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The Crime CafeAuthor: Debbi Mack
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Interview with Phil Halton – S. 12, Ep. 7
Saturday, 19 September, 2026
This episode of the Crime Cafe podcast features my interview with crime fiction and nonfiction author, Phil Halton His website poses a question: How do we create meaning in the face of chaos? Riddle me that, eh? 🙂 You can download a copy of the transcript here. Debbi (00:52): Hi everyone. Today I have a guest who says he didn’t plan to become a writer, but as a soldier and later a security consultant, he’s traveled extensively throughout the world to most places and situations that very few people get to witness. What better background for a writer, I say. (01:16): It’s my pleasure to introduce my guest, Phil Halton. Did I say that right? Phil (01:22): Perfect. Debbi (01:23): Phil Halton? Phil (01:24): Perfectly. Debbi (01:25): Excellent. Good. Good to have you here, Phil. How are you doing? Phil (01:29): Good, good. It’s good to be here though as it’s odd to be here on the 11th of September. Debbi (01:35): Yes, it is. Very odd indeed. The whole day has felt slightly strange for that reason, that it’s the 25th anniversary and all, because I remember the day it happened a little too well for comfort. So you didn’t plan to be a writer, so what made you decide to be one? Phil (01:59): In some ways I kind of fell into it. I identify I think more as a storyteller, and so I was always the guy who had the stories. I had a bunch of experiences that I didn’t want to write about directly, but I though, oh, I can rework some of this and tell some stories that I think are actually of use as well, of value. Because my first novel in some ways is kind of the origin stories of the Taliban. It ends when the Taliban begins and it’s based on my experiences working with former Taliban and others in Afghanistan. And so I had things I wanted to say, I had things I wanted to express, and so that’s how I decided to do it. Debbi (02:43): Sounds like you got some very interesting inside information in your work. Phil (02:49): Yeah. Well, I think too that when I dig and dig and dig and dig in these things, I always find humans at the base of it. And so I think of my stories as really human-centered stories, even if they’re in strange places and with strange customs and strange. It doesn’t matter. You can always find the human element of it. Debbi (03:12): Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s absolutely true. I think that’s what draws us into reading the books. If you can’t find the humanity in the character, how are you going to care? Phil (03:23): Yeah, I think so. I think so. And I think in the end, that’s a positive message that we all have this common humanity and perhaps aren’t so different after all. Debbi (03:35): I love that message. I wish there were more of that out there. Were there certain steps you took to get started as a writer or did you just fall into it naturally and know how to tell a story from the get-go? Well, Phil (03:51): Well, I don’t know about that, but yeah, certainly I started with writing screenplays and I worked with an established screenwriter, and so we partnered up on a couple projects that actually didn’t really go anywhere. People loved them and didn’t want them. And so we did that a couple of times and I decided I’m going to write my own thing here, my own screenplay. And again, people loved it, nobody wanted it. And so I realized this might do better as a novel, so I rewrote it as a novel and wouldn’t you know that I sold the novel and the screenplay within a week of each other. Debbi (04:32): Wow. Phil (04:33): Yeah. Debbi (04:34): My goodness. That is remarkable. Phil (04:38): It is. The screenplay was never produced. It died in production hell, but that’s okay. I got paid and the novel was published and became This Shall Be a House of Peace. Then from there I just kept building on my experiences and kept working at it, though my military background really gave me a mindset about professional development, that that’s important. I pursued that as well as a writer. I just finished a doctorate in English literature and I see it as my development as a writer. Debbi (05:17): Well, that’s going to develop you all right. That sounds like quite the program. A lot of people don’t go through that kind of rigorous development for sure. How do you choose your particular topics and your particular characters? Are they based on people you’ve known, situations you’ve been in or just made up? Phil (05:45): Well, I think like a lot of writers, I’ve got 20 stories in my drawer here that I’m trying to pick which one I’m going to do next. So it’s never a shortage of stories. It’s always like will I live long enough to tell all these stories? And they’re typically not drawn directly from any experience of mine. The characters are often kind of a hybrid of people I know, and sometimes it’s kind of surprising that there’s a villain in a book and someone’s like, “Well, who are they based on? They seem really realistic.” And it’s like, “Well, actually it’s me. I based it on myself, the worst version of myself.” So yeah, I try not to write too directly about my own experiences and try to take it a little farther. Debbi (06:38): Is there a favorite among the books that you’ve written? Phil (06:44): Yeah. Well, that’s hard to say. I guess my favorite of all the books would be Every Arm Outstretched, which is, it’s set during the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua, but it’s really a story of friendship and loyalty and humanity again. I think it’s kind of the most