Speaker 1: Is pet Life Radio. Let's talk pets. Welcome to Animal
Rights on pet Life Radio. That's your host, Tim Link,
and I'm super excited to have you here today. We've
got a good friend of the show, as they say,
a master novelist, a mystery writer, a thriller writer. He
wears a lot of different hats. And of course we're
talking about Jeffery D. Burton and his latest book, The
Boy in the Wall. Isn't it a crazy title?
Speaker 2: I want to dig into that and find out what
that's all about too.
Speaker 1: So we'll come back after this commercial break and talk
to Jeffery a little bit about the book, and then
we'll wrap it up with some of his writing. Masterful
ways he goes about doing things, so we can all
learn from the best. So everybody, hang tight. You are
listening to Animal Rights on pet Life Radio.
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Speaker 4: Let's talk pets on Petlifradio dot com.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to animals on pet Life Radio. Joining me
now is critically acclaimed mystery and thriller author Jeffrey B.
Burton in his laced book The Boy in the Wall. Jeffrey,
welcome back to the show.
Speaker 5: Oh, thanks, Tim, It's always a pleasure to be here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we're super excited about And I know we talked
last time about you rock and rolling on a new book,
and I don't recall the name of the book, which
I thought was very fascinating, The Boy in the Wall.
So tell us a little bit about the book and
then how that title came about.
Speaker 5: Yeah, basically, for folks that haven't read any of my books,
I have kind of made the human remains. The detection dogs,
cadaver dogs and their dog handlers are the protagonists when
you read a mystery, maybe the sheriff for you know,
the police chief for the FBI. They'll call in cadaver
dogs to search a field or you know, pond or
swamp or something, and they find the body and then
they go right back to the main stars. But in
my novels, it's the dog handler. And in The Boy
in the Wall, he's got Alice, which is an eighty
pound Bloodhound, and Rex, which is kind of a goofy
forty five pound Springer Spaniel and what came to me
the Boy in the Wall kind of not major spoiler
since it happens early on, but Corey Pratt is the
dog handler, and he's in his early twenties. There's been
a little bit of troma in his life. And his
sister is eight years older and she's a Chicago police
detective and he runs a dog obedient school, but he
also trains cadaver dogs, and so he gets peer pressured.
He gets his sister kind of pushes him into going
to a elementary school, you know, it's kindergarten through fifth
and kind of show the kids, you know, what dogs
can do, what commands they can follow, and just kind
of have fun and get them interested. And so he
goes and he does that and winds up doing okay,
And the principal brings him to the cafeteria afterwards to
have some treats and stuff. He's not going to turn
down that. And the school was remodeled, just completely remodeled
over the summer, and so he's having fun with the principal.
He's looking she bought some really fancy cookies. He's wondering
how he can sneak out half a dozen. And the
principal says to him, what are your dogs doing? And
he looks over and the bloodhound is sitting there and
facing the new cafeteria wall and kind of patting on
the ground, and the Springer Spaniel Rex is looking his way,
and I'm just about to start barking because they've alerted
him to something that is inside the wall.
Speaker 2: Oh boy.
Speaker 5: And that's where it begins. So fortunately the title the
Boy in the Wall doesn't five pages in, you're already okay,
no big spoiler alert.
Speaker 1: But still it jumps right, I mean to me, it
jumps right at you. The title self explanatory. So I
was assuming you didn't have a hook from that angle.
You know, there's a there's a boy in the wall.
My god, So it hits you right in the face.
I think the title's fantastic, and then it hits you,
you know, Okay, this is the story about the dogs
finding the child in the wall. Now what happens from there?
You know, that's that's the key and the thriller behind
it all, and who did and when it happened and
all the wonderful stuff. And it always starts with cookies.
So that's good.
Speaker 2: It's a.
Speaker 5: You know, it's kind of fun is you know, everybody
has something that's in their family tree, you know, not
like deep dark secrets like Harlan Coben novel, but there's
stuff you know, maybe great grandfather did this or that.
