F.X. REGAN

F.X. Regan was a police officer in a major metropolitan police department, an FBI agent, and a SWAT team member. He retired with 33 years of law enforcement experience as the special agent in charge of a large FBI field division and he worked on many high-profile investigations during his career. He was also a Vice President and COO in charge of security at two large corporations before becoming a full-time writer and licensed private investigator. He has written editorials for The Washington Post, Gannett, and The Hill; and has appeared on America's Most Wanted, NBC's Dateline, and Fox News. 

Regan has written several different series, mostly in the crime and spy fiction genre. The first, his flagship group of crime-thrillers, is a three-book series of novels featuring CJ Hawk, a private investigator who was dismissed from the rolls of the FBI after his alleged role in a bad shooting. Hawk is retained to help solve a several cold case homicides in Washington, D.C., and in each of his investigations, he bumps into rogue government programs that operate off the books and complicate his life. All three books, DEPARTMENT ECHO, ZULU CENTER, and WASHINGTON FIELD are available in eBook, paperback, and Audiobook. 

A second is the Detective Kiki Diaz thriller series. Diaz is not-to-be-messed with kick ass homicide detective in Fairfax County, Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C. ROSSLYN STATION, FAIRFAX STATION, and McLEAN STATION are available in eBook, paperback and Audiobook. 

GRAY GHOST, An Air America - CIA Thriller that takes place in 1968 Laos, featuring CIA case officer Chase Black started as a stand-alone thriller with an idea Regan had been walking around with for years. No sooner was the book complete, than the plot for Book Two popped into his head. So it's under development. Keep checking back here for more details.

There are several other novellas and short stories Regan has penned which are described in the Books tab. 

The Best way to keep up with F.X. is to subscribe to his Substack column which is published regularly, (about once every three weeks, so it won't jam up your inbox,) and features book and merch giveaways, early book reviews of sure to be best sellers, and articles about the FBI, police, and crime. fxregan.substack.com/subscribe . Also, follow him on X (Twitter), Instagram, and YouTube at @fxregan. 

Frequently Asked Questions:

After three decades in law enforcement, why did you start writing?

Great question. When I hung up my guns for good, I knew I wanted to tell stories. (I'm Irish, so naturally I'm a storyteller.) I fooled around with several drafts of an autobiography, but I wanted something different. Most FBI biographies go something like, "My first day at the FBI Academy in Quantico," "My first felony arrest," etc. Mine turned out not to be much different. Frankly, it was awful. 

So I thought, "What if I take some of these chapters and turn them into crime novels? Or at least use the back stories as part of a larger plot?" Which is exactly what I did. In fact, the three CJ Hawk thrillers are very loosely based on actual events. The Kiki Diaz series is chock-full of characters and anecdotes that really happened but are written completely out of time and place. And of course, the names have been changed to protect the innocent, (and the guilty!)

GRAY GHOST is complete fiction but based on actual events in the Far East in 1968, and as I described in the Author's Note at the end, I had a very close and unique source who contributed to some important details. 

How does your background make your writing different than other authors?

Truthfully, I'm not sure how crime fiction writers who were never in "The Business" do it. They must have better imaginations than mine because as I said in the first question, so many of my stories are based on actual events. And I don't mean just the crime/plot itself; I mean the human interaction between cops and cops, bad guys and cops, etc. Things like dark cop (or agent) humor, and even things that are not humorous. Like broken relationships, alcohol abuse, PTSD, and losing friends killed in the line of duty.  

My police and FBI experience is a blessing and curse because I've found factual errors in fiction by some of the biggest writers in the industry, and I'm the worst person in the world to watch cop or legal TV with. But hey, it's all entertainment, and that's what matters.

What order should I read your books in?

With anything I've written, including in a series, it literally does not matter. Each book is a stand-alone story, and nothing in one   book is required to read another. As far as backstory, I'll catch you up with all you need to know for the plot and characters of whatever book you jump into. Naturally, there is a little more origin story in Book One of a series, but it's not required you read that one first. 

What is your writing routine?

I try and write something every day. It might part of a novel I'm working on, a short story or novella, or a Substack article. When I first started, I set daily word counts, but that didn't work for me. Ditto with outlining or even reverse outlining, which I used to do. Now, I just write the story without looking back and I fix a lot of things like plot holes or time/sequence problems in editing. If I get lost in what happened, I'll use the "find" feature to look up a word to take me back to that part of the draft. I don't get writer's block, so that's not a problem. A tip I learned from another writer, (I can't remember who,) is to just pick up a book, any book, open it to the middle and read a few pages. Somehow it's like re-booting my brain. 

Because so much of my writing includes real settings and historical and events, I do a lot of research too, which is time consuming. I want to get the details right - another curse from my days as an FBI agent. All of my books have an Author's Note where I list sources and books I used in writing the stories. 

I'm my own indie press, (Duke Street Press,) so I have to do everything myself including formatting and marketing, which is a lot. Truth be told, even authors with ginormous publishing houses must do a lot of marking themselves too these days. I probably spend a third to a half of my time "soft" marketing, which means being active on social media, creating content for Substack, Instagram, YouTube, tweaking my website, etc. Things I hope people find interesting instead of just "Buy my book."

Are any of your books being made into movies or streaming? 

From your lips to God's ears. I think any author of thrillers, be they crime, psychological, military, etc., who tells you they don't care if their work gets put on a screen, is lying. But if getting visibility selling books is hard, getting seen in Hollywood is harder. For an indie press author like me, spending valuable time trying to get noticed for film or streaming would be a waste of band width. So the strategy for moving books, and having NetFlix call my cell phone is the same: Keep writing great books, and good things will happen. 

What's next? 

I'm fond of saying I'm going to run out of time before I run out of ideas, and I'm not that old. I hinted at a Book Two in the Chase Black - CIA Thriller series, and that project is already underway. I have  another three book series sketched out, tentatively called  the "FBI - CT Ops Thriller Series." My FBI centric  books come with special challenges like actual cases that might still be in prosecution, and I have to send them to the FBI for pre-publication review. ZULU CENTER took nine months, and had tweleve pages with redactions. Nothing classifed, but passeges deemed "law enforcement sensitive." 

Lastly, (for now,) there are several articles in the "Stuff" tab about the J5 pipe bomb investigation. I have several hundred pages of notes and a timeline, and am considering my first non-fiction book about that case.