fun book that I’ve written. Debbi (07:10): Interesting, because I noticed it’s about veterans, correct? Phil (07:17): Well, no, it’s about the two young men who get wrapped up in the revolution. They’re not high-minded folks, but they get forced into it and then really confront how to be a good person when there’s no rules anymore. Debbi (07:35): Yeah, I noticed there were a lot of ethical issues coming up in some of the descriptions of your books, and I like that. Those are always intriguing stories. Phil (07:44): Yeah. And I think that idea, how do we make sense out of chaos? What do we do when no one’s telling you what to do? Those are stories that always attract me. Debbi (07:54): Yeah. Now, I have to say that Postslop is a really great title for a book because it immediately got my attention. And unfortunately, we experience it all over the internet, cluttering our inboxes and gently sucking our brains out. Phil (08:11): Yeah. Debbi (08:13): What do we do about this? Is there something we can do? Phil (08:16): So my doctoral thesis was in literary theory, specifically postmodern theory, so kind of a French philosophy of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. And as I was doing all this deep theoretical reading, I realized that these theorists were talking about things that we’re experiencing now, and they were theorizing about it, but it’s sort of come true that images have become detached from their meaning, that things are circulating on social media and on the internet, and they don’t really mean anything anymore. It’s this kind of brain rot material. And so as I was doing this work and listening to my kids, who my kids are in their early 20s and are struggling with this stuff, never having known life before the internet, that I realized that, well, what are we going to do about it? And that I needed to write a short book for them, and so it’s postslop because we can’t go backwards. (09:21): We can’t get before there was slop. We have to get postslop. We need to move on and actually ground ourselves in what’s real, because slop, it’s not just AI-generated stuff, it’s humans that are making it. Influencers, I find it must be the saddest people on earth because they have a boss, it’s the algorithms. (09:45): And they have to tune their work to that in order to survive, in order to make money. So the book is really about how do we get past being inundated with slop as individuals and ground ourselves back in what’s real? Debbi (10:03): That’s definitely a book I want to read, for sure. Let’s see. I recently had an exchange with a chatbot I wanted to tell people about. It did absolutely everything it could to keep me from speaking to a human being. I thought that was interesting. Phil (10:26): Well, there’s economics behind this too, right? Debbi (10:29): Oh, yeah. Phil (10:31): It’s not just an aesthetic choice for businesses. There’s an economic reason why we’re all getting sucked into chatbots. Debbi (10:38): Yeah. It’s a little bit disturbing when you’re trying to fix a complicated problem and the chatbot just isn’t designed for it. And you keep saying human being, and they keep saying, “We understand you want to talk to a human, but I can help you. Uhh. … bye.” Let’s see. How much research do you do on your books? Phil (11:06): Well, so I flip back and forth between writing fiction and non-fiction. (11:10): So I think I take a non-fiction approach to a lot of my books because I’ve written fiction set in Afghanistan. I’ve also written a scholarly history of the war in Afghanistan. So I do a fair deal of research, though I think sometimes it surprises people because a lot of the research doesn’t necessarily make it into the book. I just want it for my foundational knowledge and it’s like a little sprinkling through because my one crime fiction book, Red Warning, is set in Afghanistan in 1978 and follows a corrupt police detective, and people are like, “Oh wow, how did you get all the details of how the police station worked and the detective’s office worked?” And I was like, “No, no, I made that up. I just made that up.” But I based it on dysfunctional offices that I’ve worked in before, and it rings true, I think, because it does touch something that’s true, even if it’s not exactly how those things worked in real life. Debbi (12:23): I think that’s just the best way to write, because sometimes people get too hung up on reality, so to speak. Fiction is not reality. That’s a documentary or a non-fiction work. Storytelling is about creating situations where people can feel something for the characters. Phil (12:44): That’s right. And you need just enough to make it believable, because I coach writers as well, and that’s a common problem, particularly for historical fiction writers, that they’re just so lost in their own material that they’re like, “Well, it can’t be that because X.” It’s your story. It can be anything you want. Debbi (13:06): It’s fictionalized history. Phil (13:08): Yeah, that’s right. So I always say it’s spice. It’s just the spices that you’re putting in the historical research. It’s not the foundation of the whole thing. Debbi (13:19): Right. I mean, if you’re writing about the 1800s, obviously women don’t have the vote yet, but human nature is human nature. Phil (13:31): Yeah, that’s right. Debbi (13:31): That’s kind of what it comes down to. I think Phil (13:34): We all want to show our homework. I think that’s what authors do. They’re like, “Look how much I know about this period.” Debbi (13:41): Yeah. It’s kind of like, yeah, they want to show off and say, “Oh, look, look, look at how this computer works, and this is how this gun works.” And