Interview with Ed Teja, author of Betrayal (Storefront Assassin, Book 1)
Today it gives the Indie Crime Scene great pleasure to interview Ed Teja, whose novel Betrayal had its debut on 16th September.
Welcome
back to the Indie Crime Scene. First of all, I’d like to talk about your recent
new release, Betrayal (Storefront Assassin, Book 1). What can you tell
us about Betrayal?
I
enjoy thrillers and crime series that develop the main character as a
multi-faceted person. And this is a bit of a genesis story: What might make a
person who isn’t a psychopath become an assassin? One possibility is that our
government trained them for it. The military trains people very well in a
variety of trades. It even has programs to help them transition to civilian
life. This story started with a simple question: How the hell would you do that
for a trained assassin? In BETRAYAL, they don’t even try. She is, as the name
implies, betrayed. She wakes in a hospital, learns her unit was destroyed, and
is handed a medical discharge with no warning. After spending six years as a
covert operative her CV isn’t great, even for a job as a Walmart greeter.
The
protagonist of Betrayal, Tina Clarke, is a storefront assassin. What does
that mean?
Without
giving too much away, a storefront lawyer is (in the best of circumstances) a
lawyer who operates out of humble, low overhead quarters with an eye to
providing affordable services to people who can’t afford fancy law firms. I
don’t use the term as a metaphor but as a direct parallel. Hitmen, assassins,
are thought of (and celebrated in films) as elite, highly paid operatives. When
Tina starts working, it is to help people, not to get rich.
What
inspired you to create this role?
When
the military assigns someone to a job, it is because they judge they have an
aptitude for it and will be good at it, not because they want to do it. “For
the good of the service,” is the phrase you here. I imagined someone smart, a
decent person, who is gifted physically and made into a killer. But, like with
pro sports, the shelf life of a career like that is limited. So how does she
react when it is suddenly over? What happens when the one job you are good at,
and have been encouraged to do by the authorities becomes an illegal and
undesirable activity? And especially, what if you see where pursuing it would
provide a desperately needed service.
There’s
an interesting paradox here because Tina Clarke, like a storefront lawyer, helps
those who can’t afford professional services - but she’s an assassin! Talk to
us about the moral ambiguity at the heart of this situation. How does Tina deal
with it?
She
undergoes an evolution… and this is part of the series arc. Tina doesn’t set
out with the intention of becoming a hired killer. In the first book, she comes
to see that poor people are sometimes abandoned by the legal system. She meets
more than one person who is in danger, but for different reasons has no
recourse. When her lawyer friend asks her to help a client that he can’t, she
uses her skills to resolve it the only way she knows how. She is an assassin.
This
leads her onto the path. But walking it, she confronts that dilemma and slowly
becomes aware that her skills go beyond being a deadly shot. With help of some
other people, she comes to see that, given a choice, she would rather be a
Paladin (the old Wild West Paladin, not Charlamagne’s knights) than a
terminator. But she still finds there are people who need to be, deserve to be
stopped. That requires someone like her.
What
was Tina’s background and why did she enter this line of work?
Tina
grew up poor in Kingman, AZ. She was an uninspired student, and after high
school, couldn’t imagine working at dead-end jobs. She was aimless, looking for
direction. She joined the army, where they discovered and developed her
talents. She became an assassin because the authorities told her that using her
skills would protect her country. She is a patriot and a caring person. Young
and somewhat naïve, she believed what she was told and excelled at it.
Will
the story arc concerning Tina’s former friends develop throughout the series?
A
few will be in the other stories… the ones who don’t die. The books will show Tina
slowly building a team to help her. The point is that the series is more than
the story of a killer… it’s also the story of what actually happened to her
special ops unit. I don’t want to say too much, but she is on a quest to
uncover whatever conspiracy is trying to erase any trace of her unit and what
they did.
Who
is Birdie and why is Tina concerned for him?
Birdie
(Colonel James Raven) created her unit, Squad Four. She is concerned for him
because he was a mentor and the only other survivor of the explosion that
killed her unit. He was in Washington, DC when the mission went bad. He gave
them standing orders and she expected him to reach out. She is worried because
she hasn’t heard from him.
Some
of Tina’s adventures have already appeared in short fiction. Talk to us about
those. What made you decide to write a complete series?
I
originally wrote a couple of crime stories with the idea of creating an
assassin who worked for average people and had a conscience. I liked her and
her attitudes. That got me thinking through a lot of questions about her: How
did she become a killer? … a lot of questions just like the ones you’ve been
asking me.
Are
the separate books of the trilogy stand-alone novels?
I’m
not sure it is a trilogy. I’m clear on the first three books, but I’ll have to
see how it works out for Tina and me (I’m still learning about her.) She could
well insist on hanging around for longer than that. But each book is a
stand-alone story, with the caveat that there are two series arcs… her
evolution as a person and in her role, and the quest: her digging into the
question of what the hell happened and why it’s been covered up.
