The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Lost Man’s Lane: A Novel by Scott Carson

Episode Date: March 21, 2024

Lost Man's Lane: A Novel by Scott Carson https://amzn.to/3IP6pdq A teenager explores the darkness hidden within his hometown in this spellbinding supernatural thriller from bestselling author Scott Carson. For a sixteen-year-old, a summer internship working for a private investigator seems like a dream come true—particularly since the PI is investigating the most shocking crime to hit Bloomington, Indiana, in decades. A local woman has vanished, and the last time anyone saw her, she was in the backseat of a police car driven by a man impersonating an officer. Marshall Miller’s internship puts him at the center of the action, a position he relishes until a terrifying moment that turns public praise for his sharp observations and uncanny memory into accusations of lying and imperiling the case. His detective mentor withdraws, friends and family worry and whisper, and Marshall alone understands that the darkness visiting his town this summer goes far beyond a single crime. Now his task is to explain it—and himself. Lost Man's Lane is a coming-of-age tale of terror that proves why its author has been hailed as “a master” by Stephen King and one who consistently offers “eerie, gripping storytelling” by Dean Koontz. About the author Scott Carson is the pen name of Michael Koryta, a New York Times bestselling author whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages, adapted into major motion pictures, and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A former private investigator and reporter, his writing has been praised by Stephen King, Michael Connelly, and Dean Koontz, among many others. Raised in Bloomington, Indiana, he now lives in Indiana and Maine.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com.

The Chris Voss Show. There you go, ladies and gentlemen. There are many things that makes it official. Welcome to the show. We certainly appreciate you guys being here. Chris Voss, Facebook.com, 4chesschrisvoss, LinkedIn.com, 4chesschrisvoss, chrisvoss1 on the TikTokity, and chrisvossfacebook.com. We have an amazing multi-book author on the show. He's out with his, I believe, third book. It's called Lost Man's Lane. A novel. Comes out March 26, 2024.

Scott Carson joins us on the show. He's going to be talking about his latest book, what's inside of it, and why you should buy it now. Like, do it now. Do it now. Scott Carson is a New York Times bestselling author whose work has been translated into more than 20 languages, adapted into major motion pictures, and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He's a former private investigator and reporter.

His writing has been praised by Stephen King, Michael Connolly, and Dean Kuntz, among many others. He was raised in Bloomington, Indiana, and now lives in Indiana and Maine. Welcome to the show, Scott. How are you? I'm doing well. Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Give us your dot coms. Where do you want people to find you on the interwebs? Yeah, it's scottcarsonbooks.com and, you know, Facebook, Instagram, all those fun places as well. There you go. Now, do I have that count right? You've got three books out under the name Scott Carson. Okay. And then I have 14 under the name Michael Corita, K-O-R-Y-T-A, which is the Scott Carson thing came about because I sort of wanted to brand

off for the supernatural stuff, the thrillers that are more in like the Stephen King, Joe Hill vein. And then I also do some under the Corita name, I write more traditional detective novels, crime novels, things of that sort. And how many books do you have over there on that designation? The Corita side of things has 14 and Carson's lagging behind, but we're going to get him caught up here. There you go. There you go. Focusing on that. So do you flip back and forth between the two?

Do you put a book out here on one side and the book on the other? Yeah. So last year I had a book under the Corita name that was, as I said, more of a straightforward crime thriller. You know, no ghosts, nothing strange, no supernatural. And then this year it's a Scott Carson. And we've, you know know we've got it all in this one we have the detective element but we also have some nice you know ghosts spooky things and hopefully a lot of fun lost man's lane so give us a 30 000 overview a tease out if you would of

the book yeah it's set in bloomington indiana hometown in 1999. And he sees her in the back of a police car. When he identifies this police officer, it turns out that the cop doesn't exist. He's not really a member of the local police force at all. So that kind of kicks things into gear. And from there, it's, I would say a a hybrid of coming-of-age story and the supernatural thriller. There you go. Supernatural thriller. I imagine a lot of your influence seems to come from your locale of Indiana. So I guess you write what you know.

Yeah, you know, it's interesting that you mention that because this is the first book I've set in my hometown. Oh, really? And I was also, when I was in high school, I had an internship with this detective. I turned, that actually was my day job for a little while until, you know, I went into writing full time. And it seems like an obvious thing to write about it. You know, this, as you say, it's right where you know, and write about a place that you know. But it took me 20 years to actually come back. And then when I finally arrived back home, I even did that under a pseudonym. So there's an odd level of distance here for something so close. There you go.