well, sometimes it can get a little too detailed. Let’s see. You’ve also done a graphic novel. How did that come about? Phil (13:58): Yeah, so that was a failed screenplay. Debbi (14:01): Oh, that figures. Visual. Phil (14:03): Yeah, that was one of those screenplays I wrote with another screenwriter. And again, we never found a home. And so at one point in my writing career, I was looking through my box of unpublished stuff, like what did I have that maybe had legs that being a short story or a novella or whatever I had that just hadn’t found a home. And that screenplay really felt like this could be something. And so I naively thought, oh, a screenplay to a graphic novel, that’ll be easy. And it’s not as simple as that. So you end up having to rewrite it pretty extensively. And then of course you have another creative involved because we hired a graphic artist to actually draw it. So it became a really interesting group project that is very different than normal work for me, which is very solitary and just me and a computer. Debbi (15:10): Yeah. That’s the thing about screenwriting. Screenwriting is highly collaborative. Phil (15:17): Yeah, it is once it gets going. Debbi (15:19): Working with an artist is also, same thing. Phil (15:22): Yeah. Yeah. And in fact, in this case, the artist had a lot of experience drawing manga, and they brought a completely different visual sensibility to the story than I had imagined, but it was terrific. I really liked how it worked, and it was all them. I would never have thought of it. I would never have pulled it off if not for them. So the collaboration was really positive. Debbi (15:46): That’s awesome. That’s really great. I think it’s great when you can find another person to collaborate with because the result can be absolutely spectacular sometimes. Phil (15:56): Yeah, I think writers don’t do it enough. It’s such a solitary thing. Debbi (15:59): I agree. I agree with you. Let’s see. What kind of writing schedule do you keep? Phil (16:07): Well, my schedule has been pretty strange lately just because I’ve been in school full-time, but my typical writing schedule is I write about five hours a day, five days a week, because it’s what I do for a living, so I don’t have a lot of other distractions. I can’t really produce more than five hours. That’s really the limits for my brains. And it intends to be during the day, get up, walk the dog, have some coffee, read the paper, and then sit down to write. I like monastic silence when I write, so I need a very quiet, dim place to go and write, but I also tend to go in fits and starts. And so when I start a novel, then I just drive all the way through it, and then I’ll take a bit of a pause, plan something else out, and then dive in again. (17:03): So right now I need a pause. Debbi (17:03): Yeah. Yeah. Take a pause and take a look at what you’ve done and figure, am I going the right way? That kind of stuff. Phil (17:13): Yeah. What do I want to do next? What really attracts me? Debbi (17:16): Are you more of an outliner or a pantser? Phil (17:19): Oh, I am an outliner extraordinaire. I have big corkboards covered in index cards. They’re color-coded. I do all of that. I did try more of a pantser method with my last book that is currently looking for a publisher because it was a really complex structure. It was a chiastic structure, so like a ring structure, which you would think needs more planning, but it was so complicated that I couldn’t plan it. So I planned the first half and then just tried to figure out how to write my way back to the beginning again. And yeah, it was interesting. I’m still a planner though. Debbi (18:03): Oh yeah. Same here. I’m more of a planner than a pantser, though I tend to deviate from my plan a lot. I like to say, wait a minute, maybe I should go this way instead. That seems to be better. Phil (18:17): I forget who said it, but plans are useless, but planning is essential. Debbi (18:21): Right. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, totally. Let’s see. What are you working on now? You’re taking a pause, you said. Phil (18:32): Yeah. So this is a funny year for me. So it’s a three-book year in terms of publishing. Now, most of them have been stacked up years before, but it looks like a pretty massive output. And I just finished writing a novel a couple months ago, and so I’m planning my next book, which I think actually is going to be nonfiction and will be a guide for veterans who want to write memoirs, so a guide to memoir writing. Debbi (19:04): That’s great. Phil (19:06): Yeah. Yeah, because I coach a lot of veterans and coaching’s expensive and not everybody can afford it. And so I thought this would be an easier entry point for veterans who have stories to tell and are kind of one and done writers. They may not have a second book, but they have one that’s really burning. Debbi (19:25): Yeah. I write about a female veteran actually, so this is kind of interesting for me. Phil (19:32): Yeah. Debbi (19:33): I can get the Canadian perspective on this then. Phil (19:37): Yeah. Well, it’s probably not that different actually, to be honest. Debbi (19:39): I would think not. It’s the human perspective, eh? Phil (19:43): That’s it. That’s it. Yeah. Debbi (19:47): What advice would you give to someone who’d like to write for a living? Phil (19:54): I think there’s two parts to that. Someone who wants to write and then someone who wants to write for a living. When I first was circulating the idea that I was hoping to write for a living, I was in a poker group of writers, writers and poets and reviewers and editors. And when I said, oh, I think I might give this a