In this episode of The Magic Book Podcast, Adrian Tennant interviews John Gaspard, author of nine Eli Marks Mysteries. John explains his research and writing process, including his collaborations with magicians. John also discusses the creation of Eli Marks, balancing magic content for both magicians and general readers, and his popular podcast, "Behind the Page." John shares his experiences with the magic community, and offers advice for aspiring authors interested in magic-themed fiction.

Coming up in this episode of the Magic Book Podcast.

On the whole, magicians are really smart, a little on the neurotic side, and have a weird way of looking at the world. And that makes them really interesting and sometimes really annoying.

You're listening to the Magic Book Podcast, conversations about classic and contemporary books that teach, illuminate, and celebrate the art of magic. I'm your host, Adrian Tennant, a lifetime student of magic and mentalism, occasional performer, and long time book collector. Thanks for joining me. In the 3rd episode, Marco Pusterla mentioned an underexplored area for research, the presence of magic and magicians in non-magic literature. Marco's observation is the inspiration for this 4th episode of the Magic Book Podcast. Today, my guest is John Gaspard, the author of the Eli Marks Mystery Series, which follows the adventures of the titular magician turned sleuth. With 9 books in the series and a prequel for middle grade readers, John has carved out a unique niche in mystery writing. Although not a magician himself, John's extensive research includes contributions from many friends he's made within the Magic community, so it's not a surprise that Eli Marks Mysteries appeal to magicians and general readers alike.

In addition to his writing, John has a background in low-budget film making, and he's the co-host of Behind the Page: The Eli Marks Podcast, which dives deeper into the world of his books, and features interviews with magicians. John, welcome to The Magic Book Podcast.

I am delighted to be here. I've listened to all the episodes, and I'm so surprised to be on so early in the run.

Oh, thank you for being on. Let's start at the beginning. What sparked your interest in writing and storytelling?

You know, if I had to pinpoint a moment when I was probably about 11 or 12 years old, my uncle who was a missionary priest who was stationed in Hawaii, came home to visit and said, "I have this little regular 8 camera that I'm not using anymore. Do you want it?" And I was delighted by the idea, because I was intrigued with the idea of making movies. And you would put in a roll of 16 millimeter film, and you would shoot for 2 and a half minutes, then you have to flip it over and shoot the other 2 in half, and then they would cut it. But I really enjoyed telling stories that way and realized very early on that in order to make a compelling movie, you had to have a story, and you had to write something. And as I made more and more movies in my junior, senior high years in college and beyond, I ended up doing a lot of writing just in order to have something to shoot.

How has your early background in filmmaking influenced your approach to writing mystery novels, do you think?

One thing you learn early on making movies, particularly if they get a little more complex and involve more people and more equipment, is if you go to all the trouble to shoot something, you want to be able to use it. And I got to the point in a couple of early movies where I would shoot scenes, and get to the edit, and go, "Oh, we really don't need that scene to tell the story." And I wasted all that time and all that effort shooting that scene that I didn't need. And if I'd figured that out in the script phase, I would have been a lot happier in the shooting and editing phase. I wouldn't be shooting things I don't need. I remember having a pretty big deal screenwriting teacher who came to the Twin Cities and taught here for a while, and I took his class. And he looked at my script and he said, "Everything that's wrong with your movie, is in the script, and it could have all been fixed in the script." So I took that to heart.

And I've really looked at, when I'm writing something which is now novels, is this scene necessary? I don't have to get up and shoot it anymore, but I don't want to waste the reader's time. I think it was maybe William Faulkner who said, "Don't write the parts people skip over."

Well, let's talk more about writing and authors. John, who were some of your early influences?

Well, you know, I read a lot as a kid, and in terms of mysteries, I was very intrigued by Encyclopedia Brown. I loved Encyclopedia Brown. Didn't always love the solutions that they came up with, but I I just love that idea of a kid solving stuff. And there was also a series called Two Minute Mysteries, Five Minute Mysteries. I read a lot of those as a kid. On TV, there was a show called Ellery Queen. I didn't read Ellery Queen Magazine, but I liked the Ellery Queen show, which starred Jim Hutton. And at the end of every episode before he revealed who the killer was, he would look right at the camera, and he would say, "Well, I know who did it.

I know who the killer is. All the clues are there. Do you know who did it?" Then they go away to commercial, and you had a chance to figure that out. Or in my case, never figure it out and come back, and he would tell you who the killer was. As I got older, I started reading, you know, real mystery writers. Lawrence Block being a big favorite. He has a series about a private eye named Matthew Scudder that's a little dark and gritty. He has much lighter series about Bernie Rhodenbarr, who is a burglar and a bookseller, and he also has a hitman series.

And I really liked his Bernie books and his hitman books because they mixed good mysteries with humor. And that's kind of where I've always tried to land. There's a good mystery that's kind of funny.

Contemporary mystery fiction encompasses a wide range of sub-genres, including noir, police procedurals, historical mysteries, and psychological thrillers, of course, each with their own conventions. John, how would you categorize your Eli Marks books within the mystery genre?

Well, they're what's called a cozy mystery, which I think can be a little confusing for people sometimes because some people think of a cozy mystery as a little old lady who does knitting and solves crimes. But it just is any light mystery where there's no sex and no violence. Any violence happens off screen, and Eli definitely fits in there although there is a humorous bent to it as well. So I I think of it as a humorous cozy mystery series.

