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The Crime CafeAuthor: Debbi Mack
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Interview with Charles D’Amico – S. 12, Ep. 8
Saturday, 3 October, 2026
This episode of the Crime Cafe features my interview with crime writer and independent publisher, Charles D’Amico. His Neil Baggio series has a villain, who’s got his own story, too. And you can learn more about that here! And you can download a PDF of the transcript here. Debbi (00:55): Hi everyone. My guest today is originally from Metro Detroit. He writes the award-winning Neil Baggio suspense series. In 2020, he founded the small press Blue Handle Publishing. It’s my pleasure to introduce Charles D’Amico. Hi, Charles. How are you doing today? Charles (01:16): Good. How are you doing? Debbi (01:18): Oh, I’m hanging in there. Not bad, considering I’ve been kind of nonstop all week doing something crazy of some sort, either editing a film, doing a book signing or being at someplace or other doing something that I haven’t. Charles (01:34): It’s always good stay busy though, right? Debbi (01:36): I suppose. Charles (01:37): Because some of us when we get quiet, we don’t know what to do. Debbi (01:40): Oh, I always know what to do if I’m quiet. That way I can pick up a book or watch a movie. It’s like, at last a quiet moment. I can read. So I was going to ask you about the Neil… Is it Neil Baggio? Charles (01:57): Yeah, Neil Baggio. Debbi (01:59): Baggio. Charles (02:00): Yeah. The original framework for what is the book I have coming out in November, Why I Kill is called the Neil Baggio series. And that started as an FBI agent, Neil Baggio, whose mentor goes on a killing spree. And the book picks up four years after that, the first one, where he didn’t catch him. He leaves the FBI and it picks up with that broken down anti-hero. He was piecing everything back together. The killer comes out of hiding and now he’s got to find that lane, work with the FBI. They have to work with him and figure out how he’s going to catch his old boss. And that’s the first book Veritas, and it kind of goes off from there, the next three books. And then for years people would ask me, “How does an FBI agent become a killer?” So I wrote it, which is Why I Kill, the Cappelano journals that comes out in November. (02:46): And it used to be actually really thick, but I was like, “To be that dark and that thick might not be the best idea.” So we kind of trimmed it. Debbi (02:54): Yeah. Kind of gradually get there? Charles (02:57): Yeah. If it kicks off, we’ll really see an unabridged version. Debbi (03:02): Wow. Yeah, I noticed that. I noticed those Frank journals and I was like, “Oh, what is this?” And I’m looking, I’m like, “Oh, how interesting. Okay.” Charles (03:14): I had a son who read the first version of that years ago and he kind of ducked my call for like three months. I was like, “Everything okay?” And he’s like, “Honestly, man.” He goes, “Didn’t know what to think that you thought of that stuff.” Debbi (03:29): Well, you got to come up with a reason why they turn out to be a villain. Charles (03:33): Exactly. It’s just a thought process. Debbi (03:37): Yeah, it’s just a thought process. Exactly. It’s a hypothetical exercise. Charles (03:42): You hope that an FBI profiler can think and understand the way a criminal does without being a criminal. Debbi (03:48): Exactly. Charles (03:49): I get it. Yeah. Debbi (03:51): Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It’s not like hearts and flowers stuff, if you’re going to write about killers. Which was very interesting because it makes me think of the old adage, every villain thinks they’re the hero of the story. So wouldn’t it be interesting to go back, look at all of my antagonists, my major ones, my killers and so forth, and just figure out what their story really is, go deep into it. That could get a little depressing, if I do it too much. Charles (04:20): I started off with him being reluctant and then him rationalizing certain decisions and certain things that he wouldn’t say. And I’ve talked about this before, so it’s not like it’s an Easter egg or anything, but in the first volume, he doesn’t say kill. He doesn’t want to admit that he’s killing people. He keeps rewording it. He’s just removed people from the mathematics of life. And he’s rationalizing these crazy ideas on what he’s actually doing. And then eventually there’s a turning point in the middle that really flips the switch and he goes all in on it and he’s even aware of the moment. In these testing moments where he’s cognizant enough of what’s going on and he’s like, “If I was normal, I should feel something here.” And I don’t. It’s kind of cool to just think through what someone who’s rational