Blood & Whiskey

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One of 10 million snow photos I took this winter. So. Much. Snow.

Blood & Whiskey #40

Neal Thompson — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 17:07:55 GMT

Hey friends and readers,

I tried ten times to get this one out the door, but… the election, holidays, New Years, whatever. Now I’m sending this on my birthday. One of those landmark b-days — ends with a 0 and starts a new decade (shut up, doesn’t matter which decade…) Feels like a good time to put Blood & Whiskey on ice to tackle some urgent writing projects. Not forever, but this’ll be my last newsletter for a bit.

I’m grateful to you generous paid subscribers. Your support helped keep this newsletter supplied with books and bottles. I loved taking your money, but I’ve turned off all subscription payments for the foreseeable future.

Before I sign off, here’s a mish-mash of bookish and whiskey-ish things…

To be honest, I’d tapered off the whiskey over the past year. (And apparently my lack of intake contributed to the nation’s bourbon glut.) But I did dust off my bourbon bona fides to write the foreword for this pretty book, Whiskey Stories (coming in March), by Richard Thomas, editor of The Whiskey Reviewer.

Next, not that anyone needs yet another Best of ‘24 book list. But if you do, here are links to: Obama, CrimeReads, New York Times (and best crime or thriller), Wall Street Journal (and best mysteries), People, Washington Post’s thrillers, Time, Bookshop, Amazon, and the New Yorker. The NY-er has “Essential Reads” at the top, but it’s worth scrolling down to the extended “Also Recommended” list. Although best-of lists had once been my job (Amazon), I don’t do that here at Blood & Whiskey. But as I head out the rear exit, I will share a couple last lists:

3 to start 2025, 2 that pissed me off, and 1 that got away.

My 2025 reading started with the latest from William Boyle, Saint of the Narrows Street (coming in Feb), about an Italian-American family and neighborhood in Gravesend, Brooklyn. Boyle is a smart, gritty, funny writer, and this is his best yet. Features a cast of characters whose names alone are worth the cover price: Double Stevie, Religious Pete, Widow Marie, Jane the Stain, Fab and Chooch. Starting in 1986, the story follows Risa Franzone and her sister and son across the decades after a cast iron frying pan ends her abusive husband’s life. It’s dark and violent and kinda sad, but moving and beautiful. Also: Spirit Crossing, the latest in William Kent Krueger’s excellent series featuring ex-sheriff Cork O’Connor, set in Northern Minnesota. A dead body found in a blueberry patch launches the story of pipeline protests, tribal politics, family secrets and the dark beauty and lurking spirits of the north country. Not pictured but excellent and hilarious: Richard Osman’s latest, We Solve Murders. Devoured it.

For some reason, around election time, I ended up reading two back-to-back books (Jason Rekulak’s The Last One at the Wedding and Teddy Wayne’s The Winner) featuring annoying male protagonists, middle class strivers who brush up against life-altering wealth. Weak and weaselly in different ways, both men too easily sacrifice their moral standards at the altar of rich assholes with waterfront mansions who get more in life than they deserve. (Both reminded me of the Riley Sager I read last year.) Good writers; smackable characters.

I’m currently reading Alafair Burke’s new one, The Note. (So far so great. And I’m reading it on a fun new mini Kindle-like book gadget called a Palma 2. #booknerd) One that got away from me last year but made many best-of lists was Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods, which I’m now listening to on Spotify.

If interested, some faves from 2024: James, Percival Everett; Lost Man's Lane, Scott Carson; The Ministry of Time, Kaliane Bradley; Horse, Willy Vlautin; The Hunter, Tana French; Chahokia Jazz, Francis Spufford; Like Mother, Like Daughter, Kimberly McCreight; and Where You End, Abbott Kahler.

Also after the election, my wife and I canceled our NYT subscription (first time in decades, though we’re back on board now) and dove into escapist TV. Faves included “Slow Horses” (best season yet); “The Perfect Couple”; “The Diplomat”; “The Agency” (based on the epic French series, “The Bureau”); “Say Nothing” (based on Patrick Radden Keefe’s excellent book); and “Interior Chinatown.” And now we’re bingeing “For All Mankind,” full of fun flashbacks to the characters and the world of my first book (which turned 20 last year).

Cocktail of the Month

I recently came across another cocktails & crime newsletter by another Seattle writer (Vince Keenan — if you need a replacement while I’m on hiatus). He’s also written about legendary Seattle bartender Murray Stenson, who died in 2023. I wrote about Murray in late 2023, and it seems fitting for my last newsletter (for a while) to share with you Murray’s best-known creation…

The Last Word

3/4 ounce gin
3/4 ounce fresh-squeezed lime juice
3/4 ounce maraschino liqueur
3/4 ounce green Chartreuse

Mix in shaker with ice; strain into coupe or martini glass; garnish with cherry (or not).

(*You can replace the gin and lime with rye and lemon to make The Final Ward)

(for more B&W cocktails visit: Potions)

Podcast of the Month

In my previous newsletter I mentioned a 3-part series I wrote for American History Tellers about the Titanic. Next is a 3-parter on the Wright Brothers, out now (to be followed by Jimmy Carter and a 1925 dogsled rescue adventure story):

And if you wanna hear all 20+ hours of episodes I’ve written for this show:

Finally, I’m skiing tomorrow, then headed to Austria next week for a first-ever European ski trip (birthday gift from wifey). In the spirit of the pow, the gnar, the shred, here’s a profile I wrote years ago of icon Warren Miller (click the pic).

And here’s an interview I did with Warren at Benaroya Hall (2012):

Thanks for reading (and drinking) along with me these past few years. I’ve enjoyed sharing my book recs, reviews, author interviews, cocktails and playlists. I remain grateful for your support and hope to be back in your inboxes again someday. Till then…

cheers,

-Neal

Find me @ Instagram; sometimes Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Goodreads

And it's a battered old suitcase
To a hotel someplace
And a wound that will never heal
No prima donna, the perfume is on
An old shirt that is stained with blood and whiskey…
-Tom Waits, “Tom Traubert’s Blues”

with birthday roses from wifey

Blood & Whiskey #39

Neal Thompson — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 15:00:56 GMT

Hey friends and readers,

Allow me to interrupt your election countdown doom-scrolling to say hello and share a few distractions, including a pile of books I’ve been reading since taking a little self-imposed hiatus from this newsletter.

Put down the phone and pick up one of these:

Horse, by Willy Vlautin

A small tale of a sad man trying to live a bigger, better life. Vlautin is a spare and soulful writer who shines an empathetic light on lives we mostly prefer to overlook. He makes this story of a broke, lonely, alcoholic sixty-something ex-rocker and a blind, mangy stray horse feel like the story of everything. Funny, moving, and deeply real. This one will stay with me. So will lines like, “Nothing good happens in a bar at night to a guy over fifty. It’s just a fact.” (Also, the lists of dozens of song titles that Vlautin ascribes to his character — “The Kid They Found by the Tracks” and “Cowboy Jim and the Narcoleptic” and “The Cops at the El Cortez” and “A Drink Before Work” — are like a small poetry collection.)

The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley

What a strange, ambitious, smart and surprising mix of sci-fi, mystery, history, and speculative near-future weirdness... Worth every block of yellow defacement by my highlighter, including little gems like (from a hunky time traveler referring to a coconut): "I’d never experienced a fruit that fought back so hard against being eaten.” Also a woman snoring lightly “like a puppy being squeezed.” Plus a “dank toothache of a day” and a day that “cracked open around me — I waded through its rancidly vivid yolk.” But all the while exploring colonialism, race, love, sex, and, especially, time.

Joe Hustle, by Richard Lange1

Like Vlautin, Lange lingers over those who're struggling to get by, often backsliding, but fighting to be strong and kind. I enjoyed spending time with Joe — ex-vet, ex-con bard of a barstool — and was rooting for him on every page. Funny, observant, respectful, sharp, and wise, Lange is the real deal and knows how to whip wonders out of weird small moments, like Joe running down an LA sidewalk covered with snails, leaving them crushed to snot in his wake. It’s a road-trip story, a crime thriller, and a love story with a message of hope and survival.

Creation Lake, by Rachel Kushner

Longlisted for the National Book Award and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Kushner’s latest is a European eco-caper spy story on its surface, but is really a genre-bending profile of a wounded, driven, devious and alluring woman seeking to bring down a group of anarchists and at the save time save — or perhaps rediscover, or maybe even forget — herself. Woven throughout is the charismatic (and cultish) lead activist’s musings on the nature of ancient man, specifically his beautiful, underrated and beloved Neanderthals.

The Audacity, by Ryan Chapman

This breezy satire feels like a book of the moment. A bunch millionaires gather on a Caribbean island to choose one global problem to collectively solve. Meanwhile, one of the invitees is missing, mainly because the news just broke that her medical startup is a fraud. Her husband attends in her place, and through him we observe the richest of the rich in their natural and nasty habitat. Stealing from the blurbs (because it’s apt): it’s a little White Lotus meets Succession meets Gatsby meets Martin Amis, but wholly original.

Bonus re-read: The Dog Stars, by Peter Heller

I first read it when it first came out over a decade ago (my fellow editors and I picked it as one of Amazon's best of 2012). I rarely reread books and wish I did it more often. It was a treat to re-enter the fraught world of Hig, his dog Jasper, and their unlikely survivalist partner and protector, Bangley. Also to linger over Heller's post-apocalyptic poetry. Something like: Hemingway meets Jim Harrison meets Barry Lopez meets Norman Maclean.

Up next: Jason Rekulak and William Boyle (see photo below), whose previous books I reviewed HERE and HERE. Also the forthcoming Stephen Spotswood. I missed his last one, but mini-reviewed the previous one HERE.

And as we head into book award season, I’ll share this, from Kathleen Schmidt’s excellent newsletter — “the best way to expand your reading pallet is to read long-listed books for literary awards.” Amen.

Pegu Club on right; tequila replaced gin in the margarita, left. Flowers by wife.

Finally, a shoutout to one of my favorite Substackers, Michael Ruhlman. When he’s not sharing insider tips from his New York neighborhood (Below 14th Street) he and his novelist wife Ann Hood are traveling, eating/drinking, meeting cool people, and reading lots of books. I love the tone: not “look at us” but “aren’t we lucky” and “look at these great people and places.” I’m also grateful for Michael’s recent shoutout to Blood & Whiskey, which pushed this little publication above 3,000 subscribers. (And there was much rejoicing.)

Cocktail of the Month

I’d previously posted a guest cocktail from Michael (a Gimlet, from his last book, the The Book of Cocktail Ratios). Here’s another …

The Pegu Club*

2 ounces gin
3/4 ounce Cointreau
1/2 ounce lime juice
1 teaspoon simple syrup (optional)
Dash Angostura bitters
Dash orange bitters
1 lime wedge

Combine the gin, Cointreau, lime juice, and simple syrup in a shaker, add ice, shake till chilled. Strain into a chilled coupe or an old-fashioned glass over ice. Add the bitters. Garnish with the lime wedge.

[*Generous with the shoutouts, Michael hat tips writer Will Schwalbe for this drink, his fave. Schwalbe’s latest: We Should Not Be Friends]

Also, since fall is here (and, well, the election), you can never go wrong with…

Classic Old Fashioned

2 oz. bourbon
1/4 oz. simple syrup (you can also just use sugar)
2 dashes Angostura bitters

Pour ingredients into an ice-filled rocks glass and stir. Garnish with thin-shaved lemon or orange peel. (No need to do the muddling thing, imho.)

And for a twist: replace the bourbon with mezcal, the simple syrup with agave syrup or nectar, and the Angostura with something like Mole Bitters.

Btw, I started collecting all previous B&W cocktails in this section: Potions

Podcast of the Month

I wrote a 3-part series about the Titanic for American History Tellers.

Finally, I’m overdue in posting this Q&A with Praveen Herat, whose excellent book Between This World and the Next came out a few months back…

● Origins: Twenty years ago I was floored by an exhibition: John Pilger’s Reporting the World at the Barbican in London, which assembled the world’s greatest reportage photography. From that day on, photojournalism became an obsession and the photojournalist a central character in Between This World and the Next. In a time when we’re surrounded by images from all over the globe, often of horrible pain and suffering, what does that mean for us? What responsibilities does it place on us? If those questions fascinate and trouble you, I hope my novel is a good place to start. And for anyone in London this summer I recommend Storyteller, the Imperial War Museum’s exhibition of the work of Tim Hetherington, who was killed in Libya in 2011. It’s utterly remarkable—and free to all.

● Secret weapon: It can be a lonely business, writing. For years, you’re chipping away at something that only exists in your head, hoping your whittling will reveal a meaningful form. I think of it like Henry Moore’s concept of truth to materials, except as a novelist you’re working not with stone or bronze, but the world, human experience, ideas, what we feel. When you allow someone into the world you’ve made, who’s just as invested in the work as you are, that’s an extraordinary thing. I was blessed to have my agent, Anjali Singh, who helped me polish what I’d sculpted into something much better. With Between This World and the Next, this was a special challenge, as I had foolhardily planned it to be the first of a tetralogy; I had to retain the groundwork for books to come, without compromising on narrative momentum. Whether I ever write the sequels or not, of course, depends on Between This World and the Next’s success. (Insert praying hands emoji here, haha.) But regardless, I’ll always be writing something: it’s my vocation, my raison d’être, my love.

● Quote: The heroes of Between This World and the Next — Song, Fearless, and Amos — are all, in their own ways, living with loss and the desire to get away from the toll the world has taken on them. I think that’s best reflected in the lyrics of a song that Song sings (there’s a tongue-twister for you!), a classic of Cambodian rock, Ros Sereysothea’s “Kom Nirk Oun Eiy”:

This life and the next, my baby.
I’ll wish for you. Hopefully, I’ll get what I wished for:
That I’ll meet you in every life after this.

● Risk: I think the most daunting aspect of research is knowing when to stop: a challenge I’m not sure I’ll ever master. With a novel like Between This World and the Next, which tackles big themes (transnational crime, grief, our moral duty to others), there were so many directions to pursue and so many things to learn and turn over in my head. Ultimately, though, with everything I write, things boil down to a dozen or so indispensable sources. But you have to read a lot and explore numerous avenues before you can settle on exactly what those dozen or so are.

● Fuel: Writing’s sedentary; there’s no getting away from it. But that’s good, I think: moving around becomes so necessary it makes it impossible to avoid exercising. For thirty years, I have run several times a week. I could probably write a book about the intertwined nature of running and writing if only Haruki Murakami hadn’t already done it (and so much better than I can!).

● Escape: I worry more about getting into my own head or, more precisely, the flow state I need to be in to write well. Music’s essential for that—something I wrote about recently for largeheartedboy. Bark Psychosis’s wondrous Hex LP is one of my favorites; it’s never far from my record player or on infinite repeat on my phone.

● Hero: I’d travel back in time to share a tankard of ale with Chaucer. At the Tabard Inn—the setting for The Canterbury Tales. I’m pretty sure old Geoff would be a cool drinking buddy. And I like the idea of hamming it up with him in bastardised Middle English.

● Words: The majority, but not all, of my reading relates to what I’m writing. At the moment, I’m finishing up my second novel, which explores the quest for real human connection in an age when technology presents us with unprecedented opportunities but also grave challenges that threaten us, mentally, socially, and epistemologically. My protagonist’s life is dominated by an addiction to pornography and I’ve been reading a lot around modern masculinity and feminism, past and present. Yesterday, I read Grayson Perry’s The Descent of Man—a little gem. Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex and Andrea Dworkin’s thrilling Intercourse have also been hugely important for me. People don’t talk enough about what a brilliant writer Dworkin was.

● Drink: Summer evenings in Paris revolve around wine and its infinite variety. In contrast, my taste in cocktails is pretty conservative. I usually ask for a Tom Collins in the hope that I’ll be served the same cocktail I drank twenty years ago in a hotel bar in Brighton: a random moment that left me with one of my greatest taste memories. Whatever I’m served is drinkable but never the same. No one, lest we forget, steps in the same river twice.

Praveen Herat

If you missed my previous Q&A, with Kimberly McCreight, it’s HERE.

Thanks for reading, everyone. Always grateful for your comments, questions, likes, shares, book suggestions, newsletter suggestions, or quick hellos.

And if you’d like to support my writing, consider subscribing:

Or just:

cheers,

-Neal

Find me @ Instagram; sometimes Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Goodreads

This one was suggested to me by Greg Mollin, who runs the excellent Artifact Books shop in Encinitas, CA — and earns a character named after him in the novel (although, not a character anyone would be proud of).

Interrogation: Kimberly McCreight

Neal Thompson — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 17:09:51 GMT

Hello friends and readers,

I’m happy to share this Q&A with Kimberly McCreight, whose new novel, Like Mother, Like Daughter (her eighth) I’d reviewed a few months back.

As I wrote back in April, this is the best kind of mystery: layered and tangled but easy to devour, a smart and twisty mix of crime drama, legal thriller, and domestic thriller, with messily believable characters and lots of heart. It’s also a book about learning to raise a teenager, about learning to let go.

The story begins: NYU student Cleo comes home to Brooklyn for a rare dinner with her mom, Kat (they’re not on great terms), but finds smoke spewing from the oven and her mom's bloody shoe under a sofa. While Cleo and the cops search for her, we learn Kat and husband Aidan are separated. We also learn that Kat is “controlling and judgy as hell,” as Cleo puts it, and Aidan is the nice parent, but he’s hiding something. Actually, everyone is, from Kat’s boss to her neighbor to Kat herself, lying about what she really does at her law firm and still keeping secret a dark (and bloody) incident from her past.

I reached out to the Brooklyn-based runner and former lawyer with some Qs and got some thoughtful, surprising, inspiring, and funny replies…

(photo by Nina Subin)

Where do you write (the place) and how (longhand, laptop, etc)?

