The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – A Town’s Nightmare by Alan R Martin

Episode Date: September 9, 2024

A Town's Nightmare by Alan R Martin https://amzn.to/3AVSEIZ Pastor Albert mentioned a minister who was slain in 1847 after changing the proclamation of religious beliefs in 1839. He was educated and tortured during his tenure in his last days. The man changed indoctrination from Catholic to Protestant. This was when the frightful adventure started, in 1847, and his name was Pastor Matthew. Hendrick Elias Leckner was a former pastor of the Catholic faith, the one who made a pact with the devil in 1817. "If someone changed their faith, then I give intermission for the devil to extinguish ten people in a two-week period every ten years." And he sold his soul for this admonishment, an agreement between him and the devil.

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Go to Goodreads.com, 4chesschristin.com for chris voss chris voss won the tiktokity and all those crazy places on the internet as always we have the most amazing authors on the show coming out with the most amazing books and the great stories that you want to share whether they're non-fiction or fiction they're just going to amaze you and blow your minds today we have alan a i'm sorry alan r martin on the show with us today his latest book is out january 9th 2023 called a town's nightmare which i believe is a biography on me growing up in my town and city terrorizing it no i'm just kidding that's not what it's about it's a novel about whatever we're going to get into what it's about alan is a grew up his mother was german

and his father was irish he met his mother he didn't meet his mother but his father met his mother while stationed in germany as a soldier in the army growing up on the base he usually played sports he got into writing and retired from the state of missouri now that and he doesn't necessarily call himself a writer but he has no formal training in journalism or any type of editing. He's never been to college or held a job around in English courses or extensive writing. He usually calls himself a storyteller. My education, or his education, I'm converting this here, to third party, extends to a high school diploma in trade classes. And his experience is in the form of electrical, heating, cooling, welcome to the show alan how are you oh just peachy keen there peachy

keen you gotta love being peachy keen that's the best way to be you might be the first person to come on the show in 16 years 2000 episode who said they are peachy king maybe that maybe there should be a keen maybe that should be entitled for your next book or something peachy king maybe that maybe there should be a keen maybe that should be entitled for your next book or something peachy king the murder in in uh westminster i don't know sound like a good time well maybe maybe in a uh maybe in a peach orchard you never know put it in put in georgia they like peaches down there so give us your dot coms where can people find you on the interweb, sir? Yeah, they can find me on the website at AlanRMartinAuthor.com. And give us a 30,000 overview. This is your second book that you've put out, correct?

Right. Give us a 30,000 overview, if you would, please. 30,000 overview? You know, just a general, what the hell did you write here? I'm just kidding. Oh. What's in the book? What's in the book?

I actually started out as a short story, and I was writing short stories. And you got to get a certain amount of short stories, the number of them, to actually make a book. That's true. Lots of short stories. Yeah. I mean, you can range anywhere from about 10 pages to about 25 pages. But, hey, that's a short story. Okay?

So you have to, if you don't have nothing else to write about it, you just go on to the next story this story was actually wrote with the short stories and before i knew it i had about 25 pages of it and i just got up started thinking about it and said i think i want to make a novel out of this oh so it took me probably a couple of years to write this. It's very intense. You have a lot of actors in here, which sometimes people, I get confused on the years and sometimes on the characters. Because you got, I think I listed about over 20 characters in that story. Oh, wow. In the book?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's in the book. Yeah, I had to make a cast of characters in the back. And I gave them a job description and the page number where they were first found. With that said, time periods, I had to actually create the time periods because this actually kind of told stories going backwards. So in 1857, they told stories all the way back to, they mentioned, 1815. But it was a short story. Short story.

So in your new book, give us an overview of A Town's Nightmare. How would you describe this in kind of a short summary so that people can kind of get an idea of what's inside. If they like suspense and mystery, that it actually kind of starts out that way. But the page on, I think it was page five or something, that the first murder was actually committed. And this was a butcher in a shop, and his wife was calling for him. And he was up there on the rafters, hung, with his eyes out.

Oh, so he was dead, huh? Yeah. And anyway, she started screaming in the town, which woke up the citizens. And they wanted to see what all the commotion was about. So the sheriff, they had a sheriff, believe it or not. It was a population of 327 people. They did have a sheriff, and I'll get into that later. Okay.

And so it's a mystery then. We know that. What made you want to write the book? What motivated you about the story? How did it come to you? I wanted to write something that put fear in the people. I wanted to fear the bejeebies out of them. All right.

