by Anna Shura
May 21, 2021
David Putnam is the author behind the Bruno Johnson series and has written over 38 manuscripts. He is also “Deputy Dave”, or as he reveals in our interview, occasionally “Karl.” He is an ex-cop who worked in law enforcement since he was a teenager. Putnam worked on crimes, criminal intelligence, street level narcotics, major narcotics, airport interdiction, internal affairs, and the Detective Bureau supervision. When Putnam wasn’t tailing criminals, he was reading and writing. In our interview, he discusses writing his first four novels on legal pads in his cop car and provides a detailed breakdown of his writing schedule.
Putnam describes childhood influences and experiences from “night-farming” to witnessing crime amongst his relatives. He also reveals his long-time passion for writing beginning with a junior high cowboys and aliens book and continuing in crafting manuscripts in a wide variety genres from YA to Sci-Fi. When David Putnam isn’t writing about Bruno Johnson, he explores other genres by writing a “hobby book” each year.
When he “got bitten by the law enforcement bug”, David Putnam’s writing was forced into the hours before work or breaks on the job. His work provided him with the content he explores in his books, and David Putnam describes how his Bruno Johnson books enable the opportunity to revisit his work, “I get to save children the way I want to save them and where they should be saved.”
Despite a serious career in law enforcement and challenging book topics, David Putnam offered a joyful interview and kindly sent along an ARC of his book.
AS
Could you tell us about your latest novel?
DP
My latest novel is part of a series with a continuing character. Bruno Johnson is an ex-cop who rescues children from toxic homes in South Central Los Angeles. He couldn’t do it when he was a cop because there’s too many rules and regulations. Now he goes outside the law to rescue the children. Each book is a snapshot of my career, and I had a pretty diverse career. For instance, The Innocents is my time in narcotics. The Reckless is my time chasing bank robbers and following bank robbers around to rob a bank. The Disposables, Replacements, Squandered and Vanquished, came from the publisher saying about one book, “yeah, we love the book, but we kind of left Bruno physically and emotionally torn up. How are you going to come back from that?” I figured she was right, so I decided to write prequels. When I started The Disposables, I started to get a bunch of backstory to make them more three dimensional. I went back and took all that backstory and made four prequels out of it. So The Innocents is when Bruno is the first brand new detective. Then The Reckless and The Heartless, and The Heartless was my time working on an organized escape from our jail. Six murder suspects who were eligible for the death penalty escaped. Their girlfriends took cordless drills and drilled out the windows of visiting because it was an old structure. They had somebody distracting the guard, and six murder suspects will climb to the visiting window. So that’s what that book is about. The Ruthless is the newest one. This is the last one in the prequel series, and it ties everything together. But I wrote it as a standalone tool, so you can read it as a standalone too. I’ve had comments on Goodreads talking about how it does work as a standalone. It’s about a murder that I was aware of when I was working in the Detective Bureau. It was a killing of a judge that was never solved. It really intrigued me. So the heart of that book is one of the subplots is the murder of that judge and how Bruno is pulled into find and chase the murder of the judge.
The other plotline is Bruno’s son in law was a bad guy. He and his twin grandson disappeared. So Bruno’s trying to find out what really happened to his grandson in that book too.
AS
What’s your writing process like for your books? Do you kind of work from an outline? Or do you just have an idea and see where it takes you?
DP
I started writing about in 1989. I was on a surveillance of a meth lab out in the Mojave Desert. Surveillance is not like in the movies where one person watches, and it’s a singular type of surveillance. You have to have four or five cars. So you have one guy watching and then everybody else is laid off, like in the back of a grocery store or at a school. Well, I was I’m an avid reader. So I had novels in the backseat of my undercover car. So they were actually paying me to read novels, which was kind of great. So I got to be paid for cops and robbers aspect and read my novels on the side. I was done my last novel, and I was out in the Sun Valley. [The novel] was by this guy who I read his first book, and I loved it. It was a great book. I thought this is going to be a good book and I started reading it. What happens so often is an author will write for 10 years on one book and finally get it published. And then he or she has one year to come back on a second one. So sometimes, that second one does not live up to the first. The reason I’m giving you this background is because I wrote my first four novels by hand on the front seat of my undercover car while waiting for something to move. It was four legal pads. I thought I knew what I was doing.
