Dana sez, Now and then I bat my eyelashes at authors of books I have loved and ask them to write a little something for the blog. Sometimes they say yes.
James Byrne writes
When I decided I wanted to create a single male protagonist action/adventure mystery, the first thing I needed to do was to make the hero unusual. There were enough tall, handsome, studly
dudes running around in the mystery/thriller genre. My guy had to have something to make him stand out.
I tried close to a dozen characters but they were all fairly meh.
I knew that most of these protagonists were brooding sorts. Some of them a little broken. So what if my guy was, say, just in a terribly good mood. That’d be different.
The heroes of these books were always tall. My guy could be five-eight. I hadn’t seen that before.
The grand majority are Americans. Well, my guy could be from somewhere in the United Kingdom. And he could be the kind of guy who didn’t speak the king’s English. Well, those would be challenges. First, because I’m not from the U.K., I’m from the Pacific Northwest. And second, I am, by training, a newspaper copy editor. I just about pull a muscle when I try to write with improper English. When my guy says, “them what” instead of “those who,” it hurts my soul!
Then came the name. I like a short, punchy first name. Dez is good and under-used. I’m Irish American, and I like Limerick because it’s both a playful bit of poor-man’s poetry, and a town in the old country.
And finally the middle name. Aloysius. Which is simply the dopiest male name in history.
I had my hero.
Turns out, that was the easy bit.
James Byrne is the pen name of Dana Haynes, who lives and writes in one of the coolest cities on Earth: Portland, Oregon. He has published 13 mysteries and thrillers, including CHAIN REACTION, released in 2025 and nominated for Best Series Novel by the International Thriller Writers. The fourth book in the Dez Limerick series, STORM WARNING, drops this May. He is a longtime print journalist and lives with his wife, Katy King.
Dana sez, I reviewed Storm Warning on yesterday’s Book Review Monday. You’re gonna fall hard for Des, and you’re welcome.
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#thiswritinglife Chatter Des Limerick James Byrne Storm Warning
6 Comments Leave a comment ›
LOVE these books. So much fun to read! Thanks for contacting other Dana to get the scoop on how Dez came to life!
Entirely my pleasure!
Thank you, thank you, thank you. These are books where you laugh out loud just for the unexpectedness.
When you get to know Des, you learn to have absolute faith he can get out of any pickle he gets into, and almost always in a way you never saw coming. Popeye with a flare gun. Gotta love it.
Thank you, thank you for recommending these books. I am so in love with Des and I love the author’s reasons for making him so different from typical thriller heros. I love the fact that he is cheerful and not brooding, that he always has an idea for saving the situation and that he talks like a working class bloke. And I love the end of Storm Warning.
Which ending? I lost count but it felt like there were about a dozen. (But I know what you mean and I agree. It is not often we see Mr. Limerick caught flatfooted. It was a joy to watch.)