Crime writer turns to podcasting
August 27th, 2020
Having successfully published a half dozen crime books, Eve Lazarus is using her content to produce podcasts.
Lazarus’s first podcast, launched in 2019, was a 12-episode series based on her book, Blood, Sweat, and Fear: The Story of Inspector Vance (Arsenal 2017). Each podcast went over a different case that had been solved by Inspector Vance over his 42-year career with the Vancouver Police Department.
This first podcast “was a way for me to figure out how to rewrite my book for audio, producing, hosting, editing, distributing and marketing,” says Lazarus. “It was a huge amount of work, extremely challenging and I loved it.”
This past July, Lazarus launched a new podcast, Cold Case Canada and its first series is based on her title Cold Case Vancouver: The City’s Most Baffling Unsolved Murders (Arsenal 2015).
“Not long after the book came out in 2015, I started a Facebook page — Cold Case Vancouver — and later a private group page Cold Case Canada so the friends and family of the victims had a place to remember them, and so that I could go outside Vancouver and the cases in my book,” says Lazarus.
“The pages often get discussions going from followers that include friends and family of the victim, law enforcement, criminologists, lawyers, a coroner and a couple of forensic psychologists. I realized that there were very few avenues for people to talk about cold cases (murdered and missing) and this became a place where they could do this.”
Cold Case Canada attracts a high proportion of women followers — 85% according to Lazarus — many of whom are Indigenous.
Practice makes perfect and Lazarus is finding that she is more confident adding interviews on her most recent podcasts. “So far, I’ve included family members of the victims, homicide detectives who worked the cases and updates with police/RCMP. I firmly believe that many of these cases can still be solved, even those that are decades old. The podcast is a way of reaching a much larger audience and to hopefully generate some tips — there’s a PSA from Metro Vancouver Crime Stoppers at the end of this current episode about the 1994 disappearance of Nick and Lisa Masee.”
Other episodes up on Cold Case Canada are: the 1944 unsolved murder of Jennie Conroy, the 1947 unsolved murder of 7-year-old Roddy Moore, and Vivien Morzuch, 15 who was killed in 2000 in Kamloops and his murder solved through a Mr. Big operation six years later.
The podcasts are available on all the usual platforms and also from Lazarus’s website at: https://evelazarus.com/
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