I’m a member of the Center for Fiction Writers Studio, a small area of the CFF dedicated to people who work full-time as writers. However, when I have to work weekends—which is most of the time—I switch to a local coffee shop so that I can bribe myself with a steady stream of lattes and try to convince myself that I’m not really working. And always on a laptop computer at first! I don’t understand how anyone can write longhand. It just sounds painful! I do, however, turn to marking up pages once the book is good enough for me to go “on paper.” I mark them up extensively—sometimes it looks like I’m writing a whole new book on top of the existing one. I then have an assistant who is kind enough to try to decipher all that and enter the changes. There’s something very tactile about the whole experience for me. For instance, I could never dictate. It’s like my brain needs my hands to help. As for word counts, I always have them, or page counts if I’m revising. I use a program called Pacemaker that helps me keep track.

What was the genesis of Like Mother, Like Daughter?

My relationship with my own teenagers as well as my own upbringing were the inspiration for the novel, in particular how the two have intersected in good and bad ways. I can remember when my older daughter started first asking me real, complex questions about love that left me contemplating the choices I’d made in my own life. It made me realize what a complicated intersection there is in the lives of mothers and daughters.

Who or what helped bring the story to life?

I rely very much on research, but that’s usually later in the process, after I have a complete draft. I prefer to have my own intuition be the guide to finding the story and then fact-check myself after. I, of course, make any necessary changes and sometimes those changes are very necessary! And again, I’d say it was my own life experience in many different facets that most strongly informed the narrative, but readers become absolutely critical later. My editor Jennifer Barth is a patient saint who, believe it or not, makes my books a lot less complicated than they start out. Although at the end they are still pretty complicated! She’s very, very good at isolating superfluous threads.

Anything that helped fuel/sustain the writing?

I am a huge runner. I tend to sign up for a new long-distance race out in the future as I write a new book. I find the training and the writing really inform one another.

Is there another writer who you look up to (or did when you got started) — not just their writing/storytelling but lifestyle, attitude, how they conduct themselves in the world of books? In short, who’s the first writer you remember thinking: I want to do that?

I have many answers to this. I think Andre Dubus III’s House of Sand and Fog was the first book that I read and distinctly remember thinking: I need to do this. That and The Hours by Michael Cunningham. In terms of suspense craft, Gillian Flynn and Liane Moriarty are both bellwethers for me. I find their balance of suspense, theme, and characters to be, in different ways, incredibly inspiring. And in terms of “author citizenship,” I always point to Jodi Picoult, who is just a queen on all fronts. She is respectful and kind to every writer and reader she interacts with. She is an inspiring example of how to be a human in this world. Whenever I feel short on patience, I always think: What would Jodi do? And it’s always taking the high road and reaching for grace.

How have you changed and adapted over time to shifts in the literary ecosystem? Do you write or read differently? Promote your work differently?

I use social media quite a bit, but I limit it to ways I enjoy—which is mostly just Instagram. I actually like using it as a visual storytelling medium. It has become (at times when I’m not deep in book promotion!) another creative outlet for me. And I do very much keep an eye on the market and trends and all that. I am aware when aspects of the market may have become saturated and it’s time to pivot—but that’s more pivoting in the way I position my books. Because they are all crossovers you can talk about them in lots of different but accurate ways. But I think there is only so much you can do on that front. The marketplace certainly should never dictate the stories you write. That’s a recipe for disaster.

Is writing a lonely place for you? If not, why not? Outside of your work, how do you commune with the world?

The writing itself never feels lonely because I’m living in the heavily populated world I’m creating. In there, I have loads of friends! I do find the world of being a writer to be quite isolating, especially if you have a deadline and hence are working all the time! You really do spend all of your time alone and the long hours don’t allow a lot of time for the joining of writers’ groups and such. But I am trying to get better at developing my own network of writer friends by reaching out to others whom I admire who write similar books. Those relationships are absolutely invaluable.

What do you do to get out of your own head?

I meditate regularly and there is the aforementioned running. I also love going to the movies, the theater, and museums. I find it inspiring but also a real way to escape.

Do movies or TV shows influence your writing? Which and how?

Absolutely. Anything that marries complex characters with a thrumming plot engine is absolutely an inspiration—and also great dialogue. I appreciate any willingness to be bold as well, such as in the movie Poor Things. It’s a real reminder not to get tethered too tightly to this world. Classic thrillers like Presumed Innocent, which leave you on the edge of your seat while also genuinely feeling for the characters, are also inspiring as that’s the same balance I try to strike in my books.

Any writer you’d love to meet (dead or alive), and what would you ask them first?

Probably Gillian Flynn. I’d ask how I could convince her to be my friend irl.

What are you reading now and why?

I just started Murakami’s Norwegian Wood. I’m reading it with my daughters in a little book club. It seemed like a great book to reach across the gap between us. I’m not far in, but I’m already considering setting my computer on fire.

What are you writing now?

I’m working on revisions to my new book, Someone Else’s Husband. I’m at the very messy first-draft stage so it’s lots of just staying calm and toiling away.

What's your go-to cocktail or mocktail - and where?

I’ve actually been sober for 20 years, but I still like to try to get fancy mixed drinks when I’m out. I like bartenders to invent. I usually say, “Something with ginger beer that’s not sweet”—that way it’s always a little surprising. Turns out they love to put jalapenos in them these days!

Finally: where would you hide a body?

Come on now, I hire people to hide all my bodies. I don’t like heavy lifting, or getting my hands dirty.

(photo by Nina Subin)

“Gillian Flynn and Liane Moriarty are bellwethers for me. I find their balance of suspense, theme, and characters to be, in different ways, incredibly inspiring.”

Thanks for reading. You can find more “Interrogation” interviews HERE.

Feel free to like or comment below. And if you know others who might enjoy Blood & Whiskey (or need intel on disposing a body), please share:

-Neal

Find me @ Instagram; sometimes Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Goodreads

Blood & Whiskey #38

Neal Thompson — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 13:03:33 GMT

Hey there friends and readers,

During a recent Covid funk, I thought about what connected this month’s books and what I look for in all good stories. A twisty mystery is fun. Believable and empathetic characters are essential. But most vitally important to me is a strong sense of place, which is this month’s throughline, with stories set in rural Maine, the Puget Sound coast, small-town Missouri, and the fictional city of Chahokia. (As I was drafting this and got smacked by Covid I also read Krueger’s Ordinary Grace in a 2-day fog — more on northwoods Minnesota next month.)

Cahokia Jazz, by Francis Spufford — I could devote an entire newsletter to the weird, ambitious inventiveness of this reimagined version of America circa 1922. Spufford has not only created an alternative nation in which Aztec-descendent natives managed to cling (loosely) to a small piece of their former land — the fictional city of Cahokia (near real-life St. Louis). He’s crafted an entirely new American world order, with reshaped borders, social and political alliances, invented languages, rites, rituals, and, well, lots of blood. At the core of the story is detective (and jazz pianist) Joe Barrow, trying to find out who gutted a Klansman named Fred Hopper and left his disemboweled body atop a downtown building. Joe has no true alliances: he looks indigenous (he was orphaned), but can’t speak the native language, Anopa. He’s a cop, but out of sync with his corrupt and racist peers, including WWI-damaged partner Phin. The one place he feels at home is on stage with fellow musicians, but the day job mostly keeps him away from his keys. Cahokia is a “mongrel city” (as an FBI jerk calls it), with white people (many of them KKK-aligned) living uneasily among takouma (native) and takata (Black) people. On each page it’s unnervingly unclear who runs the show: the taklousa (whites). But mysterious and beautiful Moon and her uncle Sun, leaders of the takouma, also hold power. So do leaders of the Navajo and Mormon republics out west, and the Russian-owned “NST” region that in Spufford’s telling is not our Alaska. A reckoning is simmering.

Spufford is a smart, slick, gritty, witty writer. At times I wasn’t sure who to root for. Many of the characters are hard to like, and the murder mystery is often just scaffolding for the beguiling world he’s carefully built. But the language is vivid, fresh, bizarre, original; the scenes chaotic, exotic, and often quite bloody. At times I was awed and even intimidated at his pyrotechnic, sci-fi-level Cahokian creation. I was also grateful for the closing four-page summary about his research and the real-life details that inspired parts of his story. (Such as: Anopa was based on a pidgin language used along the Mississippi among Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Creek people and their French and English visitors.)

Btw, turned out that a quick visit with my dad to Belize was the perfect place to get lost in this trippy, sometimes challenging, wildly ambitious story:

nonambulatory on Ambergris Caye

Burn, by Peter Heller — I love the high bar scenarios Heller sets with his intense but heartfelt in-the-wild action stories (others include The River, The Guide, The Last Ranger, which I reviewed here last year). In this story, he aims higher: two childhood friends are hunting in Maine when they come across a bombed-out village, charred to the ground, bodies scattered. They’ve lost cell service, bridges have been blown up, villages are empty, black choppers circle. In this one Heller brings his backwoods storytelling chops into a politicized present day. It’s not giving anything away to say secession is in the air, and Maine is caught in the crosshairs. The friends are trapped and far from home, trying to survive and understand the conflict that’s been unleashed during their time in the woods. Heller tells great stories, but he’s foremost a stylist and poet, and I could fill a whole newsletter with lines I highlighted in Burn. Here’s a few:

The sun broke over the trees and ignited the frost to a crystalline brilliance that for a few minutes blinded them.
The pale wood smoke drifted straight upward out of the meadow.
The frost had melted in the grass and yarrow and goldenrod, and the meadow was wet and glistening, as if after rain.
It was a brilliant fall morning in one of their favorite territories on earth, and the air stirred barely with the particular sweetness of fallen leaves and turning woods, of moss and spicy ferns and wet earth.
Below them were pastures the farmer had let go: the grasses and clover were tall and golden and flecked with Indian paintbrush and wild pea flowers and black-eyed Susans, Queen Anne’s lace, fireweed.

But often, after a moment of beauty, we hear the gunshot, see the husk of a burned-out car or boat, hear the cries of an abandoned young girl, or discover a corpse. As one of the friends observes: “It seemed like they, whoever they were, wanted no witnesses at all.” And this: “Everybody’s crazy. Berserk.” Yup.

All the Colors of the Dark, by Chris Whitaker — Patch and Saint are misfit besties in small-town, mid-70s Missouri. He wears pirate outfits and a patch over his bad eye and quotes Blackbeard; she raises bees with her grandmother, the bus driver. One day, someone tries to kidnap beautiful classmate Misty, Patch comes to her rescue, and the baddie kidnaps Patch instead. From that setup unfolds a sprawling epic about small town secrets, class, art, friendship, love, and obsession. It’s not a spoiler to share that Patch returns home a changed person. Saint joins in his fixation on finding those who snatched him — and kidnapped others who didn’t escape. There are some great characters here, including a boozy art dealer and beleaguered Chief Nix, who tries to protect Patch and Saint from themselves. At one point Saint asks, “Will Patch be the same?” The Chief touches her cheek: “None of us will, kid.” The story takes its time, covering two-plus decades over 600 pages, at times a bit too slowly for me. But if you’re headed on vacation, it’s a great summer read to get lost in.

Middletide, by Sara Crouch — I enjoyed this debut mystery set in a fictional town on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, roughly across Puget Sound from my Seattle neighborhood. Crouch, a former professional marathon runner, has a nice easy-going style and (like Heller) is especially good at finding moments of natural beauty amid the procedural machinations of an investigation: nettle-covered forest paths; layers of moss and pine needles muffling footsteps; a plunge into a chilly pool of water; snowcapped mountains in the distance.

The gist of it: one morning at the edge of an inlet, two fishermen find Dr. Erin Landry hanging from a rope. The property belongs to Elijah Leith, who had recently returned to Point Orchards after his father’s death, years after leaving home to become a writer in California. Someone sends Elijah’s mostly forgotten novel to the sheriff. It’s a mystery about a murder made to look like a suicide — eerily similar to Dr. Landry’s death. The cops don’t believe it: “Too convenient,” says the sheriff. But all evidence points to Elijah, who insists on his innocence, then runs away before the sheriff can question him. He’s hoping Nakita, the Native women who’d been his long-ago girlfriend, might save him. Without giving anything away, though, some sections started to bug me… Characters and voices felt off and I thought the book was going off the rails. I scribbled in the margins “no way” and “Ugh!” Soon enough, I realized that was the point. I’d been duped by a clever plot twist. I also circled a few cliches I’d have edited out (world of hurt, heap of trouble), but mostly liked the world and learned that Crouch is working on a new book now set near Mount St. Helens. I’m all in.

More books and coming soon…

I did a Q&A with Kimberley McCreight that I’ll share next week. Her new book, Like Mother, Like Daughter (reviewed in April) is out Tuesday.
Looking forward to new ones from Willy Vlautin (The Horse); Eli Cranor (Broiler); Kevin Barry (The Heart in Winter); and a debut psychological thriller from fellow Seattle nonfiction writer Elizabeth Eaves (The Outlier).
I’ve been sifting through the New York Times’ curious and eclectic Best 100 Books of the 21st Century list, and finding some forgotten gems plus some I’d never heard of. Despite some to-be-expected odd inclusions and omissions I was happy to see three favorite nonfiction books on the list: Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers; John Jeremiah Sullivan’s essay collection, Pulphead; and Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing.

Mocktail of the Month

Here’s a weird bit of oversharing: after a hike near Mount Rainier, my foot swelled like a blowfish and the diagnosis was, ridiculously, gout. It hurt like a mother and left me hobbling until the steroids kicked in. I’ve had chronic arthritis for many years and have now learned that it leaves me vulnerable to weird shit like kidney stones (not yet, thankfully) and gout (arthritis’s creepy cousin). Turns out two things can contribute to flareups: whiskey and beer.

In recognition of that bit of glum news, here’s a mocktail…

NA Margarita

(adapted from last month’s cocktail, the La Cigua*)

3 oz. fresh lime juice
2 oz. fresh orange juice
2 oz. agave syrup
1 oz. cucumber juice (or chopped cuke if blending)
seltzer

Two options: a) add all ingredients to a shaker with ice, shake and strain into an ice-filled, salt-rimmed glass, then top with seltzer; b) toss everything in a blender, blend, pour into ice-filled, salt-rimmed glass.

* If you’re not mocktail-minded, just add a big splash of gin or tequila. Boom.

my first book; hardcover recently celebrated its 20th birthday

Finally, a quick Blood & Whiskey update… This newsletter started more than three years ago as a Covid (ha!) project and I’ve had a blast sharing book reviews, author interviews, cocktails, mocktails, and playlists with you. But a couple writing projects need my attention, so in the months ahead I’ll be scaling back on Blood & Whiskey (and on the whiskey, too). I’ve got a few more newsletters and author interviews planned for the coming weeks, but at some point may go on hiatus, with hopes of reviving this at a future date. You’ll probably still hear from me sporadically, just not monthly, and I may pause all paid subscriptions. But I’m very grateful to those who’ve throw some $ at this thing.

Thanks everyone for reading along with me. Please drop a line if you have a book or drink recommendation, a newsletter suggestion or a quick hello.

cheers,

-Neal

Find me @ Instagram; sometimes Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Goodreads

my outfit for the next six months

La Cigua

Neal Thompson — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 19:35:20 GMT

(reposted here from Blood & Whiskey #37, June 2024)

Cocktails of the Month

One bourbon, one tequila…

Classic Old Fashioned

2 oz. bourbon
1/4 oz. simple syrup (you can also just use sugar)
2 dashes Angostura bitters

Pour ingredients into an ice-filled rocks glass and stir. Garnish with thin-shaved lemon or orange peel.

[For a twist: replace the bourbon with mezcal, the simple syrup with agave syrup or nectar, and the Angostura with something like Mole Bitters.]

La Cigua (Spicy Margarita)

I’d rather drink a tequila on the rocks with lime than a margarita with triple sec (though I can occasionally handle one with Grand Marnier). But this one is a fave, with equal parts tequila and mezcal.

(from Theodora in Brooklyn, via Imbibe magazine, via Instagram…)

1 oz. tequila
1 oz. mezcal
3/4 oz. fresh cucumber juice
3/4 oz. fresh lime juice
1/2 oz. simple syrup
dashes of hot sauce or spicy tincture (to taste)

Add all ingredients to a shaker with ice and shake vigorously. Strain over ice in a glass rimmed with chili salt (1 tsp salt, 1 tsp chipotle, 1 tsp chili powder).

(Photos from La Cigua’s creator, Theodora, in Brooklyn, and Imbibe magazine)

Also… since this newsletter is ostensibly whiskey themed, I try to go easy on the amaros, bitters, and other aperitivos that lately comprise the bulk of my (lower ABV) drinking. But if interested, here’s a great primer on the world beyond Campari, from the expert in the field, Brad Thomas Parsons (LAST CALL).

Related: I really liked this Lambrusco Spritz (via NYT Cooking + Rebekah Peppler, whose newsletter, Shortlisted, helped guide us around Mexico City).

Blood & Whiskey #37

Neal Thompson — Sat, 22 Jun 2024 18:03:08 GMT

Hey friends and readers,

Better late than never.1 Mainly due to one lonnnnngggg book. It took a while to work my way through this 900-pager. I tried to savor it…

Southern Man, by Greg Iles

Iles has a lot to say about a lot of things: the history of the South (especially slavery), book-banning Karens, White Panic, voters who elected Trump “with fierce gladness in their hearts.” Also Armageddon and the great unraveling of America. Plus his and our “imminent mortality.” Penn Cage is dying of the same blood disease that took his mother. And, it should be said (because this book is heavy with it): the same rare cancer that afflicts the author.2

This excellent book picks up 15 years after the violent events of the third book in the “Natchez Burning” trilogy featuring lawyer-author-mayor-badass Penn Cage. This time, Iles is not effing around3… He drops us smack into a mass shooting and the burning of Old South plantation homes and the current presidential election, in which an electrifying third-party candidate rockets into position as a viable and well-funded alternative to Trump. Robert E. Lee White is a son of the South, an ex-sports star and war hero who lost an arm in Afghanistan and whose Tik-Tok videos rack up millions of views. But, of course, nothing about this Golden Boy is what it appears. “Bobby” Lee has secrets, and he has plans. Penn Cage is determined to show the world who this guy really is and what he wants. Looming over it all is the surging threat of another Civil War.