It looks like your background being a detective or private investigator. Do I have the same thing, basically, or is there a difference? From a PI and a private detective? No. I mean, just different terminology. You never know, Dan. There's terms for everything now. And they're all unique.

It's like, don't call me this. Call me that. Let's see. So you were a former private investigator and reporter. Did you do newspaper reporting, TV? Yeah, I worked for a newspaper. Did police beat theirs? And some of the events that are in this book, as I mentioned, from 1999 to 2000,

and that was the era when I began to work at the newspaper. So one of the crimes that is sort of, it's not central to the book, but it was very central to the inspiration. There was a guy who came through my town and it was on the 4th of July in 99. His name was Ben Smith. And I don't know if you remember this guy, but he shot someone in Chicago, shot and killed the Northwestern basketball coach in Chicago, and then went on this multi-state race-based killing spree. And he passed through Bloomington and shot a Korean Indiana university student outside of a church.

And a few years later, when I was working at the newspaper and in the police beat, I ended up sitting down with the guy who was his inspiration, for of a better term his name was matt hale and that was just those crimes it was so shocking in this you know we weren't mayberry but i think there was the sense of being in a very safe community this bucolic sort of idyllic college town and so that that crime really it stuck with me and I wanted to come back and write about it, but not about that topic. You know, I didn't want to dig into, I didn't want to give a voice to the Matt Hale kind of movement. And what I wanted to do was capture this, you know, my town, the way I remembered it. And some of the questions that came out of that about you know the community and

okay was this was this guy homegrown or it was the threat coming at us from the outside and I wanted to explore all of that within this coming of age uh framework I've always loved books like you know the body which became stand by me, Stephen King, that's a big influence. And A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. So those seem like wildly different, but that same kind of idea. So it sounds like, I think we've had a few different authors on the show that also did beat reporting and newspaper reporting on what was going on with the police and their things. And likely, a lot of that exposure gives you a lot of material for stories and writing and suspense, I guess,

since some of it's trying to solve mysteries and puzzles and find criminals, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, without a doubt. I think the other thing that it brings is a discipline to the writing practice. You know, when you're in the newspaper business, no one is interested in hearing about your lack of inspiration or how you're waiting on the muse. You know, that doesn't fly when you go to press at 3 a.m. You know, I think writers who were very influential to me and became sort of mentor figures early on Michael Connelly and Laura Lipman were both you know beat reporters and I always admired those writers who

they were able to generate a book a year at a high quality and I do think there's something about having been in the newsroom having that background obviously it informs the work on a detail side but it's also just on the craft side you've got to show up every day and put down you know put down your words there you go there you know that's having that having that motivation and get things done is probably really important when you when you added tell us a little bit about how you grew up like what what motivated to want to get into writing? When did you know you were a writer, per se?

What were some of the influences that got you there as you were raised as a child? You know, I think I wanted to be a writer from the moment I understood you could make a living doing it. Like, once I understood that could be a job, it's what I wanted to do. And within this genre in particular, my father was a big film noir fan. So you think Humphrey Bogart and those Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade kind of movies, Alfred Hitchcock, stuff like that. He was very into those older films. So I would say I probably was driven to this genre as a writer more from movies than books even at an early age and then what were some movies that influenced you if you can recall any yeah absolutely i mean really the the one that stands out to me is the big sleep

and key largo both bogart movies but you know they just had that great, it's very noir, very of its time period, but Key Largo really stands out. For whatever reason, I was very young when I saw that, and that one lingers. All the Hitchcock stuff, too. And then I was probably way too young when I saw The Shining. I think I was maybe 10 or 11. But that one made an impression that The Shining I think I was maybe 10 or 11 but that one

made an impression that The Shining and Jaws are the lasting memories for me there you go I'm a big bogey fan I still think he's one of the greatest actors in the world I I can watch bogey movies all day long absolutely Largo was so great the big sleep wasn't the big sleep was that the first one that he had his wife in or who eventually became his wife i think the very first one with lauren was to have and have not okay yeah that's right that's right and yeah yeah they were she's also she's in key largo too yeah yep the one thing i the one thing i hate is every time i watch the movies i see him smoking and i'm just like, dude, that's going to kill you.

