Rex Kusler ~ Author of the Mystery Novel PUNCTURED

Some time ago I connected online with a writer named Rex Kusler when we discovered we'd had a similar publishing journey. For many years, we each wrote books which seemed like they might get published only to have the carrot snatched away in the eleventh hour. The only thing that saved both of us from complete and utter failure was self-publishing on Kindle and ultimately getting publishing contracts with AmazonEncore.

When I found out Rex was going to be attending the Book Expo in May, and staying at the same hotel, and attending the same party, I looked forward to meeting him in person. And then I went and never once laid eyes on him. Yes, we managed to miss each other entirely. I'm thinking it was like in the movies where one person gets on an elevator while the other person exits the one next to it. 

 During the time we kept missing each other in New York, Rex's first novel, a mystery titled Punctured, was released.

Here's the premise: Jim Snow and his sister Karen have never been very close. In fact, they haven’t seen each other since their mother’s funeral two years ago, despite living just three miles apart. But then Snow gets a panicked phone call from Karen telling him that her estranged husband has been murdered and she is the number-one suspect. Snow agrees to help, seeing as he’s the only family she has left. Plus he is a Las Vegas homicide detective—or at least, he was until he quit the force to become a full-time poker player. But while his crime-fighting skills may be a little rusty, even he has to admit Karen is a likely suspect. She stands to collect on her dead husband’s life insurance, which is quite the coincidence considering she’s been living on her first two husbands’ insurance for years. Snow isn’t sure whether or not his sister is innocent, and there’s only one way to find out. He joins forces with feisty cocktail waitress-turned-cop Alice James and together they set out amidst the glittering lights of Vegas to solve this witty and entertaining whodunit.


Rex graciously agreed to answer a few of my questions. Read on to find out how he once gave up on writing and threw away four of his novels. Yipes. 


And if you have any questions about writing, Las Vegas, poker, or publishing, Rex said he'd be happy to answer in the comments.


Tell us about your path to publication.

I started writing short stories in 1983. After some success placing a few of them with regional magazines, I decided to write a comedic road novel. No one was interested in it, so I wrote a suspense novel, and that drew the interest of my first literary agent. While he was sending that around, I finished a private eye novel. I thought that was stronger than the suspense novel, so I sent that to him. He didn’t seem interested in it, and after a few months he still hadn’t read it—so I moved on to my second agent.


This agency specialized in private eye novels, and the woman running it liked what I sent her, so she started sending it around. In fact, she began sending all three of my novels out to anyone who would look at them.


After about a year of this, I began to wonder if she had the necessary talent to represent my work—since she had taken over the agency after her husband’s passing—and hadn’t been working as an agent for very long. So, I moved on to my third agent. He spent the next four years sending my private eye novel around (by then I had finished the sequel to it). And though it was a near miss at Berkley Books (PI novels were in a downtrend), he finally gave up on it—several years after I had given up writing.


For years I kept the floppies that contained the WordPerfect files for those first four novels. Eventually I no longer had the software to open the files, and I was sure I would never have any use for them, so I tossed the floppies in the trash. All I kept was the thick stack of correspondence from agents and editors as proof that I had actually written four unpublished novels.


For the next thirteen years I told myself I could always write another novel if I came up with something unusual. And in 2003 I finally did. I wrote Angela in seven weeks. Nobody was interested—it didn’t fit neatly into a category. I considered writing a mystery for my sixth attempt; instead I gave up writing for the second time.


In the summer of 2009 I received an email from Amazon recommending a novel I might like, How I Became a Famous Novelist by Steve Hely. It’s an entertaining book and for some reason just reading about all the inadequacies of the publishing industry made me want to take a stab at one more novel. This one was a mystery based on the sale of my travel trailer for cash. The first chapter in Punctured actually happened, except I didn’t get murdered. I finished that in six weeks. And, like all the others, I sent queries out to every legitimate agent I could find. There were no takers so I gave up again.


