The doors to the Interrogation Room may be padlocked once more (for now at least!), but I have managed to squeeze in one final interview… To celebrate the release of Bishop Rider Lives (Down & Out Books), I dragged Beau Johnson – creator of cop-turned-vigilante Bishop Rider – into the hot-seat to discuss the life, death and afterlife of his cult anti-hero.
First things first: congratulations on the publication of Bishop Rider Lives! We will dig into the new anthology in due course, but this is going to be a deep-dive, so I need to go back to the start. You and I first encountered one another on the flash fiction sites many years ago, but when and where did Bishop Rider make his first appearance?
The first published Bishop Rider story—FIRE IN THE HOLE—went live in 2012 in the now defunct OUT OF THE GUTTER ONLINE. Joe Clifford gave him his first home and both he and Tom Pitts championed him from the start.
After that first story, was Bishop Rider an itch you felt like you needed to keep on scratching as a storyteller, or did you find that there was a receptive audience for more stories in that vein?
With regards to the itch, I had a few Rider stories in the bank by 2012, as his inception happened a few years earlier, but once I hit the fourth or fifth story back then I realized I had a character with legs. The receptive audience is a little bit larger nowadays, and I’m grateful for every reader who takes the plunge, but back at the start, man, the tumbleweeds I drank…
Looking back to 2012, the indie crime landscape and the social media landscape were both very different back then. Do you think that Bishop Rider would be a different beast if he had emerged a decade later?
Hmmm. Good question. I can’t honestly say. My gut says no, and trusting my gut has helped me more times than not in my life, so yeah, now or back then, he’d still be that bright ball of rage he’s always been.
I’m sure regular readers will know the key facets of Rider’s blood-splattered life story by now. How much of this narrative was preconceived, and how much did you flesh out as you went along?
Ha! Another great question. Short answer: none of it was preconceived. Ah, the life of a pantser! Saying that, however, the more I expanded Rider’s story, the more story it created. When I felt it got a little too easy for Bishop, this is when I took his leg, which in itself created even MORE story, as it opened to door to Rider’s eventual successor, Jeramiah Abrum. Further still, when I decided to kill Rider in my third book, ALL OF THEM TO BURN, it gave birth to two more books, BRAND NEW DARK and OLD MAN RIDER, where the end of that book, my fifth, circles back the end of ALL OF THEM TO BURN. Did I choose to tell Bishop Rider’s story out of sequence? Not at the start. It became what it did, however, and I feel I embraced it as best I could.
When you are writing flash fiction, and you only have 500/700/1000 words to hook and entertain a reader, I always considered ultraviolence to be an extremely useful option – are there any scenes you regret writing, or do you stand by all of Rider’s handiwork – no matter how grisly?!
The only regret I’ve ever had over the years was when I took the bottom part of Rider’s leg. I say this for two reasons. One, it made things not quite harder for me, but the situations I put him in post-reduction, well, let’s just say they couldn’t involve anything treadmill related. Second, looking back, I feel I may have rushed the maiming. Within the original story it takes place in, I mean. I have since course-corrected and expanded in such a way that I happy with it now, but yeah, it bugged me for a good few years.
Batman and The Punisher are often used as reference points by readers – do you think Bishop Rider is more of a comic book anti-hero than a traditional crime fiction protagonist?
As I feel I straddle both crime and horror as a writer, I think Rider rides if not blurs each of those particular lines. He is indeed an archetype, influenced by the Charles Bronson Death Wish movies of my youth as well as [Garth] Ennis’s run on The Punisher. However, where I see Bishop Rider as much more of a Frank Castle, I see his successor, Jeramiah Abrum, as a Bruce Wayne.
Of all your books to date, which was the easiest to write, and which was the hardest? And why?
My hardest book to write was BRAND NEW DARK. It was the first book exclusive to Bishop Rider and his story. I don’t know if that’s the full reason but it’s the one that makes the most sense. Once I decided to kill Rider in ALL OF THEM TO BURN, and knew he wouldn’t be going out in a blaze of glory, I knew I had to set up OLD MAN RIDER as well. Now that I think about, yeah, that’s probably the reason why BRAND NEW DARK took longer than the rest.
Although you have famously killed off Bishop Rider, are you tempted to dive back into his story and go again? Non-linear storytelling gives you a free pass for prequels, and I imagine that his narrative voice comes as easy as breathing. Or is his race well and truly run?
I’m of two minds there. One, I’ve dipped into the free pass you speak of for a good part of Rider’s story, so going back after bookending OLD MAN RIDER to ALL OF THEM TO BURN feels like a little bit of a cheat in some ways. However, with THE ABRUM FILES, along with the upcoming LIKE-MINDED INDIVIDUALS and LONG PAST GONE, I’ve gotten to resurrect Rider without using the prequel design as I have in the past, and doing so by going at Rider’s story through Jeramiah Abrum’s eyes—a fresh take on stories I thought I was done with as well as pushing on into a post Rider world. As I’ve said before: this writing gig is a trip.
Moving on to Bishop Rider Lives, it must have felt pretty surreal when international bestselling authors like S.A. Cosby and Rob Hart submitted stories to your little anthology! In which other ways has the anthology surprised you?
If I’m honest, it’s surreal ANYONE wanted to write a Bishop Rider story, you included, Tom. I mean, if I keep with the honesty, there was a time when no one read Bishop Rider. And yes, we all have to start somewhere, but here now, with you authors writing about my alter ego as you have, bestselling authors or not, it blows my goddamn mind. Beyond fortunate only scratching the surface of how it makes me feel.
Is the anthology assembled in chronological order, or have you gone for a non-linear approach?
Non-linear, baby. It’s my jam!
As you mentioned earlier, the mission will continue through Jeramiah Abrum’s words and deeds, but are you going to weave any scenarios, characters or details from Bishop Rider Lives into future works? Essentially: are there any dark new corners of the Rider-verse that you are keen to poke around in?
Funny you should mention that. Nick Kolakowski’s story, FEED THE MACHINE, inspired my own story to involve an incident similar to Uvalde. Granted, people won’t get to read my interpretation for a few more years, as it’s slotted for the book after LIKE-MINDED INDIVIDUALS, but yeah, it’s gonna cook.
Readers (and writers!) have clearly responded to Bishop Rider and his blood-soaked world. If this book proves successful, would you be tempted to green-light a sequel to Bishop Rider Lives? Or would you be open to resurrecting the character in a different format?
At one point I said no, but the more I think about it, the more I’m open to the idea. And hey, if this book takes off like you say, it’s sort of a no-brainer, right?
One final question: for any crime fiction fans out there who are still on the fence, how would you pitch this book to get them to click the ‘Buy’ button?
Click to buy? As I’ve been telling anyone within earshot: They are NOT ready for this book. All of you absolutely brought your A games and killed it. Like Rider himself would say: You burned them all.
Thanks, Beau – it has been a pleasure!
Order Bishop Rider Lives here!
Beau Johnson is the author of A Better Kind of Hate, The Big Machine Eats, All of Them to Burn, Brand New Dark, Old Man Rider and The Abrum Files. You can find him @beaujohnson44 on Twitter. https://twitter.com/beaujohnson44
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