’m late to the party on Lansdale but that’s among the reasons I’m trimming some of my other reading, so I can catch up. A damn near perfect book with well-drawn characters and one that belongs on the pantheon of greatness, namely Jim Bob Luke. What begins as a simple home burglary turns deadly and a solid revenge story starts to spin out until a plot twist that made me lower the book and take a deep breath. There are a couple of things that might defy the suspension of disbelief in lesser hands, but Lansdale pulls off the ultimate success: an ending that seems surprising yet inevitable. The movie’s good, but it only scratches the surface and makes a few odd choices. By all means read the book.

Apprehension, Mark Bergin. Just because I’m fussier about what I read doesn’t mean I’m only reading big names. Bergin’s debut is a combination police procedural/courtroom drama that succeeds on all counts in a manner that would make Joe Wambaugh proud, a fascinating story that is far more about how the cases work on the cops than how the cops work on the cases.

The Ghosts of Galway, Ken Bruen. Been a while since I read a book by Bruen. Can’t let that happen again. His style is as unique as Ellroy’s in its own distinctly Irish way. This time Jack Taylor gets involved in a classic MacGuffin tale that’s ostensibly about a rare book that ends up not being any more about the book than The Maltese Falcon is about the Audubon Society. Everyone uses Taylor for a pawn, not the least of which is a young woman who give Alice from the Luther TV show a run for her money in the crazy bitch department. What no one figures is the man they dismiss as an aging, broken-down drunk has limits to what he’ll put up with and skills to do something about it.

Cozy up to Death, Colin Conway. You might have assumed I don't read many cozies. The figure "none" comes to mind. This is a cozy with a difference. Sure, it's in a quaint New England seaside village. Sure, the protagonist owns a mystery bookstore and the bookstore has a cat. The lone police patrol officer rides a bike. Ah, but the store owner is a biker who ratted on the MC and is in Witness Protection, where he rubs up against some people he should really have stayed clear of. Delightful way of turning the genre on its head while still observing all the conventions.

Colin Conway, Author of Cozy Up To Death

I met Colin Conway at Bouchercon in Dallas and liked him right away. (Of course he was standing right next to Frank Zafiro, so the bar was pretty low, but still.) I was aware of Colin’s work from having read, and loved, Charlie 3-16, which he wrote in collaboration with Frank. We got to discussing Colin’s current solo project, Cozy up to Death, the first book in a series that would fit the description of a cozy—bookstore in a small seaside town, bookstore cat, bookstore owner solves crimes—except that the main character is a biker in the Witness Protection Program. That hooked me right there and I asked him to talk about it on the blog.

Besides writing the Cozy Up series, Colin is the author of the 509 Crime Stories, a series of novels set in Eastern Washington with revolving lead characters. They are standalone tales and can be read in any order.

He is also the co-author of The Charlie-316 series. The first book in the series, Charlie-3-16, is a political/crime thriller and has been described as “riveting and compulsively readable,” “the real deal,” and “the ultimate ride-along.”

Colin served in the U.S. Army and later was an officer of the Spokane Police Department. He's a commercial real estate broker/investor, owned a laundromat, invested in a bar, and ran a karate school. (If all of these gigs in conjunction don’t sound like fronts, I don’t know what does.)

He lives with his beautiful life partner, their three wonderful children, and a crazy, codependent Vizsla that rules their world.

Find out more about Colin at his official website—colinconway.com.

One Bite at a Time: Hi, Colin. Good to see you back on OBAAT. You were here last with Frank Zafiro to talk about Charlie-316 but Cozy Up to Death is a solo venture for you. Start us off by giving just a tease of the story.

Colin Conway: I’ve looked for catchy ways to describe the book and I have a couple. The first is the back copy of the book. “A man in hiding. A gang of outlaws searching for retribution. This is no time for cupcakes.”

This second is a blurb from Libby Klein, the author of the Poppy McAllister mysteries, who said, “This is not your grandma’s cozy.”

OBAAT: Cozy up to Death has all the hallmarks of a cozy: The protagonist runs a bookstore, the bookstore has a cat, it’s in a small waterfront town in Maine, there’s a chaste love interest, and a quirky group of characters. The things that happen day to day are appropriate. Yet the “store owner” is an ex-biker on the lam and the prospect of violence is there almost all the time. It’s a trick path to walk and you did it quite well. What gave you the idea to mess with the cozy structure?

CC: The idea came to me while attending Left Coast Crime (LCC), a writer’s conference. My girlfriend had batted around her own cozy concept for several years and, because of that, I thought it would be helpful to attend one of the LCC sessions on that genre.

