One of the more pleasant outcomes of having a story published in the crime fiction collection Bad Intentions: A Crime Fiction Anthology Based on the Music of Warren Zevon has been the opportunity to get acquainted with the works of some outstanding writers of crime fiction. Keith Roysdon is one of those writers.
I was acquainted with Keith and his work from social media, but since the publication of Bad Intentions, I’ve dug into much more of his phenomenal writing. Following a 40-plus-year career as a newspaper journalist that started when he was in high school, Keith turned to the world of fiction writing in 2019. That background no doubt contributes to his talents as a fiction writer, and his experience as a crime reporter provided him with ample training as a writer of crime fiction.
He’s the author of two mystery/crime novels: That October, a 1980s-era coming-of-age novel published in 2025, and Seven Angels, published this summer, about a young woman who returns to her hometown to run the family funeral home business and discovers how much it’s changed–for the worse. He’s also the co-author of the true crime book The Westside Park Murders: Muncie’s Most Notorious Cold Case, which, as he notes in a recent blog post, continues to attract attention five years after publication. He’s a regular contributor to the crime/mystery/thriller hub CrimeReads, and has had short stories published widely, including as part of a new anthology, Daydream Believer: Crime Stories Inspired by the Songs of the Monkees! from Shotgun Honey Books.
Like others of his vintage (including me), Keith grew up in the golden age of Baby Boomer/Generation Jones pop culture, the pre-internet era of 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s TV, movies, comics books, and music. His interest in horror movies and magazines, true crime, haunted houses, and other strange phenomena heavily influence his writing.
As we enter spooky season, it seems fitting to feature Keith in this venue. Read on to learn more about his writing origins, influences, and projects.
1. How did you become interested in writing fiction in general and crime fiction in particular?
I’d grown up reading horror and science fiction in the 1960s and 1970s, but eventually my reading of the classics led me to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and I slowly started reading more crime and mystery fiction. When I started writing fiction in earnest in the early 2000s, I wrote something like five crime novels following a newspaper reporter in a city called Middletown, all based on my career and city, Muncie, Indiana, which is known from the Middletown sociological studies. I outlined my novel Seven Angels in 2009 but didn’t write it until 2019, after I’d taken a buyout from the newspaper I’d written for since 1977, when I was in high school. It seemed natural to write about crime since I’d read so much of it and covered so much of it, including an FBI investigation of the city’s mayor. (He eventually went to prison, briefly.)
2. How has your journalism background influenced your writing?
I think it’s been positive and negative. You learn to keep emotion out of your news coverage of politics and government, even though what you’re covering sometimes was filled with emotions, so I’ve had to learn to add emotion to my fiction writing. So in that way, 40 years of newspaper writing really had to be overcome. But it did give me a good grounding in the ability to ensure I had a complete story to tell before I started telling it. I’m a plotter through and through, although I deviate and elaborate in the actual writing.
3. Recently, your writing has veered a bit toward literary fiction, as evidenced by your recent story, “The Damn Train,” published by Roi Fainéant Press. (I really enjoyed that story, by the way.) Why have you taken this detour from your typical crime writing?
I’ve got a behemoth 108,000-word novel Ghost Show that’s a family story, set in Middletown in 1948, very loosely based on my mom and her siblings and their struggles and coming of age. But as is typical for me, I loaded it up with fictionalized elements, like a ghost in a haunted movie theater, a serial killer nicknamed the Middletown Ghost and more literary, I guess you’d say, elements like infidelity, prejudice, domestic abuse. So I’ve been inclined to do something more reality- and family-based for a while now. I actually wrote “The Damn Train” for submission to an anthology a few years ago; it got rejected but I was fond of it so I wanted to finally find a home for it–and did.
4. Based on much of your writing, you’re interested in and influenced by the pop culture of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s (Twilight Zone, classic horror movies, comics, etc.). Who are the top two or three writers who have most influenced you, and how?
I was one of those kids who absorbed everything I read, every movie and TV show I watched and I was reviewing movies for my town’s evening paper from 1978 (“Animal House”) to 1990 (“The Two Jakes”). It was a great period to be immersed in movies and I interviewed everyone from John Carpenter to George Romero to Arnold Schwarzenegger. But there was always this foundation of fiction that I loved, from Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s Marvel comics to Robert B. Parker’s Spenser (and other) series to the best writer and series I think I’ve ever read, Dennis Lehane’s Patrick and Angie series, which must be read in order. So Lee and Kirby and Parker and Lehane (the latter when I was an adult) shaped my writing. I’m still amazed at how powerful many contemporary writers are.
5. You’ve written over 75 articles for the crime, mystery, and thriller website CrimeReads. How did you get involved with CrimeReads, and what are a couple of your favorite pieces there?
I was a CrimeReads fan in March 2020 when “Spenser: Confidential” debuted on some streaming service. Immediately after I finished watching the movie, I fired off a few hundred words and emailed it to a blind CR-related email. And they wanted to publish it! I’ve regularly pitched stories to them in six-plus years and they indulge my taste for offbeat and obscure topics, like weird 1970s TV movies, traveling ghost shows (a cornerstone of my novel), juvenile detective novels like Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators, all of which remain some of my favorite things I’ve written. I think my favorite, though, might be “Growing Up Spooky,” which was about my growing up as a horror movie and mystery fan in a house that was genuinely haunted. I got to visit the house a few years ago for the first time in 30 years and asked the new owner, “Do you … ever hear unexplained noises?” She said they do. It was good to know the ghosts are still there.
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- Follow Keith Roysdon on Twitter/X at @keithroysdon, on Bluesky at @keithroysdon.bsky.social, and on Instagram at @keithroysdon.
- Follow Keith’s blog at keithroysdon.com.
- Read this Literary Garage interview with Keith about his short story “Sunset Stakeout,” from Bad Intentions: A Crime Fiction Anthology Based on the Music of Warren Zevon.