Okay, that’s the summary, but here’s what I really think: this is a horror story, one that feels sadly possible. As Penn Cage puts it, Jefferson Davis may be long dead, “But his ideas live on like an unkillable virus in the American bloodstream.” Speaking of blood, when Cage’s mother dies she leaves behind the manuscript for a book she’d been researching, one that will reveal to Cage just how deeply entwined his own life has been with Davis’s ideals. Hello, DNA surprise.

Since this is the tenth book Penn Cage appears in, there’s a lot of backstory and catching up, context and reminders that can bog things down a bit. But Cage’s backstory is a doozy, as complicated as the history of the South (lots of KKK and Lost Cause evils). As Cage’s ex-lover, the French filmmaker Martine, puts it, “the South seems a particularly brutal and vindictive place.” Says Cage: It can be.

I’d interviewed Iles ten years ago, for Natchez Burning, and this quote has stuck with me: “I’m concerned with evil, and why good people do bad things.” That concern is the burning heart of Southern Man, too.

Don’t Let the Devil Ride, by Ace Atkins — “An ebullient, rollicking ride,” as Megan Abbott blurbed it, from one of my favorite writers. (“Favorite” not just because he interviewed me at the amazing Square Books in his hometown of Oxford two years back4 — it was more the beers he bought me before and after.)

A former journalist (we both worked for Tampa-St. Pete papers), I was first introduced to Atkins (hat tip Megan Abbott) through his true-crime-based novels, like Wicked City and Devil’s Garden, and have since sampled his Quinn Colson and Nick Travers series. I still need to try his Spenser books (Atkins was picked to continue the Robert B. Parker franchise and wrote 10 Spenser novels).

This new one, his first in a while, is a total blast, fast, funny and fun as hell. The kick off is the disappearance of boozy Addison McKellar’s rich husband, Dean, who we soon learn is not really Dean McKellar and is not a Memphis real estate mogul. Addison hires PI Porter Hayes to help find her husband and unravel mounds of secrets and lies. But we’re soon introduced to an over-the-top cast just begging for a TV show: the One-Armed Man, a Russian thug named Zub, a sassy-sexy ex-Elvis co-star, even the Taliban. (I pictured a Lynchian-Scorsese mashup; a quick Google search tells me a TV show is already in the works.)

Everyone’s looking for the mysterious contents of a shipping container, and everyone seems willing to kill for it. As the body count rises a Memphis cop sums up the madness after one bloody shootout: “Russians? In Memphis? Ain’t that some shit.” Memphis shows off it’s gritty best here: bourbon, fried chicken, barbecue, Graceland, the blues… Each sentence is packed with small, smart blink-and-you’ll-miss-it details. I devoured it in three sittings and you should too. Hints of Ellroy, Lehane, and Pelecanos, but wholly original.

(l-r): Oxford all stars: author William Boyle, me, Square Books co-owner Lisa Howarth, Ace Atkins, Jack Sonni — at City Grocery, March 2022

Kala, by Colin Walsh — As someone who regularly attends college and high school reunions, and has a deeply nostalgic connection to my hometown, I’m always intrigued by stories about friends who come back to the scene of their youth. In this case, fifteen years after a memorable summer three friends are reunited in the Irish seaside town of Kinlough. As teens they’d been inseparable, but now they’re mostly far flung, experiencing varying degrees of adult success (one is a rock star), except for Mush, who stayed working in his mom’s cafe. Missing from the reunion is Kala, who had been the original group’s “white hot center” but who disappeared. When human remains are found in the woods — and two other girls are reported missing — long-buried secrets are unearthed. Like other great Irish writers, Walsh can turn character descriptions into weird poems; one man had shovel hands and “a cudgeled face, like a heap of salted meat.” Another’s cigarette-stained fingers were like “dirt that had become skin.” These are pages to linger over and admire, and Walsh is a writer to watch.

América del Norte, by Nicolás Medina Mora — During a recent trip with friends to Mexico City, I shared a mescal cocktail with Mark Doten, an editor at Soho Press (and an impressive author in his own) who gifted me a copy of this book. This was a perfect companion for our time in Mexico and our glimpse into expat life and politics during the runup to the historic election of Mexico’s first female president, Claudia Sheinbaum, whose campaign signs and billboards were everywhere. (We even got caught in a massive rally downtown near the Palacio de Bellas Artes.) The story follows a young man coming of age in the turbulent city of his youth and his travels to New York City and Iowa City (where the author studied at that city’s storied writers’ program). Very assured, elegant, and imaginative storytelling, strong on voice and humanity, featuring a vivid cast of characters across place and time, tackling class, race, family, immigration, NAFTA, Trump, the Mexican drug wars, Mexican history, and that nation’s complicated relationship with outgoing president Lopez Obrador.

The Demon of Unrest, by Erik Larson— I’ve been a Larson fan since Lethal Passage (30 years ago!) and have read them all. I just found this one in a Little Free Library and am diving in this weekend. It’ll be the perfect complement to Iles and Atkins, since Larson here explores the months leading up to the assault on Fort Sumter that triggered the Civil War. More next time…

Cocktails of the Month

One bourbon, one tequila…

Classic Old Fashioned

2 oz. bourbon
1/4 oz. simple syrup (you can also just use sugar)
2 dashes Angostura bitters

Pour ingredients into an ice-filled rocks glass and stir. Garnish with thin-shaved lemon or orange peel.

[For a twist: replace the bourbon with mezcal, the simple syrup with agave syrup or nectar, and the Angostura with something like Mole Bitters.]

La Cigua (Spicy Margarita)

(from Theodora in Brooklyn, via Imbibe magazine, via Instagram…)

1 oz. tequila
1 oz. mezcal
3/4 oz. fresh cucumber juice
3/4 oz. fresh lime juice
1/2 oz. simple syrup
dashes of hot sauce or spicy tincture (to taste)

Add all ingredients to a shaker with ice and shake vigorously. Strain over ice in a glass rimmed with chili salt (1 tsp salt, 1 tsp chipotle, 1 tsp chili powder).

Related: I really liked this Lambrusco Spritz (via NYT Cooking + whose newsletter, , helped guide us around Mexico City).

Playlist of the Month

Last month I mentioned a podcast series I wrote about the Pinkerton Detective Agency for Wondery’s American History Tellers. All three episodes are out now:

Thanks for reading, everyone. Always grateful for your comments, questions, likes, shares, book suggestions, newsletter suggestions, or quick hellos.

And if you’d like to support my writing, consider subscribing:

Or just:

cheers,

-Neal

Find me @ Instagram; sometimes Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Goodreads

Remembering Jack Sonni (December 9, 1954 - August 30, 2023) It was just after midnight last night when I read the news that Jack Sonni had died at the age of 68. He would be the first to tell you that he was best known as “the other guitar player in the…

Not that anyone’s keeping track, but I try to send these out between the 15th and 20th of every month. I was raised Catholic, then converted to journalism, so guilt over missed deadlines is in my blood. Speaking of guilt: all male authors this month.

Iles writes about that HERE.

Iles has spoken publicly about the car accident that took his right leg and nearly cost him his life. Penn Cage suffered a similar fate, and the depictions of Cage and his prosthetic are intense. Btw, Iles is also a guitar player and one of The Rockbottom Remainders, with fellow authors Stephen King, Amy Tan, Mitch Albom, Roy Blount Jr., Dave Barry, James McBride, Scott Turow, Matt Groening and other drop-ins.

While in Oxford, I also met former Dire Straits guitarist (also a writer) Jack Sonni, who died last summer. Brad Parsons wrote this nice piece about Jack:

LAST CALL

Remembering Jack Sonni

3 years ago · 21 likes · 12 comments · Brad Thomas Parsons

Blood & Whiskey #36

Neal Thompson — Thu, 16 May 2024 14:43:46 GMT

Hey friends and readers,

I recently plowed through most (but not all — more on that in a sec) of the trilogy by late Scottish writer William McIlvanney, featuring hard-bitten Glasgow cop Jack Laidlaw. The first, Laidlaw, was published in 1977, followed by The Papers of Tony Veitch in 1983, with Strange Loyalties closing out the series in 1991. McIlvanney, who also wrote poetry and literary fiction, died in 2015 at 79.

The Laidlaw novels got tagged as “Tartan Noir” (allegedly coined by James Ellroy, although McIlvanney preferred Noire) and they inspired Scottish writers like Val McDermid (“He kicked open the door”) and Ian Rankin ("It's doubtful I would be a crime writer without the influence of McIlvanney's Laidlaw"). Like Agatha Christie’s detectives, Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe, and Georges Simenon’s Maigret, Laidlaw is smarter than everyone else around him and knows it. He’s tetchy and stubborn. He quotes poetry and mostly does things his way. I won’t bother with much about the plot, cuz that’s not really the point with these books, but in short: book 1 is the brutal murder of a teenage girl (and we know who dunnit from the start); book 2 is a gangster’s murder and a missing college student; book 3 is the death of Laidlaw’s brother. What binds them and elevates them are the gritty streets and smoky pubs and underworld brutes of Glasgow. Also Laidlaw himself and the quirky Scottish dialect McIlvanney often (but not always) spells out phonetically, which I found both intriguing and sometimes tedious to follow. (I = Ah, to = tae, no = nae, wouldn’t = widny, and etc.)

McIlvanney is at his best describing the walking wounded of Glasgow, especially Laidaw. A deputy is assigned to work with him is warned: “Laidlaw? You’ll have to wear wellies when you work with him. To wade through the tears. He thinks criminals are underprivileged. He’s not a detective. He’s a shop-steward for neds. It’ll be a great experience for you. Boy Robin meets Batman.”

He’s also often funny. Of one thug, he writes: “He wore a shirt like an action-painting, sleeves rolled up to show impressive hairy forearms. Melted down, the silver buckle of his belt could have saved the economy.”

He’s been described elsewhere as "Raymond Chandler meets Albert Camus" and a writer who "transcends the conventions of the crime novel even while he observes them.” Reading these three books got me thinking about the experience of committing yourself to an ongoing series, the relationship that evolves between reader and, say, Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache, William Kent Krueger’s Cork O’Connor, Mick Herron’s Jackson Lamb. My shelves are stacked with a dozen such series. I love collecting them and seeing their matching covers lined up, reminding me of good times spent in their pages. But also? I sometimes run out of steam (I did with Louise Penny, even though I loved contributing to the newsletter last year). Sometimes I just get a little tired of the same cast of characters and want a new book.

Okay, enough on that. If you have any series you’d recommend, I’d love to hear from you (in the comments below). Other faves: Daniel Silva, Cara Black, Joe Ide, Andrea Camillieri, Ken Bruen, and the Marseilles Trilogy I wrote about in 2022.

Ash Dark as Night, by Gary Phillips

I’d heard his name for years but had yet to dive in, then I saw him on the bill at the recent Left Coast Crime convention outside Seattle, and then got a galley of his latest from friends at Soho Crime. And… Phillips is amazing, a revelation, ranks right there with Ellroy and Mosley. It’s August of 1965 and at the onset of the Watts riots photographer Harry Ingram (the previous book introduced him: One Shot Harry) takes a photo of cops killing an unarmed man. Harry gets pummeled but his photo gets published, and the twisty story spirals out from there, featuring his girlfriend, who happens to rob banks, and a mother seeking a son who disappeared during the riots. Smart, funny, and sexy, with a bunch of catchy historical asides and lots of grudging love for effed up L.A. A total blast.

For more, here’s a nice review of One Shot Harry in the Washington Post.

Wandering Stars, by Tommy Orange

His 2018 debut, There, There, put him on the map, but this new one will keep him there. We follow Jude Star’s escape from the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864, from Colorado to the Fort Marion prison in Florida and then Oklahoma, where Jude’s son, Charles, is born. Charles later ends up at the new Carlisle Indian Industrial School, run by Richard Henry Pratt. Students are forced to cut their long hair, wear uniforms, eschew any native rites, rituals, ceremonies. In short, to become white. Time moves quickly across the first 100+ pages, until we get to 2018 and things slow down. We meet the descendants of the massacre — reintroduced to characters from There, There — most facing the same hardships: assimilation and addiction, inheritance and identity, sorrow and survival. Wandering Stars is a story of inherited wounds: timely, urgent, beautifully written and terribly sad.

Lit bits…

Listening: The first episode of a series I wrote about the Pinkerton Detective Agency is now up on Spotify ( wherever you get your podcasts):

Watching: Speaking of dialects (see Laidlaw above), The Tourist, starring Jamie Dornan (the 50 Shades stud) as an amnesiac bad guy trying to be good, is packed with them: Northern Irish, Australian, Greek, Columbian. Season 1 is good not great; Season 2 is meh, but still fun and mostly worth it.
Wishing for: The martinis in Gary Shteyngart’s tour for the New Yorker. And if you haven’t yet, check out his cruise ship horror story in The Atlantic. Oh, and his Substack newsletter, .
Winning: Ed Park (Same Bed, Different Dreams was named a Pulitzer finalist) and Ben Fountain (won the Joyce Carol Oates Prize — his latest is Devil Makes Three). Both are Blood & Whiskey alums.
Watching: Northern lights! We missed them when they blazed through Seattle (watching The Tourist) but my son was camping on the Olympic Peninsula with friends and saw versions of this for an hour…

Cocktail of the Month

First, a shoutout to two whiskey distillers in my home state who won top honors (i.e. “Double Gold”) at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition: Woodinville Whiskey Co., for its Straight Bourbon Whiskey, and Bainbridge Organic Distillers, for its Yama Mizunara Cask Whiskey. When we first moved to Seattle, I wasn’t impressed by any West Coast whiskeys — too wheaty and flat compared to the bourbons I’d gotten used to in North Carolina (and the legit moonshines I’d sampled while “researching” my book, Driving With the Devil). But the whiskeys of the west have come a long way. I plan to try the Woodinville soon and will report back. I’d love to try the Yama Mizunara, but… not for 600 bucks. Unless a Blood & Whiskey sponsor cares to donate a bottle? It’d be for a good cause.

Now, onto the Rob Roy… I’ve also never been much of a scotch drinker, but McIlvanney’s Laidlaw and the streets of Glasgow inspired me to crack open a dusty bottle (still in the box) of Macallan 12 Year Single Malt, a years-ago gift from pal Julie’s boyfriend Ben (also known as just Ben). It’s probably sacrilege to use a great sipping scotch for a mixed cocktail, but it was delicious.

Btw, the origin of the drink comes from NYC’s Waldorf Hotel, in honor of the cast and crew of the popular 1894 play, Rob Roy, performed at the nearby Herald Square Theater, about the Scottish gangster Rob Roy MacGregor.

Rob Roy #1

(the classic — from ’s great 3-Ingredient Cocktails)

2 oz. scotch
1 oz. sweet vermouth
2 dashes Angostura bitters

Shake scotch, vermouth and bitters with ice in cocktail shaker; strain into coupe or martini glass; garnish w/lemon twist

Rob Roy #2

(from Under The Table: A Dorothy Parker Cocktail Guide)

2.5 oz. scotch
.75 oz. sweet vermouth
.75 oz. dry vermouth
3 dashes Angostura bitters

Shake scotch, vermouth and bitters with ice in cocktail shaker; strain into coupe or martini glass; garnish w/Maraschino cherry

(We got arty with the dead flowers. We’re available for weddings and funerals.)

Thanks for reading, everyone. Always grateful for your comments, questions, likes, shares, book suggestions, newsletter suggestions, or quick hellos.

And if you’d like to support my writing, consider subscribing:

Or just:

Btw, I'm sending this from Mexico City, which means next month’s newsletter will be heavy on the tequila.

Hasta luego,

-Neal

Find me @ Instagram; sometimes Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Goodreads

Interrogation: Deepti Kapoor

Neal Thompson — Wed, 01 May 2024 16:19:54 GMT

Hello friends and readers,

I’m happy to share this Q&A with Deepti Kapoor, whose second novel, Age of Vice, I reviewed last month. Kapoor’s first novel, A Bad Character, was published in 2015, a prelude of sorts to the sprawling Age of Vice, which came out last year and earned heaps of praise for it’s take on wealth, crime, and violence in modern India. It’s the first book in a planned trilogy and TV rights have been sold to FX Studio — this would make a great a TV series.

Kapoor was born in the Uttar Pradesh state of northern India, where much of the action in Age of Vice takes place. She worked as a journalist in New Delhi and lived in Goa before moving to Lisbon with her husband.

I reached out with some questions and was glad to connect with a fellow Scrivener user and to be introduced to the Curry Gimlet.

photo by Lea Meilandt

How long did you work on Age of Vice?

Years. I’m tempted to say half my life. I’d like to say more years than I care to remember, but in truth it’s more like a bunch of years that bleed into one another and become indistinguishable until the very end. You could say it was a range between twenty years or three.

When and where did you write the book? Also how?

I started in Goa, took it to Prague for a while and did nothing but drink there. Did some more back in Delhi. But really finished it properly in Lisbon. My first novel I wrote in longhand first and pared it down, but this was simply on the laptop. A friend introduced me to Scrivener, which helped organise the work, although I often get sidetracked and obsessed by creating PDFs that look like how I want the end book to look, and also get caught up in changing the font of the title page for hours at a time. Writerly procrastination at its best!
I guess what might be unusual, but I think really isn’t, is that my husband is fully involved in the work with me. He is my researcher, editor, sounding board. He came to India in 2006. We met and he never really left and we've never really been apart. We shared one disastrous magazine job between us then fled to Goa and dropped out of society. I studied yoga and he managed to get one or two freelance jobs in advertising or photography a month and that kept us alive in the years until my first novel sold. The rest of the time was just spent thinking reading, talking, and riding motorbikes, and slowly leading to writing novels.

Was Neda informed by your time as a journalist in Delhi?