A few months later I learned about Amazon’s self-publishing platform in the Kindle Store. I uploaded both Angela and Punctured. Sales were miniscule for awhile, but gradually began to increase for Punctured. During the summer of 2010, without any promotion on my part, it climbed into the top 100 in the Kindle Store and stayed there for 29 days.


On September 14, 2010 I received an email from an acquisitions editor at AmazonEncore. At that point a new story began—and this one is looking pretty good.


What genres most appeal to you as a reader and a writer?

As a reader I prefer nonfiction, because the books are about events that actually happened, and that makes them more interesting to me. In fiction I prefer comedy and mystery/suspense, although it became harder for me to enjoy fiction after I started writing (which was a long time ago), because I tend to analyze what the author is doing. Only a very unusual novel will draw me in sufficiently to suspend disbelief.


As a writer I’ll probably stick with mystery/suspense. It’s easier for me to concentrate on putting the puzzle together, and that way the characters and their problems seem to show up without me forcing it.


Your novel, Punctured, is set in Las Vegas and features Jim Snow, a former Las Vegas homicide detective turned full-time poker player. Why Las Vegas? Why poker?


Las Vegas was an easy choice. It has always been my favorite city. I like the desert, and I’ve had an interest in gambling all my life. I started out a horseplayer, and progressed to counting cards at blackjack. During the spring of 2010 a few months before I started writing Punctured I considered playing poker in Las Vegas as a means of supplementing my future retirement. I began playing short-handed limit Texas Hold ’Em (six players or less) on the internet. I played a total of 160 hours over a six week period. The limit was $5-$10 and the streaks were unbelievable. I’d be down almost $2000, come back up to being ahead over $2000, then back down, then up. Finally I had a horrible losing streak that destroyed my confidence. I’d get four aces and lose to a straight flush. I’d draw a king-high straight flush and lose to a royal flush. It got to the point where I hoped to get lousy hands so I could just fold. The rake (what the casino takes) was too high at that level I realized, so I would have to move up to a higher limit, but there weren’t enough players at the higher limit tables on the internet. But that final losing streak completely destroyed my interest in poker.


And that is where Jim Snow comes into the picture. It was easy for me to project my failure at poker and loss of interest onto him. Of course in subsequent books in the series, poker is seldom mentioned.


Take us through your writing process.

Before starting a new mystery I come up with a crime and a perpetrator, and maybe a few other characters. This could stew in my head for a long time. Usually it comes to me while I’m still working on the previous book. Then I come up with the initial scene and write that. At this point I always feel that I’m doomed to complete failure with the project and nothing further will come to me. But something always does: the next scene. I always develop an outline and descriptions of the current and future characters as I write. That way I can keep track of everyone in the book and what’s going on. For the first half of the book, the outline never gets ahead of the writing. But by the time I get half finished, the outline takes off, and I have trouble keeping up with it, for fear of forgetting details and subplots. I also keep a timeline to make it easy to remember who did what when. I have to be organized because my memory is lousy.


Ashes to Dust, your sequel to Punctured, comes out in July. What happens next for you as an author?

I’m currently working on the sequel to Ashes to Dust. The title is Desert Drop and it takes place in Las Vegas and also Silicon Valley. It’s about 30 percent finished, and I’m getting excited about it, because of the way it has come together for me. I have everything figured out all the way to the end, including the final scene, and if I had ten days off in a row, I think I could finish it. So it’s just a matter of when I take my next vacation (or quit). It’ll be finished no later than July.


After that, I think I’ll take a short break from the Las Vegas Mystery Series and write a suspense novel. The second book I wrote during the 80’s has been coming back to haunt me and I can’t stop thinking about it. I don’t have anything but a small memory of that book, but I’ve been expanding and improving it in my head. The title for that one will be Family.


I consider myself a pulp writer, nothing deep, just pure entertainment, so I write pretty fast. Once I ditch the day job, I’ll be churning out a lot of mysteries and suspense novels. Somewhere between three and twelve per year. I think my best work is still years away.