Well, the blending of magic and mystery is not that uncommon in detective fiction as you know. Clayton Rawson was an American mystery writer and amateur magician who created the detective magician, The Great Merlini, who first appeared in the novel "Death from a Top Hat" in 1938. That also belongs to a subgenre known as Locked Room Mysteries. Today, the novelist, inventor, magician, and artificial intelligence expert, Andrew Mayne who just spoke at MAGIC Live! this year, continues the tradition of detective magicians with his series of novels featuring Jessica Blackwood, an FBI agent with a family history in magic, who uses her skills to solve crimes often with magic effects as central plot devices. And there's also a series of six books by Ellie Griffiths, in which detective inspector Stephens and his magician friend Max Mephisto solve murders in 1950s England. So, John, what makes the combination of magic and detective work so appealing to you as a writer?

You know, I think it's the very reason that I picked a magician to be my main character. I'm not a magician, but because I worked in corporate entertainment for years, I knew probably more magicians than most people do. And I found them to be fascinating people. They're generally very smart. They have as performers, they have sort of built in neurosis that are interesting. And I knew that I would have lots of opportunities to put Eli in different situations. If I jump back to Lawrence Block and Bernie Rhodenbarr, his burglar who runs a bookshop, he was always able to put Bernie in a situation, because Bernie was a burglar and went into people's homes and did things. If he had just been a bookstore owner, he would have been kinda stuck in the store.

Well, with Eli, I knew that not only did he have a magic store that his uncle owned that we could use as a kind of a home base, but he's going to be doing corporate events. He's going to be doing trade shows. He might be on a cruise ship. He might be travelling to the Magic Circle in London or the Magic Castle in LA. There was always a good opportunity to put him in a new situation with new people, 1 or 2 of which would be killed and the rest would be suspects.

Well, let's talk about the Eli Marks Mysteries. Can you introduce us to Eli and tell us a bit about the premise of the series?

Sure. Eli Marks, when we meet him in the first book, which is called "The Ambitious Card," all the books have magic trick titles. He's in his early thirties. He is recently divorced from his wife who is an assistant district attorney. She has married essentially a coworker, homicide detective Fred Hutton, and that's a bane in Eli's existence. There's nobody wants to be left and probably be left for someone who is essentially as boring as homicide detective Fred Hutton is. But Eli is struggling as a new single person. He's also trying to make his living as a magician, which isn't all that easy.

He's trying to get gigs and do things, And he has over him the shadow of his uncle, who raised him. Eli's parents died when he was in his teens, and his uncle Harry has raised him. Uncle Harry is a master magician. He knows everything. He knows everyone. He is a sage. And being in that shadow, Eli is never going to be his uncle as hard as he tries. So that's the premise is Eli has a certain number of neurosis, not unlike myself.

And each book tries to put him not only in a different situation, whether it's a different kind of magic environment or a personal environment, but also bring some form of his neurosis to the surface. He has panic attacks. We deal with that. He feels tremendous jealousy at times. We deal with that. As with many magicians, he feels guilt because magicians are essentially lying to the audience for much of their act, and he has to deal with that. So there's always something else going on with Eli besides whatever murder investigation he's in.

You mentioned Eli's uncle Harry. Who is the character of Harry based on?

Well, Adrian, when I started the series, like I say, I'm not a magician, and I didn't really know that much about magic. So I had to really, really study and learn enough about magic that I would know more than the average person. And that required reading a lot of books and magazines and listening to podcasts. And as I developed Harry, in my mind, he became two figures that are sort of pretty well known in the magic world combined. He is, on one hand, Eugene Burger, a teacher, a sage, a very thoughtful, deep person, a very kind, considerate, wise person, and Jay Marshall, who was a consummate performer who performed in every type of situation a magician could perform in. So in my mind, that's who uncle Harry is. He is a sage and a teacher, a very wise man, but he also has all that experience that Jay Marshall brought to the fore. Just about any time I'm dealing with Harry, I'm having a good time because Harry is always a step ahead of Eli.

There's a few consistent comments I get from readers, but one that is coming over the years over and over is don't you dare ever kill Harry. So that won't happen.

Well, I'm glad to hear it. Harry's magic shop is called Chicago Magic.

It is, and that confuses some people, but I wanted to really set this in the twin cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, and there are a lot of local landmarks. And there is a street called Chicago, and on that street there are all the things that Eli talks about. There is the Parkway Theater movie theater, next to him that he can view the projection room from his bedroom. Above the store, there is a bar called Adrian's. There's several other shops. And then on the corner, there is what was a drugstore, and I think now is Pizza Place. But in our book, it's his girlfriend Megan's shop, Chi and Things. So it doesn't take place in Chicago.

It takes place on Chicago Avenue. As it turned out, when talking to the owner of the Parkway theater, there was actually a little toy shop right about where I placed the magic shop. It wasn't as big as the magic shop, but the owner told me, yeah, the lobby was half the size, and there used to be a little store here. So turns out it was sort of there. It just wasn't as big. But the primary reason I picked it, which is an odd one, is that although she was gone before I got to this point, I believe that my mother, growing up looking out her back door, could see the Parkway Theatre. And I thought, "Well, I'll just set the store right there where she could see it and keep it on Chicago Avenue." It also sort of harkens to the Chicago style of magic, which is something that Harry would understand, and Magic Inc, Jay Marshall store and all that.

So there's a little bit of reference there, but it just happens to be on Chicago Avenue, and so he named it Chicago Magic.

Starting with "The Ambitious Card," published in 2013 and continuing with "The Bullet Catch," in 2014, "The Miser's Dream," in 2015, through to "The Professor's Nightmare," published just last year, Eli Marks Mysteries are named after well-known magic effects or routines. So, John, how did you come up with this idea?

