Bookpleasures.com welcomes as our guest Keith Hirshland whose recent book, Song Girl: A Mystery In Two Verses has been published on January 21, 2022.

Keith Hirshland is an Emmy Award–winning sports television producer with more than three decades of experience producing live and pre-recorded programs that aired on ESPN and ESPN2. Among the first forty people to be hired by the Golf Channel in 1994, Hirshland was in the middle of the action when that network debuted in 1995. He provided his talents for Golf Channel, as its live tournament producer, for two decades.

Cover Me Boys, I’m Going In: Tales of the Tube from a Broadcast Brat is a memoir about his experiences in the television industry. Published by Beacon Publishing Group, Cover Me Boys was recognized as the Book Talk Radio Club Memoir of the Year.

Hirshland’s second book, and first work of fiction, Big Flies, was published in 2016 and is the recipient of the New Apple Awards “Solo Medalist” in the True Crime Category.

Hirshland followed that success with his third book, The Flower Girl Murder.

In 2020 Beacon Publishing Group released Murphy Murphy and the Case of Serious Crisis, Hirshland’s third mystery novel. It was a Top Shelf Magazine First Place award winner and was named the Book Talk Radio Club Book of the Year for 2020.

Song Girl Hirshland’s fifth book is the sequel to The Flower Girl Murder and was released in January of 2022.  All five books are available at www.keithhirshland.com,  Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other bookstores.

Welcome to BookPleasures Keith, thanks for taking part in our interview.

Bee: The title, Song Girl comes from a character in the book whom can only speak in song titles.  Wow, how did you come up with that?

Keith: Hi Bee! First, thanks for having me. It’s wonderful to speak with you and all of your readers at BookPleasures.com.

My initial idea was to write a mystery centered around a main character who, after a traumatic accident, could only speak in song lyrics. So I collected dozens of song lyric books and started highlighting the ones that I believed could be believable dialogue.

Early on I realized it was going to be a herculean task to have this character carry an entire novel so I decided to make her one character in a larger mystery. I also subsequently ran into legal issues with using song lyrics (you can’t) and changed course to using song titles (you can).

Bee:What draws you to this genre? 

Keith: Great question. I think the simple answer is that it’s the genre I like to read. For me there is nothing better than getting wrapped up in trying to figure out a good mystery or ripping through the pages of a taut thriller so I wanted to write those.

Bee: I always enjoy looking at the names that authors choose to give their characters. Where do you derive the names of your characters?  Are they based on real people you knew or now know in real life? How do you create names for your

characters?

Keith: I hope you’ve asked other writers this question because I’d love to hear some of their answers. Honestly, I find character names among the hardest part of writing.

Luckily, I have great friends who, so far, have been more than willing to offer up their names as characters.

Sometimes I flip them e.g. Roger James become James Rogers or I combine them. Marc Allen, the detective in Song Girl, comes from good friends Marc Mayette and Dana Allen. Quite frankly I hope I never run out of willing friends!

Bee: Which actor would you like to see playing the lead character from Song Girl?  How about Hannah?

Keith: Gosh wouldn’t that be fun. How about Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise? Actually I am huge fan of Clive Owen and I think Jeffery Dean Morgan does great work so if I had a vote I might pick one of them. As for Hannah Hunt?

I think Emma Stone is great in everything she does or maybe Anna Kendrick who would be sassy enough to pull off speaking only in song titles.

Bee: How did working on ESPN and the Golf Channel influence your writing fiction.

Keith: A big part of my job throughout my television career was writing both at ESPN and The Golf Channel.

One of my responsibilities was writing what we called the “tease” essentially the first :30 to 1:00 of the broadcast which set the scene for the day’s telecast.

I wrote hundreds of those as well as features, bumpers (which were 30 second mini features about the city or area in which the tournament was played). It helped me hone my skills as a writer and made me very familiar with the thesaurus and the dictionary.

Bee: When did you first have a desire to write?  How did this desire manifest itself?

Keith: My best friend and I growing up told each other we were going to write the “great American novel” and would share ideas with each other.

I always enjoyed writing, reading, and English classes in school much more than science and math. My first major in college was English with a minor in creative writing (I later switched to Journalism).

As an adult I really never thought I’d write a book but when my parents, who were both very accomplished, passed away my wife encouraged me to compose a journal to leave stories about my career in broadcasting for my kids.

That turned into my memoir, Cover Me Boys, I’m Going In (Tales of the Tube from a Broadcast Brat). I realized then I enjoyed writing enough to give fiction a try and now we’re four mysteries in with another on the way.  

Bee: What writers have you drawn inspiration from?

Keith: Several including favorites Michael Connelly, Lee Child, and C.J. Box. I religiously read everything they write. Ben H. Winters is another favorite and so is Peter Swanson.

I also enjoy Jasper Fforde and Eoin Colfer. When I was pitching Murphy Murphy and the Case of Serious Crisis I described it as “Michael Connelly meets Jasper Fforde” and the folks at Beacon Publishing Group loved it.

Bee: What kind of messages do you try to instill in your writing?

Keith: One critic described my writing as “a literary Easter egg hunt” and I absolutely adore that. I’m hopeful that folks who read my books are, first and foremost, entertained but I’d also like them to learn something.

I certainly learn more than a thing or two with every book.

Bee: What is next for Keith Hirshland?

Keith: Next immediately is the sequel to Murphy Murphy and the Case of Serious Crisis. I always envisioned it as a trilogy so in book two our intrepid detective finds himself mixed up with the fictional Commission on Cliches.

After that I’ll have Murphy Murphy involved with the “Pun Police”. 

I also have started thinking about another Detective Marc Allen mystery.

Bee: Thanks again and good luck with Song Girl!

Follow Here To Read Bee's Review of Song Girl