I mean, Neda is a version of me, for sure. She doesn’t have the same family background - I lived in an unfashionable and more middle class part of Delhi, whereas she has a culturally elite family who owned prime real estate. I got smuggled into that world. My father was an employee with the State Bank of India and my mother was a housewife who happened to have a Masters in Literature. She came from a more establishment family, police officers and bureaucrats, and he was a very intelligent man from a very poor background. He should have gone far, but he couldn’t get into the heights of the Indian civil service because he failed his English exam. He was posted by the Bank to Bahrain, and when the Gulf War broke out I was sent back to a boarding school. That’s where I met all the rich people, the Sunnys, the Gautams. Then I ended up becoming a journalist in Delhi. Neda is a combination of the work as a journalist and my life with my rich schoolmates, who then went on to be very powerful people in their own right. But in terms of the novel, the research I did was a case of crossing the i's and dotting the t’s, in the sense that I had lived through a lot of stories from the perspectives of the people involved, or I'd heard stories told by people, and I needed to back those lived experiences up with a bit more journalistic detail. Almost all of the characters are based on people I knew or know. Events are based on the real life of people I knew even if I wasn’t there. The main cast of characters are all living in the world somewhere in some form, unless they're already dead, of course.

Sunny tells Ajay "money’s a fucking curse" - how is that true for you?

I’m not going to shit on money. Selling the novel changed our lives. We were broke when it was being written, a close friend of ours, Max, paid our rent for the last year. At the same time, money doesn’t solve the crises of the soul, it doesn’t let you escape from yourself, and it comes with its own weight. I say this as an observer too - I know a lot of very wealthy and very unhappy people from Delhi. The wealth comes with a responsibility that can be crushing, because you are a prisoner of its expectations. You can never convince someone who is starving of this, but it is still true. The bottom line is wealth can bring stability and material comfort, but it doesn’t guarantee the least bit of happiness and it can't solve the problems of the soul. And you can definitely buy a lot of new problems.

Sunny had good taste in cocktails. Do you have a fave/go-to cocktail?

Curried Gimlet. Gin, lime, fresh ginger, fresh curry leaves (kadi patta), sugar syrup. (*see below) Our house in Goa backed onto the jungle, and there was a curry leaf plant growing wild. The house was part of an extended family compound with four brothers and their families and lots of unspoken rivalries and rules. I never saw the plant myself because it would require passing through many metaphorical gates, but the wife of one of the brothers, Sushma, who became our designated protector, cook, housekeeper, cat sitter, spy and friend, always went and took the leaves for us. Curry leaf is pungent but glorious. You mix it with gin, lime, ginger, and sugar and it’s insane. My husband thought he’d invented the drink himself until he looked online a little later and saw that it had been used in many recipes, but he did come up with it in isolation. In those years we lived without much internet. Jungle all around, vipers and pythons and leopards in the hills, ravers and hippies on the beaches. And Blue Riband, an Indian gin, which is objectively rough but was the height of sophistication to us then. Also, you can give the cocktail a feni wash. That’s my husband’s unique contribution. It’s the alcohol of the fermented cashew apple. There were home stills all over the jungle, as well as the industrial ones. One of our local grocery and liquor stores held their own feni in a giant plastic vat, and served it in a bathroom bucket in the dark little room behind the shop. It’s an acquired taste I never really acquired. Ripe and fruity and wild, but if you hate it, it's like a mix between vomit and paint stripper. Goans are really crazy about their feni, and you can't buy it outside the state, so sometimes we'll get someone to smuggle some over to us in a plastic bottle. Once we brought a bottle to a friend who has a pub bookstore. It got put up behind the bar in a proper dispenser and everyone went crazy with it. It gives a really silly wild buzz. Anyway, for the drink you give the glass a little wash of feni (as you would absinthe) before you do the regular gimlet (the ginger and curry leaf muddled with the lime). That gimlet has taken us far. It hovers around Last Word territory, too, if you decrease the gin and up the feni. Otherwise I'm a regular Negroni girl.

Book or writer who made you want to become a writer - and why?

No one person or book makes you want to become a writer, at least not in my opinion. It's not like watching an athlete as a kid and being inspired. It's more like something there inside you, always inside, creeping up on you. It's not a profession, more like a compulsion. And in truth it's more like there are books out there that are so good they make you want to stop writing, because you know there's no way you can achieve what they did. But I think there are definitely books that have come out over the years that have expanded my ideas of what's possible in writing, or rejuvenated my own creative desires. An early book that energized me was The Sheltering Sky. Then the work of Anna Kavan gave me a new sense of strangeness, with her slipstream novels like Ice. Bolaño, definitely. Murakami before that. Rachel Cusk redefined the modern novel with her Outline Trilogy, reading those three books was utterly thrilling. Svetlana Alexievich's Second Hand Time is a breathtaking achievement. But none of them made me want to write. I am just in awe of them.

What's the weirdest thing in your writing space?

I don’t personally consider it weird, but I have a digital tanpura, a drone box. It’s used by Indian classical musicians as a device to set a continuous drone accompaniment for other musicians and instruments. I used to listen to it while I wrote, but now it sits there more as a charm. It got destroyed when we shipped all our things from Goa to Delhi, and we carried it to Lisbon like a religious relic. Then we moved into a Nepali immigrant district and through the local restaurant Miteri (best momos in town!) I found an electrician who said he could put it back together and make it work. He could! But I don’t use it now out of superstition that it’ll break. I switch it on every few months though just to check, and it still gives its classic drone.

What’s the weirdest thing you googled for the book?

The weirdest thing is probably some research material about human trafficking around the Indo-Nepal border. There’s a shady company that appeared in a few mentions, a front for a front, an agency that purports to help with job placements, but is allegedly involved in the trafficking of skin — taking women over the border from Nepal into India on the pretense of jobs, then forcibly imprisoning them and cutting the skin from their backs to be used for cosmetic surgery in the big India cities. Surgeries like penis enlargements. I’m not kidding. The leads go into dead ends, the company seems untraceable, the case itself is possibly just an urban myth, though I believe the practice does take place. It’s grotesque and terrifying.

What's the best or worst writing advice you've ever received?

I find that men often get in touch with unsolicited advice. Not so much advice but they’ll tell me things like: "I reviewed you on Goodreads… I told you what I think is wrong with your novel, but I’m also telling you here." You know, they'll DM me on Instagram to tell me everything I did wrong and where I could do better. It's usually Indian male writers or aspiring writers. They think they're being helpful. As for good advice, I can't think of anything anyone ever told me. I don't hang out with writers. The good advice I get is from reading good books and figuring out how and why those writers did what they did. You're always in a private conversation with great writing.

Finally, I've started asking all writers this: where would you hide a body?

The last place they’d ever look.

photo by Lea Meilandt

The Curried Gimlet

I tried to find a recipe, and found a couple that use curry syrup or nectar (like this Bengali Gimlet). This is my take, based on Kapoor’s description above…

2 oz gin
1 oz. lime juice
chopped or grated fresh ginger
fresh curry leaf (kadi patta — I substituted cilantro)
simple syrup

Pour gin and simple syrup into cocktail shaker with ice. Muddle the ginger and curry (or cilantro) leaf with the lime juice, then add to the cocktail shaker. Shake and strain into coupe glass. I decided to garnish with a cuke slice.

Optional: feni wash (i.e. rinse the glass with feni, but you probably need to be in Goa to find feni — see above)

not exactly a Curry Gimlet, but in the ballpark

“No one person or book makes you want to become a writer, at least not in my opinion. It's not like watching an athlete as a kid and being inspired. It's more like something there inside you, always inside, creeping up on you. It's not a profession, more like a compulsion.”

Thanks for reading. More “Interrogation” interviews: HERE.

Feel free to like or comment below. And if you know others who might enjoy Blood & Whiskey (or need intel on disposing a body), please share:

-Neal

Find me @ Instagram; sometimes Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Goodreads

Blood & Whiskey #35

Neal Thompson — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 23:06:33 GMT

Hello friends and readers,

I started this newsletter on Saturday, which was 420 Day, but I got so baked I couldn’t finish. I’m kidding. I don’t smoke or pop edibles and rarely have since high school. But 420 Day has special meaning in our house. As in: I fucking hate it. I’m happy for those who celebrate, I guess, but for me it’s a PTSD day. Getting whiffs of weed around Seattle gave me flashbacks to the skunk-smelly days of raising skateboarding teen boys, days that are thankfully now in the rearview. (You can find plenty of dad rants on that topic in my book Kickflip Boys.)

Better yet… Happy (day after) Earth Day! From the guy who made that great My Octopus Teacher film, here’s a story (half fun, half depressing) about the octopus that stole his camera. Also about the end of the world as we know it.

Or… more appropriately, I’m looking forward to this Saturday’s Independent Bookstore Day and to visiting a few local faves: Phinney Books, Elliott Bay Book Co., Secret Garden Bookshop, Third Place Books, Edmonds Bookshop. Shoutouts also to a few far-off faves: Malaprops (Asheville, NC), Tombolo Books (St. Pete, FL), Square Books (Oxford, MS), The Last Bookstore (LA), Harvard Book Store and Porter Square Books (Cambridge, MA), Munro’s and Russell’s (Victoria, BC).

Speaking of the Indies… I’ll kick this off with a note from Tom Nissley at Phinney Books, on Percival Everett’s latest: “It'll make you want to read Huck Finn again; it's so good it'll also make you want to read James again.”

James, the latest from Percival Everett

If you haven’t seen Jeffery Wright in American Fiction (based on Everett’s 2001 book Erasure), do it. And if you haven’t read James yet, do it. This is one of those high-wire “how’s he pulling this off?” novels, and one that’s stuck with me long after. In short, it’s a re-telling of Huck Finn from Jim’s perspective. When Jim/James learns that his owner plans to sell him, separating him from his wife and daughter, he runs away. Huck, meanwhile, has faked his own death to escape his violent father and the two join forces and start their epic journey by canoe and raft down the Mississippi. Among many clever twists: before his escape, Jim gives speech lessons to enslaved kids, teaching them the slave-speak dialect they must use around white people. As James explains to his students: “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint.” He also coaches them to avoid eye contact and occasionally stutter or mumble “so they can have the satisfaction of telling you not to mumble.” The real joy of the story is watching James’s friendship with Huck deepen and see Huck wrestle with the reality of James as another man’s property. There are moments when James slips out of character and Huck wonders why “Jim” sounds smarter that a slave should. James can read and write (with stolen books and stolen nub of pencil). He converses with the ghosts of Rousseau and Voltaire. But he must hide his intellect to survive and hopefully reunite with his family. In the end, we learn, this has been a book about family all along. And like other Everett books, it can veer from angry to funny to sad to beautiful, sometimes within the span of a sentence.

Like Mother, Like Daughter, by Kimberly McCreight

Speaking of family… Based on my own (flawed) parenting experience, especially the brutal teen years (see 420, above), McCreight (who has two daughters) clearly knows the fear of being bad at the job. “My mistakes as a mother had been accruing over time, as Cleo grew from little girl to teen and, increasingly, simply needed me to love her, and not try to fix everything.” And this: “It was as if I was following instructions from a What Not to Do as a Mom textbook.” Yup. Been there. McCreight’s story (not out till July) launches with NYU student Cleo coming home to Brooklyn for a rare dinner with her mom, Kat, but finding smoke spewing from the oven and her mom's bloody shoe under a sofa. While Cleo and the cops and Kat’s ex all search for her, we learn: Kat and husband Aidan are separated. Kat is “controlling and judgy as hell,” as Cleo puts it. Aidan is the nice parent, or tries to be. But he’s hiding something. Actually, everyone is, from Kat’s boss to her neighbor to Kat herself, lying about what she really does at her law firm and still holding onto the secrets of a dark (and bloody) incident from her tragic past. This is the best kind of mystery: layered and tangled but easy to devour, a twisty mix of crime drama, legal thriller and domestic thriller, with believable characters and lots of heart. It’s also a book about learning to raise a teenager, about learning to let go.

Age of Vice, by Deepti Kapoor

I really enjoyed this one and was a bit awed by the epic sprawl of it, with no wasted words — of which there were many. It starts with a violent incident: a car has plowed into a crowd in New Delhi, a pregnant woman is dead, a well-dressed drunk man is behind the wheel. But none of it is quite what it appears. The man behind the wheel is Ajay, who was plucked from an impoverished home in the Uttar Pradesh of northern India and forced into servitude but learned survival skills that helped him become bodyguard to Sunny Wadia, the handsome playboy son of a crime boss. The story veers from New Delhi to Goa to London to Mumbai to the slums and farms of Uttar Pradesh, also from the POV of multi-talented Ajay to dreamy-but-naive Sunny to ambitious but conflicted Neda, a journalist in New Delhi who reluctantly falls for Sunny, then falls hard. Some of it is over the top, frenetic, relentless. The dialogue is hyper-paced, slick and boozy. What I admired most were the smaller moments, how “the yolk of a sun cracks over the peaks,” how a tube light “gathers yearning moths” and “steam escapes resting truckers’ mouths.” Ultimately (it seems to be a theme this month), it’s a story about flawed fathers and their aspirational sons who admire but also hate and fear their dads and yearn to break free. And the motto of it all? “Money is a fucking curse … It annihilates everything.”

I reached out to Kapoor for a Q&A, which I hope to share next week.

A Killing on the Hill, by Robert Dugoni

At a recent Left Coast Crime writers’ conference in nearby Bellevue, I heard Dugoni speak on a panel and realized I hadn’t read any of his books. I picked up his latest (from the Third Place Books table), drawn by the moody cover, the newspaper reporter protagonist, and the setting: my hometown of Seattle, in 1933. I’m only halfway through but it’s been a blast. I love when a writer clearly sweats the historical details, from the candlestick telephones to the price of a coffee to the nuances of the dying days of Prohibition. Cub reporter William “Shoe” Shumacher lands his first big story when ex-prizefighter Frankie Ray turns up dead at the mob-run Pom Pom Club on Profanity Hill. (See? Pure poetry.) For a Seattle local, it’s a blast reading about the earlier days of salmon-throwers at Pike Place Market (a job my son once had), speakeasies and “disorderly houses,” the Italian neighborhood called Garlic Gulch, and Seattle’s rain and misty marine layer hanging over it all. I also love it when the cops talk dirty, like: “Let’s go talk to the coroner.”

Lit bits…

Watching: Ripley (Adam Scott as a creepy and excellent Tom Ripley, on Netflix); Sugar (Colin Farrell and Amy Ryan, Apple TV); The Nice Guys (hilarious 2016 film with Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe).
Listening: The Rest is History podcast. Lots of Khruangbin.
What my current wife is currently reading: the rest of Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brody series (and watching the TV series, too).
Celebrating: Speaking of my current wife, we just hit 30 years. Just shy of half my life with this one. So far so good.
Waiting: up next = Wandering Stars, the new novel from Tommy Orange. Also a few from scrappy, Blood & Whiskey-friendly Soho Crime: Ash Dark as Night, by Gary Phillips; Murder at La Villette, by Cara Black; Broiler, by Eli Cranor; The Murder of Mr. Ma, by SJ Rozan and John Shen Yen Nee
Cheering: I was glad to see three writers I admire pick up LA Times Book Prizes this past weekend — mystery/thriller winner Ivy Pochoda, for Sing Her Down; fiction winner Ed Park, for Same Bed Different Dreams; and Seattle’s own Claire Dederer, for Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. (I’m headed to see/hear Claire read tonight at my local Phinney Books).

Soho Crime swag

Cocktails of the Month

There’s lots of whiskey in this month’s books, especially Age of Vice (often chugging from whiskey bottles, but also some high-end cocktails). I liked the sound of the Venetian spritz (a 2-1-1 mix of prosecco, Aperol, and soda water) that hottie bad boy Sunny insisted be made not with Aperol but with Mauro Vergano Americano, an Italian herbal aperitif/vermouth. I haven’t been able to find a bottle, but as the days start to get warmer (so slowly here in Seattle), I plan to experiment with other vermouth or amaro spritzes. I’ll report back.

Meanwhile… My longgggtime friend Blaise and I were recently discussing our parents’ 1970s drinking habits. Blaise remembered that his mom’s favorite was the Rye Presbyterian, which she called a “Rye Press.” So I give you…

The Presbyterian

2 oz. rye whiskey
2 oz. ginger ale
2 oz. soda water

Pour the rye over ice in a Collins glass first, top with ginger ale and soda. Optional: replace ginger ale with ginger syrup + fresh lemon and/or lime juice.

Optional: for the full 1970s effect, fire up a Parliament and, say, the Eagles.

Thanks for reading, everyone. Always grateful for your comments, questions, likes, shares, book suggestions, newsletter suggestions, or quick hellos.

And if you’d like to support my writing, consider subscribing:

Or just:

Till next month,

-Neal

Find me @ Instagram; sometimes Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Goodreads

Blood & Whiskey #34

Neal Thompson — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 16:26:22 GMT

Hello friends and readers — a belated Happy St. Patty’s Day.

I’m just back from a ski trip with buddy Blaise, capped by a 4-hour train ride (PDX>SEA) devouring Tana French’s latest. I read my face off this past month, with half an eye on Irish themes. The best of the bunch was French’s The Hunter.

There’s something compelling about the slower pace and deliberate “don’t rush me” table setting of her books. She doesn’t give you a mutilated body on page 4, or 40, or maybe ever. Like Louise Penny, she carefully introduces place and character, then lets the menace and dread unfold slowly. I’ll admit, for an impatient reader, this can take some breath work. In fact, I didn’t love The Witch Elm (2018), which kept me from reading The Searcher (2020). This new one is a sequel of sorts to The Searcher, though you don’t need to have read one to enjoy the other. All that throat-clearing aside: The Hunter is a blast.

It continues the story of ex-Chicago cop Cal Hooper, who’s settled in a rural west-Ireland village where he nurses a romance with neighbor Lena and repairs furniture with teen protégé Trey, who has “the general air of being raised by wolves.” Trey (short for Theresa, whose brother Brendan went missing in The Searcher) is a wonderfully intolerant and twitchy character, someone who’d “rather pull out her own fingernails with pliers than do anyone here a favor.” When Trey’s shitty dad returns home from four years in London, the charismatic and conniving Johnny Reddy sets the story into lurching motion with a scheme to find gold in the hills and farms of peaceful Ardnakelty.