That's the reason why the book, it actually mentions there was a curse on that town, and the curse was basically brought on by the Baptist, which when he passed away in 1817, he went ahead and made the bargain with the dark one. Oh, the devil that if anybody changes this denomination, my Catholic denomination, to any other denomination, I give you, it's like I give you a promise, you know, that you have. That's a bad word. But anyways, he allowed the devil to go ahead and every 10 years, go ahead and take 10 people. Oh, really? From his congregation? Yeah. Yeah.

It was basically because even after he was dead, the curse still lingered on. Oh, really? That's a hell of a curse. Yeah. The devil, he's going to take whatever he can. So if he made this, I could put it in better words if I look at something. Let me see something here. I don't know where in the heck I put it.

Oh, here it is. The story tells about the townspeople and the curse that was released upon it in the late months of 1839, when Pastor Matthew made an announcement to the congregation that he suggested and wanted to change the denomination from Catholic to Protestant, that was when the terror began its countdown. So do you like writing for terror? For horror?

Scary? Let's say it's an influence. An influence. Yeah. I can write some other stuff, but to me it's kind of boring. Ah, kind of boring. So tell us a little bit about yourself and your words. I kind of covered some of it in the bio, but people like to hear it from the author themselves.

Tell us a little bit about how you grew up. When did you get interested in writing short stories? When did you get interested in writing books? When I retired from the state of Missouri. That's a funny question. Were you writing up until then? No, no, no. Were you writing kind of like some people write as kids or something.

They'll have some early influences. No, no, no. Nothing like that. It was actually the opposite. Oh, really? Yeah. When I retired at 58 and a half, I took their retirement plan. 58 and a half, you started writing.

Yeah, no. I started writing about six months later because during that six-month time, I didn't know what to do with myself. So I said, what is it? What is there that I need help with? I wanted to get some help with some kind of a category. And I said to myself, how about words?

So when I started playing around with words, I started to realize that I was actually on pen and the notepad when I was writing some of these short stories. Because I didn't have a computer at the time. And anyways, that's how I started. And it was probably about another six months before I started getting a little more confidence on what I was writing. And you're going to spend probably six to eight months before I started creating writing and that's the reason why the first book Windows Open has got like over 33 short stories oh wow because I you know I just

I couldn't carry on from the story that I told oh yeah so're able to, your first book was a book of short stories. This one's a full-length novel, correct? Yeah. And you started writing in 58. Congratulations. That's, you know, everyone has a restart date. You know, I think KFC, the guy who made KFC chicken started in his 50s. Oprah, I think, started in her 50s. There's a lot of, there's a lot of people who started their most successful projects

late in life. Good for you, man you thanks yeah what do you love about writing what is it what does it do for you what do you enjoy i and what i enjoy about it is the possibilities of creating something new and different so they say i have my quite a few people out there that say i have my own way of writing that's unique and i say i'm not a writer so you you're calling me a writer and i'm not a writer you have a books you have two books out i you i think you're a writer at this point if we can officially well actually i got three books out now okay see now even more you're a writer yeah yeah a lot of stories found is the third book yeah but we're going to talk about the second book right we're talking about a town's nightmare right yeah yep anyways to

verify a few things that i left out on this town, and I'll give some insight to it. Is that for Bishop Hendrick Elias Lechner, that's the Catholic priest, made a pact with the devil in the month of April, and the year was 1817. He was a devoted Catholic and his beliefs were strictly to the Catholic faith. And his secretariat, of course. This bishop was so obsessed with his philosophical doctrine that he made this sacrifice

to the dark spirit of lies. Wow. Yeah, this agreement to the dark spirit of lies. Oh, wow. Yeah, this agreement allowed the devil to terrorize the people in the town. Yeah, I got trouble reading between the lines. Yeah. So is there a protagonist in the book that they've got to figure all this stuff out and all that stuff and do battle to win whatever yeah it's what i call a a theme of fear birth and unity huh and the unity comes in because the townspeople got together as a group. And they didn't.

They've really never done that before because they had to come as a group and collect information and see what was actually transpiring and if they knew anything about the victims. And they never caught the or even seen. They seen a back side of him as he entered through a wall

oh killer? yeah so he's actually what I call let me see here no he's actually called what I call him is the Angel of Death. Ah, the Angel of Death.