In doing research on what would be the first book, and I didn't know there'd be a whole series, but I was pretty sure I could finish one book, I came across a trick called "The Ambitious Card," which all magicians would know. You know, a card keeps being put back in the deck and jumps to the top. And I love that phrase, "The Ambitious Card." That seems so interesting. So I thought, "Well, I will just if I do more books, I'll just name them after that." And as part of my process for learning what it's like to be a magician, I was very fortunate and still very fortunate that the Twin Cities has a master magician here by the name of Suzanne, Suzanne the magician, who is a phenomenal teacher. She's a student of Al Schneider and also Eugene Burger. And so I hired her, and we had several 90-minute sessions where we sat in a coffee shop, and she taught me how to do The Ambitious Card.

She also taught me a lot more, which was very helpful about what is the life of a magician. What are the actual day-to-day concerns of a magician? But she taught me the trick, which I could do at the time somewhat. And I thought, "Oh, that's great. That's great. Every book will have a title that is a magic trick, and then I will learn that trick and then be able to do that trick." And then got to the second book and realized I was gonna call it "The Bullet Catch," which as research you know, my research I bought, "Twelve Have Died," and all the other research on it, and went, "Well, I'm not going to learn this trick. I'm not probably not gonna learn any more of these tricks because that one's too dangerous. But I am going to know as much as I reasonably can about it."

And so all the other titles in it, "The Miser's Dream," "The Linking Rings," "The Floating Light Bulb," "Zombie Ball." I understand the mechanics of them, so that I know what's going on. And primarily, so I don't accidentally write something that gives something away. So I can make sure I'm not pulling back the curtain too far. But, you know, I wouldn't say there's an endless stream of book titles in magic tricks, but there I still have a long list of things I haven't gotten to yet, because they're just evocative.

If you're enjoying this episode of The Magic Book Podcast, please consider leaving a rating on Spotify or a review on Apple Podcasts. You can also follow The Magic Book Podcast page on Facebook. Thanks. John, can you explain your process of incorporating real magic principles into your plots?

Well, the first thing that I learned is don't overdo it because the majority of readers may have a slight interest in magic, but they probably have a bigger interest in mysteries. And so they only wanna know a certain amount. And I overdid it in the first book and ended up cutting back quite a bit because there's a scene early in the ambitious card where Eli is watching this mentalist named Gray watching his act, and I doing painstaking research, cobbled together an entire act for Gray, and then broke the whole thing out. And that was a huge part of the book, and that was cut way, way, way, way, way, way down. And so it's just a matter of learning enough to incorporate the parts you need without overdoing it, so the audience gets bored and walks away from it. And finding that balance is tricky. Sometimes, the trick is really, really integral to the plot. In the case of "The Bullet Catch," that's very integral to the plot, because one of the threads of that story is Eli is working on a movie.

It's a biopic of a magician who sort of was based on the Masked Magician and who died doing the Bullet Catch, in theory. And so that was really woven in. The next book is called "The Miser's Dream," and although Eli does do the Miser's Dream in it, that was more of a thematic thing. There's 4 murder suspects in that, and they're all kind of being Miser's Dream-ish, where they're trying to grab things out of the air and keep them and grab them and keep them, grab them and keep them. So sometimes it's integral, like in "The Floating Light Bulb," he's learning to do the Floating Light Bulb. Sometimes it's more thematic, like "The Linking Rings." There's a bunch of magicians who all wear the same ring, so it's tied in that way. So the goal is make it a nice seasoning on it, but don't over season the stew and make people spit it back.

And I understand that you've had magicians like Scott Wells proofread your books. Is that right?

Both Scott Wells and Joe Diamond out of Chicago were kind enough early on to read through the the rough manuscripts and, mostly correct the magic, which is very helpful. Scott, in particular, was very precise on the way things happen, the order that things happen in a trick. When I needed a walk-around routine for Eli to do at a corporate event, I talked to Scott, and he said, "Well, here's what I do, because these three things tie together, and they keep the audience looking up at my face and not down at my crotch. And I can bail whenever I want to," which was something that was sort of reinforced years later when we interviewed Jade, and she said the same thing. "I structured so I can get out at any point." So those sorts of specific things were very helpful. Because the magic community is as open and approachable as it is, when I've had specific questions about something, I've been able to go to people, David Regal has been a help on things, Derek Hughes, Mike Caveney, Tina Lenert, with specific questions. And they're just great about, you know, "No.

Here, do this or do that." And I don't know for other mystery writers who are writing about an occupation if they have that luxury, but I do have that luxury of being able to reach out to virtually anyone to get an answer. Even if the answer is no, I still get an answer. And that's been very, very, very helpful.

John, what kind of feedback have you received from readers in the magic community?

You know, it's it's probably best summed up in the very best response I ever got. When I got it, Adrian, I really thought I should probably just stop now because this is as good as it's going to get. Each book opens with a quote from somebody. In most cases, it's people who are, gone. But in this case, I wanted to open the fourth book with a quote from Teller.

Well, I have it right here. "The Linking Rings," opens with Teller's quote: "Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect."

Yeah. And I thought, "That's great, but it's Teller. And I respect him, and I gotta get permission." And again, because of the interconnectedness of the magic community, I know Tina Lenert. I sent her an email, said, "I know you know Teller. Here's what I wanna do. Could you ask him?" And she wrote back and she said, "A, yes. B, always ask."