Though US-born, French has lived in Ireland for decades and she has a great ear for dialogue and the subtleties of Irish wit and snark. Hilarious conversations — at a pub, beside a fence post — can last for pages. Once I settled into the pace and let the story take me, I gained a new appreciation for French’s brilliance.

Galway Confidential, by Ken Bruen

Unlike French, Bruen gives you a body on page one. It’s a nun. And it’s not pretty. I’d read a few earlier books in the Jack Taylor series. This one (#17) catches up with Jack as he’s waking in the hospital from two years in a coma (insert eye roll) and picks up where he left off: smoking and drinking too much “Jay” (Jameson). Jack’s coma was the result of a near-fatal attack in the last book. Sitting by Jack’s side is a strange man named Raftery, who claims he was there the night of the attack and saved him. Jack’s recovery introduces him to a post-pandemic world that he must navigate on shaky legs and a constant thirst for the Jay. He’s hired to find the villain who’s attacking Galway nuns, but Jack is weak and world-weary; he’s a wreck and he knows it. Bruen’s style is stark, brisk, darkly funny, with glimmers of hope and light. It’s fast paced and a bit herky-jerky, with short chapters — some just a page, some just a poem. The book’s title refers to a crime blog that doesn’t exist. Also to Ireland’s hidden secrets. (You can read a great interview with Bruen at CrimeReads.)

Lost Man’s Lane, by Scott Carson (Michael Koryta)

I’ve been reading Koryta’s smart, deeply researched mysteries and thrillers for years, but this is the first of his “Scott Carson” books I’ve tried. I’ve mentioned I can be an impatient reader, like a crabby casting director, arms folded: “Show me what you got, kid.” I’m especially skeptical with a 500-page book. But this one? It shut the casting director right up. Marshall Miller is a 16-year-old in Bloomington, Indiana (Koryta’s hometown) who’s testing out his new driver’s license when a cop pulls him over. But there’s something strange about the cop, and there’s a young woman in the back seat of his cruiser, crying. We soon learn the woman has been reported missing, and Marshall ends up interning for a private investigator on the case. Together, they uncover all sorts of small-town strangeness. At times it felt like Carson had 20 plates spinning, but it all holds together nicely. I loved this book. It had the sweep and sweetness of John Irving and the spooky-ghostly grit of Stephen King. But wholly original, too, with vivid and loveable and heartbreaking characters. It’s a coming-of-age story (clearly based on Koryta’s younger days: he was once a PI), plus a mother-son story and a love story. It’s also a love letter to the college town of Bloomington — and to the late 1990s and high school keggers and English teachers and Dashiell Hammett and friendship and young love and family. Also snakes and ghosts.

The Havana Run, an Amazon Original short story by Ace Atkins

Ace has a new novel, Don’t Let the Devil Ride, coming in May. In the meantime, I tore through this fast-paced short, a riff of an adventure story featuring two smart-ass/dumb-ass ex-journalists (both laid off from the Tampa Tribune, where Ace once worked, competitor to the St. Pete Times, where I once worked), who fly to Cuba to find a treasure. George and Jay are sent there, all expenses paid, by a mysterious old man Jay met over cafés con leche in Ybor City, who may or may not be some kind of Cuban royalty. In Cuba, they meet a beautiful translator/fixer whose warnings — “trust no one” — go unheeded. Bullets fly and the two chatty pals sink deeper in over their heads. It’s a hoot. (Another Amazon Original Short I’m looking forward to is Ivy Pochoda’s just released Jackrabbit Skin.)

Panic, by Luke Jennings

Jennings is a London-based author and journalist who wrote the novel Codename Villanelle (followed by two more in the series) that became the TV series Killing Eve. Panic is a catchy, clever page-turner that tackles some of today’s nastiness around hate, nationalism, and intolerance for gender and identity politics. It’s the story of four super-fans of the TV show City of Night. They all bristle against the narrow mindedness of their far-flung small towns (two of them are trans), but they find each other in an online fan chatroom. The show’s fans want love to bloom between the two main characters, Pandora and Lyric, and the mashed-up name of that hoped-for affair — #Panic — gives the chatroom (and book) its name. (I read that Jennings got the idea after being invited to a fan chatroom for Killing Eve.) The foursome soon learns from the show’s make-up artist that it's star, Alice Temple, is in trouble. They meet in L.A. to try and save Alice, but they’re soon on the run from a violent, far-right hate group called Legion. It’s all wacky and feels clearly written for TV (it’s already in development), but it’s a fun, fast read and the characters, all marginalized in their own way, are a funny and chaotic crew. (Jennings is writing a serialized new Villanelle novel here on Substack: KILLING EVE: RESURRECTION)

Two set in New Orleans:

The American Daughters, by Maurice Carlos Ruffin — Antebellum New Orleans is a city “at war with itself … in love with its own beauty.” That’s the setting for Ruffin’s hauntingly beautiful story of Ady and her mother, Sanite, enslaved by a prick named du Marche, from whom they escape into the bayou. Ady later joins up with a society of spies and resistance fighters called The Daughters, where she thrives thanks to the survival lessons from her resilient mother. Part spy story, part revenge story, part mother-daughter story, The American Daughters reminds readers of the horrors and brutality of this dark period in U.S. history. In a jarring but effective conceit, Ruffin regularly refers to “slave labor camps, also called a plantation,” to remind us that enslaved women like Ady and Sanite lived not on moss-covered estates but in forced and violent captivity — an American gulag. Still, there’s poetry and vivid imagery throughout (“The Mississippi churned by, a rippling walnut-brown sheet…”) and Ady is memorably spirited, funny, creative, defiant and courageous. Ruffin wrote much of the book as a John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence (an amazing program, whose alums include Megan Abbott and Jesmyn Ward) in the boozy and bookish town of Oxford, Mississippi. (Ruffin discusses that and more in this great interview with Barnes & Noble’s amazing Miwa Messer.)
Blessed Water, by Margot Douaihy — This is the follow-up to Douaihy’s debut, Scorched Grace, which I reviewed last year (and interviewed Douaihy: here). Blessed Water catches up with Sister Holiday, the tattooed punk rocker who’s joined the Sisters of the Sublime Blood and, at the same time, become an apprentice PI with the Redemption Detective Agency, run by ex-fire inspector Magnolia Riveaux, whom Sister Holiday befriended in the first book. As the good-bad nun begins her first case (in a spooky echo to Ken Bruen’s murdered nuns), we soon see a murdered priest floating down the Mississippi. Sister Holiday pulls the swollen “manatee of a person” from the river and realizes it’s “clad in all black, like me.” Like Ruffin, she makes much of the weather, the history and the water, water, water of New Orleans. Douaihy’s background as a poet glimmers on every punkish page.

painting by my mother in law, Pauline

Books I haven’t read yet, but will, and you should too, and other stuff…

Atop my TBR pile is James, the latest from Percival Everett, who has become one of my favorite writers. (I reviewed Trees in 2021 and Dr. No in 2022; and So Much Blue reigns among my all-time faves). If you haven’t seen Jeffery Wright in American Fiction (based on Everett’s 2001 book Erasure), do it. (And I mentioned B&N’s Miwa Messer above: she also interviewed Everett.)
Lisa Unger’s The New Couple in 5B is just out. Collette Bancroft, the great book critic at the Tampa Bay Times (my former employer, when it was the St. Pete Times - RIP), called it a classic, with echoes of Rosemary’s Baby. (You can find Lisa’s newsletter here: )
This one I did read, but it’s not out till July, so I’m saving my review for later: Like Mother, Like Daughter, by Kimberly McCreight — it’s realllllly good.
What my current wife is currently reading: Kate Atkinson’s Transcription. Says wifey: “Smart!” I read it years ago but might try it again soon.
I’d mentioned that I wrote a podcast episode on James Baldwin (listen here). So here’s a great NY Times roundup on “The Essential James Baldwin.”
Also up next: Wandering Stars, the new novel from Tommy Orange.

Cocktail of the Month

A traditional Stone Fence is made with rum or brandy, but I came across this one — from New Orleans bartender J’Nai Angelle — in Imbibe magazine. (I also liked that Stone Fence felt very rural Irish). You can also get away with using the Jay (Jameson), but I found this version to be simple, tasty, crisp, and elegant…

1.5 oz. rye whiskey
2–3 oz. apple cider
2 dashes angostura bitters
2 dashes Peychaud’s bitters
1 dash orange bitters

Mix all ingredients in a cocktail shaker, then pour over rocks. Or just mix it up right in an ice-filled glass. Garnish optional.

Unboxed… As someone who follows many authors on social media, I’ve seen lots of unboxing videos. That’s when an author eagerly knifes open a box of galleys or hardcovers they’ve just received from their publisher. Some are better than others. Here’s mine from two years ago — featuring a Guinness cameo.

Thanks for reading, everyone. Always grateful for your comments, questions, likes, shares, book suggestions, newsletter suggestions, or quick hellos.

And if you’d like to support my writing, consider subscribing:

Or just:

Till next month,

Sláinte! (that’s Irish for “the Jay”)

-Neal

Find me @ Instagram; sometimes Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Goodreads

as last year’s Grand Marshall for Seattle’s St Patty’s Day Parade

Blood & Whiskey #33

Neal Thompson — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 16:04:25 GMT

Hello friends and readers,

I don’t say too much about my own books in this space. I’m like a parent who brags about other parents’ kids. But my offspring have been on my mind lately, so indulge me…. This week is the 1-year paperback birthday and 2-year hardcover birthday of my sixth book, The First Kennedys: The Humble Roots of an American Dynasty. Also this week, I received a first-ever royalty check for my second book: Driving With the Devil: Southern Moonshine, Detroit Wheels, and the Birth of NASCAR. That book came out nearly 18 years ago and still sells a few hundred copies a year. The royalty check (tiny, but cute) means my publisher has recouped the $ they fronted me (the “advance”) and I have “earned out.” Only one other book has reached earned-out status (the rest may never), so it’s a nice mini-milestone to celebrate (with a Cocktail of the Month, see below). Also, I’m now in the process of working with my agent to pitch book #7 to publishers — or, as I like to think of it, sticking my finger in an electrical socket once again, and hoping for a different result. More on that soon, I hope.

3 of my 6 babies

But there’s another reason for all this me, me, me…

The Golden Gate, by Amy Chua — Chua is best known (at least by me) for her 2011 book, Battle Hymn of a Tiger Mother, about raising her daughters in the strict “Chinese way.” Back to me: in my 2018 book Kickflip Boys: A Memoir of Freedom, Rebellion and the Chaos of Fatherhood, I described Chua’s Tiger Mom as a guilt-inducing taunt to our free-range parenting approach with our sons.

The Golden Gate is her debut novel and it’s surprisingly good. Set in Berkeley, CA in 1944, it’s the story of the murder of Walter Wilkinson, a presidential candidate (based loosely on Wendell Willkie) and lover of China's First Lady, Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, who has a place in Berkeley. Wilkinson is shot one night at the Claremont Hotel, where ten years earlier the daughter of a wealthy San Francisco family had died. On the case is Homicide Detective Al Sullivan, a Mexican American cop with a mysterious past. In Chua’s hands he’s a bit of Sam Spade, but she treats it all with a knowing wink at the tropes of the genre.

Lots of entertaining historical asides and backstories: about otters, the Lincoln Highway, forensic policing, Japanese internment, San Francisco’s Chinatown, California’s Native tribes. She’s also flirty and funny. One dumb-ass cop “fell out of the stupid tree and hit every branch on the way down.” There’s plenty of cigarette smoke and whiskey, also some fun lines. A lodge full of taxidermy is “like a cathedral where the gods were animal carcasses.” A fancy living room “smelled like gin, orchids, and expensive carpets.” Good dialogue, too — including this easter-egg nod to the Tiger Mom: “Why didn’t some expert — like maybe a doctor — write a book teaching people the best way to raise a kid?”

I put The Golden Gate in the category: didn’t expect to like it, it grew on me, and I’m glad I stuck with it. The reverse of that experience was The Fury by Alex Michaelides, whose bestseller The Silent Patient has been on my TBR list for ages. The premise seemed solid: murder on a Greek island. Except… it’s narrated by annoying Elliot Chase, pal of the ex-movie star who invited him to her island, who was there the night of the murder and promises “a story unlike any you've ever heard.” Except… his slowwww recounting of the night’s events grated on me, as did his tone. Aiming for chummy — “you and I should be sitting together on a couple of barstools right now” and “I’m a sly one, aren’t I?” and “where was I? forgive me…” (ugh) — our narrator comes off as trite, sneaky, cloying. Not for me, so I gave up halfway through. (After wondering “am I missing something here?” I was relieved to read the New York Times’ critical review.)

But here’s one I loved: Iron Lake, by William Kent Krueger.

Published more than 20 years ago, it’s the first in Krueger’s long-running series featuring Cork O’Connor, a part Irish, part Native former Chicago cop sleuthing in small town northwoods Minnesota. I know it’s lazy to quote blurbs, but this one sums it up nicely: “one part James Ellroy, one part Stephen King, one part Jack London.” When we meet Cork, he’s the ex-sheriff, having stepped down after an unfortunate shooting. His marriage to lawyer Nancy Jo is on the rocks, so he’s living in a dead friend’s Quonset hut and sleeping with a beautiful waitress with a rumored reputation. Everyone knows everyone in the town of Aurora and surrounding Tamarack County. Often they’re related. But even here the racial and economic lines are drawn in bold. On one side: developers, casino owners, and lawyers; on the other: casino workers, ice fishers, and the just-getting-by. Cork straddles multiple worlds (racial and economic) but doesn’t seem to fit comfortably in any of them. The gist of the story is the apparent suicide of a wealthy judge, and the disappearance of a kid who found the body. But the real story is the people of this beautiful but wounded remote corner of America.

I loved the mood of it: chilly, snowy, icy, bloody. The characters are real, the bad guys bad, the violence sharp, and the ice on Iron Lake thick enough for a car chase — except for that spot where it’s not. Looking forward to getting to know Cork better as I read deeper into the series, which is now 20 books strong.

Next, three nods to Dashiell Hammett…

For the past year I’ve been writing scripts for the American History Tellers podcast (see playlist below). I’m currently drafting a 3-part series on the Pinkerton Detective Agency. Dashiell Hammett spent a few years as a Pinkerton agent before launching his writing career. This led me to finally reading Hammett’s classic first novel, Red Harvest, which was inspired by his time as a Pinkerton. The hard-boiled, unnamed “Continental Op” drinks and shoots his way through the corrupt and violent town of Personville (pronounced Poisonville in gangster-speak — like shoit for shirt). Full of ice picks, pipe bombs, whiskey explosions, car chases, juke joints, and tough-talkin’ dames, it’s a hoot. And the names are pure noir poetry, like from a Tom Waits song: Reno Starkey, Lew Yard, Pete the Finn, Whisper, the Op, a bunch of lungers, bulls, and muckers and “a little lame guy called Step-and-a-Half.” Also perfect little moments of gloom to go with a body count to rival John Wick: “Day was still a little way off. The street was the color of smoke. My feet made a lot of noise on the pavement.”
We just finished watching the TV series Monsieur Spade, written and directed by Frank Scott (recently profiled in The New Yorker). Clive Owen is a better-then-expected Sam Spade, now semi-retired in southern France (with a terrible French accent). The show was a blast, with the snappiest dialogue and an odd but hilarious final-episode cameo by Alfre Woodard.
Hammett pops up everywhere… I’m reading a fantastic new book by “Scott Carson” (aka Michael Koryta), about a 16-year-old kid who spends a summer working for a PI in Bloomington, Indiana. The kid’s boss introduces him to Hammett’s unnamed operative employed by the Continental Detective Agency, so the kid reads a collection of Hammett’s “Continental Op” stories. His boss then becomes the Indiana Op. (More on that book next month.)

Tidbits…

Also reading: The Rabbit Hutch, by Tess Gunty; The Penguin Book of Murder Mysteries (X-mas gift from wifey, with obscure stories from around the globe); The Lost Detective: Becoming Dashiell Hammett, by Nathan Ward.
Up next (all publishing in March): Lost Man’s Lane, by Scott Carson (Michael Koryta); Blessed Water, by Margot Douaihy; The Havana Run, an Amazon Original short story by Ace Atkins; #Panic, by , who wrote the trilogy that became the TV series Killing Eve, and who’s now writing a serialized new Killing Eve: Resurrection novel here on Substack.
Here’s a great piece by S.A. Cosby on the impact crime novelist Chester Himes has had on his work, in the New York Times.
And a horror story: According to an Economist/YouGov poll about America’s reading habits, nearly half of U.S. adults read ZERO books in 2023 (46%); 33% read five and 5% read just one. Those (like me) who read a book a week-ish? Top 1%. Hit the Washington Post to read the full story (and weep).

Cocktail of the Month

Keeping with the Dashiell Hammett theme… In Red Harvest, the Continental Op is never far from a drink — usually with Dinah Brand, often just gin, lemon, ice. (“I tried to laugh with her while I kept my head above the gin I had guzzled” and “At forty I could get along on gin as a substitute for sleep.”) Or sometimes just a shot of Scotch. (“I moved some of the Scotch from my flask to my stomach.”)

Sam Spade is also a Scotch man, but partial to the occasional cocktail. I found a few cocktail tributes to Hammett or Spade, but my favorite was the Prohibition-era drink, the Scofflaw, apparently created in 1924 in Paris. There are various versions out there, but I prefer the one below, which I found via an Instagrammer (@vintagepulps) who found it inside a 1927 issue of the pulp magazine Black Mask featuring Hammett’s story, Poisonville. That was the first installment of a four-part serialization that in 1929 became the book Red Harvest.

The Scofflaw*

2 oz Scotch (you can also use rye)
1 oz. dry vermouth
3/4 oz. lemon juice
3/4 oz. grenadine
2 dashes orange bitters

Combine with ice and shake, then strain into a chilled glass. No garnish.

(*here’s the post on Instagram — tell them Blood & Whiskey sent you):

The Scofflaw

Playlist of the Month

More me, me, me… Here’s a collection of podcast episodes I’ve been writing.