But I found out that a good author makes it look easy, and it’s not easy. So I went to writing conferences, book conference…I was invited to Squaw Valley, and mentor of mine picked me up because he liked my writing. We hit it off, and he was a creative writing instructor from San Jose State. He taught me a lot about writing. I ended up an internal affairs in San Bernardino, and I didn’t like that job at all. So I’m sitting there, bemoaning my position, and I found a job in Hawaii for Hawaii-50. My wife was born and raised in Hawaii. So I put in for it. I got an interview, they hired me. I retired with 20 years here in Southern California, and I went to work for Hawaii 50 in downtown Honolulu. So I have some good Hawaii stories too. But anyway, reason I wrote The Disposables while I was in Hawaii.
I was on my 38th manuscript. I’ve written 38 books, before I sold the 36 to one, and I had five agents. Three were great. Two were not so great. But my agent actually didn’t sell the book. My wife was big into Toastmasters, and she was talking about my book naturally. She was skin diving in Bora Bora, and she happened to be diving with the owners of the publishing company. She said, “You got to read this guy’s books.” So they came home and emailed me. I’d heard this kind of thing before. So I sent number 36. Just randomly. And they loved it. And that was the start of the Bruno Johnson series.
But then to get back to your question, I was working full time in law enforcement, I would get up at four o’clock every morning, and write for three hours every day and write 1000 words a day. Then I’d go to work, and by the time I got home, I couldn’t write when I got too tired. Chasing murder suspects, sometimes I’d be in the car for 40 hours straight chasing these guys. But that’s how I accumulated so many manuscripts. I made my bones by trial and error. I tried Young Adult. I tried Fantasy. I tried Sci-Fi. I tried Police Procedurals. I just love writing. I love reading. It doesn’t matter. Because if it’s well written, I’ll read it. So I’m not stuck in any one genre. But because I know the police procedural area, that’s what I finally sold.
So I get up in the morning, I still do, and I go back 20 pages of my manuscript that I’m working on. I read forward to get tone of the writing. To me, it is in the voice. So if I sit down, and I’m a little bit melancholy or a little bit depressed, it might come out in a tone. So I start 20 pages back, and I read forward. I get that cadence and syntax down. Then I start writing the new stuff, so I have an even flow when I want to continue on. I write 1000 to 1500 words, and I stop. I could go on, but I don’t because my writing starts to deteriorate. And next day, I come back, so I’m going over everything four or five times before I move on. That’s how I write the Bruno Johnson series.
AS
That’s a very dedicated process. Do you edit as you go back? Or do you just try to get it all on the page?
DP
I’m dyslexic. So sometimes I’ll have the sentences or words reversed. So I change as I work. Every time I go back, I rework those 20 pages each time.
AS
Wow. You already kind of touched on this, how you channel your career background into writing, but if you can just describe for our readers, what was your previous career outside of writing?
DP
My dad was a deputy sheriff. I don’t know if that had a big influence on me, but I watched Adam 12 when I was growing up. I loved Joseph Campbell books. I read them too. When I was too young, I was reading way above my level. My mom was a big reader, and she would buy a book. One time it was an Autobiography of Eddie Rickenbacker. I loved the picture of Rickenbacker on the front of the cover, and I said “When I can I read that?” I kept bugging her. And so finally she goes here, and she tears the book where she is and hands me half.
I thought I was gonna be a writer, and I wrote a book in junior high school. It had cowboys and aliens, and it was a lot of fun. Then in high school, I tried to write two crime novels never finished them. Then I got bitten by the law enforcement bug, and I just loved the idea of getting paid to play cops and robbers. So I became a sheriff’s explorer at 15. I was a police cadet at 17. I became an officer at 20. They hired me early, and I worked for four years at Ontario police department, Later I transferred to LA County Sheriff’s Department and had a great time there. I went to South Central Los Angeles working patrol. When I had enough of that, I transferred to San Bernardino County Sheriff’s where I did 22 years there. I did two tours on SWAT there. I worked on crimes, criminal intelligence, street level narcotics, major narcotics, airport interdiction, internal affairs, Detective Bureau supervision, that kind of thing. So the whole time I was writing and putting my stories, my adventures, within books. I had a lot of fun adventures being a cop.