Without giving too much away, I thought, well, what if
something from the past, from the deep past, from generation
to go collides with the present and the authorities are
at a loss because it's hard for them to find
a motive. And so that's kind of kind of where
it kind of proceeds to dive into nice.
Speaker 2: Nice.
Speaker 1: So we have the main cast. I love, first of all,
the dogs rule the book, which is always a good
thing for me. But any new, surprising new characters in
there from the fans have been reading your thrillers, I.
Speaker 5: Think for Corey. Uh. He's about twenty two or twenty three,
and later on in high school, his parents had gone
out for a date and wound up in a car
accident in Chicago. Sometimes the winner will come in right
off the lake, and so that kind of sent him
into a you know, a pretty much of a funk.
And his sister moved back home to try to hope
that she could drag him out of his shell. And
he was lucky enough to make it through high school
and she got him, well, let's get you. You know,
their dad was a veterinarian. Let's you were training dogs
with dad. Let's get you. She was trying to, you know,
pull the guy out of his shell and got him
into doing a dog obedient school. He's not the greatest
business man. He enjoys, you know, working with the dogs,
but he needs some help when it comes to kind
of business acumen. And so he's gone back to kind
of part time at a community ed school for for
some computer classes where he meets a girl. He meets
a girl. He meets a girl and she gets drawn
into some of the adventure in the book.
Speaker 2: I Love That, I Love It.
Speaker 1: Now in this particular series, is this number three in
the series, Is that correct? Or yeah?
Speaker 5: It started with the Dead years and then last year
was the second grave, and then The Boy in the
Wall just came out, and I've got oh at my feet,
I've got my beagle Milo, and I pretty much model
Rex Rex the Springer Spaniel after him, just he's goofy
and good hearted. Although I don't know if a dozen
squirrels or rabbits in the backyard would share that opinion.
I think they'd probably say Milt's a serial killer.
Speaker 1: It's a sin. He's the share of what you had
around this place. That's fantastic. Well, then, books, though, I
will say that, you know, even though they're part of
a series and you get sort of wrapped into the characters,
they are standalone books. You know, you can pick up
one and pick up The Boy in the Wall right
now and read through it and really have a good thriller,
a real good mystery behind and fall in love with
the characters and then work your way back, or you know,
start the beginning the series either way exactly.
Speaker 5: I think I'm pretty good where the book starts, and
in the first few paragraphs or pages you meet the
characters and their relationship and so yeah, you don't really
have to read them in order. It's not like, you know,
Lord of the Rings or anything like that. It's a
standalone adventure with each book. You know, it's kind of
like human Remains detection dogs. Each time they find human remains,
there's going to be some sort of a mystery, and
every now and then they wind up opening a Pandora's
box with a discovery.
Speaker 1: And I love obviously, I love your writing and love
what you do, but I love the fact that, you know,
I talk to a lot of great authors out there,
including yourself, and they write a lot of different mysteries
and thrillers and they own have their own unique angle,
but yours. I love the fact that starts off to
me very simple. You know, you got a guy, got
to figure out life, why not train some dogs? And
next thing you know, he's knee deep into all these
thrillers and mysteries in Shenanigan.
Speaker 2: So it was like it.
Speaker 1: Started off, Okay, let's find you a good life, and
now it's like, oh my gosh, how can I get sometimes?
How can I get away from this life? Because it's
everything I turn around, it's some sort of chaos going.
Speaker 5: On right right. I've made the dogs, you know, Springer
Spaniel on a bloodhound where he gets into trouble and
they're great dogs, but they're not like you know, a
pit bull or German shepherd or anything. So there's still
the fear factor where you're like, oh my goodness. And
the dogs aren't really trained as attack dogs or any
anything like that. But he gets into predicaments and you
hope he and his sister and the dogs we'll be
able to help remove him from the predicaments.
Speaker 1: Exactly exactly, We won't say if they do or not.