She sent him an email. He sent her back an email saying, "Yeah, go ahead." When the book was done, I sent him the book. A couple months go by and I get an email, and the subject line is "From Teller," because the email address you'd never know from that. So I guess he does that so the people don't, you know, throw it in the junk pile or something. And in it, he said something like, "I was in the mood for a good mystery novel, and I picked up 'The Linking Rings' that you sent me. Thank you for sending it. And I thought the killer was A, but it turned out to be B.

"So you surprised me there. "And then he wrote, "And I especially like the accurate behind-the-scenes aspect of it. Usually, magic detective stories don't really have a clue about the mentality and preoccupations of magicians. Yours is true to life." The game ended right there. That's all I wanted was for arguably one of the, let's say, five best magicians in the world to read it and say, "Yeah, you got it right." And I've gotten a a lot of very kind comments from magicians all over the world about the books, but that one really stands out as, "Yeah, okay, good. I'm I'm doing something right here."

So, John, let's talk a little bit about your writing process. First of all, do you plan the key plot points in advance?

Yes. In the world of writers, there's 2 camps. 1 which is called - you know - recently, they were called pantsers. And then the British folks said, "Pants means something different over here. Come up with something else." So now they call them discovery writers or plotters. And I am three-quarters plotter, one-quarter discovery writer.

I will have good idea of a very firm outline for probably the first three-quarters to four-fifths of the book. I'll know who the killer is, why they did it, how they did it, how Eli will solve it, or in many cases, Eli solved it twice, usually once wrong, putting himself in a deeper situation, and then once right. And I know the very, very end, generally. But that last quarter of the book, I'd leave a little loosey-goosey because things are gonna change. Early on, I had a book where I got to a point where I realized, "Hey, every red herring, every suspect that I have is either dead in the hospital or in jail, and murders are still happening. They're gonna know right away who the killer is because there's nobody else left," and I had to go back and rewrite and make that happen. I've gotten better at that now. I'm not running into an abyss at that point, but I do like to keep some wiggle room at the end because things do change.

How long does the process of writing an Eli Marks Mystery typically take you from that first plotting to publication?

At least a year, sometimes a year and a half. During COVID, I was able to do a little bit faster because I wasn't doing anything else. But I'm my own boss. When I'm done with the book, I put the book up. So if I'm done with the book on Wednesday, it can be on Amazon on Thursday, which was one of the reasons I stopped working with a regular publisher. I had a real publisher for the first four books and then bought them back because they wanted a contract, and they wanted a contract for 1 book or 2 books or 3 books, and they wanted to be on a schedule. And then when you finished the book, they'd work on it for 18 months and it would come out. And I didn't have any control over the marketing and they weren't really marketing it anyway.

So as an independent author, I can do it whenever I want. I can keep it in the fun zone and not in the job zone.

Staying with the craft of writing, how do you balance different narrative elements like exposition, action, and dialogue? How do you determine the right mix?

Well, because up until the first novel, everything I'd written was a screenplay or a television play, a teleplay. I was very versed in when to come into a scene, when to get out of a scene, what's a good tagline on a scene, what's a good way to leave people hanging. And all of that overlaps very nicely into novel writing. The books are often dialogue driven. There is not a lot of description. It's all told from Eli's point of view, and everything we see is what Eli sees, and Eli doesn't say things like, "She had glimmering green eyes that bore right through me." That's not Eli. Eli is "My palms are sweating as I cross the room.

"I don't think I'm going to make it," kind of thing. So he's not heavily into description. It wasn't until the middle grade book came out, and there was a picture of Eli in the cover that I ever even acknowledged that he was white. He certainly could have been, and he and uncle here both could have been Black. There was no reason why they couldn't be. And it just never came up because it never comes up to Eli. He just doesn't mention race. It only, I think, is mentioned twice in the whole series because someone had to be East Indian.

But other than that, they can be anything. That's not what he's looking at. He's looking at, "Are they nice? Is this person gonna kill me?" He's a magician looking at an audience going, "I need to make them react." He's not looking at them individually. So it is mostly dialogue driven with just enough description to get us by.

And I've noticed that Eli Marks Mysteries avoid incorporating current news or world events into the plots. Was this a deliberate choice to create more timeless narratives?

Well, that's the hope. I did have someone send me an email that says, "I know that in reading the books that Eli is in his mid-thirties. You are obviously in your sixties based on your references." And my response to that was "A lot of Eli's references come from Harry, the things that Harry has taught him over the years." But, yeah, you know, there's cell phones. There's Internet. All that is in there. But I remember hearing an interview with Carl Reiner talking about creating a Dick Van Dyke show, and he said one of the things he strove to do there was not put in anything contemporary.

There is no mention of contemporary politics, of anything contemporary, really. And because the show's in black and white, it is still fairly timeless. You look at it and go, "Meh. The fashions aren't quite well, they come and go. Yeah. This is probably in the sixties or seventies, but I don't really know." And that's the way I wanted Eli to feel. I wanted someone to pick it up at any point and go, "Yeah.

"This is turn of the century kind of ish," but not ever really be exact on it.

Now you've stated that you're not a magician, yet when we were preparing for this podcast, you mentioned that you have been known to perform in public. Is that correct?