That definitely is a killer. Yeah. I don't want to meet that guy anytime soon. That's my policy. That's my policy. I'm not returning his calls, and I don't answer the door. That's what I do. In your book're you're writing

in the novels of course there's not much we can give away because we want people to order the book and find out the plot and all that sort of good stuff and the what do you hope people come away with in the book what do you hope that they maybe learn from it or maybe they're entertained or what do you hope people come away with the book after they read it i think a little bit of history and some of its education that actually happened in in 1850s but there is one error i made in there and i i should correct it when i mentioned the Colt 51 Colt that the sheriff had with a six-shooter, no, it wasn't. Uh-oh. It was a cap and ball because they didn't come out with the six-shooter until in the 60s. You're probably going to get some emails on that.

I don't know. I might now because I told everybody about everybody about it yeah you might do that you know it's funny we have so many novelists on the show like yourself they write books and and they're they're they'll always tell me they're like it's funny my audience will find all the mistakes and errors in the book and they'll write me and tell me about them or sometimes they'll tell me stuff that they think about the characters like one of my my good friends, Jay Jantz, is on the show later. She has about, I don't know, 80 or 90 books now. Wow.

Yeah, she's a really successful novelist. She's been doing it for, I think, 40 or 50 years. Wow. So she was telling me that one of her characters drank, and he was a detective. And she didn't realize it, but her audience did. Her audience would come to her at book events and say, do you realize that your protagonist, your sheriff guy, is that's drinking all the time?

He's an alcoholic. You realize that, don't you? And she had had an alcoholic first husband. And she didn't realize that she basically blueprinted that. But she didn't realize that her character was an alcoholic first husband and she didn't realize that she basically blueprinted that but she didn't realize that her character was an alcoholic her audience did and so then she had to realize that hey he really is an alcoholic and he started writing that he's an alcoholic so it's kind of funny how the audience tends to chime in on these things and and and make things better for the authors. Yeah.

I guess you got to just tell it like it is, you know. Tell it like it is. Like the character, you know. You got to, in my book, it's basically, everything's all dreamed up, imagination, you know. So I had to create these characters. I had to come, you know, give them names. And I had to go ahead and basically give them what type of work they were doing in town.

So, with that said, I had to create them and I had to make them look, oh, let's say, effective. Make them look effective. Yeah. Good stuff. So, what are some of the things that you've enjoyed and maybe favorite scenes that are in your novel oh the favorite scenes there were some times when they found gerald see most of those those murders were actually like duplicated to what kind of craftsmen they were and gerald he was hung in his own barn and he was he was actually a butcher right okay yeah the second one was a guy named oh i got hank

on my mind but he's third the second one was you know i can't I'll get back to that one. Okay. The third one was Hank, and he was in the barber shop, and he was basically somewhat mutilated in his own barber chair. Ow, that's going to leave a mark. Yeah. Yeah, and this is the, oh, I don't know, the, if any word that would actually describe that, a good word, efficient word. Huh. But it's like, it's something I actually invented. The word? To go ahead and make sure that it was actually.

As we go out, give people, and I pitch to pick up the book, order it wherever fine books are sold. And your.coms, where can people find you on the interwebs? Yeah, of course I'm at Barnes & Noble and Amazon. And there are a few bookstores, which I have listed, but I didn't have it ready for the program. People can find it, they can search your stuff online. Alan, it's been wonderful to have you on the show to talk about your amazing book and your insights. I think everyone's going to be excited to pick it up, read it,

and get involved with it and all that good stuff. Did we get your.com? I can't remember if we got the.com there. Yeah, you got my website. Okay. And that will be on the show as well, so people can check that out there. Thank you very much for coming on the show as well so people can check that out there

thank you very much for coming on the show we really appreciate it man yeah I'm kind of got to excuse me on my how slow I go I got this busting headache behind my head oh check it out folks wherever fine books are sold

The Town's Nightmare out January 9th 2023 Alan R. Martin has been on the show with us today we certainly appreciate it Oh, check it out, folks. Wherever fine books are sold. The Town's Nightmare, out January 9th, 2023. Alan R. Martin has been on the show with us today. We certainly appreciate it. Thanks for joining us for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, 4Chess, Chris Voss, linkedin.com, 4Chess, Chris Voss. Chris Voss, one of the TikTok, and all those crazy places on the internet. Thanks for tuning in.

Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time. And that should have us out at...