We'll leave a cliffhanger there for sure. All right, We're
going to take a quick commercial break. We'll come back
and continue a conversation with Jeffrey B. Burton, talk a
little bit more about this lace book, The Boy in
the Wall, and then we'll talk to Jeffery a little
bit about writing in general. We talked a little bit
about how we get to these books, but I want
to talk about the whole meat, potatoes behind it all,
or the cookies, shall we say? So everybody hang tight.
We're listening to Animal Rights on.
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Speaker 1: Hi. This is Tim Blink, animal communicator and pet expert
and host of Animal Rights on pet Life Radio. Have
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Speaker 3: Let's talk past, Let's done, Pet Talk About Life Radio,
HETLFE Radio.
Speaker 4: Pet Life Radio dot Com.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to Animal Rights on pet Life Radio. Continuer
conversation with quickly acclaimed author mystery thriller author Jeffard D.
Speaker 2: Burton in his lacebook The Boy in the Wall.
Speaker 1: So, Jeffery, when we when you put together this series,
are just writing in general. If you go into it
with an idea of what the whole theme is going
to be about, what you're looking for, do you pull
things from the news perhaps, or is it since in
this particular, this is the third in the series, is
it a progression that you're writing about? How do you
come up with the next greatest thing?
Speaker 5: You know? Tim When I started out, they have the
thing with writers, whether you're a plotter, whether you outline everything,
and some authors outline it to the you know, one
hundredth degree. And I started out that way, where I'd
have a very loose outline, but as you go along,
something occurs to you that's better than anything on your outline.
So I'd wind up having a manuscript. But then I'd
have to keep updating the outline because if something occurred
to you at chapter ten, well it's it's going to
affect the progression of the rest of the novel. And
so for this series, at least the last couple of books,
I've become the pants an author that goes by the
seat of their pants and I'm lucky that Severn House,
my publisher. They believe in me enough where I don't
have to give them some you know, Well, here's those
you know, one hundred chapters, and here's everything laid out
ahead of time. You know, I thought, years ago, I
helped a friend remodel his bathroom, and you know, we
ripped the wall apart and everything, and he had just
gotten married and he'd had a bachelor party. So he
took all these bizarre gifts that people had given to
him at his bachelor party, tossed him inside the wall,
and then we put the wall up and he goes,
he goes. You know, twenty twenty five years from now,
someone's going to be remodeling. They're going to go, what
the what the hell is this? And so I had
the idea, well, the dogs have found shallow graves, They
found human remains here and there in you know, swampy water.
And I thought, well, wait a minute, what if if
the murderer hid the body inside a wall, knowing that,
you know, in this case, the school was recently remodeled,
and lord knows that means it'll be another forty years
before they touch anything. And I thought, well, him being
cajoled into having to give a presentation, and then the
dog's tripping over it would be a great kind of
a hook. And then I did the seat of the
pants thing, where I'll write a chapter and then I'll go, okay,
where would this logically kind of go? Where should it
go next? And I'll put down a couple of notes
on where I think it should go, and then the
next day I'll pick up from there. And so I've
really oh, I haven't really used an outline in two
or three books.
Speaker 2: Now that's nice.
Speaker 1: Do you find it's just because you know the progression,
you've written a number of books, so it's not needed
per se. Or is it just sort of a shift
in how you go about writing?
Speaker 5: You know, there's been such a big debate in the
writing community on the outline versus the seat of your pants.
And I've given the outline a chance. It's not like
it really is saving me time because my outlines were
so they were just you know, bullet points and then
just a phrase of what I think a chapter should
be about. But you know, maybe it saved me eight hours,
you know, with the course of a book, which is
which is really nothing. And some people that argue for it.
They say, you know, if you online everything, and when
you talk to some of the authors that you probably have,
they get into such detail. I've heard some authors talk
about how before I even begin chapter one, I have
every twist and turn all set up, and some of
them have even done the research. And I'm like, well,
you know, i'd have to think that as you're going along,
I'll think of the character and I'll be like, okay, well,
what kind of a car would this particular person drive?