AS
That’s a wide variety of things you probably are exposed to. But that’s interesting to know that you’re writing from the start. What was the first story you remember writing?
DP
The one in junior high school. I wrote it on one of those PT, junior high school notebooks kind of thing. My handwriting was horrible. It was about these cowboys, and their horses die while walking across the desert. They come across this monolith. I don’t know where I got the idea this. I was reading Sci-fi at the time. And then something happened, and the aliens come down. It was Cowboys and Aliens before they made the movie with Harrison Ford.
AS
You were ahead of your time. Alright, well, again with your career, you’ve pointed out a couple of books where there’s direct examples of your career experiences. Is that something you really tried to incorporate? What are some of those instances in your books?
DP
After the third book, I started writing an extensive author’s note in the back explaining in each book what is real and what isn’t. The fans actually comment about the authors’ note and how much they enjoy it. So The Ruthless came out last February, this is number eight. Sinister comes out in February which is number nine, and they just picked up Scorned. That’ll come out a year from there, and I’m just finishing Witches. …I wrote about children, and children were the most emotional thing to me. So all my books have that embedded and things that I actually dealt with. The Squandered was a very emotionally powerful book for me because I was actually there, and I actually saw it happen. …As soon as they bought the book, I knew that they want a sequel. So I started writing Replacements.
When I was chasing murder suspects, I was working on a crimes team. This one guy, his name was James Lawless, believe it or not. He committed a murder, went into 25 years in prison. He did halftime and got out in 12. He comes out, commits another murder, gets convicted, goes in for 25 again, gets out at 12. So now he’s been 24 years institutionalized. He’s coming out again, and they figure he might be a threat to public safety. So they pulled my team. We followed him to make sure he didn’t kill somebody else. He was tattooed. Every part of him was tattooed…He’s the bad guy in Replacements. If I make Bruno too much of a hero, he turns into just a character. Right. So Bruno has some flaws. At the same time, Drago, who I from renamed James Lawless, I had to give him flaws. Otherwise, he turned into a character as well. So to give him flaws, I had to humanize him a little bit, give him some humanity. And the third book I sent into the publisher, I killed off Drago because I didn’t like him. I didn’t like the guy at all. And the publisher goes, “No, we like Drago! Don’t kill him off.” So I had to rewrite the third book all over again. And I’ve been carrying Drago now through a whole series of the books now. I’ve made him even better than he was. I redeemed him.
AS
Are you interested in what makes the Bad Guy tick and how to get into that mindset? Is that something that you tried to do? Or are you looking at it from more of a detective/cop perspective?
DP
I think I was good at chasing the murder suspects because I could relate to them. I could see what they were thinking. This goes back probably when I was too young. We came from a very poor background. Eventually my mom and my stepdad made some money, and we see went across the border and got a Hispanic housekeeper. I would go down as a small child, you know, probably eight or nine years old, and I’d sit in the front seat of the station wagon. We’d go down and pick her up, and we’d hide her in the car. Then we’d come across the border.
Well, my two aunts, my Aunt Virginia, and my Aunt Carol, were doing it as well. Mom had six kids, and she babysat 10 or 11 kids. So there were 17 kids in the house. My aunts took me, and I would get farmed out one month in the low desert with my Aunt Carol and one month in Redondo Beach with my Aunt Virginia.
Well, my mom would put me on a Greyhound bus when I was 10 years old. I’d have my grocery bag full of clothes. That was my suitcase. The first time she puts me on his Greyhound bus, I’m all alone. I’m scared to death. And I’m driving up the freeway, and a seagull hits the front of the windshield and splatters blood and stuff all over. The driver just keeps driving, turns the windshield wipers on and makes a big mess out of feathers and blood and stuff. So I’m kinda shocked. My aunt picks me up at the Greyhound place. She drives to us to get some candy, and she drops us off at the Aztec Theatre in India. We just go in I sit down, and I’m watching. It’s a black and white movie of In Cold Blood. I am 10 years old, and I’m watching. I’m just shocked. I could not believe it. My aunt was kind of deranged.