Most recent = mini profiles of James Baldwin and John Steinbeck (both serious drinkers, btw) for a series on Great American Authors.

Share Blood & Whiskey

Always grateful for comments, questions, likes, shares, etc.

Thanks for reading…

Till next month,

-Neal

Find me @ Instagram; sometimes Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Goodreads

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Blood & Whiskey #32

Neal Thompson — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 19:32:41 GMT

Hello friends and readers,

Well, here we are in 2024. Election year. Nothing to worry about, right? I’m starting off the year-that-might-explode with a few weeks of sobriety (hurry up, Dry January, let’s go…) and a bunch of reading. Happy to share a few faves.

The Lost Van Gogh, by Jonathan Santlofer

This follow up to Santlofer’s excellent The Last Mona Lisa (which I reviewed back in 2021, here) reunites us with artist-sleuth Luke Perrone, art-thief daughter Alexis Verde, and INTERPOL agent John Washington Smith. This time they’re after a long-rumored final Van Gogh self-portrait, which Alexis seems to have found at an antique shop, a discovery that fires up this steamroller of a novel.

Santlofer is an artist and art teacher (some of his sketches are included in the book) who knows his stuff, knows a Picasso from a Gaugin, knows his way around a museum, which makes him a great tour guide through the shady world of art forgeries and art theft. The story is intricate and twisty, full of double- and triple-crosses, with occasional flashbacks to 1944 Paris, when the Nazis were looting art. There are lots of characters to track, all packing secrets and lies, so I recommend reading this is a few big-gulp sessions like I did.

From an upstate New York junk shop to Manhattan’s art galleries and auction houses to the museums and cafes of Amsterdam to the town outside Paris where Van Gogh lived and died, it’s a fast-moving and page-turning hoot of a historical thriller. It’s also an ode to Van Gogh. Says one character, standing beside Van Gogh’s grave: “Some people live a hundred years and do not accomplish a thing. Vincent lived thirty-seven and changed the way we see.”

I also loved the nods to other mystery books and writers, to the noir-packed Criterion Channel. (Santlofer created and taught at the Crime Fiction Academy at the Center for Fiction in New York — he’s noir through and through). And I thank Santlofer for this Van Gogh ditty, now tacked on my corkboard:

“If something in yourself says, ‘You aren’t a painter.’ It’s then you should paint. And that voice will be silenced.”

The Thursday Murder Club, by Richard Osman

I’m late to the party on this one. My wife got there first and raved, and now I see why — it’s a blast! The tone felt peppy and irreverent, a sly and winking spin on the whodunnit. In the Jigsaw Room at Coopers Chase Retirement Village in southeast England, a group of retirees meets weekly to sip wine and whiskey and discuss cold cases. When a builder is killed, followed by the greedy, cocky developer of their village, the group finally has a real murder case to investigate.

This cast of eccentrics — cops and crooks, boxers and priests, groundskeepers and farmers, Turks and Cypriots, all with slow-to-reveal backstories — reminded me some of Louise Penny, but even funnier and occasionally kookier. The murder club crew is a mix of sweet, grumpy, and mysterious, but all ultimately loveable. Meeting in the Jigsaw Room is an apt setting for the Murder Club’s sessions; the story’s scattered pieces come together slowly, messily, and then… surprise! Says one character, summing things up: “We all have secrets, don’t we?”

With lines like “Why send Starsky and Hutch when Cagney and Lacey could have done the job?” I’ve already ordered #2 in the four-part series.

Where You End, by Abbott Kahler

Kahler is best known for her gritty-boozy nonfiction books — Sin in the Second City; American Rose; Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy; The Ghosts of Eden Park (written as Karen Abbott) — all masterworks of narrative nonfiction that all read like crime novels. Now she’s made that bold leap into fiction (many a nonfiction writer’s dream, including yours truly), and the results are fantastic.

Set in and around Philadelphia, Where You End tells the spooky story of “mirror twins” Kate and Jude in the days after an accident has wiped out Kat’s memory. Jude is caring for Kat, telling her stories about their childhood, trying to “reconstruct her sister from the ground up.” When Kat begins to doubt some of Jude’s stories, she sets out to investigate her own missing life. She begins to distrust the one person she needs to trust with her ghosted life.

Mirror twins are identical twins whose traits are flipped — one is right handed, one is left handed; one parts their hair on the left, the other on the right. Looking at each other is like seeing themselves in a mirror, and that image (based on Kahler’s own mother and aunt) haunts the book. I kept picturing the twins in The Shining, and Kahler has fun with it. The twins speak in a secret language of jumbled letters that only they can decode — wint = twin.

Slipping back and forth in time (before and after Kat’s accident) we slowly learn who these sisters really are, and were, and that Jude’s descriptions of an idyllic childhood are pure fantasy. Jude seems to be protecting Kat, but from what? Kahler is a patient and poetic writer. She takes her time unraveling this taut mystery, which eventually introduces us to the twins’ troubled time in a culty group called “The Plan” (the dark details of which I won’t spoil here, except to say that recruiting for the club was called hunting rabbits). We meet a limping loan shark, an ex-dancer named Very Sherry, a handsome-pervy bad guy turned antiques dealer called King Bash. It’s all creepy, unnerving, tense and intense, especially as Kat begins to understand who she really is/was: “I am a person capable of losing control in unpredictable and dangerous ways.” Much later she wonders if her sister’s lies were meant not to deceive her but to save her.

If you missed it, I did an “Interrogation” Q&A with Kahler last week:

Rabbit Hole, by Kate Brody

I loved this book: smart, funny, raw and poignant, and far more self-assured than a debut should be. The opening line sets the tone: “Ten years to the day after my sister’s disappearance, my father kills himself.” Our narrator is Teddy Angstrom, a school teacher who learns that her drug-addled father had been obsessed with the mystery of her sister Angie’s disappearance. He’d gotten pulled deep into the rabbit hole of Reddit and online conspiracies, a hole Teddy finds herself sucked into after his death. Despite a close relationship with her snarky Irish mother, and a steamy romance with a hot landscaper (great sex scenes, by the way - sometimes sexy, sometimes realistically awkward), and a good job that she mostly enjoys (“I teach the shit out of Joyce”), Teddy starts to lose her shit.

As Teddy spirals into subreddits she meets Mickey, a tattooed young student who sorta resembles Teddy’s sister and seems to know a lot about Angie — and Teddy’s father. The two team up to chase leads, both online (with detours into MySpace and AIM) and in real life (the story is set on the coast of Maine). But as Teddy discovers, sometimes “things that are broken cannot be unbroken.”

Teddy is a wonderful but heartbreaking character. She hates the Dave Matthews Band (ditto), loves her sick Irish wolfhound, Wolfie, enjoys rough sex with boyfriend Bill. But she’s so sad, grieving the loss of sister and father, and as she gets tumbled by the world of doxxing and DM-ing she seems headed for a fall. And she knows it, can feel the wolf inside her, “twitchy and ravenous.”

I reached out to ask Kate (a fellow part-Irish native New Jerseyan) a few Qs…

Mood: A gritty, dark look at the way grief breeds obsession.
Origins: I wrote a failed novel before RABBIT HOLE that was also about grief and growing up. The feedback I got from agents who passed on it was that it didn't have enough plot structure, so with my second attempt, I looked to a genre that I loved (mystery) and tried to incorporate those elements into a work of literary fiction. I knew right away that there would be a sister relationship at the heart of the book, as well as a kind of doppelganger (Mickey). I started with Mark's suicide to force myself into action, and I incorporated the Reddit parts as a way of thinking about how we live and communicate right now. I had become fascinated with Reddit and the larger true crime ecosystem, and it felt like a good fit for the ideas and relationships that I wanted to explore. Both grief and the internet can be lonely, isolating, intense places.
Secret weapon: My friend, Jacquelyn Stolos, has been one of my first readers since college. She knows how to strike the right balance of cheerleading and criticism, depending on where I am in the process. I always feel like she understands what I'm trying to do, and she helps light the path forward in moments when I'm feeling stuck. It helps that she is a brilliant writer, too. Her adult novel is called EDENDALE, and she has a Middle Grade novel ASTERWOOD coming out next year. It's the kind of book that I would have read under my covers late into the night. I can't wait until my kids are old enough to discover it.
Favorite line: So hard to choose! You could probably open Robinson's GILEAD to a random page and pick any sentence. I think often about the perfection of Amy Hempel's short short "Sing to It": "At the end, he said, No metaphors! Nothing is like anything else. Except he said to me before he said that, Make your hands a hammock for me. So there was one."
Risk: I gravitate towards characters and language, but I struggle with plotting, which is tricky when you're attempting a mystery. So the part I was most nervous about was making the plot feel propulsive and satisfying without trafficking in any silliness or cliche.
Fuel: Books are the best writing fuel. I was definitely inspired by contemporary greats, like Miriam Toews and Kate Elizabeth Russell. KER's My Dark Vanessa is how I ended up with my/our brilliant agent, Hillary Jacobson. I was also teaching during the writing of the book, and the kind of deep textual attention that teaching requires improved my own work. I loved going deep into classics like Frankenstein and The Odyssey, as well as short stories by writers like Edna O'Brien, Anton Chekhov, Edgar Allen Poe, James Joyce, and Nabokov. Sadly, if I'm in a groove with my writing, that usually means I'm eating like shit and barely working out.

Mocktail of the Month

As I get older my body keeps rethinking its relationship to drink. My tolerance is down (especially brown liquor, sadly), so I keep trying new things (like NA beer and low-alcohol cocktails). And each January I try to do the dry thing. This year I’ve had more fund than usual playing with low- to zero-proof concoctions using kombucha, bitters, syrups, seltzers, ginger beer, and some of those faux “spirits” (like the “Black Ginger” and “tequila alternative” I found at the bustling Cheeky & Dry nonalcoholic bottle shop up the road). Read more about the NA trend in my local paper, the Seattle Times, which featured this tasty drink:

Baby Juice

0.5 oz. fresh squeezed lime
0.75 oz. grenadine (I used real pomegranate syrup)
0.75 oz. fresh squeezed grapefruit
3 oz kombucha

Pour first three ingredients into a small glass, then add ice cold kombucha. Garnish with a lime wheel. “Wets” in the household can add a splash of gin.

(*this one comes from Ryan Minch at the excellent Seattle bar, Liberty)

And if you’re just not into the dry thing, more into Wet January or Dampuary, here’s a drink from Abbott Kahler that’s nicely themed to Kate Brody’s book, too:

The White Rabbit

8 oz vodka
4 oz triple sec
4 oz fresh lemon juice
A splash of simple syrup
Mint leaves

Says Kahler: “Delicious and deceptively potent”

Playlist of the Month

At least we can get a little whiskey in song...

Finally, a request… My subscriber list is nearing 3,000 and I’m asking readers to be a pal and tell a friend about Blood & Whiskey — email your ex, post to the socials, tell your bookstore or book club, the hot landscaper or your therapist?

Share Blood & Whiskey

Also, I’m always grateful for any comments, questions, likes, etc.

Thanks for reading… Till next month,

-Neal

Find me @ Instagram; sometimes Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Goodreads

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Interrogation: Abbott Kahler

Neal Thompson — Fri, 12 Jan 2024 22:09:12 GMT

Hello friends and readers,

Happy New Year — and, for those partaking, happy Dry January. A full Blood & Whiskey newsletter is coming next week, with cocktails and mocktails. But first, I’m happy to share this Q&A with the hyper talented Abbott Kahler, whose previous books (written as Karen Abbott) include Sin in the Second City; American Rose; Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy; The Ghosts of Eden Park.

Now Abbott has done what many of us nonfiction writers dream of: written a novel, and a very good one… Where You End, out next week, is the story of twins Kate and Jude in the days after an accident has wiped out Kat’s memory. Slipping back and forth in time (before and after the accident) we slowly learn who these sisters really are, that their childhood wasn’t as idyllic as Jude tells Kat it was, and why they’re still haunted by their time in “The Plan” (the details of which I won’t spoil here). It’s creepy, twisty and intense. It’s already earned a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly (“brilliant and spine-tingling”) and Kirkus called it “a vertiginous paranoia tale and a melancholic meditation on identity.”

I reached out to Abbott with a six pack of questions.

What was the biggest challenge pivoting from researched nonfiction to making shit up?

I found myself comparing the two genres while writing WHERE YOU END. You can’t write bad dialogue in nonfiction. All of the conversations are already written out for you, immutable and perfect in the historical record. You’ll never make a wrong decision with your plot, because you’re merely recording the twists and turns rather than inventing them. My nonfiction outlines, which are always inevitably longer than the books themselves, offer a clear blueprint of the narrative trajectory. But dead people are stubborn. They don’t always do what you want them to do, or say what you want them to say, or make decisions that generate interesting plot paths. Chronology can also be an issue, since dates and world events are annoyingly immovable.

Fiction, on the other hand, is thrillingly liberating but also terrifying; there are so many possible narrative pitfalls and dead ends. When I wrote an outline for WHERE YOU END, my characters wanted to rebel against it, and I had to listen to them.

What was the best part? No endnotes or bibliography?

That was definitely a highlight! Although I should say that I did have to do a bit of research for WHERE YOU END, particularly the appearance and vibe of Philadelphia in the 1970s and 1980s (I visited my cousins in the city frequently, but lived in Norristown, just outside the city limits).

Like a lot of big cities during those decades, Philly had a bit of a Wild West feeling, and I wanted that to come across as accurately as possible.

How did the twins in Where You End come to you? How did you research the lives of twins?

WHERE YOU END is actually inspired by a strange, true story of identical twins and amnesia. In 2019 I watched a fascinating documentary called Tell Me Who I Am, which tells the story of British identical twins Marcus and Alex Lewis. Alex suffered a traumatic brain injury, and when he awakened from his coma he recognized only his twin’s face and name. All other memories and history had vanished. In this tragedy, Marcus found an opportunity: he would rewrite their history and invent new memories—ones that bore little resemblance to reality.

I was also inspired by my mother and her identical twin. Like the twins in the book, they’re named Katherine and Judith and are mirror twins—a phenomenon that occurs when the embryo splits later than usual. My mom is right-handed and my aunt a lefty; their hair parts naturally on opposite sides. Looking at each other was akin to looking in a mirror. Even the secret language Kat and Jude use in the book was based on a language my mom and her twin had invented when they were young. I had been observing this unique twin bond all of my life, and the complicated relationship between Kat and Jude came naturally to me.

In your nonfiction and now in fiction, you keep things dark. I'm curious: if you had to, where would you hide a body?

This is an excellent question, and one I’ve thought about over the years (in terms of plotting novels, of course)! My runner-up option would be the meat grinder route: run the body through the machine and either toss the bits or use them as fertilizer. But this method necessitates a very messy preliminary task: severing limbs and other body parts to avoid cogging up the wheels, so to speak. I think the better option would be an iron barrel and a generous dose of concentrated lye. Let the body simmer in there for a month until it’s reduced to sludge, and then either bury the barrel or toss the sludge down the gutter.

Come to think of it, there’s one more option: dispose of the body on the Galapagos island of Floreana. My next nonfiction book, THEN CAME THE DEVIL, features a few mysterious disappearances—and bodies that were never found.

[ed. note: Then Came the Devil: A True Story of Sex, Murder, and Utopia at the Dawn of World War II is coming in 2025. Read a short sample HERE]

"The Plan" was creepy as shit (and reminded me a little bit of this weird weekend retreat thing my Catholic school did our senior year, called "Search"). Was "The Plan" based on any true story, or totally from the mind of Abbott?

I did a bit of research into Werner Erhard and his “Erhard Training Seminars” (later known as the Forum). All sorts of self-improvement movements were born in the 1970s and EST was among the most popular, attracting various celebrities (some of whom are mentioned in WHERE YOU END). The basic idea was that you could change your life by “experiencing” your negative habits and thought patterns and choosing to reframe them. But the rest of The Plan, including the animal games, is all my own invention. Weirdly, Erhard is from my hometown.

What book or writer who made you want to become a writer - and why?

I’ve loved Edgar Allan Poe as soon as I could understand him. When I was a kid, I would often try to rewrite his stories from another character’s point of view. For instance, what was Madeline Usher thinking when she was trapped behind those bricks? What story would she have told? He helped me identify my favorite feeling: a sense of dread. There is no other feeling I enjoy more while reading a book. (In real life, of course, I prefer no dread at all.)

What's your go-to cocktail - and where?

Oh, I love this question! My current favorite cocktail (usually at home) is the White Rabbit, in honor of WHERE YOU END.

The White Rabbit

8 oz vodka
4 oz triple sec
4 oz fresh lemon juice
A splash of simple syrup
Mint leaves

Delicious and deceptively potent...

“dead people are stubborn”

And here’s a couple from the archives…

I interviewed Abbott at Book Expo in 2014:

… and at Elliott Bay Books in 2011:

“Let the body simmer in there for a month until it’s reduced to sludge, and then either bury the barrel or toss the sludge down the gutter.”

Thanks for reading. More “Interrogation” interviews: here.

Feel free to like or comment below. And if you know others who might enjoy Blood & Whiskey (or need intel on disposing a body), please share:

Till next week…

-Neal

Find me @ Instagram; sometimes Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Goodreads

Blood & Whiskey #31: end-of-year edition

Neal Thompson — Sun, 17 Dec 2023 14:08:12 GMT

Hello friends and readers,

Before we get to the moll or the Korean novelist or the Irish unraveling or the Du Maurier homage or my favorite cocktail of the year, let’s start with the serial killer on death row.

I’d missed it when it came out last year, but glad I finally found time for Danya Kukafka’s incredible Notes On An Execution. We meet Ansel Packer twelve hours before he’s scheduled to die. In alternating chapters, we slide back in time to hear different women in Packer’s life — a detective, his mother, a girlfriend’s sister — tell his story. It’s the story of an abandoned boy becoming a manipulative monster. Yet in Kukafka’s telling, he’s also earnest, human, and hopeful, making him all the more terrifying as we learn about his crimes.