enough, but even admitting, “Well, there might come a time I won’t be.” And there’s a couple moments where he, because it’s told from his perspective where he’s having the thoughts that there will come a time where I’m not rational about the irrational decisions I’m making. Debbi (05:27): Yeah. Yeah. It’s just you don’t know where to draw the line after a while. You’re just so deep into it. You’re so deep in denial that you can’t… Charles (05:37): After a while, I would think you could get used to anything or rationalize anything, whether it’s somebody who went off to war as a way to protect your psyche, not as a way necessarily out of ego, which some might be out of ego, but I think some of the greatest war heroes we talk about historically just maybe found a way to switch it off and found a way to rationalize it at an extreme level and more than just the plus-minus. I have to do it for survival because there’s quiet moments. And that’s one of the things that come up in the book. In the quiet moment, how do you rationalize this stuff? Debbi (06:11): Exactly. Yeah. It’s the quiet moments when you start thinking about things. I noticed you also have two books with different protagonists, one called Perdue and one called One Golden Day. Charles (06:27): Yes. So One Golden Day was kind of this exercise I did of putting all the advice my grandmother and mother gave me when they were still alive about relationships and life. And it’s told from this guy’s perspective called Travis Golden, who does really good around high school and college graduations. It’s told from the morning of his wedding day and it’s a flashback of his whole life, like high school and college, all these different big decisions in his life. And it’s told first person, he’s having these conversations, whether it’s with his mom or his grandmother or somebody in his family who’s giving him really good advice to solve this stuff. So it’s kind of a self-help book without it being a self-help book, kind of hidden in the story. Some of my favorite reviews of that book were like, “I count myself taking notes when it’s really good advice.” That’s kind of the idea behind it. (07:18): If you know somebody’s in a tough place, but you don’t want to be upfront honest, like, “Hey, man, this is a really good book. Start reading it.” Debbi (07:25): Interesting. Charles (07:26): And then the Marie Perdita series, which is Perdue, I’m actually working on the follow-up to that right now called La Tase. When writing this, Why I Kill, put me in such a dark place and I was in a bad mood all the time, I needed something that cleared my mind. So I wrote, which originally was just kind of an exercise, a spinoff character from the Neil Baggio series who shows up a little bit in Book Three and a lot more in Book Four. I wrote her own spinoff, but it’s like a PG-13. And I imagined. (07:58): My daughter who’s now 11, what it would be like if my daughter had become a spy, she was kind of out on her own, and then I kind of like flashbacks. I’m decent at them. What would it be like if these interactions with her dad, me being obviously the dad, but this role of his influenced her in all these different things through her life that now while she’s in these tough situations, she’s drawing on. She’s alone, but on these occasions you’re learning these things about her. So I wrote this whole plunging the palette book just to get through the first draft of the journals because they were so dark. And ended up becoming a big series. I ended up writing three books or three rough drafts, three different manuscripts. Debbi (08:39): Wow. Yeah. Yeah, you really have to mix things up sometimes because you don’t want to burn yourself out. Charles (08:47): When I talked to somebody recently at Killer Nashville about that and he said, “I never thought of cleansing my palate in a way because I’m writing stuff that’s dark or putting me in a mood.” And I was like, “Well, it doesn’t always have to be for publishing.” I’m for fun, still little by little been working on a fantasy series for my kids. I don’t know if I’ll ever finish it. I don’t know if I’ll ever… But we’ll have conversations about certain things. I’m not really good at writing fantasy, but I like the fact that it challenges me. I’m trying to write it in third person, which is not my natural choice, and they like interacting with me on it. So when I get stuck or if I just want the exercise, I continue to work on this thing off to the side. And I think sometimes we get so stuck in this belief that you have to write only for one purpose when you can write for a million different reasons, write to write. Debbi (09:40): Yeah. What made you decide to write crime fiction? Charles (09:46): It’s actually a funny story. Out of spite