There are certain rules when writing cozies—limited (or no) violence, limited (or no) sexy stuff, and limited (or no) swearing.  The genre also has certain tropes.  Among them are small towns, charming protagonists who work in cute businesses, and often an adorable pet.

None of that sounded like anything I would ever write. However, being a writer who doesn’t like being told what to do, I thought, “What if I wrote a cozy?  How would that look?”

That’s when I came up with the idea of an anti-cozy cozy.  Basically, my protagonist would be a big, tattooed guy who is an informant for the FBI.  Because of his physical attributes, he would be hard to hide.  If I dropped him into any type of Murder, She Wrote scenario, he’d wreak havoc, even if it was unintentional.

OBAAT: Beau Smith—sorry, Brody Steele is in Witness Protection. You had to fudge a few things about how the program is run to fit the demands of a cozy structure, but never in a way that even I, a notorious prick when it comes to verisimilitude, objected. On one hand, that a sign of an author who knows the material so well he understands what can be messed with before the shark gets jumped. That said, did it ever give you pause while you writing to think, “They’d never do this…ah what the hell.”

CC: Even in a cozy, verisimilitude should be important. Several things I chose to do came from some sliver of truth. In fact, a Popular Mechanics article, How the Witness Protection Program Decides Where to Send People, helped spark the whole plan for the series.

In the article, a retired FBI agent explains that his agency had businesses they used for agent cover stories.  It’s a procedure called “backstopping.”  This agent opined that the U.S. Marshals probably had similar business for those in witness protection.

I thought what if they actually put witnesses to work inside those businesses instead of just using them for backstories?

There was one convention I created in my story—a website tracking mob informants—that I have often thought, “Why doesn’t something like it exist?”  It seemed like a natural thing to create especially with so many people in hiding.  After I put it on the page, I’ve had numerous people say, “Does something like that really exist?” When I tell them I don’t think so, they usually respond, “Why the heck not?”

OBAAT: You were a cop and even though Cozy Up to Death is not a procedural, are there any things in the book based on your actual experience?

CC: Nothing based on law enforcement experience made it into the book. Beau is an amateur sleuth who previously solved all his problems in the motorcycle club by force.  Now, he’s trying to use his head which creates its own set of issues.

Beyond being a mystery, Cozy Up to Death is a fish-out-of-water story. Think Crocodile Dundee, if you will.  We’ve all been that fish at some point in our life.  For this story (and its sequels), I’ve ramped up that feeling of being out of step with everyone around.

OBAAT: The style and genre of Cozy Up to Death is far removed from Charlie-316; your range impresses me. Is there anything different in how you approach the different books either in your writing method or frame of mind?

CC: Thank you for the compliment.  I really appreciate it.

The most important thing about writing the two different series was my audience.  I wrote Cozy Up to Death for my mother-in-law.  She is a deeply religious person who has read my other works.  Violence and swearing in books like Charlie-316 bothers her, but she still wants to be supportive.

So when I first started CUTD, I kept thinking, “Can she show this part to her friends at church?”  Once I got into that groove, the book flowed easily along.

With that being said, the story is for anyone who digs traditional crime fiction or mysteries. Especially since I push the bounds of the genre in the arena of violence.

I’m willing to bet that no cozy has ever featured a full-on donnybrook inside a bookstore with a protagonist using a hardback as his weapon of choice.

OBAAT: This is an awkward question but we all know publishers are in the business of putting out books that they can shoehorn into a known market. Cozy up to Death plays with the cozy genre to the point where I can imagine a cautious editor deciding it’s neither fish nor fowl and take a pass. Did you run into any of that on the road to publication?

CC: Not awkward at all.  I decided early on I was going to publish this through my own company.  Publishing is a different game now.  As Mark Dawson’s Self-Publishing Show says as part of their intro, “There’s never been a better time to be a writer.”  Some of my work goes through a publisher while some of it is being independently handled.

I choose to go the indie route with the Cozy Up series due to how quickly I wanted the books to follow each other.  I waited to launch the first book until I had three of them written and ready to go. That way they could all come out shortly after the previous one. 

Any reader will tell you the worst part of a new series is the wait for the next book.  I will launch the first three books of the series in roughly ninety days.  That is unheard of in traditional publishing.

OBAAT: Tell us a little about your 509 stories.

CC: The 509 Crime Stories are set in eastern Washington state and feature stories with alternating viewpoints.  The novels are centered around the Spokane Police department, but the lead characters change with each story. Due to the alternating points-of-view, I’m able to not only tell different stories, but deal with different issues.

