F.X. Regan
Rosslyn Station
DOSSIER: Between John “Black Jack” Morrison or CJ Hawk, which book character in your writing pounds more bourbon? Do they each have a particular brand preference or does the highest proof win?
REGAN: Black Jack Morrison is a serious (read heavy) scotch drinker while CJ Hawk likes expensive bourbons. Black Jack’s poison of choice is Cutty Sark which in his day was a decent brand for the price. But he will drink the good stuff when somebody else, (like the federal government) is paying while he’s deployed to Area 51. CJ on the other hand, inherited a hundred million dollars when his father, who ran a global equity firm was killed in an ATM robbery. Which is how he got into law enforcement – chasing revenge, though he won’t admit it. So, with him, think Pappy Van Winkle, Blanton’s – the good stuff.
Detective Kiki Diaz, the protagonist in my newest series, Rosslyn Station coming out December 19th is the smartest of the three concerning alcohol. She is well aware of the dangers that law enforcement officers face with self-medicating away their stress, which doesn’t mean she totally abstains, but she is very careful with alcohol.
DOSSIER: As a police officer/federal agent, one of the best things is hearing a suspect tell you how well they know the law. What’s one of the best things you’ve heard from a suspect that really made you want to laugh?
REGAN: Anyone who has spent a couple of months in law enforcement has heard citizens complain they weren’t properly advised of their (Miranda) rights, which even most civilians know by now only applies when you are 1. In custody, and 2. Being interrogated. My favorite Miranda story is when I was an FBI agent and got a confession from, I think it was a female accomplice of bank robbery suspect, over the phone. Her attorney filed a pre-trial motion claiming I didn’t properly read her her rights before she confessed. The Assistant US Attorney pointed out to his honor that, not only was she not in custody at the time of the confession, she could have just hung up the phone on me.
My favorite “rights” story however is when as a young patrol officer, I talked a prominent defense attorney I had stopped for suspicion of DUI into taking an Alco-sensor test, which is the voluntary field test you take on the side of the road, not to be confused with a mandatory breathalyzer you have to take once you have been arrested. He hemmed and hawed, and eventually agreed to the test. And passed by a couple fractions of a point. “See,” I told him, “Always trust the police.”
DOSSIER: When and where do you write, and what kind of environment do you thrive in? (Music/silence/a cop bar listening to LEOs talk about their day?)
REGAN: I would love to say I write in a cop bar listening to war stories. Because I have it on good authority from a fellow retired agent who started at LAPD before the Bureau, that as a rookie, his training officer took him to a cop bar (off duty, of course) where they met the prolific author, Joseph Wambaugh. Wambaugh apparently spent time there collecting vignettes from the cops drinking at the bar, many of which made it into his great books. Wambaugh is the patron saint of every cop turned aspiring writer.
The real answer is I write from an office in my home most mornings, and work on marketing stuff in the afternoons. It’s mostly quiet with my wife there, a couple of dogs, and an occasional grandkid hanging around when she’s not in preschool.
DOSSIER: Even with all the research you’ve done for your AREA 51 novellas (PROJECT SAPPHIRE, PROJECT ONYX & PROJECT LUNAR DUST), why do you think it is you still believe the intelligence on planet Earth is the only intelligent life in the entire universe? It is a lack of physical evidence or are there other mental factors involved that make it hard to believe? Fox Mulder believed.
REGAN: Fake news. If anything, the extensive research I did for the AREA 51 novellas made me lean more toward the several theories that there might be something else out there. As for what, and where they are from—not so sure. I am intrigued with the notion that there could have been a more developed civilization on earth eight to ten thousand years before what’s been established as “modern” civilization, that was destroyed in a cataclysmic event. I realize that probably loses me the archeologist-reading community, but maybe I make it up in Sci-Fi—LOL.
DOSSIER: Since your writing draws so much from your real world life experiences, what’s been the hardest part of getting an autobiographical story into a fictional story?
REGAN: Letting go. For nearly 33 years I was trained to write in a third person, passive voice. “Just the facts ma’am.” No flowery language, no opinions, no descriptors of the scenes I was writing reports about. About ten years ago I wrote an autobiography I was determined would be different from all the, “my first day at the FBI Academy….my first office as an FBI Agent…my first big arrest,” biographies that I read for thirty years from many former agents. It turned out to be anything but different. It sounded awful when I read it back to myself.
That’s why when I decided to write fiction full-time, I went back to those events and spun them into fictional stories that contribute to a larger narrative. Ninety percent of the crimes, action, and characters, especially in the CJ Hawk and Kiki Diaz series’ I write about, are actual events I experienced during my career. I just changed the names, locations, and time sequences, to, as a former smart-ass supervisor of mine in Detroit used to say, “protect the guilty.”
Website: F.X. Regan | Amazon author page
Jeff Circle 