is how I got started. I’ve always been good at writing. I mean, I could write a 10-page paper in college in an afternoon while watching a football game, which could drive my roommates nuts. My sister was a huge voracious reader when I was growing up. I remember reading those whole Anne Rice novels in two days and she’d plow through these novels and dislocated my ankle right after I graduated college. And about a week into it, I got bored of all the usual video games and TV, and everything I tried reading, I just didn’t enjoy. (10:30): I was like, “I’m going to write a book.” It was kind of like a fleeting thought one day. And my sister was like, “You don’t read enough to write a book.” I was like, “You know what? Just because of that, I’m going to write a book.” So just out of kind of spite for my sister at the time, being younger, just gave me the motivation to get over the edge. And I wrote the first rough draft of Veritas and then went right into writing Ave Maria, and then those two manuscripts, as bad as they were, sat in a drawer for 10 years while life happened. And then one day I decided to get back into writing, found an editor, and never stopped after that. Debbi (11:06): Interesting. It’s interesting that you wrote all that stuff out of spite and then just put it aside. Probably good though, huh? Charles (11:17): Again, I didn’t read enough. And then when I got back into it, it was right before COVID, and I reached out to this guy who helped me. He edited my work for content. I did content writing for a little bit, and he was really brutal with me, which I loved. I was like, “If I give him this, he’ll be honest.” He gave me some really good feedback. He said, “I can’t help you with this.” He was like, “I would find an editor. It’s good enough.” He’s like, “I would.” I was like, “Cool.” That’s when I went down the rabbit hole finding an editor. While I was waiting for the editor to get it back to me, I started writing One Golden Day, just as an exercise to see if I could write something. (11:56): And then I started editing Veritas and Ave Maria. When those were done, I started writing Colloquium, and I didn’t stop. I ended up writing a million words in about a year and wrote 14 manuscripts. I just kind of kept going. I didn’t edit anything, I just kept plowing through. So I’ve got seven Neil Baggio manuscripts. The fifth one’s about to come out early next year, three Marie Perdita ones. Then there’s One Golden Day, Frank’s journal, this weird spinoff, Western spinoff I wrote that’s like my Neil Baggio character in the 1800s. I just wanted to see if I could solve crimes without technology, so I made this whole world back in the 1800s. While developing Blue Handle and our editing firm, Book Puma, I realized there’s just things I had to get better at, but I started slowing down in my writing and just reading, reading and learning, focusing on growing those two companies, my restaurant company, Jimmy John’s, and just reading and trying to get better at reading, editing, and just becoming a better student because I didn’t grow up wanting to be an author, so I didn’t have that kind of background. (13:05): After about three years of just trying to edit here and there, I finally got back in really hardcore into it. I started working on Frank’s journal, which is now called Why I Kill, and I started educating myself more and more, and I started understanding some problems I had got better and being more realistic myself and the mistakes we all make in the process. And now I just love teaching, whether it’s going to conferences and speaking on panels and telling people, “It’s okay. This is normal. This is part of the process.” You wrote a manuscript and it’s hard when someone says, “Oh, it’s only your first. You put your blood, sweat, and tears.” It’s like saying you have a kid and they’re like, “Oh, it’s only your first kid. It doesn’t count.” You’re like, “What? It’s a kid with a life.” You’re consulted and they’re like, “Well, it’s seven. We can fill the football, basketball team with two subs.” It’s great, but I’m surprised I made one. But the more you get through it and the more you do it, the more you realize, oh, see the beauty in the repetition, the beauty in not just researching, but reading other people and learning. I read The Book of Fallen Leaves recently, which was not my genre, and it was really hard. The writing wasn’t bad. The writing was beautiful. It’s not something I would normally read, and I wanted to read this completely different thing and challenge myself. I wouldn’t have done that a couple years ago, and it’s been cool to just broaden my spectrum in crazy, just wide shot and just to take it all in. It’s been really fun. Debbi (14:42): That’s fantastic. Those are welcome words