For example, in the first book, The Side Hustle, a detective (Quinn Delaney) is struggling through overwhelming personal debt.  He’s got collectors after him and he’s received a notice of foreclosure on his home.  It’s something I’ve never read in a crime fiction book, and I thought it would be interesting to read how that impacts a Major Crimes detective during an investigation.

In the second novel, The Long Cold Winter, our hero (Dallas Nash) is depressed following the recent death of his wife.  As such, he’s begun hearing music every morning and is struggling to understand if his wife is sending him messages from beyond the grave. This leads him to wonder if he might be crazy.

Both characters are in the other’s story albeit as minor players.  That’s how the series continues as we see the characters grow and change not only through their own eyes, but also through the actions and opinions of those around them.

Everybody is the hero of their own story—even a dirty cop (whose tale is coming soon).

OBAAT: Classic last question: What are you working on now?

CC:  It’s going to be a busy 2020.  As I mentioned above, the second and third novels in the Cozy Up series will be released in early spring (Cozy Up to Murder and Cozy Up to Blood).  Beau will be on the move in both those books.  Unfortunately for the big man (but great for the reader), he’s going to have a tough time fitting in anywhere.

I’ve got the next several Cozy Up stories mapped out, so I’ll get to writing them in late spring.

Beyond the cozy genre, the final three books for the Charlie-316 series will be released this year from Down & Out Books.  This starts in late June with Never the Crime.  Frank Zafiro and I had written the final three books and petitioned D&O to release them all this year (the previous plan was one a year).  They graciously agreed so book three will be out in September and book four will drop in November.

There are a couple 509 works that are done and sitting in the editing queue.  Once those get cleaned up and approved, I’ll figure out what to do with them.

Frank Zafiro and Colin Conway, Authors of Charlie-316

I always thought of myself as an ensemble player when I was a musician, so a collaborative effort is nothing new to me. That said, I’ve always been a little in awe of writers who can collaborate well, as I can’t imagine doing it. The thing is, collaborating in a musical is a simultaneous thing; collaborative writing is much more of a taking turns thing. The rough edges don’t disappear after a fleeting second as in music. They live forever.

That’s why I was so knocked out by Charlie-316. Frank Zafiro and Colin Conway have created a seamless, fast-paced, and engaging police procedural/thriller that kept me engrossed throughout. I wondered how they did it—all of it—and it was a pleasure to get them both to sit and pull back the curtain a little.

One Bite at a Time: Charlie-316 is an officer-involved shooting story with a couple of twists, so I don’t want to say too much about it. Why don’t you fill us in?

Colin Conway:  Charlie-316 is the lead character’s patrol designation.  It was also my call sign for a year while assigned to a power shift team on the Spokane Police Department. 

As a writer, I always liked the sound of that call sign – Charlie-three-sixteen.  Not only does the name ‘Charlie’ have a nice sound to it, but the numbers “316” are very familiar to most of us because of the biblical verse John 3:16 which states that “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have ever lasting life.”

It was the marriage of those two ideas, the police officer and sacrificing a loved one for the sins of others, that became the germ of this story.

Frank Zafiro: Colin had this great idea to start with, and we really built on it (and continue to build on it in the remaining three books in this arc). We knew we wanted to show how all kinds of different people reacted to a controversial shooting – the officer himself, his peers, the investigators, the brass, the media, different interest groups, and city hall, just to name a few.

Throughout the whole book, we kept to the ideas that a) everything is not always as it seems, b) perspective matters, and c) people are complex, gray creatures, not a good or evil archetype. Most of them, anyway.

OBAAT: Officer-involved shootings are now a hot topic. (The next book I have planned for the Penns River series revolves around one.) You took this one down a wholly unexpected path. Or two. Three, even. Did you get together and plot everything out like The Wire or Ray Donovan, laying out all the story beats in advance so whoever writes each episode knows what needs to happen? Or was it more organic?

Frank: Colin had a pretty good skeleton of a plot when he brought the idea to me, and we expanded on that considerably. As I remember it, we developed a fairly detailed bullet point outline, so we both knew what was coming. That said, we discovered a few surprises we didn’t expect.

We also flipped the script to explore the scenario in a different way. Spokane is over ninety percent white, so the racial dynamics are different than in some of the cities that have seen controversial shootings. By reversing the races of the officer and the civilian/suspect/victim (depending on how you see it), it opened a different way of discussing the event.