What ultimately happens is my cousin Danny and my aunt hire a hit man named Cornelius out of Orange County and murdered my favorite uncle. My uncle worked for the Metropolitan Water District. And so, they hired this guy because my uncle found out my aunt was selling tar heroin for the Mexican Mafia. Now, I was already a cop, a cadet in Ontario, when all this was going on. My aunt wanted the Double Indemnity on the insurance. So if he dies at work, it’s Double Indemnity. So they sent in a call saying there’s an emergency for the Metropolitan Water Company. [My uncle] drives out there, and my cousin walks up behind him and shoots him in the back of the head and kills him. My favorite uncle! My aunt goes to jail. My cousin, they can’t get him for first. So they wired up my cousin’s girlfriend, and they sent her in for conversation. Eventually they arrest my aunt and my cousin. He goes into prison, goes into jail awaiting trial, and my aunt with the attorney says, “You cop out to it. I’ll get out. I’ll hire the best attorneys, and I’ll get you out.” So my cousin says, “I did it all. My mom didn’t anything to do with it.” And she gets out and just walks away from him. Doesn’t ever come back. So now my cousin murdered my favorite uncle.
While my aunt was still in jail, waiting for my cousin to get her out, she had an argument with my mom because Ronald and Julie were staying at my mom’s house in Ontario where I was working. So my aunt had the Mexican Mafia come over, kick my mom’s door and kidnap the two kids at my mom’s house. You’re asking if I could get into the headspace, and they’re criminals: my relatives.
You know, we were very poor. We were on government aid. It was back when they didn’t give you food stamps or money; they gave you food. I remember distinctly. I was just probably six or seven years old. We’d go stand in line with all the other unfortunates, and they’d give us these boxes of rice, mystery meet, and big blocks of Velveeta cheese. All the stuff that’s cheap to produce and to keep you alive. But we would go a night farming. …We would go down to some cornfield and pick corn, watermelon or strawberries. So we were getting our fresh fruit and vegetables that way. We couldn’t afford to go into the movies. So my mom would load up the station wagon and drive up to the back of the drive in theaters. We were night farming one time, and we got shot out with a shotgun. We just jumped in the truck. It was kind of crazy.
You know, Christmas time we pulled down this mistletoe from [tall trees] which was crazy. I mean, we shouldn’t have been doing that. We would package them and sell them. [My mom would] put us out in front of grocery stores, and we’d sell mistletoe. I remember making $800 one time. [My mom] came home one time, and she says, “Come on out.” We had loved the car, the station wagon, the Belvedere station wagon. I go out there, and she had laid all the seats down and was loaded the care to the top with strawberries. We brought all these strawberries in, and it was a pile of strawberries in the living room. We would put them in bags, and we’d freeze them. Same thing with McDonald’s shamrock shakes. This was back when the special was 15 cents. So, my mom would pull in, and she’d say give me 30 shakes. And they’d say, “Oh, you’re kidding, right?” “No, I want 30 shakes.” And we would take them home, put them in a chest freezer. We go to McDonald’s, “give us 30 shakes.” We would get like 90 shakes, and we put them in a freezer and freeze them. So in the summertime, they were popsicles for 15 cents. That’s the kind of background I came from. It was slightly nefarious. I knew what the crooks are thinking, where they’re running, whether they’re hiding.
AS
Do any of these fun elements of your childhood make it into your books? The Shamrock Shakes and the strawberries?
DP
There is a lot of humor in the books. People say they laugh out loud. They come up at the Barnes and Noble, in 2019 my wife and I had 26 signings at Barnes and Nobles. People come up and say, “I put the book down and laughed.” And I would think, you know, I didn’t mean that to be funny. But yeah, it’s in there. Now in the last three or four I put the dogs in there as comic relief. And the dogs do some pretty funny things in the books.
AS
That’s kind of a nice balance especially for this genre. How do you develop characters across your series?
DP
I try to keep the same characters because the readers, that’s what they’re in for, they want the continuation of the story. So I’ll write a character in and later on down a book, I need something else to happen. I won’t create another character, I’ll reach back in the same book and pull that character forward. It also interlocks the story better as well. And the characters, I draw from people that I know, you know, people out on the street that I work with. The Innocents is probably 70% true. I probably shouldn’t have written all the stuff that I wrote in that book because there was some wild stuff. The character of the bad guy character was actually somebody I worked with. It’s interesting that the characters. James Lawless is a character that I watched him for two weeks. I surveilled him for two weeks waiting for him to commit a crime. I got to see where he went, how he acted. I pretended that I was a parole officer, because a parole officer was too scared of him. So every day I would go in at the beginning of the day and strip them down and make sure he didn’t have any dope on him. And he would say, “you don’t act like a parole officer, you’re not a parole officer.” That kind of thing. So yeah, I put them in the books just the way I saw them.