to my ears because reading broadly, I think, is really important. I mean, it can help you out in so many ways as a person and as a writer, it can help anybody out. But as much as I love crime fiction, I always love reading other things like sci-fi or historicals, Westerns, what have you, as long as it has a good story and characters that I care about. Charles (15:14): Exactly. And the very specific reason I think I wrote crime fiction is that’s my background, degree in criminology, degree in psychology. I originally went to school to be a profiler. That’s what I wanted to do. When I graduated, I needed to work for a little bit to save up for grad school. I ended up getting a job as a GM at Jimmy John’s, and before I knew it, I was a director of operations making pretty good money, and I ended up not going back to the school, and I was making too good of money to get grants. I could only get loans. I tried it for a little bit, but it was hard doing both. But it’s always something I’ve loved. I mean, I researched it, went to school for a reason with it. When I finally sat down to write, it was kind of natural for me to pick that area because that’s what I studied. (15:58): I studied in the mind of a killer and studied what made people do the things they do. I knew a pretty traumatic… I wouldn’t say it was any worse than any other kid, but there was plenty of stuff going on in my house growing up in the neighborhood, and I was the youngest of a whole generation. My sister’s three years older than me, and my cousins are older than me. I am the baby of the babies. I was in the room with adults or oftentimes forgot about the 80s and 90s. In a mean way, just like, “Oh, that’s right. The youngest one’s still here.” And because of that though, I saw the world from a different perspective. I always say I’m very big on empathy in that it’s not sympathy. I don’t feel bad for that person necessarily, but I do have a pretty good way of asking myself, “What made that person do that?” Or empathize and be like, “I can only imagine what they went through if this is the decision they feel is all that’s necessary, or what is all they have available, Debbi (16:58): Yeah. Charles (16:58): Whether it’s a criminal or someone just in the current environment today mouthing off at a youth sports game, empathizing. And I think that’s one of my favorite parts of writing and the way I write is creating these in situations that allow you to maybe empathize with the antagonist or maybe not like your protagonist as much for a short term only to be cheering for them a few minutes later.” (17:25): When I first started, there was a really cool reader, Joanna, who’s a bookstagrammer, and she was a very big early fan of my work, and she joked once. They gave me the abuse I needed to really keep writing, and if I had a spirit animal, it would be Neil Baggio. She’s like, “You just have this brash way of writing the things I wish I could say.” I was like, “Wow, I say those things in real life, so I get in trouble.” Debbi (17:59): Yeah. Well, I don’t know. I think you just faded out of the picture there for a moment. Charles (18:05): Sorry about that. Debbi (18:06): There you are. Okay. Yeah, I was just looking down at my questions and thinking about what to ask you. It sounds like you already know a lot and you probably don’t need to do as much research on the topic as you do maybe new developments in it. Charles (18:24): Correct. It’s more about understanding the current state of affairs, depending on what I’m writing, or maybe procedural things. I also try not to get in the weeds on procedural. I was told once actually that I won an award and I kind of got mad, give you an idea of how ignorant I am sometimes in the industry. When I first got into it, I don’t remember which award it was for, but they wrote, “He writes nothing better than anyone we’ve seen in a long time.” I got mad, and my editorial director was like, “That’s a compliment. They’re saying you could write a scene where nothing goes on and they would enjoy it.” I was like, “I didn’t hear it that way.” I think I’m just good. Aaron Sorkin, it’s the closest thing I would say to a literary inspiration, someone I enjoy. I can read a play of his, not even watching TV, I’ve read screenplays, because I love the way he does dialogue. I’m a big, heavy dialogue person, and I love the fact that nothing could go on technically in a scene except two people walking or two people sitting at a bench, but an insane amount of information and storytelling was done in that kind of stale scene. It didn’t have to be full of crazy physical action, but a lot of emotion or a lot of thougts could be coming from that situation. I feel like that’s probably one of the strengths that’s carried my story. It’s