OBAAT: I had to keep reminding myself this was a collaboration. No seams at all. What was your writing process? Did you edit each other’s work? Take turns chapter by chapter?

Colin:  Thank you for the compliment on seamlessness.  I think a lot of

that came from how we prepared for the story.  After drafting our outline and developing the character whose POVs the readers would see, we both selected a couple of characters that would be “ours.”  After that, we shared the writing duties on several characters and tried to evenly distribute the workload.

For example, I would write a character’s POV, then send it to Frank for his review/addition/subtraction, then he would write his chapter and send it to me.  I would then go back to my original chapter, review the changes he made and approve/add/delete, then edit his chapter, and write my new one.  Afterwards, my work would be sent to him.  The result would be a long snake of edits which would get cleaner as we moved deeper into the story.

When we finished the first draft, it was the cleanest I’d ever seen.  It was a wonderful experience.

Frank:  I love our process for several reasons. It keeps us both involved

in 100% of the work. There’s no mine/yours, just ours. By the time a passage has been written and revised and revised again, it’s no longer mine or Colin’s, but something separate. That’s probably why it seemed seamless to you – there was only one voice, in the end.

The other great thing about our process is that it spurs some great discussions and ideas that can really improve the work. We hash out suggestions, ideas, and resolve differences of opinion pretty fluidly this way.

From a technical standpoint, the extra revision as we go also means that by the end of the first draft, it’s very tight.

OBAAT: How did you two get together?

Colin:  We first met when I was on the department while we were working patrol.  Frank was a corporal and I was a rookie on his team.  Neither of us knew the other wrote at that time.  I was just trying to make sure I showed up on time, did my job professionally, and went home safely at the end of shift.

Fast forward a few years, I ended up in an administrative gig across the hall from Frank, who was a Sergeant at the time.  We began talking and somehow writing came up.

Most of my writing then was short stories.  I was essentially learning the craft and spent hours alone (as most writers do) creating weird and odd crime fiction tales.  They were fun to write then, but they are painful to read now.

Frank was much further along in his writing when we first met.  He had a vision and really understood what he was doing.  It was great to have someone like that around who I could bounce ideas off.  I always felt motivated after one of our writing conversations.

Frank: I have to credit Colin with really super-charging my desire to get back to my writing, and to write crime fiction in particular. I’d written a draft of Under a Raging Moon (River City #1) back in 1995, but it went into a drawer. These were the days when it literally went into a physical drawer because it was printed out on a dot matrix printer… Anyway, in 1996, I was working full time as a cop, and I went back to college full time. From 1996-98, I wrote a lot of police reports and a lot of papers for my history degree, but no fiction. Then, in 1999, I got promoted to corporal, so I was busy learning a new job. In 2001, I made detective – new job. Same in late 2002 – made sergeant, new job. By 2004, though, I’d settled into that role and got assigned to Volunteer Services, where I oversaw five different volunteer programs with about 140 total members ranging from fourteen years old to ninety. It was a challenge, but it was an office gig… so my hours were a little steadier, and I could stop and grab coffee or lunch with Colin, and we talked a ton of writing. It really spurred me on, and from 2004 onward, my output has been pretty good, with a few minor dips due to life events.

I think this illustrates how important it is to find people in your tribe, and to support each other. With technology today, those connections don’t even have to be in person. One of my earliest and best writer friends (and a hell of an editor) is Jill Maser in New Jersey, and we’ve never met face to face. This is someone I’ve exchanged Christmas gifts with, but never hugged. It’s weird, but that’s our world, right? I finally got to meet Eric Beetner in person at Bouchercon in 2018, and will meet Jim Wilsky (and hopefully Larry Kelter) at Bouchercon in Dallas in 2020. I’ve written books with these guys!

I’ve also written a book with Bonnie Paulson, and we’ve met, so that’s more normal. And then there’s Colin and I. We’re good friends and there’s something uniquely powerful about that friendship/collaboration connection that really drives the creative process. When we’re able to get together in person and brainstorm or outline or just talk about one or the other of our solo projects, it is such a positive thing for me.

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Frank Zafiro writes several different series by himself (River City, Stefan Kopriva, SpoCompton) and teams up with other authors like Colin Conway, Eric Beetner, Jim Wilsky, Larry Kelter, and Bonnie Paulson for additional mayhem. He is a retired cop and a tortured guitarist.

Colin Conway is the author of The Side Hustle, the first book in 'The 509 Crime Stories' series.  He is a former police officer and currently works in the commercial real estate industry.