AS
Interesting. And then what about the good guys? Are you similar or different in any way with Bruno Johnson?
DP
It’s like when you’re thinking about something, and you say “I wish I would have said this, I’d go back, I would have told this guy.” I couldn’t do a lot of things. Because like I said, the rules and regulations. Now, with Bruno, boom! I get to be out there. I get to save children the way I want to save them and where they should be saved. I brought that from my personal background. And the good guys are usually real good guys. And bad guys are usually an amalgamation of a couple of people. Sometimes I take that language and syntax from one. Law enforcement people say some wild stuff. I try to remember that and put those in there with them and keep them very consistent. Consistency to me is very important to character. I don’t want them going high and low. When I do dialogue, I don’t necessarily tag it. I do a carriage return or context. Context is very important to me.
AS
Okay, got it. You’re an avid reader yourself, and I’m curious to know, who are your favorite authors, and then what’s next on your reading list?
DP
My wife says, I have a serious problem. I buy a lot of books. And I read last read 100 books. I did reviews on Goodreads. I have a pretty big presence on Goodreads. I’ll read anything that is well written. Right now I’ve got woman’s fiction on the brain. I’ve been reading a lot of women’s fiction. I just I don’t know where I’ve been. Some of these women writers out there are just killer with the craft. They have the voice down. In fact, I pre-ordered some of the books because I like them so much. So I have that going on.
I like John Sanford [too]. John Sanford is one of my go-to’s. I like John D MacDonald. My favorite book of all time is Lonesome Dove. I’ve read it two and a half times. People think it’s a Western, but it’s not. It’s all about character. That book is strictly character voice. I’m reading five books at a time. I’m always reading it because I’ll read 50-100 pages of one, put it down, pick up another one, and come back and rotate through. I’ve got probably 150 books on the coffee table in living room right now. I get excited about them, and that’s why I move around.
I read everything: Sci-fi, fantasy, whatever’s on book lists. I take Publishers Weekly. I follow the blogs and I know who’s on the shortlist for prizes: Booker, the Pulitzer… I watch all those. I pick a lot of books from there. Sometimes they’re a little bit too highbrow for me. So I sample those before I buy them. But some of them are just brilliant books, too. I read more than actually I write because I love reading so much.
AS
That’s great. So here at The Strand, we are some of the original publishers of Sherlock Holmes, and Sherlock classically wears his deerstalker hat. You have some real detective experience, so I’m wondering, what’s something that’s personal to you that would be your accessory like Sherlock’s deerstalker?
DP
Because I’m a six foot six, white boy, I can’t get into areas without being without standing out. I was chasing all kinds of murder suspects working violent crimes. I went to a uniform store, you know, the kind of place that picks up uniforms and cleans them. And I bought some uniforms that were not picked up. They were just left there. So I paid like nothing for eight of these khaki shirts. It was a truck driver shirt. I had the patches put on, and it said “my name is Karl.” I put Karl on there. And I wore a ball cap. So I was a truck driver. In fact, my captain, if he passed me in the hall, he would snicker and say “hi Karl”. I wore that shirt so often.
AS
[David’s wife finds several Karl shirts to show on our call] Oh, very cool. It’s the Karl shirts themselves.
DP
Yeah, this the Pepsi shirt. I wore the Pepsi shirt too much. People would stop and ask me for Pepsi…
When I moved to the airport, I was working interdiction at the airport. I was chasing murder suspects and I compared it to grizzly bears catching salmon. The crooks don’t come armed to the airport, so you scoop them up out of the water. It was fun, because I sat there and did crosswords while waiting for the right crook to go by and I snatch him up. I would wear my Karl shirt at the airport.