And then two hours later, I'm coming back to work
after having search dealerships and what kind of used cars,
and I'll get lost in some of the research there.
But I think that if you have the concept for
a book and you kind of dive into it knowing
where the first few chapters will go, and then as
you go along you go, of course, the next thing
would be this, and I think I'm a panser, now
a panther. I've migrated to the dark side.
Speaker 2: I guess that's a good one.
Speaker 1: Well, I could never write where I had to figure
out what car the main character would be driving, because
that would be it. I'd be buying cars, I would
be spending all time on the car Guru or whatever
site's out there, figuring out how I can maybe if
the book did really well, I could get the Lais Jaguar.
Speaker 5: You know, yeah, you know that would be nice, you know,
And I'm insane, Like it takes place in Chicago. I
live in the Twin Cities, Minneapolis, Saint Paul. But I
do a ton of research, and if they're meeting at
a restaurant, I find myself looking at the menu and
then I'm like, you know, I'm not I never Corey
had the number four over easy with Rye Toast. I
never really do that much, but I wind up doing
enough for the research, and then you know, you trip
over some kind of maybe there's a medical concept that
you don't want to bore the heck out of anyone,
but you want to at least have a paragraph where
you sound like you're in the you know, you're kind
of knowledgeable about it. And then I do have Milo
Milo the Beagle periodically. He'll want to just kind of
sleep on my lap when I'm writing, and whenever you
start snoring, I go, oh, I better have some action here,
you think.
Speaker 1: Keeps you on track.
Speaker 2: I like it. I like it. He's your make sure
you're getting it right. That's what he's there for.
Speaker 5: Make sure the pace moves along.
Speaker 2: That's it. I love it.
Speaker 1: From an outliner to a panther, I'm more of a
old crap. It's the deadline writers what I am.
Speaker 5: You know. I hear about writer's block, but I think
I have something that's more fear of missing a deadline block.
Speaker 1: You know, minus can't keep track of a calendar and realize,
oh my god, I got to get it in this week.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I mean, I'll just you know, probably eighty percent of
the time I'm in a great mood to work on
a book, but twenty percent of the time I'm not
really in the mood. So I just kind of sludge
through it with not the greatest of writings. But I'm
moving the ball, you know, four or five pages forward,
and then I'll come back and when there's something on
the page, I can make it better, you know, I suppose,
like farming clay or something. I can make it better
once I get it down on paper. But some days
the sludge is just a bit much.
Speaker 2: That's it. That's it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I love the fact you bring up research
and I've talked about this quite a few times with
different authors on the show.
Speaker 2: Is the fact that you.
Speaker 1: Know, no matter what you're writing, whether we're talking fiction
non fiction, whether we're talking to you know, children's story,
youth story, whatever may be, you've got to do your
research because if you get it wrong just by the slide.
I mean, if you start talking about thin sliced pizza
in a Chicago based book, they're going to throw it
out the window already. So you've got to have some
deep dish in there. But more importantly, you've got to
know if you're bringing up a particular building or a
particular school location, or whatever it may be, you better
do your research because the reader will expect it because
next thing you know, they're from that area where they
know it very well, and they'll call you out on it.
Speaker 5: Oh absolutely. I mean it's amazing how I'll get notes
on my website from people that I've read it. And
I messed up in a book where I gave a
rich person forty acres in a certain really nice suburb
of Chicago, and I got an email that said, dear
mister Burton, I really enjoyed your book. However, nobody has
forty acres in that particular suburb, you know, and then
send me some material on how I think the guy
that had the most acreage was twelve acres. Yeah, I
just sit reply and I'm like, you got me.
Speaker 2: I love it. I love it well.