Well, yes. This is back when I had a small publisher out of Texas, and I was gonna go to a book convention called Malice Domestic in Maryland, I think. It's a collection of mystery writers and mystery readers. And at this event, they had what they called author speed dating, where they had 20 tables in a big ballroom, and there were nine readers at each table. And then every 3 minutes, a new author would sit down at that table and tell them about his or her book. And I think there were 40 authors there. And I realized early on before I even got there, I thought, "Well, if I'm a person sitting at that table and you try to tell me about 40 books, I'm not gonna remember anything about them." And it was David Parr, who's a great magician out of Chicago, happened to be in town then, and I said, "I wish I could do a trick instead."

And he said, "B'Wave - Max Maven's B'Wave. Perfect trick for you." And so I bought it, and I learned it. And because we used to run a magic show here in town for a couple years with Suzanne, I later met Max Maven and he gave me some pointers. And I met Eugene Burger and he gave me some pointers. But anyway, I went around to all these different tables and I did wave, where I picked 1 person and the card that they are imagining turns up face up in a packet of 4 cards, and all the other cards are blank. And it was a huge hit.

It was a huge hit. So the next day, the publisher, who at that point was publishing probably 20 or 30 different authors, had any of us who were at that convention to lunch at a restaurant. And it was my first time meeting her. And, she was sitting right across from me at a long table, and sitting next to me was this woman who was an author, who said, "I was at one of those tables the other day, and I think I know how that trick is done. I think it's always gonna be king of diamonds." And I said, "Oh really? Let's just do it." And I pulled it out, and I did it for her, and it ended up being the king of spades. And she was blown away.

And she yelled across the table to the publisher, "You've got to see this trick!" And the way I had set up B'Wave was I had it in a little packet. It was sort of like a Himba wallet, where I would just, you know, flip it and no one realized I flipped it. And I had a whole different set of cards there. And I did it for the publisher. And as luck would have it, she landed on king of diamonds, which I was able to say to her, that's amazing. I know why you thought of king of diamonds, because you designed the cover of the first book, the ambitious card. And every character in that book, everyone who dies, dies with the king of diamonds on them.

And wouldn't it be weird if that was the card that was face up here, hey, open it up, and there's the king of diamonds, and hey, all the other cards are blank. And her mouth was agape, and the woman next to me was freaked out because she just had a black card and this woman had a red card. And the publisher said, "I would publish any book of yours right this minute." She was so excited by that. And it's the perfect trick, because I can do it in 2 minutes. I can relate it to the books. I've had the distinct advantage of having magicians like Max Maven, Eugene Burger, and John Carney offer me nuances on it. Also, Suzanne also had some things on it.

So that's the magic community. You can learn a trick and have the best magicians in the world go, "That's great, but I think it's better if it's 3 cards down." "You know, when I do it, I use the rubber band." "No. No. If you say it this way, they'll never do." I mean, what other profession are the people so open and so generous that, you know, a schmuck like me off the streets who can just do that one trick can get training from that level of magician. It's it's just phenomenal.

Max Maven's B'Wave or B-Wave is the most commercially successful packet trick ever reportedly, and you received personal instruction from Max Maven himself. That's pretty remarkable, John.

Well, here's the thing. Here's the thing. I can't remember the wording exactly because he shot me down on one thing. What's weird is we were doing the show called Sunday Night Magic where we're every month, we bring in a different magician into town and, because they're all Suzanne's friends. They would do a lecture in the afternoon at a local magic shop, and then we had a public performance that night for about a 100 people. So I'm picking these people up at the airport. So I'm picking up Max Maven at the airport. And as we're driving into town, I'm saying, "So I do it, and this is a problem I have," which he wasn't able...

He just disagreed with me. I said, "You know, I hold up the cards, and they always say this thing." He said, "No. They'll never say that." "That's all they always say to me." He had some other ideas, and then when I talked to Eugene, again, same situation, driving him into town or having dinner with him or something. And he said, "No. No."

"I do it this way." And then he also said, which I think is so funny, he said, "And if I know I'm doing it for magician, I preset the deck so I can show them everything, all the cards. And it totally freaks them out because they think there's gonna be some trick card in there, and and there isn't." So anyway, yeah. It's the only one I do. Suzanne has taught me a very clever Cards Across that I'm able to do that I did for a group of 6th graders who were just burning me the entire time, but it worked out fine. But like most amateur magicians, I don't have an audience. If I'm going to a book thing, I can do B'Wave 10 times in a day, maybe.

Other than that, I have no outlet for performing, so why would I bother trying to learn it if I can never do it? Because I'm only gonna get better at it if I can do it a lot, and I just can't do it a lot.

We're talking about the Eli Marks mysteries. Can you tell us about the prequel for middle grade readers? What motivated you to write for that younger audience?

You know, I mentioned my interest in Encyclopedia Brown and mysteries you can solve yourself. And, you know, there are 2 kinds of mysteries. There are the ones you can solve, where the clues are there, and if you're clever, you can figure them out. And then there's ones that they don't really ever expect you you to solve. I think the guys who edited Ellery Queen said, "We don't really expect people to be able to solve this. You have to be a super genius." We watch a lot of British mystery things in this house, like Midsummer Murders and Inspector Lewis and all that. And they're mysteries, but they're not mysteries you can solve, because the key piece of information they get at the 11th hour, and they solve it that way.

But there are mysteries you can solve. You can figure them out. And that's what I wanted, and I wanted to find a way to bring young readers into Eli Marks. There's nothing inappropriate in the books, I don't think, but they are a little tiny bit grown up. You know, if you're 15, 16, you're probably fine. If you're 12, you're gonna be a probably precocious 12-year-old reading it. So I thought, "Why don't I do my own version of Encyclopedia Brown?" And the book is called "The Curious Mysteries of Eli Marks." And in it, it is a prequel in that we meet Eli at age 13.