How
much can you tell us about the next instalments of the trilogy?
It
involves Tina doing a lot more of poking her nose into things that shouldn’t
concern her. She starts up her "business" while dealing with the
conflicting goals of keeping a low profile and carrying out an investigation. Army
Intelligence hasn’t stopped watching for anyone looking into the fate, or even
the “alleged” existence of Squad Four. It has been erased.
You
have many series and short stories in print. What about your trilogy Proper
Crimes, and your recent short fiction in magazines and anthologies,
including Tales of Mystery: The Gravity of Death?
PROPER
CRIMES are the stories of Sherry Proper. She intended to be a lawyer, but
preferred poking into the whys and wherefores of crimes more than practicing
law. She becomes a legal researcher who acts more like a PI. And she gets in a
lot of trouble doing it. She has some whacko friends to help her, including a
legal secretary who is training to be a mixed martial artist.
I
love writing for crime anthologies and magazines are fun for experimenting with
ideas, playing with things. My story in Tales of Mystery: The Gravity of Death
is called THE LAW NORTH OF THE PECOS. It is about a PI in New Mexico (there is
reality of my life sneaking in again) tracking down an art thief (to a
campground) and solving the case with the help of the legendary, and very dead,
Judge Roy Bean. That was fun to write and clearly stomps on genre distinctions.
Tell
us about your crime stories scheduled to appear in Black Cat Weekly and MALICE,
an anthology from Dragon Soul Press.
In
a way, the story in Malice was a precursor to the stories about Tina Clarke.
LOCAL EXPERTISE is about an FBI agent and a local cop pursuing an assassin.
After I wrote it, I realized that I liked the criminal as much as the cops. But
she has a tragic end. So I captured some of her better qualities in Tina.
The
story in Black Cat Weekly is called UNDER HARD ROCK. It’s a tale of the death
of a hard-rock miner that came out of reading a nonfiction story told by a
former miner. It was an incidental piece of information about the realities of
the mining life that triggered an idea for a crime. I lifted a couple of intriguing
facts and an observation from his tale and put them to work.
How
do you research a story like Betrayal which deals with the military and
special ops?
I
grew up as a military brat, living on army bases, and then served in the Navy
for four years. While the story reflects on special ops, I don’t write about it
directly. The facts of that training, that life, are simply her background, the
backstory, and an inherent part of the series arc. This isn’t a war book.
As
a martial artist (a third-degree black belt in karate) I have studied various
aspects of war and warriors and trained with people who have served in a
variety of combat situations. Their attitudes, more than their stories,
informed the book. And when that fails, I remember Dean Wesley Smith’s
admonition that fiction writers sit in a room and make shit up. That makes it
impossible to get stuck for too long.
As
an indie author, how has the market changed in recent years, and have you
noticed the impact of AI?
I
suppose it is a cliché to say that the proliferation of eBooks and the
platforms that sell them has encouraged a lot more people to tell and sell their
stories. That produces a lot more competition… but that’s not necessarily a bad
thing, especially for the avid reader. (Go, readers!) Having a lot of
competition makes selling a book that much sweeter.
AI
is a funny term. In developed countries, we’ve been using artificial
intelligence in a lot of ways for years--in industry, for instance. Unintelligent
robots can’t build cars. But we didn’t have meme or buzzword that caught on.
My
experience with AI in publishing and writing is limited. I’ve tested out some
of the book description generators and found they can give me ideas, but not a
description I can use. So the impact isn’t significant to me. I use some of the
editing tools that apply AI, judiciously… We will have to wait to see what the
long-term effects are, but I’m not going to give it much thought. As a writer,
I am focused on improving my craft and thinking up better stories. The rest
will be whatever it becomes.
Tell
us about your life outside of writing. You have spent years travelling the
world as a Caribbean boat bum, blues musician, magazine editor, and freelance
writer. These days you live in New Mexico, write full time and teach martial
arts. Have your real-life adventures seeped into your writing?
Although the adage ‘write what you know’ is
overworked (and limiting) what we’ve done and experienced always shows itself
in a writer’s work. My wife and I spent ten years cruising the Caribbean (five
of those years in Venezuela) and then I wrote a series of Caribbean thrillers
(The Martin Billings Stories) and a humorous novel about the world’s best
Caribbean boat bum (The Legend of Ron Anejo) that doesn’t get nearly enough
love.
On the other points, many of my stories have music and
musicians in them; my magazine career (LOL) means I meet deadlines; and of
course, a knowledge of martial arts is handy when you write or think about
conflict of any kind. And New Mexico… it’s a great place to live and to write
about. And that makes it perfect.
Amazon | books2read
About Ed Teja:
Ed Teja is a full-time writer and part-time martial arts instructor. After years of traveling the world... as a Caribbean boat bum, blues musician, magazine editor, and freelance writer (not usually at the same time), he has hunkered down in rural New Mexico where he is focused on writing fiction that will engage readers and draw them into the world he has lived in.
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