And it did, yes, exactly. No one ever looked better smoking a cigarette, and it came for him. Yeah, but he was such a man's man. I got lucky enough recently, the local symphony here in Utah, they played the movie Casablanca, and it was so cool because they played the music through the movie and some of the sound effects. God, you listen to the movie, and I think you can hear sometimes in the sound the sparks in the track or whatever. And so listening to the fullness of a symphony behind it was just

amazing man that had to be it was that's a very cool idea too yeah it was like watching the movie like it is if it was produced now in black and white for fun you know like they do and but the sound just i mean just made the movie come alive in a whole new way for me. I've watched it like a billion times. Some of those influences for you, Jaws, of course, that thing, The Shining, that movie still freaks me out to this day. I still want a movie to watch.

Then I promptly went to read the book. That was my first Stephen King read. King has been a huge influence and also a really generous, unbelievably generous guy and supporter of younger writers, too. He is, I think,

he and Michael Connolly are just in a different league in terms of they're at a level where they don't have to worry about paying it forward. And yet that is such an important thing to those guys but king's so king's fiction was important then his book on writing i don't know if you ever read that that came out when i was like 18 years old and that was so helpful because it pulled the curtain back on you know know, what this guy was doing. And I loved how concrete it was.

He gets down into the nuts and bolts of, you know, just write clean sentences, write strong, cut out the adverbs. And to know that someone who has that level of imagination was also a craftsman who is, you know, going about it in the same way that I'm attempting to with my amateur efforts was unbelievably encouraging. It's a great book. Wow. Is that one on writing?

On writing, yes. There you go, 2010. I should check that book out because I'm trying to get my second book written. And it's nonfiction, so we're not writing the great novels you guys do. We're writing about stupid shit. You've got the background for it, though. book written and i'm it's non-fiction so we're not writing the great novels you guys do we're writing about you know stupid you've got the you've got the background for it though if you ever wanted to write a novel i mean i would think you have to have some stories to call on right definitely definitely we'd have the business stories to do it what's the what's the future

that you've got working on the book uh uh are you working on the other series or you see more coming out on this one or what's the future looking like for you yeah right now i'm working on a script actually for an adaptation of a book that came out last year that one was called an honest man and i'm working with the producers who did mayor of east town i don't know if you saw that really good show on hbo so i'm not a big tv watcher i just don't get time i'm a big podcaster podcaster and reader i like it there you go yeah i just don't i just don't find time to sit down and do the thing but reading is important right my audible just eats up i eat so much stuff between driving, going places, and the gym. I love Audible.

Yeah. I'm listening to a ton of books. In fact, I just heard you on, you were on Huberman's podcast not long ago. You might be thinking of the other Chris Voss. I'm the original Chris Voss. You're the original, okay. I'm the original Chris Voss. I started the Chris Voss brand 16 years ago.

Christopher Voss, if you pull his wiki page, his name is Christopher Voss, which he goes by. He hijacked our brand in 2016 because he had no followers and built his brand off of our brand. Well, already you've got another story. Yeah, I've got a lot of stories about that. I've got the emails telling him what a fucktard he was. Yeah.

Who knew people from the fbi were great thieves shocking right shocking i joke about the fbi we love the fbi i think we've got frank flaguzzi on again later this year any other tease outs you want to do to people about the book i know with novels we can't give too much about the middle and the ending of course any other tease outs you want to give out about the book yeah i would just just say I had more fun writing this one than anything else I've done. There was something about going back and writing that era of... 99 is such an interesting time capsule year in terms of I feel like we were right on the edge of a very different world and feeling very safe at that point in time. But one of the things

that I really enjoyed from a research standpoint was when you talk about Y2K now, almost everyone thinks that it was funny and nothing happened, you know, but it took billions of dollars for nothing to happen. And I didn't realize until I started the research on it, how deep into the Y2K prepper world some people went. And there's this culture of paranoia that I feel like we were just starting to edge up against that was right there. And I really enjoyed, research drives a lot of, you know, what I do. And going back to that era that era seeing you know from columbine to y2k the sort of increasing just american tension was was really interesting there you go do you think maybe that's what started the whole breaking of our innocence and going down the conspiracy