But then the captain calls me said, “I need to chase these [six escaped murderers]. I said I don’t do that anymore. And so the third time he calls me, and he says look out the window. The captain was sitting in the car out front at the airport. He says come out here. So he indentured me, and I started chasing these crooks. He gave me three detectives, brand new detectives who have no experience. And I started chasing this one guy who very brutally cut this woman’s head off in front of a five year old girl. He was the one I wanted the most. I did a background check on the crook, and he had a car that was getting repaired. When he did picks it up, the car pops up on DMV.
So, I take my car, my three detectives, and I go over there and in my truck driver shirt. This big heavyset guy owns this car wrecking yard, and I walk up. He’s eating a sandwich, and he sees me and he knows that I still have my badges and I’m the cops, and he sucks his teeth, which is a sign of disrespect, right? But I can’t do anything because I want to search the car. I said, “I need to search that car.” He goes, “You got a search warrant?” I said, “No, I don’t need a search warrant.” Well, he sucks his teeth again, “you’re gonna need to get a search warrant.” I said, “All right.” So I take a business card out of my pocket, and I write “Okay to search” and I sign it. And he looks at it. And now these three green detectives are like, you can’t do that. But rules of evidence. I’m not looking for anything to put them in court. I’m looking to find him. So the guy looks at it doesn’t say anything. I tell the guys go search the car. The next day at the debriefing, before we go out again, the captain is talking and he says, “be sure everybody has a full pocket a search warrants.” I caught that guy within two weeks, that murder suspect.
Another time, I was Karl, and I actually went to a bar and sat down next to the bank robber I was going to rest in a couple of days coming out of a bank with a bag of money and a gun in his hand. I sat and had a beer with him and talked to him as Carl a truck driver. I had a lot of fun. I would still be doing if I wasn’t old and slow. It was a fun job.
AS
Did anyone ever recognize you after they met you first as Karl and then you came back later as a cop? Do they do a double take?
DP
There was a time when my wife and I were living in an apartment complex, and we were upstairs and right below us was a fireman from Riverside County. He only saw me in my Karl shirt, and I never said anything about it. So he invited us to this party doing dope and stuff…I wasn’t gonna bust anybody off duty, and he was smoking dope in his apartment one time. Anyway, he was working at one of the vineyards out in Temecula, and we went to visit him and we’re tasting wine and stuff. And I forgot how it came up, but I took out one of my San Marino county serious violent crimes card. I wrote on a back I wrote a phone number, I just hand it to him. Then we’re walking away, and he turned the card over and he goes yelling, “Is a this true? Is it real? Is this your card? This is a joke, right?” You can see in his eyes he’s thinking, “what did I do around him?” Another time, I was working on clinics, and then the people at the coffee shop, they always knew me as Karl not my real name. We stopped at coffee every morning, my wife and I on the way to work. So a lot of captains at the department still call me Karl.
AS
That’s great. Just to reiterate, what are you working on now?
DP
I’ve write two books a year. And the publisher only takes one contract book per year. I’m trying to finish the current contract book. I don’t hurry, but it takes me, like I said, 1000 words a day. But It doesn’t take me very long to write a book. And then I write a what I call a hobby book. So my hobby book last year was called A Fearsome Moonlight Black, and it’s when the moon lit blood looks black on the ground. My agent is marketing and right now in New York. I’m waiting to hear from them. The last three books I turned in to the publisher, he said, “Oh, we love these books. We love this book. Let’s keep it just as it is, no changes, which is wonderful.” Then they just bought Scorn. They want one plotline removed. When I put a plotline, it’s like knitting a sweater, you pull that thread and the whole sweater is gonna fall apart.
So it’s gonna take me a while to get to my hobby book this year. But the hobby book this year is going to be in the point of view of a black, 13 year old girl. She lives in a very squalid area, and she’s a big fantasy reader. She has this place that goes in the forest to get away. There’s this giant rock, and the rock actually talks to her. It looks like a dinosaurs head. It’s just her and her imagination because what’s happening to her in her traumatic life is like PTSD. I’m going to walk that thin line. The storyline fascinates me. So that’s what I’m going to work on next. It’s like ginger at sushi. When you’re eating sushi, you want to clear your palate. My hobby book is a [cleanser], and I want to try my hand. That’s what’s next.
AS
That is incredibly prolific to write multiple books in a year. It’s been wonderful talking with you! Thank you.