Joe Kenda says that he understood that his true-crime series “Homicide Hunter” and “American Detective” are seen in 180 different countries in 50 different languages.
But this didn’t fully hit home until a friend returned from a stay in a small village in Kashmir Province on the border of Pakistan and India where she worked as a missionary. Kenda’s friend, when asked about having an iPhone, showed it to the villagers, he says.
“They’re going through her pictures and there’s a picture of she and I,” he says. “One of these girls says, ‘You know him?!’ Well, yeah, he’s a friend of mine. ‘What?!’
“The village gathers around the only TV they have, in the community center, to watch that show on a foreign network in Pakistan, 100 miles from anywhere,” Kenda continues. “She said, ‘My status in the village was elevated.’”
“Homicide Hunter” ran for nine seasons on Investigation Discovery, featuring Kenda taking viewers through his own murder case files. When it ended in 2020, it was still the top-rated show on the network.
“American Detective with Lt. Joe Kenda” expanded the scope to other murders and other detectives around the United States, with Kenda serving as its host. It just finished its third season on Discovery+.
Kenda is also the author of four books: “I Will Find You: Solving Killer Cases From My Life Fighting Crime,” an autobiography; “Killer Triggers,” an examination of 12 murders and what motivated the killers; “All Is Not Forgiven,” a crime novel loosely based on one of Kenda’s cases and “First Do No Harm,” a second crime thriller that arrived in bookstores this month.
In an interview edited for length and clarity, Kenda talked about the decision to give his fictional protagonist his own name, why he embarked on a second career in murder-based TV and books after his real-life murder work gave him PTSD, and more.
Q: In the new book, you’re investigating deadly drug overdoses, a crooked anesthesiologist and a Mexican cartel. What inspired the story?
A: It’s all about the experience of doing what I did for a living and seeing how narcotics destroy people. Some people are innocently caught up in it. The most common ones are people who have a serious injury as a result of an accident or whatever and they become addicted to painkillers. Then they try to get more and the doctor won’t give it to them because it is addictive, and they knew that when they provided it, but they didn’t tell them that.
Oxycontin became the true poison that was introduced by pharmaceutical companies because it made a lot of money. Fentanyl is made from very common chemicals that are not controlled, that you can buy through the U.S. mail. So the result is 150,000 people a year are dying. People have to understand that drugs are not magic. They’re black magic.
Q: What were the kinds of drug cases you came across as a homicide detective? You had retired by the time the opioid crisis erupted.
A: That’s true. The level was lower but the result was the same. Sixty-five percent of all murders involve narcotics. Failure to pay, failure to pay enough, attempted robberies of other dealers, so on and so on. It’s just never-ending. The difference is the numbers. It’s much more potent today than it was then, but it was still killing people then.
Q: In 1978, when ‘First Do No Harm’ is set, you’d have been dealing mostly with heroin, cocaine and things like that?
A: It was more cocaine. Cocaine became the drug of choice, and then cocaine was expensive so they came up with an alkaloid of cocaine called crack. We were surveilling a drug house once looking for a particular dude who was involved in a murder case and I watched a woman trade her wedding rings for a rock of crack cocaine. It’s like, ‘Holy smokes, how far have we gone here?’ Well, we’ve gone all the way.
Q: Why did you decide to make ‘Joe Kenda’ the protagonist of your crime fiction?
A: I decided I wanted to do a particular case, an actual case that involved a guy hiring an assassin to murder his wife [in ‘All Is Not Forgiven’]. I couldn’t use the actual case because that would not be cool, so I invented the characters and the story around that case, but based it on that case. And I was the person doing it because I was at the time.
Then I came up with this one all about things that I actually did do, so I could have a true perception of it, and I didn’t have to invent. That’s why.
Q: In the book, his wife is Kathy, and your own wife is Kathy. How closely did you hew to your actual personality, habits, traits?
A: It’s very close. Instead of trying to invent something, it was all the same stuff, and it just flowed very easily for me. It was a ploy, really, to make this less difficult, as I’m doing television at the same time. I’m a little busy.
Otherwise, you write it six times and you throw it away every time. Then you finally do the seventh time. You go, ‘That’s pretty good,’ and you keep that one. But this way, doing it in the manner in which I did it, it just sort of worked. Step from one scene to the next without difficulty. Because you did that stuff.
Q: What have you learned from writing the novels?
A: What I focus on is making it realistic. Make it actually be what people do. That’s what I base these books on. Things that I have observed, not things I’ve thought up, but things I’ve seen people do. There is no limit to the capacity of violence for humans. Animals kill for need. Humans kill for pleasure. That’s why wild animals run from us. They see us coming, say, ‘Holy (stuff), man, it’s humans, let’s go!’
Q: As a police detective, you lived in a world of facts and evidence. As a crime writer, you can make stuff up. But it sounds like you still stick pretty close to the truth of your cases and experiences.
A: I’m very close indeed. If you’re going to be good at what you do, which is criminal investigation, you have to understand human nature.
Before I ever wrote a book, I read murder mysteries. Then I thought, ‘Who the (bleep) wrote this? There is no way this would happen in the real world. There’s no way.’ I thought, These people have no clue. They want to make it dramatic and make it so crazy that somebody’s going to believe that. No, no, you don’t have to do that. People are crazy enough as it is. They do really stupid (stuff) all the time, so you don’t have to go that far like they did. I told myself I’m not gonna do that.
Q: I’ve read that in your career you investigated nearly 400 murders, and that it took an emotional toll. So when you retired, why did you create this whole new career in murder?
A: I had a motive and my motive was therapy. I’ve said more to that camera and more to the written page than I’ve ever said to my wife about the realities of the work. You come home at night and Kathy was, ‘How was your day?’ I would say, ‘Well, it was quiet.’ And I got away with that for a long time. Then she watched the news and I’d be standing in front of eight microphones and crime scene tape and she’d said, ‘Well, what about THAT?’ Well, there was that.
So the result was I kind of pushed her away from it, which wasn’t a good idea. Then you bury the emotions in yourself. You push them down with a ramrod because you don’t want to look at that or think about it. Eventually, the ramrod doesn’t work. That’s when I retired. I said, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ And I walked away.
I had venom in me for a couple of years. I finally got out of that. I was sitting in my kitchen one morning, two years after I retired, and my wife says, ‘Hi.’ I said, ‘I guess you haven’t been paying attention, I’ve been sitting here for two hours.’ She said, ‘I know. But you’re the guy I married again.’ I thought that was very nice.
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