His parents have recently died. He has just moved in with his uncle Harry and his aunt Alice, who he doesn't know. He's starting a new school, and he knows nothing about magic, but he happens to live with one of the greatest magicians in the world, and they live above a magic shop. And so over the course of 10 short chapters, he learns some magic from Harry. He gets integrated into school. And he also solves 10 mysteries that the reader can solve with him, where at a certain point, somebody says, "Well, we're gonna take that kid away because he did it." And Eli says, "No, he didn't do it and I can prove it." And at that point, the book stops and you turn the page and there's a big question mark and it says, how did Eli know that Simon didn't do it? And so you take a second and then you turn the page And Eli gives his explanation, which was fair and completely in keeping with the information you've already heard.

And then it wraps up the story, which is something that always bothered me. I'm gonna go off on a rant here on Encyclopedia Brown, because Encyclopedia Brown did the same thing up to that point. How did Encyclopedia know? You turn to the back of the book, and there's one little short paragraph that said, "He knew because the phase of the moon would not have allowed enough light for Bugs Meany to have seen that and when confronted by it, Bugs admitted it and gave the money back," or whatever it is. But he never really wraps up the story. It's just this little stupid tiny, tiny recap. So I wanted each one of the stories to have a beginning, middle, and end to have a mystery to solve. And then, because he's learning 10 tricks across the course of the book, I wanted the last half of the book to be Uncle Harry teaching you, the reader, those same ten tricks. And I wanted to make sure they're all doable and that it didn't require buying anything special.

You know, you're using a quarter and a salt shaker, or you're using a handkerchief or whatever, so that someone who's reading it, boy or girl, can read it and go, "Oh, I love this. Oh, I wanna try these magic tricks." And then at that point, the back of the book says, "Here's a couple more short stories, Eli, more grown up." You can read those for free if you want. And then you kind of you funneled them in, and that was the idea. And it was really fun to do. It was hard because it's hard in any case coming up with a mystery for Eli Marks to come up with 10 of them that had really relatable clues in them. The whole thing did take more than a year to do, but it was worth it.

And then also getting the tricks described properly and getting the drawings done, and it's it's a whole deal.

Your illustrator for the book was Ever Elizalde, certainly no stranger to the magic community.

I wrote to Richard Kaufman. Again, it's magic world. You can approach anybody. And I said, "Who do you get for illustrations?" And he said, "It's this guy. "And I emailed him, and he said, "Absolutely." They were fairly cheap because I was able in every instance, because these are ten pretty common tricks. I was able to find existing images of each of the steps so I could send him those, and he was just redrawing it based on the image. Would have been much more expensive if he had to come up with them out of the clear blue sky.

But it was not a difficult process. It was just a long process. And also when I was done with that, I sent that section of the book to David Parr and then, also to Tyler Erickson, who's here in the Twin Cities as a genius magician. And they both gave me notes on, you know, "Change this word to this, change that to that. In order to do that trick, you have to do this first." So, I mean, it's kind of embedded by real magicians.

Just a reminder that you can be notified when new episodes of this podcast are published by subscribing to the email alerts. You'll find all the details on the website at TheMagicBookPodcast.com, which is where you can also find transcripts, plus accompanying blog posts with summaries, timestamps, and links to resources mentioned in each episode. Thanks. Well, John, in addition to writing the books, you co-host "Behind the Page: The Eli Marks Podcast." Now, at the time we're recording this, you've just published episode number 416. Your co-host is the series audiobook narrator, Jim Cunningham. I've listened to three of the audiobooks, and Jim does a great job of capturing the nuances of all the different characters. How did you first meet Jim?

I met Jim back when I was doing corporate events. I worked for a company that did the meetings and shows and videos here in the Twin Cities. And Jim, like many, was a local voice talent and actor. He came in to audition for something, and he was so exceptional. The producer turned to me and said, "What do you think?" And I said, "I think we should hire him. I think we should keep hiring him until we can't afford to hire him any more." And so Jim and I knew each other from corporate events for about 30 years. And Jim was the one who sort of piqued my interest in magic, because he was learning magic at the time from Eugene, and every time I would see Jim and I would see Jim at an event, he had a little tiny leather ball that he would be French dropping all over the place as he was practicing that, and that sort of got me interested.

And then I wrote the first book, and he came to me and said, "You know, we can do audio books. It's not that difficult. You can produce them yourself." And because I was in the audiovisual industry, I knew how to do that. And so he started being the narrator of the books, and he is a terrific narrator. He is a fantastic narrator. He is the voice of Eli Marks, and he's done a terrific job on all the books. And then we hit COVID, and we're sitting around.

I had just done a big project a couple years before with a bank client, and they'd done a ton of research on free. What does free mean? How do people react to free? And in the publishing industry, there's a whole school of thought that says either if you have a series of books, you give your first book away for free or for 99¢, or you have a book, a novella you give away free, and that's how you get people's emails, and that's how you keep in contact with them, and that's how you build your audience. Free. Free. Free. So I thought, "Well, I have 9" at that point, 8. We had 8 at that point, audiobooks of Eli Marks. And I'm a big fan of podcasts, which is, how I found your podcast.

Like, oh, wow. Cool. And there were things I liked about podcasts and things I didn't like. And I thought, "Why don't we do one where every episode, over 24 episodes a year, we'll just give away one chapter? Jim and I will do some sort of introduction, and you can listen, you know, twice a month. By the end of the year, you've heard the whole book." And I thought, "Well, if I'm gonna do that, I should probably do, like, oh, let's just do little short interviews with magicians. Let's do 5 minutes with Max Maven or 5 minutes with Mike Caveney or something.