Speaker 1: And things changed too, you know, if you're the area
I live, it's one of the fastest growing areas in
the nation apparently. And you can tell it. You know,
things that were there last week are now, you know,
being changed. There's a building going up or a housing
complex or whatever it may be. So maybe the guy
who owned the forty acres all of a sudden sold
off the forty acres, but that reader probably would call
you out on that too. Oh yeah, I know, mister
so and so, and he never sold that property, you know.
Speaker 5: And I had in in the dead years, I had
a bar that was just kind of a dive bar,
and I did a lot of research and I found
the perfect place that was kind of near the precinct,
and you know, so I used it and ear or
two goes by and I get a really nice email saying, hey,
have you been to this place? Because I'm a regular there.
I mean it was like norm from Cheers. I'm a
regular and so I wrote him back and I said no,
but I went to the site and it's in the
it's in the neighborhood. And I mean, you've got darts,
you've got pool. It's everything. It's perfect, it's everything. And
then the person that owned the bar sent me a
very very nice email. I sent him a signed book
and if I wind up in Chicago, bears on them.
Speaker 1: That's it, man, it's more excuses to get Chicago. Can't
complain about that.
Speaker 5: Search is paying out for me.
Speaker 2: That's it. That's the next thing.
Speaker 1: I think you need to do some research, like in
southern France and you know, some Bordeaux and right, and
take the Bloodhound with you and putting together this book,
The Boy in the Wall, as well as the rest
of the series and everything you're doing with mystery and thrillers.
Is there a goal that you're looking for when you
set this out? Is there and somebody picks it up,
reads through it, thoroughly, enjoys it. Is there something you're
hoping that get from it other than just pure pleasure,
any messages, any thing you're wanting to do, or you
just want them to have a little bit of fun
with the mystery.
Speaker 5: You know, I think I probably want them to have
a little bit of fun with the mystery. And I
think I have a lot of just dog loving followers
like myself, So I'm you know, I'm enjoying my wife
and I have managed to kind of always have one
or two running around the household for the last twenty
five years. And I'm not a dog trainer or a handler.
I don't have the patients. You know, if you came over,
Milo would be jumping up and down on you, you know,
driving you crazy. And I've had people come to me
and they say, Jeff, you write these dog training books.
Can I bring my dog over and drop them off
for a week or so? And I'm like, you know,
he's just gonna he's gonna be five pounds heavier, and
he's gonna he's gonna like go for football.
Speaker 1: That's right, right, if you're wanting to misbehave even more
and me five pounds heavier, I love it that I'm
your man.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, I think I'm writing for folks to just
enjoy and and you know, maybe if they're lying on
the beach during the summer, to have something that'll keep
them flipping pages. And then also just you know, maybe
a love of our Arcane nine friends.
Speaker 2: That's it. I love it.
Speaker 1: I love it for sure. Well, everybody pick up a
copy of Jeffrey. Where can people find out more about
the book The Boy in the Wall And where you're
gonna be and what you're doing, what's what's up next?
Speaker 5: Yes, my my website Jeffreebeeburton dot com Jeffreybeburton dot com.
And I've got an event's kind of an event calendar
where I'm going from Duluth and Minneapolis and Green Bay. Nice.
Speaker 1: Nice, and then you need to work your way over
to Chicago for free beer.
Speaker 2: That's what I'm thinking. Yeah, on it. Get your agent involved,
get the editor.
Speaker 5: You know, they said that they had the book. I'm
not sure if they have the part open to their
their thing behind glass, but yeah, I've got to stop
by there.
Speaker 2: That's it sounds like a good place to me.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, Well, everybody pick up a copy of the book.
And it's The Boy in the Wall. It's part of
the Chicago Canine Thriller series. You're going to definitely love it.
Speaker 2: Jeffrey B.
Speaker 1: Burton, jeff thanks for coming back on the show always great.
Great job with the book. As usual and we'll look
forward to chatting with you again some We're very soon
down the road.
Speaker 5: Thanks Tim.
Speaker 2: All right, well we're.
Speaker 1: Coming to end the show today. I want to thank
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