road where you know we we kind of live in a highly crazy conspiracy sort of world right now you know there's shortly after 1999 was you know the 9-11 and different things do you think that we you think maybe that was the beginning of i don't know the end or yeah that's that's exactly what it began to feel like to me. And it was perfect for this kind of coming of age book, because I think it was a moment of lost innocence. And I mentioned Columbine earlier, you know, that was April 99. Then you have, you know, 9-11. I think those are interesting bookends for,

and in the middle is the thing that didn't happen, but was deepening this sort of paranoia and maybe more of an insular i i don't know if i can trust the institution to protect me you know so there's that so i would say the opening of that door of conspiracy thinking and it's it wasn't in 99 but we're not long after waco either oh there are these different threads that were beginning to be pulled i think yeah it's interesting and that began the unraveling of of our mind and i don't know it's it yeah it's interesting you you you found that as a as marker point. I'm going to have to think about this some more because it's kind of weird how we've just become unraveled ever since

and it just doesn't seem to be getting any better. It seems like nowadays every time you go on Facebook or Twitter, there's a new conspiracy about everything. Oh, about everything. Exactly. It's hardly limited to the political sphere. There is someone with an alternate theory about everything and this sort of perpetual distrust that I think we might have been just arriving at the early days of that in that 99-2000 era.

That's also the moment when everything became we became so hyperconnected yeah started on the internet so you know there's a comedian that said one time i don't want to steal the material there's a comedian that said one time that before the internet stupid people and and it just you know they'd be in the park talking themselves yelling at themselves holding signs the world ends tomorrow and you know everyone just walked by and ignore them and be like or sometimes commit them to a crazy farm but the internet allowed all the crazy people to gather up get together and form groups and now we have the internet so it's funny you mention that because the guy i was talking about with the crime that went through bloomington in 99 the guy who was sort of behind

it, Matt Hale, who was this, I mean, just, you know, white supremacist lunatic that was currently in federal prison. But when I met with him as a reporter, he told me that where I saw him and his group as this fringe movement. I was failing to understand the reach of the internet. And the way he talked about it was essentially the public square was disappearing and people could stay within the privacy of their own home. They didn't need to go out and publicly identify with a movement or a theory yet, but they could still support it. And at that time, I think this interview would have been in 2000, yeah, 2000, maybe 2001. But at that time I thought, oh, this guy, there's no,

he's not right about this. And he was closer to right than I want him to be. You know, he was, in that regard, he was, he saw more of the internet than I did. He understood more of it. That's, that's amazing. And, you know, it, like recently with the Super Bowl thing with Taylor Swift, like I was just astounded at the stupidity of some of the conspiracy theories that got floated. It just became like, it seemed like it was never going to end. I'm like, Jesus, can we get this thing over with? Can't we just move along? Move along?

Like, you know, everything from, you know, if she's a robot or an alien from space, you know, just weird stuff that you're just like, and you're just like, seriously? She's just a young lady who plays music and she likes a guy in the NFL. I mean, can we just, you know, it's their own line that sometimes the simplest

things are the most true. But, you know, there's, I don't know. I think people want to believe. It's tough when professionally I'm supposed to be coming up with crazy plots and crazy people and now I can't outpace the news. Yeah, you can't beat the internet. But it's interesting. Well, it makes for good fodder for your books, so there you can't outpace the news. Yeah, you can't beat the internet.

But it's interesting. Well, it makes for good fodder for your books, so there you go. Give people the final pitch out to order up your book. Pick it up in.com so people can find you on the internet. Yeah, thank you. It's scottcarsonbooks.com or michaelcorita.com, K-O-R-Y-T-A. And the book is Lost Man's Lane Lane and that is out March 26th. There you go. And it's even billed at the top, A Master by Stephen King.

So you got the plug in there. That's awesome. Like I said, he is a generous guy. There you go. Order up the book, folks. Wherever fine books are sold, it's Lost Man's Lane. A novel by Scott Carson and it's available where you can get it on order on March 26, 2024.

So pre-order it now and be able to read it before everyone else in your book club does. Thank you very much for coming on the show, Scott. We really appreciate it. Thank you. My pleasure. Thank you. And thanks, Ron, for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, FortressCrispFoss, LinkedIn.com, FortressCrispFoss,

CrispFoss1, the TikTokity, and all those other crazy places on the internet. Thanks for tuning in. Be goodreads.com fortress chris foss linkedin.com fortress chris foss chris foss won the tiktokity and all those other 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 i should have a