And then I thought, "Well, if I'm going to go to the trouble to get him on the phone or on Zoom or whatever, I should make it a more more thing." And there's a lot of times when there's something going on in that chapter that we can tie into, so I'll do that. And before you know it, we're doing 24 episodes a year with 24 different interviews. The 1st year, we had, like, Dick Cavett and Kreskin and David Regal. I mean, it's gone on and on and on. David Williamson's been on a couple of times. Harrison Greenbaum has been on twice. And so we just talked to people who had great stories about either life and magic or something very specific that was related to that chapter, and it just took off.

I thought we'll do 1 year and see how that goes, and it went really well. And we did the 2nd book the 2nd year. And then life got in the way, so the 3rd year, we just did 12 episodes, which worked well because the book we picked is a book of short stories. And now we're in our 4th season and starting to record the 5th season.

Well, your podcast guest list over 400 episodes definitely reads like a 'who's who' of the magic community.

Just about everybody we've asked to be on it, with a couple exceptions that we can't quite get through to them, has said yes. When they've said no, they've said it very nicely. Had one of the nicest noes from Andy Nyman in the history of refusals, and I certainly don't blame him. Jim and I get together. We banter for a bit. We run the interview. We talk about the interview. We run the chapter, and that's it.

And it's set up so that you as a listener can listen to the whole thing. It's all indexed. If you want to just listen to the interview, you can jump to that. If you want to just listen to the chapter, you can jump to that. We're gonna keep going, at least through season 5, and and see how it goes.

That's great. And, John, is there another Eli Marks mystery in the works?

Well, I always hesitate to do this because then someone yells at you later and says, but you said, I'm starting work on what I think will be the 10th book in the series. There are things I get the most requests for when people say, "Hey, you should put Eli at a trade show in Vegas, a cruise ship, and then the biggest one is always The Magic Castle. And he has already gone to The Magic Circle in "The Linking Rings," and I felt confident writing that because I've been to The Magic Circle, like, a dozen times. So I knew my way around the building. I understood the vibe of the place, the type of people there. I totally got that. I've never been to The Magic Castle and have stayed away from writing about Eli going there just because you can't write it unless you really know it. But as it turns out, it's magic world.

And I know someone who really does know it, who's also a writer. So we're talking about doing the 10th book together, and it would be Eli at the magic castle.

Interesting. So a co-authored novel?

Yeah. We'll see. We're gonna test the waters and see what happens.

Well, John, the first Eli Marks mystery was published in August 2013. How has your relationship with the magic community evolved over the last 11 years?

Well, I had no real relationship except that I knew a bunch of magicians. You know, then I went to, like, the Genii convention and got a sense of them there. And then as the books have been coming out, you start getting emails and be able to communicate with people. It's starting to get through a bit. Jim and I went to AbraCORNdabra this last summer in Iowa. First time I've gone to a magic convention as a book dealer, and we had a table set up. It was just Eli Marks. And it was surprising because, 1, a lot of magicians came by, and that was the only audience there.

The only magicians came by and said, "Oh wow, I love Eli Marks. This is great." You had that contingent, "So great to see you here. Oh, I'm missing that book. Let me buy that." You had a second contingent, which was, "What is this? Oh, it's Eli Marks series. Yeah."

"I have heard about that. Yeah. Just give me all 9 books." People collect, and then boom! Nine books gone. And then there was a very small contingent that would come by and say, "Oh, I love this. The Zombie Ball. Great.

"Is this gonna teach me every single version of the Zombie Ball routine?" And you go, "Not gonna teach anything about the Zombie Ball. It's hardly in it at all. The name of the event that Eli's had is called the Zombie Ball in that book." And they just couldn't get their minds around. "What? But it says the name of a trick, and I wanna learn a trick." So I think that was a pretty good encapsulation of my relationship with the magic community. There's a certain number of people who love it and wait for the each new book. There's a certain that have heard of it and would probably love everything out of it and then a certain contingent.

"Is that a trick? I'll buy that."

During the course of writing the Eli Marks mysteries, have you learned anything about magicians that really surprised you?

You know, I don't think this is necessarily a surprise, but it did reinforce my original supposition, which was that on the whole, magicians are really smart, a little on the neurotic side, and have as Eli's ex-wife says throughout the series, they have a weird way of looking at the world, and that makes them really interesting and sometimes really annoying. One of the magicians I met early on in my magic booking days when I was doing corporate events, I said, "How's it going?" And he said, "I always love magic. I sometimes love magicians." And as with any community, you know, sometimes you need to step back from it a little bit. But I stand by my original hypothesis, which is this is a great character because he's an interesting guy with interesting ideas who finds himself in interesting situations.

Well, this is The Magic Book Podcast. So, John, in the course of researching and writing the Eli Marks Mysteries, have you acquired any magic books?

Early on, quite a few. I try to do it less and less just because, like I say, I'm not a magician. So what's the point, really? You know, early on for the first book, I definitely read Corinda's "Thirteen Steps [to Mentalism]." For the second book, "The Bullet Catch," I read "Twelve Have Died. "A book that I returned to again and again and again was Darwin Ortiz's "Designing Miracles," because there's so much theory in there. And he's been called out a lot of times in Eli Marks books, because Eli or uncle Harry will say something about the way Ortiz talked about time misdirection or spatial misdirection or that sort of thing. And that ties into a lot of the crimes. That they are based on that same principle of misdirection.