Convinced he’s more than wicked — “You are expansive… You are complex” — Packer has written a manuscript, his “Theory,” that he hopes will explain everything, help him outlive death. “It’s like I’m leaving a piece of myself behind,” he tells the female prison guard he’s wooed into helping with an escape plan. A jaded warden sees through him, sniffing: “So, you’re a manifesto guy, huh.” Told with empathy and in an eerily poetic prose, we see Packer realizing too late that he’s not special at all. He just a bad man who’s about to die.

Same Bed Different Dreams, by Ed Park

I hate to lean on terms like fever dream and kaleidoscopic, but it’s no easy task to describe Parks’ brilliant, trippy, outrageous and long-awaited second novel. It’s mostly the story of a writer named Soon Sheen, who works for a tech giant called GLOAT. Soon meets a group of writer friends at a party in New York, an opening scene that felt like the last sane moment for hundreds of pages.

Woven throughout is the bizarre (fictional, mostly) century-long history of the Korean Provisional Government (KPG), which is told in the pages of a manuscript entitled “Same Bed, Different Dreams” that Soon steals at the end of the party. I’d need too much space (and a drink) to explain where the story goes from there, but it’s manic and hilarious and an absolute blast, featuring walk-ons by a nutty mix of characters, from Jack London to Teddy Roosevelt to Marilyn Monroe and literally hundreds more, many of them agents with the KPG. Maybe. There’s also photos, diagrams, puzzles and codes sprinkled throughout, and I mostly gave up trying to make sense of it all and just held on for the thrilling ride and its Vonnegut-meets-Murakami-meets-LSD vibe.

(Ed and I once worked together at a GLOAT-ish company)

Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch

Gotta admit, this recent Booker Prize winner was a tough read — brilliantly and beautifully crafted, but all too believably terrifying. Eilish Stack is a biologist living in Dublin with her husband, Larry, an official with Ireland’s teacher’s union, and their four kids. We’re subtly introduced to a simmering civil unrest afflicting this fictional Ireland, where citizens worry about the rise of the National Alliance Party and the menace of the Garda National Services Bureau, which Eilish’s husband insists is “not the Stasi” — just before he heads off to join a protest march and disappears, never to be seen or heard from again.

Such disappearances are soon a common occurrence in a nation that is slowly and then rapidly imploding as a nationalist frenzy sweeps the land.

What makes Lynch’s story so terrifying is the frog-in-boiling-water inaction, the under-explained references to “the party” and the “Emergency Powers Act”; the flags draped outside some homes while others go dark; the store shelves empty, the ATM machines dark. Misinformation runs wild, then the intimidation and vigilantism begins. As Eilish’s 12-year-old son Bailey spookily declares: "the worm is turning … the worm does what it likes.” The chaos builds slowly and then horribly. And then it gets worse. At its core is a strong woman fighting to save her wounded family, clinging bravely and sometimes naively to hope, trying to keep her shit together as the world she knew collapses around her.

It’s filled with achingly dark and stunning lines. And yet… too much relentless chaos and sorrow for my taste. A “challenging read,” as they say. But given the horrors we know people are capable of inflicting on neighbors, he’s not wrong, either. It’s just a bit too uncomfortably real. Maybe that was the point.

Queenpin, by Megan Abbott

I understand the phrase “stay in your lane” and understand why (even Michael Jordan) you should stick with the sport you know best. But after five nonfiction books and a memoir, I can’t shake a nagging obsession with writing a novel. Over the years I’ve spoken to many fellow writers about making the switch (including Abbott Kahler, a nonfiction writer whose first novel, Where You End, is out next month). After a nonfiction book project recently fell through (RIP spy story), I’m now trying to revive enthusiasm for my fiction project by returning to a stack of novels recommended by writer friends, some based on true stories.

That led me to Megan Abbott’s amazing third novel, 2007’s Queenpin. Part of her early-career string of award-winning dames-and-thugs noir novels (set in the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s, often Los Angeles), it’s the story of an ambitious young woman taken under the wing of mob-connected Gloria Denton, beautiful and infamously brutal. But when the unnamed young woman falls for a handsome gambler, she wonders if she’s capable of double-crossing her mentor. The dialogue is as Chandler as can be, but the women are smarter and the sex is better. Packed with jewels (“sparkly wampum”) and smoldering Chesterfields, nightclubs and racetracks, the vig and the knife, our protagonist knows it can’t last: “I knew it had been headed toward this from the minute she set her hooks in me.” Inhaled in two days, it was one of the most enjoyable reads in a while. Now I’m onto The Song is You, based on a real-life late ‘40s Hollywood murder.

On the novel-writing front, shoutouts to the player-coaches sharing wisdom here on Substack: (Craft Talk); (SubMakk); (Gary’s Journey Through Hell); (Italics Mine); (Story Club — for kicks, here’s an old interview I did with Saunders); (Before and After the Book Deal); and , with the best-named newsletter, Shaved Meats, Piled High.

The Fiction Writer, by Jillian Cantor

On a ferry ride to Victoria, BC and back (to see my kid), I gulp-read Cantor’s fun twist on Rebecca Du Maurier’s Rebecca, which had yet another fictional Rebecca homage (entitled Becky) tucked inside, like a nesting doll.

It was a clever idea: after the flop of her novel, Becky, Olivia Fitzgerald is lured to the Malibu home of handsome billionaire Henry "Ash" Asherwood, who thinks Du Maurier stole his grandmother’s story and wants Olivia to ghostwrite a book about it. I kept turning the pages, even if Olivia bugged the shit out of me. One of many examples: the maid, who is the sister of Ash’s suspiciously dead wife (and the stand-in for Du Maurier’s Mrs. Danvers), drugs her coffee, but then Olivia thinks maybe she imagined it? This kind of thing happens a few times — maybe that thing I saw with my own eyes wasn’t real? — and I came to find Olivia annoying, sometimes tough but often naive. Still, it was a fun enough read and it sent me to my own copy of Rebecca to revisit nuggets from the real Mrs. Danvers — and to the Criterion Channel to watch Hitchcock’s classic 1940 film.

The amazing Judith Anderson as Danvers, with Joan Fontaine

Cocktail of the Month

I’d previously mentioned the passing of Seattle cocktail legend Murray Stenson, who was once named the best bartender in America. Then I came across this wonderful ode by Tan Vinh, an excellent food/drink writer at my local paper, The Seattle Times, who met with Stenson regularly to discuss cocktails and life in what Vinh describes as “Tuesdays with Murray” coffee sessions.

In Murray’s honor, and with thanks to Vinh, here’s The Last Word, a Prohibition-era cocktail from Detroit that Stenson revived and popularized at the Zig Zag Cafe, where he spent eleven years (including a few drinks served to yours truly).

The Last Word

3/4 ounce gin.
3/4 ounce fresh-squeezed lime juice.
3/4 ounce maraschino liqueur.
3/4 ounce green Chartreuse.

Mix in shaker with ice; strain into coupe or martini glass; garnish with cherry.

And here’s Vinh’s story about Stenson and The Last Word from 2009. Apparently the drink spawned variations like The Final Ward (which replaces gin and lime with rye and lemon). But... careful here. Tastes great, but like its other spinoff, the Paper Plane (equal parts bourbon, aperol, lemon juice and Amaro Nonino Quintessentia) it packs a punch.

Finally, one more from Tan Vinh, who this week reported that a Seattle-distilled whiskey was named #3 in the world by Whisky Advocate magazine. It’s the Westland Garryana single malt from Westland Distillery. But the magazine’s review isn’t inspiring me to drop $150: “The oak influence is exquisite, coaxing out notes of charcoal grill, Krispy Kreme doughnut, Honey Nut Cheerios and a touch of salinity on the nose.” (Then again, at our neighborhood cocktail bar, Baker’s, the bartender gave us a sample of a similar single malt from the same distiller, and maybe I did detect notes of Krispy Kreme in there.)

Read about the top 20 whiskeys here.

Listening: Speaking of strong drink… James Baldwin and John Steinbeck were world-class drinkers, which I learned while writing two episodes for the Wondery show American History Tellers, a new series on Great American Authors. My profile of Steinbeck is here (and Baldwin will be out soon):

Also listening: At last month’s Portland Book Festival, I spoke with their Archive Project podcast, offering two book recommendations (my bit starts at 29:25). Also last month I had reviewed Patrick DeWitt’s The Librarianist, which led me to a fabulous interview with DeWitt by novelist Brad Listi, who seems to interview everyone for his excellent OtherPpl podcast.

Watching: Fisher Stevens’ awesome 4-part Beckham documentary; third season of Slow Horses; wonderful German film, A Fire, about a thin-skinned writer. And I’m late to the party (cuz I didn’t think we needed another app/channel), but we finally subscribed to Criterion Channel - love at first sight.

Typing: Lately my desk has taunted me with unreasonable expectations (“Here is where you will write all the words!”) so I started moving around our empty-nesty home. I’d read that Michael Connelly writes on a couch, so I’m trying that, but still searching for a better device-surface system (currently iPad mini + mini keyboard). Open to any suggestions.

Plunging: Seattle’s Puget Sound just dipped below 50 degrees. Sometimes I wear a wetsuit, but when I’m feeling bold just my trunks. It’s biting but exhilarating. I’m still astounded by those who plunge into ice baths, though.

What my current wife is currently reading: Alice McDermott’s Absolution, after finishing Tana French's The Searcher and her first-time read of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five (an unread gift to son).

Writing with: While researching Steinbeck, I learned he started his days by meticulously sharpening a dozen black Blackwing 602s. They’re lovely.

I’ve got a weird relationship with “best” books lists. Maybe it’s because I spent years picking them (I once ran Amazon’s Best Books of the Month program and was part of the team that picked Best Books of the Year). I still love a good “best of” list — books, music, film, TV. But these days, if asked to pick my favorite(s)? I’d have to say “the last book I read.” So that means no end-of-year Blood & Whiskey list. But I am happy to share the lists of others.

In addition to those mentioned last month (Amazon, Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, Publisher’s Weekly, Time, New York Times), we have Vanity Fair, Esquire, NPR, and my two faves: 2023’s best crime novels from Crime Reads and (aka The Crime Lady here on Substack) at the New York Times, which includes a few books I enjoyed/reviewed this year.

Thanks for reading with me this year. If you’re inclined I’d be grateful to anyone who likes, shares, comments on this post — or becomes a paid subscriber…

Finally, a year-end shoutout to charities and nonprofits we support: BINC (Book Industry Charitable Foundation, which provides emergency funding to indie bookstores), KEXP (my excellent local+global radio station), Planned Parenthood, Wikimedia, Seattle Arts & Lectures. I’m also a major donor to my neighborhood’s dozens (not an exaggeration) of Little Free Libraries.

That’s all folks. Till next year…

-Neal

Find me @ Instagram; sometimes Facebook, LinkedIn, Goodreads.

Blood & Whiskey #30

Neal Thompson — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 17:46:04 GMT

Hello friends and readers,

Lots of bookish stuff to cover this month. I’ll start with my recent visit to the excellent Portland Book Festival, run by Literary Arts. Like many arts organizations, Literary Arts got bruised by Covid, but attendance at this year’s festival was impressive and inspiring. There were lines out the door to see Viet Thanh Nguyen, Tim O’Brien, Safiya Sinclair, Michael Lewis and others. My little slice of the action was moderating a discussion about “Family Secrets” with Edan Lepucki and Angie Kim, whose recent novels — Time’s Mouth and Happiness Falls — I’d featured in this newsletter over the summer.

In advance of my interview with Edan and Angie, I also read their debut novels, both packed with secrets and lies. Angie’s Miracle Creek (opening line: “My husband asked me to lie”) is the story of the tragic explosion of a hyperbaric oxygen chamber called Miracle Submarine that kills or injures a few occupants. Run by a Korean immigrant family, the Yoos, the chamber was used to treat assorted physical conditions, from autism to cerebral palsy to impotence. In the aftermath of the explosion, we revisit the incident from multiple POVs, mainly through a courtroom drama, as the entangled secrets and lies unfold. It’s a tightly woven page-turner, but more than a murder mystery it’s a story of family sacrifice, immigrant struggles, community mistrust, autism, and more.

In Edan’s California, everyday husband-and-wife moments take on weight and menace as we learn why Cal and Frida have fled L.A. and are living in the woods of Southern California. An apocalypse of some sort has turned the world they once knew to chaos and ash, but the book is really the story of a marriage. “That’s what I’m worried about,” Frida admits at one point… “You and me, alone.”

The country has been wracked by wildfires, snowstorms, floods, earthquakes, an epidemic. A band of radicals called the Group wreaks more havoc — Frida’s brother, now dead, had been an acolyte. When Frida becomes pregnant, she and Cal seek out the nearest settlement of survivors, a menacing community that forces them to confront their own secrets. Cal tells Frida as they tromp through the woods: “It was stupid of me to lie to you.” Her reply: “We all have our secrets.”

with Portland Book Festival pals at the Multnomah Whiskey Library (Angie Kim and Edan Lepucki = center)

Next up… I really enjoyed Distant Sons, by Tim Johnson, whose previous books (2019’s The Current and Descent, from 2015) I also devoured. The new book is the story of two aimless and wounded men, Sean and Dan, who meet accidentally in a small Wisconsin town, where decades earlier three boys had disappeared. Sean and Dan start working together on a remodeling job at the home of cranky-old Marion Devereaux. Troubled and troubling back stories and secrets of all three men trickle out slow and smooth. Tim’s writing — lovely, smart, dark — reminds me a bit of Peter Heller, Dennis Lehane, and Ivy Pochoda, who called the book “edgy, refined and complex.”

Johnson understands hard-working, blue collar America and I loved the language of the trades… PEX lines and sweating copper; century-old rough-hewn studs that, when cut, smelled of dust and cinnamon; the chop of a trowel into a wheelbarrow of mortar and a well-buttered cinderblock. He’s also a patient and beautiful writer who drops clues slowly as storylines slowly mesh and tangle. As one character observes: “Behind every good, the bad waited it’s turn. You thought you knew it but then you forgot.”

I did a Q&A with Tim, the full version of which is now in the slow-growing “Interrogations” section of Blood & Whiskey. (Past interviews include Megan Abbott, Dani Shapiro, Laura Lippman, Andres Dubus, and Edan Lepucki. More of that to come in 2024.) A sample from my Q&A with Tim:

NT: More than a murder mystery I found the book to be a beautiful exploration of real life in the hard-working heartland… Is this an intentional effort to show readers the world you come from or admire, or just writing what you know?

TJ: It turns out that these characters mostly come from the kind of lands and small towns that I come from, which is a small college town in the Midwest (Iowa City, IA). As someone who has worked with his hands in the heartland, I feel a strong connection to such people, men and women. But I've also done my time in academia, as student and teacher, and I feel these two backgrounds—blue collar guy and college guy—simultaneously within me, and I do like to get both experiences in play, sometimes at odds with each other, in the storytelling realm.

Back to Portland… While at the book festival I picked up the latest from Patrick DeWitt, whose 2012 novel The Sisters Brothers (Book Prize finalist, also a pretty good movie) was a revelation and remains a favorite. His new novel, The Librarianist, is smart, sweet, funny, occasionally slow but a charming and fast read. This is the story of Bob Comet, a retired Portland librarian whose quiet life is tumbled around when he finds a mute woman at a convenient mart and returns her to the senior home she’d wandered away from. Bob starts volunteering there and we learn more about his small, mostly solitary life. An early mentor tried to warn him away from the “syrup-slow” job of a librarian and the “language-based life of the mind,” coaching him to live bigger: “You’re supposed to be out there getting girls you don’t love pregnant … you should be in a gang, Bob. You should be getting into knife fights.” But Bob prefers books, and I admired him for that. The third of four parts felt grafted on and my gaze wandered, but it was mostly a rewarding look at getting older with grace.

Next up on the TBR pile… Same Bed Different Dreams, by Ed Park, and The Lost Van Gogh, by Jonathan Santlofer

Listening: If you’re a podcast listener, here’s a 3-episode deep dive I wrote (for the Wondery show American History Tellers) on the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake:

Cocktail(s) of the Month

Since the holidays are coming, here’s a bunch of booze…

First up (keeping with the Portland theme here) is a tasty drink from author via her fun newsletter . She calls it the Tin House Tipple, named for Portland-based publisher, Tin House. (My nephew is one of their authors.)

2 oz bourbon
1 oz huckleberry syrup (or another fruit syrup — see note below*)
1/4 lime
mint leaves
club soda
blackberry + mint leaf + lime wedge for garnish

Combine the first four ingredients in a cocktail shaker and muddle well. Strain into a short tumbler filled with ice. Top with club soda and garnish.

[*I cheated and made my own syrup: a few mashed blueberries, a tablespoon of fig jam, some honey and water, heated to a low simmer, strained and cooled.]

Next… For the Portland Book Festival I partnered with spectacular Multnomah Whiskey Library cocktail bar to pair a few of their drinks with books/authors featured at the book fest. A write-up in their newsletter is HERE. (I don’t have the proportions for each drink. You’ll have to visit the library, or wing it.)

1. MWL Old Fashioned + Brooklyn Crime Novel, by Jonathan Letham

The drink: Old Forester 100 Bourbon, Demerara, Angostura Bitters, Peychaud's Bitters

The book: Letham’s new novel is a celebration of — and reimagining of — the tradition and form of the old-fashioned crime novel. Starting in the 1970s, in the borough of his birth, Letham tracks the violence and economic crimes that have transformed Old Brooklyn.

2. Over Yonder, , by Cody Mulcahy + Time’s Mouth, by Edan Lepucki

The drink: Wild Turkey 101 Bourbon, Assam Tea, Montenegro, Cocchi Torino Vermouth, Lemon Oleo

The book: Women at a ‘80s California commune sip mint tea each morning, awaiting their cult leader Ursa’s next mysterious and energizing episode of time travel. When Ursa’s granddaughter, Cherry, discovers she too can travel yonder and back, Cherry seeks to uncover family secrets.

