This episode of the Crime Cafe podcast features my interview with crime writer David Kushner.

Check out our discussion his nine-part series on Substack about a murder at the Texas Renaissance Fair and other writing.

This is the Crime Cafe, your podcasting source of great crime, suspense and thriller writing. I’m your host Debbi Mack. Before I bring on my guest, I’ll just remind you that the Crime Cafe has two eBooks for sale: the nine book box set and the short story anthology. You can find the buy inks for both on my website, debbimack.com under the Crime Cafe link. You can also get a free copy of either book if you become a Patreon supporter. You’ll get that and much more if you support the podcast on Patreon, along with our eternal gratitude for doing so.

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Here’s a link to a PDF copy of the interview.

Debbi: Hi, everyone. Today, it's my pleasure to have with me an award-winning journalist and author. And along with writing true crime and non-fiction graphic novels, he's written for a variety of major periodicals. Today, we'll focus on his writing for a newsletter he has on Substack called Disruptor. My guest today is David Kushner. Hi, David. Thanks for being with us today.

David: Hi, thanks for having me.

Debbi: Well, no problem. It's a pleasure for me. I was reading over what you wrote on Substack about the festival. The Texas Renaissance Festival. What prompted your interest in the crime that took place at this festival?

David: Well, I had gone to the Texas Renaissance Festival. Actually, it was about 17 years ago to do a story on it for FHM magazine, which was a men's magazine at the time and I was interested in it for a couple reasons. One was because it's the world's largest renaissance festival. It's in kind of the middle of a small town, that's a town of about 100 people outside of Houston. So, it's kind of in the middle of nowhere. And this guy George Coulam who came there in the 70s and incorporated the town. Became mayor and then essentially transformed the town into a working recreation of a Renaissance Village, all that was super fascinating to me. And I went there and I was there for a few days reporting the story.Then at one point, when I was leaving the festival one night, a scuffle broke out very close to me and a lot of shouting and a crowd formed. And I got out of there, you know don't want to be in a situation like that. But what I later found out was that actually somebody had gotten killed in that fight. Somebody was stabbed multiple times and it was a terrible, obviously, terrible tragedy. It's something that I always thought about having just kind of brushed up so close to it. And then as things went, this magazine went out of business. I never wrote this story, but I thought about it for 17 years. And then I finally decided, you know, I have this newsletter and I thought there's a different way maybe I can approach telling it and telling it i...