Early on, I wanted the third book to be called "The Trick That Cannot Be Explained." And to place that in a time, the publisher said, "No, you can't call it that because that title is too long for me to tweet." So I had to rethink that book and that became "The Miser's Dream," but I loved the concept of the trick that can't be explained. And I think it's mentioned in "Stars of Magic." I know that Eric Mead had it in his book, "Tangled Web." And then it's really, really, really explained in one of the, final books of Eugene Burger that came out after he died. So I did end up writing a a short story in the 8th book. That book is called "The Self-Working Trick."

And the trick that came out to be explained is in that Eli has to learn that trick overnight. I was very fortunate in that I used what I knew from "Stars of Magic" and Eric Mead to write that, because then when you get to Eugene Burger and he explains how he did it, you go, "Wow, that's about as foolproof as you can make it. I'm glad Eli didn't learn that, because he wouldn't have been as nervous as he was in the story, because he was he was just terrified of it." I know that earlier when I was much younger, I remember reading "Flim-Flam" by James Randi. And then more current ones that I've just found fascinating, Morgan and West, the the late Morgan and West. Their book, "Parlor Magic," and the way they think about magic, has just been very helpful just organizing Eli's brain, Nick Diffatte's book "Offbeat", and his thoughts on comedy magic have been really, really helpful. Handsome Jack's book, I think it might just be "About Handsome Jack," was just a great lesson in how freaking obsessive people can be because John Lovick is many, many things. Obsessive is one of them, particularly when he taught himself how to draw.

Yeah. Those are the ones that pop up. I know that early on, I I devoured "Beating A Dead Horse: The Jay Marshall Story," that Sandy Marshall wrote. Seriously, the most information I got was from a defunct podcast called The Magic Newswire that Dodd Vickers did, in which it alternated between him doing really in-depth interviews with magicians, and Todd is very knowledgeable and was asking a lot of really good questions. And then every other week or so, they would do, and this is pre-Zoom, so I think they were doing it by phone when they did it, sort of a magician's round table with Scott Wells. That's how I met Scott. And David Kaye. That's how I met David.

And a couple other people, including Dodd, where they just got on the phone and talked about what was going on in their lives, which is a huge help because you just learn all the dumb things that magicians have to deal with on a day-to-day basis. And one way or another would all end up in the Eli books.

Excellent. For a non-magician, you have a very interesting bookshelf. That's a nice selection.

Well, I, you know, I had to curate. Yeah. The problem that I had was I didn't know what I was researching. I wasn't looking for a specific thing early on. Sometimes, you know, it's like, if the book's called "The Miser's Dream," I'm looking for Miser's Dream stuff. But in general, I don't know what I'm looking for until I hear it. I don't know until I read somewhere that there was a whole section in the library with a particular number for magic books. That comes up that's very handy to have, and I used it a couple times.

I'm not looking for that. I am just looking at this vast sea of things that I'm reading or a podcast that I'm listening to. I mean, I still listen to magic podcasts just in case something I go, oh, that's a good thing to know.

That's a

good thing to know.

Mhmm. That's you

know, I wouldn't have known to look for that, yet I'm thrilled that I have it.

Finally, what advice would you give to aspiring authors who want to write about magic or magicians who'd like to write mysteries?

Okay. If you're a magician writing a mystery, remember the vast majority of mystery readers aren't magicians, and that's the audience you're writing for unless you just want magicians to pick it up. When the publisher picked up the ambitious card, my first book, and said, this is great. We have a built in audience of magicians, I cautioned her and said, I don't think that percentage wise, you know, if you look at the number of people in the world and the percentage that like mysteries, that percentage is gonna be the same. When you look at all the magicians, that percentage of how many are gonna like a mystery novel is gonna be the same. I mean, they don't necessarily wanna read about magic, so don't assume that all magicians are gonna want that. So while Eli Marks I think, definitely appeals to magicians who are interested in mysteries, the main audience is always mystery readers, and you have to keep that in mind and not overfeed them with things. If you wanna write a book about magic and you're not a magician, I'll just say you have a lot of homework to do to make sure you're not writing a book that someone is gonna throw across the room because they get so angry at

it because of how

dumb it is.

Yeah. Perfect. John, how can the listener find out more about your Eli Marks Mysteries and listen to the podcast?

You know, the simplest thing to do is to go to the website where you can find the books. We also have some free books you can look at to kinda get up to speed on Eli Marks if you want. The podcast is there. It's all there at EliMarksMysteries.com. That's EliMarksMysteries.com.

Great conversation. John, thank you so much for being my guest on The Magic Book Podcast.

Thanks, Adrian. It's really been fun.

In this episode, we learned about John Gaspard's journey into the world of magic through his writing, the creation and evolution of the Eli Marks series, and John's continuing immersion within our community through his podcast, Beyond the Page. We also heard how John keeps general readers in mind as he's describing magic effects, and learned about his approach to research, plotting, and writing each Eli Marks mystery. I hope you enjoyed hearing about John's contributions to magic in mystery fiction as much as I did discussing them with him. You'll find the transcript accompanying this episode on the website at TheMagicBookPodcast.com, plus a blog post with a summary, time stamps, and links to the books John mentioned. If you have a question or would like to suggest a topic for a future episode, please contact me, adrian@TheMagicBookPodcast.com. Thank you for listening to The Magic Book Podcast. I've been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next time.

Goodbye.