not always a procedural, it’s more the interaction of the characters, the story, the everyday things that make you laugh and giggle a little bit, even though it’s a tense moment, because a lot of people get nervous and crack jokes when they’re tense and it’s stressful. Debbi (20:01): And it’s more than just dialogue. There’s a lot of visual stuff going on, and the actors make a great deal of difference. It’s really interesting, very interesting. Once you get deeply involved in making movies, in any way, you start to just perceive the whole thing differently. It’s very weird. Charles (20:22): The first couple times I read a script, I actually called our editorial director, Ricky, and I was like, “Are you confused? There’s nothing on here.” He’s like, “There’s really not. They leave a lot to the director and a lot to…” He’s like, “Some may be overdone,” but for the most part, they’re just kind of writing the plot, the general scene in that conversation, and it’s then up to the director to bring it to life. And you start to realize the amount of people it takes to bring this thing to life. It’s crazy. Debbi (20:53): It is. It’s really something. It’s amazing that anything gets made, especially these days with the financial stuff going on. Let’s see. What advice would you give to anyone who’s interested in a writing career? Charles (21:13): Well, first of all, one of my favorite things I heard from people like Reed Coleman and others at Killer Nashville was, “Tell people you’re a writer and your side gig is a teacher. Tell people you’re a writer and your side gig is a doctor, is a fireman, is a garbage man. If you want to be a writer, you need somewhere need to define yourself a little bit and embrace it. You may not make a living off of it, but it is a full-on task.” When I hear… I actually just corrected somebody recently, they’re like, “Oh, I was just a stay-at-home mom for two years.” I go, “That’s a full-time gig. Don’t say it flippantly.” They have four kids. I was like, “This is a lot of work. If you told me you were a stay-at-home mom for a 16-year-old that was gone all day at school, okay, you could say that a little flippant, but being a full-time parent is hard.” So maybe with a writer, being a full-time writer is hard and it’s hard to make a living off of, especially for the first decade, unless you’re lucky. (22:12): So just defining yourself as a writer who also has a job, it helps you survive, first of all. And then I would also say, remember, you don’t always have to write only your book. Your story is not going to disappear. I hear that all the time. I had this great thought and I was afraid it was going disappear, so I wrote it down. I always tell people, I go, that sucks. That’s one of the worst things you can do because you’re almost creating fear and anxiety around the creative process as opposed to when they happen, just kind of smiling, giggling and being like, “Ooh, I wonder where this goes.” Creating a dopamine hit and a psychological loop that encourages those things to happen, because if you put fear and anxiety around it, you’re only going to make it less likely to have them because you’re so tense as it’s happening and your body wants to stay away from that anxiety. (23:04): I guess unless you’re a sado-masochist, maybe you can go ahead first time. (23:10): Creating this positive environment and this routine around creativity and knowing it’s not always going to be linear, it’s not always going to be perfect. I used to be a straight answer writer. Now I’ll give myself key points I want to hit, but it’s an evolution. I always say when we were born, we couldn’t walk, we couldn’t talk, we couldn’t even go to the bathroom by ourselves. Look at this now. And it takes a lot of failure to do some basic stuff in our lives. Let’s be honest with ourselves, did we put as much effort as we think we did into this thing? And we may have put our heart and soul into it, but take a deep breath and say, “This is an amazing thing I’m trying to do and I will get there. There’s going to be a lot of failure along the way. (23:55): And if I stick through it and I trust some smart people, maybe make a few wrong decisions and keep trucking after it, by the time I get done, I will be better for it. Even if that isn’t the best story I ever write, probably won’t be because everything you write after that, you’re going to get there. So remember, everything you’ve done in your life took repetition, and I mean everything. When you sit down as a writer, remember that. So whether it’s writing on a Substack, whether you have two followers, 200 or 2000, you’re just constantly getting reps, whether it’s creating stories that may never see the light of day, just little stories. When I would get stuck, I would