Craft Talk with Mark de Castrique: Elements of a Good Story
Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:04:31 — 59.1MB)
In this episode 259, host Landis Wade has a craft talk with Mark de Castrique, author of 21 novels, most of them mysteries, where Mark discusses the elements of a good story and how to write a good mystery. Mark also reads from and discusses his book, “Murder in Rat Alley,” a mystery set in the Asheville, North Carolina area.
About the Author:
Mark was born in Hendersonville, NC, near Asheville. He went straight from the hospital to the funeral home where his father was the funeral director and the family lived upstairs. The unusual setting sparked his popular Barry Clayton series and launched his mystery writing career.
Mark has authored twenty-one books including two series. 2022 will see the launch of a new series featuring Ethel Fiona Crestwater, a seventy-five-year-old retired FBI agent who now rents rooms to active agents and is the smartest and most fearless of any in her household. Picture Ruth Bader Ginsburg as an FBI agent and you’ve got the idea.
His novels have received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and Booklist. The CHICAGO TRIBUNE wrote, “As important and as impressive as the author’s narrative skills are the subtle ways he captures the geography – both physical and human – of a unique part of the American South.”
Mark is a veteran of the broadcast and film production business. In Washington D.C., he directed numerous news and public affairs programs and received an EMMY Award for his documentary film work. Through his company, MARK et al., he writes and produces videos for corporate and broadcast clients.
His years in Washington inspired his DC thrillers, THE 13TH TARGET, involving a terrorist plot against The Federal Reserve, and THE SINGULARITY RACE, a winner-take-all quest for Artificial Intelligence.
Mark and his wife Linda have two daughters: the older, Melissa Thomson, is the author of the Keena Ford Journals, a children’s series published by Penguin Press. His younger daughter, Lindsay, works as a communications consultant in Washington D.C.
Mark lives in Charlotte, but he and his wife Linda can be often found in the NC mountains or the nation’s capital.
Connect with the Author:
Recent Books in the Sam Blackman Series
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