go, someone said to me, “Phil, do you know the difference between a writer and a large pizza?” “A large pizza can feed a family of four, maybe an extra large pizza nowadays.” (20:34): So I think if you want to be a writer, it’s actually very easy. You just write. A writer is defined by the action, and so you carve out some time in your day or your week and write. Write for yourself, write for publication, whatever you want to write. And if that’s on your phone or whatever, whatever, I think that’s a noble enterprise on its own. If you want to write for a living, that’s a lot tougher. I think certainly in the beginning it constrains what a living is, but there are a lot of people making a living as writers. They’re just not writing the way that people might think. They’re not sitting down to write the great novel and then that gets published and then they live off their fame and money for the rest of their lives. There’s a lot of copywriting jobs, there are magazine writing jobs. (21:34): So I think you got to find what do you want to write about and then how you can monetize it. Debbi (21:39): Yes, that’s important. Phil (21:41): Yeah. And I’m not going to say that it’s easy, but it’s also not impossible. You can certainly monetize writing, but it might be in a weird place that you don’t necessarily expect. Debbi (21:54): Exactly. Yeah. There are a lot of writing jobs out there and there are a lot of opportunities for writers to make jobs for themselves, to be entrepreneurs. Phil (22:06): Yeah, because I think if you’re a writer, you’re a business. You have to think of it. You’re not an artist, though maybe you are, but primarily you’ve got to think about it as a business and make those decisions so that you can survive. I don’t think there’s any glory in being a starving artist. Debbi (22:26): There isn’t. Phil (22:27): I don’t think there’s any value in that for itself. Debbi (22:33): Yeah. I mean, artists really do have to think of it as a business, even artists. Phil (22:41): Yeah, artists of all kinds, and writers are artists. Debbi (22:43): Truly, that’s pretty basic. If you’re going to make money at anything, you better treat it like a business. That’s all there is to it. Is there anything you would like to add before we finish up? Phil (23:01): Yeah. I’m really thinking about this thing about writing as a business or writing for a living, because I think people feel sometimes that if they want to be a writer, that’s the only way that to be serious, they have to write for a living. I don’t know. I don’t think that’s necessarily true either. How you pay your mortgage, how you pay your rent is kind of a separate question from what do you do that gives value to society. Debbi (23:33): Yes. Phil (23:35): And so I think you can be a very credible writer who also has a job that doesn’t involve writing. And I think that’s really okay too. And I wish more people wrote, particularly in the face of all the AI slop and the rest of it, just sit down and write. Write a story for fun, write something to express an opinion or a concern you have. I think these are important skills actually. Debbi (24:06): I love hearing this. Phil (24:09): Yeah. Well, and I find it sad. I work with a lot of veterans and writing their memoirs and they’ll say, “Well, I kind of dictated a bunch of stuff into ChatGPT and then it spat out this memoir. Now I want you to edit it, Phil.” And I’m not going to edit it. And also, do you realize that the one thing that you had going for you is that the only person who can tell this story is you. Debbi (24:37): That’s right. Phil (24:38): The only person who can tell your story is you, and you’ve given that up. So yeah. Again, I think there’s a lot of value, a lot of value in writing and storytelling. It’s kind of the code of how humans work, how human society works. Debbi (25:00): Yes, you’re right. You’re absolutely right. It’s funny, there are so many contexts in which I tell people that storytelling can help them. Phil (25:11): Absolutely. Yeah. I think leadership is essentially storytelling because you’ve got to create a convincing story, if you will, as to why people should do the things that you’re asking them to do and to all work together for a purpose. You can’t do that without crafting a narrative around why we’re doing whatever we’re doing. Debbi (25:33): Yes. Phil (25:35): For good and for evil, these narratives get created. So yeah, it’s powerful stuff, writing. Debbi (25:41): It is. The pen really is mightier than the sword. Phil (25:46): I think so. I think it is. Yeah, having waved both, I think it is. Debbi (25:52): Hey. All right. Well, thank you so much for being here, Phil. I really appreciate your time and all of your thoughts, and we can hang around afterward and do a quick bonus episode for the Patreon supporters. Phil (26:07): Okay. Sounds good. Debbi (26:08): All right. Well, thank you so much, Phil, for being here. And I will just say thank you to my listeners for tuning in, so to speak. I like to say tuning in, even though we don’t have a radio frequency. I’m just an old-fashioned gal who used to listen to the radio. Music, that is. I wasn’t around for the shows. Those go before my time. Anyway, you can get ad-free early access to the podcast as well as book reviews and updates on what I’m doing if you become a Patreon supporter, along with chapters from my books and other things. I hope you consider becoming a member and take advantage of the perks. On that note, I want to thank you again for listening. In two weeks, we’ll have another author on, and until then, take care and happy reading. I’ll be seeing you. Take care. ***** Check us out on Patreon!
