John David Bethel has found plenty of success as a novelist, but he’s never had any kind of plan—either for the books that he writes or for his career as a whole. “I never write from a prepared outline or anything else,” he said as he discussed hs latest book, Mapping the Night. “I just sit down, if I have a kernel of an idea, which I usually do, and I go from there.”

Though the mysteries Bethel writes are fictional, he explained that he takes inspiration from true crime events. Mapping the Night follows a pair of FBI agents pursuing a New York serial killer, but the genesis of it came after the author caught a story about a murder victim in the pages of the New York Times. “She had been raped and murdered, and her son was sitting next to her applying ice to her forehead,” Bethel said. “He told the police, this is the only way my mother was able to make me feel better, so I’m trying to revive her the same way, and that haunting scene took me into a story.”

He did not set out to become a professional author, though his interest in writing started at a young age, as a result of missing school while his family was overseas due to his father’s career in the Foreign Service. To fill in the gaps created by not always being in class, his parents encouraged the young man to read. “I fell in love with reading,” he reflected, “and at some point I decided well, what the heck. I’ll give it a shot, see if I can write something. I think in fifth grade I wrote my first short story, and I thought it was wonderful because my dad had it typed up and gave it to me.”

It wasn’t until many years later, when interning in Washington, D.C. in the 1970s, that Bethel began to consider writing as a career avenue. “I discovered when I was there that there’s a lot of writing going on. People preparing press releases, writing speeches, floor statements, testimony for committees, and so on and so forth,” he continued. “At that point, I pretty much decided this is where I want to be, because I know I can write [and] I like to write.”

He accomplished plenty in the political world as a writer and consultant, from penning important speeches for various public officials to authoring white papers for different agencies and companies. Yet when he turned his attention to fiction, he took that political expertise with him and translated it into thrillers. From there, Bethel met private investigator Ed Du Bois, who had read one of his early books and reached out with an interest in adapting one of Du Bois’ cases—the infamous Sun Gym gang case that would later hit the big screen as the 2013 film Pain & Gain.

“He wanted it written in about six weeks,” Bethel recalled. “It couldn’t be done. I wrote a treatment of the novel, we sent it off, but there’s no way a novel is going to get written and produced and published in six weeks. So I asked [Du Bois] and I asked the victim if they minded if I went ahead and turned [the treatment] into a novel, which I did. That kind of got me started on the true crime genre.”

That book was 2020’s Hotel Hell, one of several novels that Bethel has under his belt, both before and since as he continues to go wherever his creative instincts take him. “I take something I’ve read about or something that strikes my imagination. [Or] maybe I see it on TV,” he said, “and then I go from there. I will just take that idea and and run with it. But the last couple of years, the things that have captured my fascination are true.”

And while many authors find their lane and stick with it, Bethel told us how his literary career has been a growth experience, both creatively and personally. “When I first started out, I was so plot-driven that I don’t think I handled the characters very well,” he conceded. But as he continued to read more crime novels (citing James Lee Burke as a particular inspiration), he learned to put more emphasis on his characters, which is seen in Mapping the Night. “I’ve written some what I think are interesting characters,” he said. “One of the characters is a young man who is afficted with a condition… He’s allergic to light, so he spends most of his time running around at night, and that’s how he comes into contact with the [other] characters in the novel.”

“The other thing is we spend so much time leading our daily lives. Reading allows you to broaden your perspective,” he concluded. “to understand other people and what they’re dealing with. I think that’s the most important thing that that I find in writing. It’s gotten me out of my world. out of my head, into somebody else’s. And I better understand the world.”

Mapping the Night is now available on Amazon. For more on John David Bethel, visit his website.

Article content is (c)2020-2026 Brittany Frederick and may not be excerpted or reproduced without express written permission by the author. Follow me on Twitter at @BFTVTwtr and on Instagram at @BFTVGram. For story pitches, contact me at tvbrittanyf@yahoo.com.