write these side conversations between Neil Baggio and a bartender or a cabbie of him talking while he was stuck. I never went in the book. (24:41): I would literally open up a new document, just have a conversation. It would allow my left and right to talk to each other. Practice will really get you there. So the best advice I can tell everybody is when you write, tell people you’re writing. Don’t be ashamed, don’t be afraid of it. And if for some reason the people in your immediate circle don’t agree with you, this is the beauty of the world we’re in now. It’s so much easier to find a community, even if it’s only digital, to support, help, and encourage. Even if your niche is [narrow] no matter what it is, you can find a group, take a deep breath, keep writing your stories, and look for that group that reminds you that what you’re doing is just for you and two people. You know what I mean? Debbi (25:30): Well, that’s excellent advice. Charles (25:32): Talking about writers and getting people encouraged. Debbi (25:36): That’s excellent advice. I mean, look for the people who get you and they will get you, and there you go. I think really – Charles (25:47): Gladwell once said… Oh no, you’re good. I’ll finish after, you were saying. Debbi (25:52): That’s okay. It’s just really good advice, and I’m glad you said all those things. Charles (25:58): Well, Malcolm Gladwell, I think it was the masterclass that he did for that at masterclass. He said, “If you get a one-star review, unless it’s really poor editing or a really blad plot line that everybody’s pointing at, you just didn’t write that person’s story, and that’s okay. They just didn’t see it your way.” And he’s like, “You can go look at some of the greatest books out there that cult followings. One of my favorite things when I would get down on myself is I would go read one-star reviews of Harry Potter.” Sold millions and millions and millions and millions of copies, and there’s people out there like, “I got it.” And they just remind you, that’s okay. Some people aren’t going to do that. Debbi (26:41): And some people just like to give one-star reviews, I’m convinced. So it’s not an indication of anything really or anything to worry about. Charles (26:52): Oh, magical. He’s like, “My wife loves Yelp. Used to love Yelp.” And he’s like, “You don’t know what that person’s five star is.” He might be like, “This restaurant, you can have blood on the napkins.” You don’t know that person’s one-star scale. Maybe they’re upset, maybe they had a bad day. You don’t know. (27:12): Keep trucking, keep writing, keep trying to get better. So remember, every great book has one-star reviews. Even some of the worst books have five-star reviews, somebody loved it. Just keep writing and keep trying to get better. Debbi (27:28): Exactly. Yeah. So on that note, would you like to add anything before we finish up? Charles (27:36): Yes. I have a new book coming out November 17th, Why I Kill. You do not have to read other books to read it. And even though it is a dark story, I think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever written. The feedback I’m getting, Reed Coleman just gave me a blurb to put on the book, a New York Times bestseller. If you just really love great storytelling and you want something you’ve never read before, especially if you’re a big fan of the Dexter series or Silence of the Lambs, I would definitely preorder this. Debbi (28:06): Oh, that’s a nice comp. Yeah, good one. All right. Well, thank you for being here, Charles. I really appreciate your time. Charles (28:14): Thank you for your time. Debbi (28:16): Oh, it’s my pleasure. My pleasure to have you on. And to everyone who’s listening, thank you so much for listening. To my Patreon supporters, thank you very, very much. It really helps a lot to get that small bit of income that helps to defray some of the costs of doing this podcast. Yes, I was going to say something about where I’m going with the podcast, except I’m not really sure at this point. I keep thinking I want to do something in the form of a scripted podcast at some point, but I’m not sure. I don’t know. I’m not quite sure. So I’m pondering it. Charles (28:58): You’re pondering it? Debbi (29:00): I’m pondering it. I ponder a lot of things. In that vein, I will just say if you would like to be a Patreon supporter, find us at the Crime Cafe on Patreon. I’ll put a link to it, and you can check out the tiers. You can get access to chapters from my book if you reach at the, I think it’s the $10 level a month, as well as book reviews. Anything is up there is early access and without ads. I don’t do ads. And with that, I’ll just say thank you for listening and take care, and I shall be talking to you in two weeks. Be seeing you.
