Bruce Robert Coffin

Bruce Robert Coffin is the award-winning author of the Detective Byron Mysteries. Former detective sergeant with more than twenty-seven years in law enforcement, he is the winner of Killer Nashville’s Silver Falchion Awards for Best Procedural, and Best Investigator, and the Maine Literary Award for Best Crime Fiction Novel. Coffin was also a finalist for the Agatha Award for Best Contemporary Novel. His short fiction appears in a number of anthologies, including Best American Mystery Stories 2016.

Coffin's new novel is Bitter Fall, his second title featuring Detective Brock Justice.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

I would say it does quite a bit. Bitter Fall captures both the mood and the season in which the story takes place. While I’ve had a vague idea for the titles on each of the Detective Justice novels, I wasn’t entirely happy with what I had come up with. My publishing team has been very involved in both title suggestions and cover art concepts and I must say I’m very happy with the results.

What's in a name?

Much like book titles, I think the names of characters play a vital role in how the readers see them and even feel about them. Bestowing the characters with meaningful names, something for which Charles Dickens was well known, allows the author a subliminal way to connect with the readers on a gut level. I read the name Scrooge and it immediately conjures up the image of a cantankerous old miser. Likewise, I hope my readers get what I was trying to say by naming my main protagonists Justice and Wright. In my opinion those names add just the right amount of nuance to who the characters are and struggle to be.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

Great question. I’m not sure my teenage self, despite wanting desperately to be a novelist, would believe it. Not the subject matter, though I have always enjoyed mystery novels, and certainly not my having had ten published novels to date. I think the other thing teenaged me wouldn’t have believed is that it would take me until age fifty-two to see my first book published!

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

It really depends upon the book. I tend to write cinematically in that I visualize the scenes playing out in my head as I write. Usually I’ll get a strong idea for an opening scene that I hope will grab the reader by their lapels and drag them kicking and screaming into the story. The rest of the plot builds off of that initial scene. I guess if there is one aspect that I may tweak or even change entirely it is the ending. Sometimes a better ending just writes itself as the story unfolds.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

The more I write the more I’m convinced that it’s nearly impossible to draw fully fleshed out characters without inserting, or perhaps revealing is a better word, some of yourself. One of the things I’ve learned that readers enjoy is the feeling that they are right there with my characters as they race toward danger or feel frustrated while working the case. I find giving the reader some insight into how things feel and the toll of the job by way of close third person narrative adds another dimension to the stories being told. Author Joseph Wambaugh once said something along the lines of: Don’t show the reader what cops do on the job, show them instead what the job does to cops. Wise words, despite my having butchered his quote.

Visit Bruce Robert Coffin's website.

--Marshal Zeringue