3. The Cold Smolder, by Pete Kellers + Happiness Falls, Angie Kim

The drink: Balcones Brimstone Whiskey, Mellow Corn, Nixta Corn Liqueur, Clear Creek Cherry, Kramer’s Aromatique, Mole & Memphis BBQ Bitters

The book: Angie Kim’s second novel — about a seemingly close-knit Korean American family in Virginia, searching for their mysteriously missing dad — simmers, smokes and smolders. At times it’s sharp and bracing, at times hiding the truth behind a smoke screen of deceptions and secrets.

4. Low Tide + Every Drop is a Man's Nightmare, by Megan Kamalei Kakimoto

The drink: Altos Plata Tequila, El tequileño Blanco, Carpano Bianco, Cap Corse Blanc, Pineapple, Verdita Oil

The book: This buzzy debut story collection, by a Japanese-Hawaiian writer from Honolulu, is both a love letter to Hawaii and a eulogy to a colonized island paradise, a land caressed by the Pacific tides yet haunted by the ghosts, myths, and legends of its storytelling people.

5. I Got U-Bae, by Arland Bay + Chain-Gang All-Stars, by Nana Kawame Adjei-Brenyah

The drink: Cornflake Reyka Vodka, Avua Amburana Cachaça, Yzaguirre Blanc, Licor 43, Ube Cream, Pineapple

The book: Inside packed arenas, thousands cheer as hammer-wielding, bad-ass female gladiators wrapped in leather try to kill their foes — live and onscreen. Could be a Beyonce show if not for the bloody, televised killings. This remarkable novel is as over the top as this drink.

I Got U-Bae

6. Glass Cannon, by Dakota Nidalmia + Good Night, Irene, by Luis Alberto Urrea

The drink: Altos Blanco Tequila, Mezcal Unión, Paranubes Rum, Cappelletti, Watermelon, Absinthe rinse

The book: Tijuana-born Urrea might approve of the trio of Mexican liquors in this cocktail. But the Irene of his stunning new novel — a gritty Red Cross volunteer serving in Europe in WWII, based on Urrea’s mother — would surely have appreciated the addition of an Italian aperitivo.

7. Golden Age, by Dakota Nidalmia + A Man of Two Faces, by Viet Thanh Nguyen

The drink: Knob Creek Bourbon, Sfumato, Oloroso Sherry, Cocchi Torino Vermouth, Lemon, Soda

The book: In this searing memoir, Nguyen revisits his family’s escape from Vietnam and their uneasy resettling in golden California when Nguyen was 4. A beautiful exploration of race, war, family and what it means to be a refugee, an immigrant, an American.

Speaking of Viet Thanh Nguyen … He was here in Seattle last week as part of the amazing Seattle Arts & Lectures lineup this season (and at the Portland Book Festival before that). I missed his PDX talk, but at SEA he discussed his family’s struggles and traumas and “how difficult it is for us to know ourselves.” Last night I saw Tim Egan interview David Brooks.

Speaking of Seattle Arts & Lectures (aka SAL)… SAL’s former executive director, Ruth Dickey, now heads the National Book Foundation, which last week announced this year’s National Book Award winners, with Blackouts by Justin Torres named the fiction winner. (Chain-Gang All-Stars, which I reviewed back in June, was a finalist.)

Speaking of best of the year… end-of-2023 lists are popping up all over, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Publisher’s Weekly, Time, and the New York Times’ top 100 (which most closely reflects my tastes, and features ten books that have appeared in this newsletter this year).

Finally, with Thanksgiving two days away, I thought I’d share one of my favorite seasonal odes: It’s Decorative Gourd Season, MF-ers…

That’s all folks. Till next time…

-Neal

Find me @ Instagram; sometimes Facebook, LinkedIn, Goodreads.

a couple Tin House Tipple cocktails and an effing gourd

Interrogation: Tim Johnson

Neal Thompson — Mon, 13 Nov 2023 19:53:18 GMT

Hello friends and readers,

A full Blood & Whiskey newsletter is coming in a few days, but first I wanted to share this interview with Tim Johnston, whose great new novel DISTANT SONS is out from Algonquin (available at Bookshop, Amazon, Barnes & Noble).

I had enjoyed two of Tim’s previous books (2019’s The Current and Descent, from 2015). The new book is the story of two wounded men, Sean and Dan, who meet accidentally in a small Wisconsin town, where decades earlier three boys had disappeared. Sean and Dan start working together on a remodeling job at the home of cranky-old Marion Devereaux. The troubled and troubling back stories and secrets of all three men trickle out slow and smooth. Tim’s writing — lovely, smart, dark — reminds me a bit of Peter Heller, Dennis Lehane, and Ivy Pochoda, who called the book “edgy, refined and complex.” Tim lives in Iowa City, Iowa.

I was a builder, and my son is a builder. I love reading the details of the trade… As a longtime carpenter, how does your trade and physical labor in general mesh with the sedentary life of writing stories? How do they relate to each other?

For a long time, for most of my adult life, in fact, I made a living as a carpenter—building and remodeling, mainly—so the sedentary life of writing stories was interstitial at best. I wrote when I could, and typically had to set the writing aside to go make my living physically in the world. Which I think was a good thing, especially when I was younger and still finding my way toward a more confident writing voice and more fully realized characters and stories; having to make a living as a carpenter slowed the whole writing process down. In the best of times I found, or created, a working schedule that allowed me to designate two or three waking hours of the morning for writing, and once I'd done the writing, going to work on other people's houses was far, far more enjoyable, and I would often continue writing in one part of my brain as another part oversaw the more rote activities of working with one's hands. In fact it was in the midst of doing all the finish work on a new house in the Colorado Rockies, entirely by myself up there for months on end, that I conceived of the idea for my novel Descent, a mental preoccupation that eventually became so insistent that I finally sat down and began to write (off the clock, of course). In a very literal sense, if I hadn't been a carpenter, I would never have written that novel—and by extension, since the main character of Distant Sons first appeared in Descent, I never would've written this novel either.

These days, and for the time being, I don't have to make my living doing anything but writing, but I also now own a hundred-year-old house, so there is always something I can be doing with my hands when I've been sitting long enough writing or revising. Also, now that carpentry isn't something I have to do, I'm beginning to enjoy it in a way I haven't in years. And that enjoyment is manifesting itself in the writing—the details of the trade, as you put it, that are so prevalent in Distant Sons.

Over time, I've come to understand that my best qualities as a carpenter, which were patience and attention to detail, are the same qualities that most influence how I write, and seem to serve me best.

Much of the plot occurs because someone gives a stranger a lift, and the book seems to dwell heavily on the question Sean asks early on: “Sean would later wonder why he didn’t just let the man go.” Did you ever hitchhike? (I did, a lot, and it once almost went wrong.)

I was never a big hitchhiker myself, but if there's a better scenario for creating drama and tension, and for dramatizing the Chance Encounter that Changes Everything, I'm not sure what it is, and I kinda love to write those scenes.

But now I gotta know: What almost went wrong?

[NT: Well, ok… I was a bit of a knucklehead in high school. I’d gotten suspended for drinking in the girls’ locker room with my friend Janey. One afternoon I hitchhiked to her house, got high (with a homemade Popeye shampoo bottle bong), then started hitchhiking home. A guy picked me up and I told him where I was headed, a good 30 minutes away. He offered to drive me the whole way if I’d, let’s say, spend some time with him. I told him to pull over, but he kept driving. When he slowed down to turn off the highway I jumped out, rolled into the grass, and ran to a nearby bar, where I called my exasperated mom for a ride. ]

More than a murder mystery I found the book to be a beautiful exploration of real life in the hard-working heartland, the so-called blue collar flyover states. (I see/feel the distinction where I live in Seattle, Arcteryx-land, while just 60 miles east is Carhartt-land). Is this an intentional effort to show readers the world you come from or admire, or just writing what you know?

I don't set out to show readers the world I come from—or in fact to show them anything in particular... more to place them in the place I'm imagining—but place is the extension of the characters I tend to find compelling enough to want to write about. It turns out that these characters mostly come from the kind of lands and small towns that I come from, which is a small college town in the Midwest (Iowa City, IA). As someone who has worked with his hands in the heartland, I feel a strong connection to such people, men and women. But I've also done my time in academia, as student and teacher, and I feel these two backgrounds—blue collar guy and college guy—simultaneously within me, and I do like to get both experiences in play, sometimes at odds with each other, in the storytelling realm. A retired high school science teacher, for instance, who quotes Shakespeare at his daughter's new carpenter suitor.

The novel had a fairly intricate plot, with scattered clues, multiple time periods and storylines, all twisty and entwined. As a builder, did you map it out, draft a blueprint? Or find your way?

Unlike building a house, I don't require a blueprint to begin building a novel. In fact the less I know about the finished product, the better. I prefer to assemble some various elements, such as characters, times and places, problematic and/or dangerous situations, and then see what kind of structure takes shape. Along the way I begin to notice pieces that fit together nicely, or work nicely against each other, and the longer I work on this construction, the more I begin to see the shape of it, those twists and turns. If I'm following my process naturally and not trying to force something to happen, then I'm more inclined to be surprised by the story, and this in turn makes for a more authentic surprise for the reader.

It's not my thing to try and complicate the plot... it's more like I've bought an Ikea table but there's no instructions and I'm trying to figure out all the pieces and how they go together to create some semblance of a sturdy and satisfying table, and it's going to take me a long time, plus a lot of revision and good editing, to get there.

One character tells himself: Behind every good, the bad waited its turn. Do you believe that?

I know I've been pretty lucky in life. I haven't had a lot of hardship that others have had, though as I get older I have become more acquainted with grief. But no one who's paying attention to what's going on in the world can believe that prosperity and peace and safety can be sustained. There are just too many bad actors, too much greed for money and power, too much natural and man-made (inseparable now, in my opinion) disaster at large in our world. Some writers look those big-picture problems square in the face in their fiction and non-fiction, but that feels like too much for me. I'm better at concentrating my focus on individuals whose trials might be symbolic of larger ills, but which must be faced in the most personal and immediate of ways. In the end, as fiction writer and human, I'm also inclined to believe that behind every bad, some measure of good waits its turn.

[NT: 👍🏻]

I’d seen you refer elsewhere to Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream as a favorite. Why that one?

I think because I'd never read it until a few years ago, and it surprised me. I was really moved by the writing, and the story, which centers on a painter who has three young sons he loves intensely, each distinct in his personality and who break his heart with their young strivings, and who, very suddenly, are all gone forever from his life. The passages that describe the father's grief, or very pointedly don't describe his grief, are heartbreaking. And in the last section of the book, the story turns improbably into a cat-and-mouse World War II adventure with a German U-boat crew on the run from the father and his crew, a ragtag group of men who have become, figuratively speaking, his sons, grown up and each with his own distinct personality. There's just so much love and grief in the story... and of course those clean, no-nonsense Hemingway sentences.

If I'm following my process naturally and not trying to force something to happen, then I'm more inclined to be surprised by the story, and this in turn makes for a more authentic surprise for the reader.

Thanks for reading. More “Interrogation” interviews: here.

If you know others who might enjoy my Blood & Whiskey newsletter, please:

Later this week I’ll review Tim’s book and others, share some cocktail-book pairings and more from the Portland Book Festival, which I recently attended.

Till then…

-Neal

Find me @ Instagram; sometimes Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Goodreads

And it's a battered old suitcase

To a hotel someplace

And a wound that will never heal

No prima donna, the perfume is on

An old shirt that is stained with blood and whiskey…

-Tom Waits, “Tom Traubert’s Blues”

Blood & Whiskey #29

Neal Thompson — Fri, 20 Oct 2023 15:33:02 GMT

Hello friends and readers,

I had the chance to see two authors at my local Seattle bookshops recently: Ben Fountain (at Elliott Bay Bookstore1) and McKenzie Funk (at Third Place Books2). I mentioned both books last week, but apparently have more to say…

Ben Fountain’s previous novel Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, ranks among my favorites of the last decade. The new one, Devil Makes Three, is a different beast altogether — and it is a bit of a beast, weighing in at 500+ pages. At Elliott Bay, Fountain discussed his decades-long interest in Haiti, dating to the early 1990s, just after the coup that toppled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, followed by scores of visits and one previous attempt at a Haiti novel, that ended up in a drawer. Devil Makes Three takes place just after Aristide’s been deposed. It’s a twitchy, lawless, occasionally bloody time in Haiti. We mainly follow the personal and professional ups and downs of Matt Amaker, an American whose scuba shop becomes a victim of the post-coup chaos. His partner, Alix, comes from a prominent Haitian family; Matt loves Alix’s sister, Misha, who’s home from college (Brown). CIA agent, Audrey O’Donnell, who goes by Shelly, falls for Alix, and later tries to recruit Misha. Entanglements and violence and lies and deceptions ensue. This is a book I wish I had a week on a beach to consume. There’s SO much packed in here, from vodou to treasure hunting to the age-old colonial drubbing. As one character puts it: “So many foreigners come here with big plans. They think they’re going to transform Haiti, save it … and usually end up doing more harm than good.” If you like Graham Greene, this one’s for you.

On the micro-level, the book is littered with highlightable lines, scattered like gems. Over Port-au-Prince, a dull orange haze hangs “like a fulminating cloud of Cheetos dust.” The city is a scab — “a dun-colored chancre at trhe lip of the sea.” By day: “Herons stood in the irrigation ditches, still as golfers crouching over a money putt.” By night: “Frogs and insects whirred and rattled like a symphony for kitchen implements.” And: “The waning moon had all the shine of day-old oatmeal.” In Haiti, we’re told, all conversations have “something to do with goods, profit, buying and selling, sharp deals.” As Matt and Alix and Misha and Audrey pinball off each other and the mayhem around them, we meet the buyerrs asnd sellers, both sinister and absurd… One dude’s giggle sounded “like lotion squirting out of a tube.” Another was so tightly wound, “Someone needed to slap a warning on his forehead: Contents Under Pressure.”

Ultimately, this is Fountain’s love letter to “the rot and rubble, the sheer apolalyptic grottiness of Planet Haiti.” It’s also timely, a book for now.

Another book for this endlessly strange moment in time is The Hank Show by journalist Mackenzie Funk, who explained at Third Place Book how he came to discover the man, Hank Asher, whose bizarre back story and savvy ascent to wealth and power occurred at the expense of our privacy. Asher was a house painter turned entrepreneur turned drug smuggler turned DEA informant who then stumbled his way, bizarrely, into a new career in data brokering. As Funk explains it: every tech company’s method of tracking our every move — our purchases and finances, our likes and dislikes, our homes, cars, traffic tickets, travels, social secutiry numbers, relationships, and, basically, every stupid thing we’ve ever done — can be traced back to Asher’s 1980s/90s launch of the first of many data collecting/tracking/manipulating/sharing companies. Asher made millions if not billions, and we’ve all suffered the results. Still do.

Funk calls Asher “the most important person you’ve never heard of.” He died in 2013, but Funk brings him fully to life here, a outsized human whose opening line was often, “Who the fuck are you?”

Also started reading and am really enjoying:

Distant Sons, by Tim Johnson — I loved Johnson’s previous books (Descent, The Current) and this one’s off to a great start, set in a small Wisconsin town where three boys disappeared in the 1970s and where two newcomers arrive and stir up the past and the town’s fragile peace. Johnson is a beautiful writer who understands hard-working, blue collar America.
A rec from brother-in-law: The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel: Genius, Power and Deception on the Eve of World War I — about the life and 1913 disappearance of Rudolph Diesel, inventor of the internal compustion engine, which were used in the German submarines of the coming conflict. Diesel was headed to London to help Britain with its submarine program when he vanished. “Equal parts Walter Isaacson and Sherlock Holmes.”
Angie Kim’s Miracle Creek and Edan Lepucki’s California.3
I’ve been reading James Baldwin and John Steinbeck for a podcast project. More on that next time.
Wife’s reading: Mating, by Norman Rush; The Rabbit Hutch, by Tess Gunty
And if I had more time and fewer obligations I’d be rewading new books by Christian Kiefer, Ed Park, Tim O’Brien, Claire Keegan, Tod Goldberg, Daniel Silva, David Joy, James Ellroy, Viet Than Nguyen and James McBride.

At the risk of making the newsletter irrelevant, Time magazine published a chronological list of the "100 Best Mystery and Thriller Books of All Time." Happy to see a few faves on there, from classic faves (Raymond Chandler, Margaret Millar, Patricia Highsmith) to more recent faves (Walter Mosley, Dennis Lehane, Laura Lippman, Megan Abbott, Louise Penny, S.A. Cosby). Also a reminder of authors I’ve yet to read (looking at you, William Kent Krueger).

Cocktail of the Month

Sharing this beautiful ode (from whiskey guy ) to Seattle’s cocktail king, Murray Stenson, who recently died. Murray was a Seattle legend who influenced my evolution from bourbon-rocks guy to cocktail-er. I probably ordered fewer than a dozen cocktails from Murray over the years but he always remembered my name - and my drink (some version of a Manhattan).

The Berlioni (with thanks to )

Sharing this one because it’s a perfect example of an adaptable cocktail. You can swap out the Cynar (the artichoke-based Italian amaro) for other amaros or aperitifs. I tried it two ways: 1. with Seattle-made Sennza Finne’s “Autumn” amaro (from my excellent neighborhood Molly’s Bottle Shop), and 2. Meletti.

#1 was nicely bitter, great for fall; #2 was mellower. With Cynar is perfect, too.

1-1/2 ounces gin
3/4 ounce Cynar
1/2 ounce dry vermouth
Orange twist

Combine liquids in ice shaker; shake and serve straight up in a coupe glass or in a rocks glass with one large ice cube. Garnish with the twist.

That’s all folks. Till next time…

-Neal

Find me @ Instagram; sometimes Facebook, LinkedIn, Goodreads.

Interviewed by podcaster and the Civic Poet of Seattle, Shin Yu Pai

Interviewed by indefatigable Seattle author, journalist, teacher, etc., Kristen Millares Young

I’ll be interviewing Angie Kim and at the Portland Book Festival on November 4: https://pdxbookfest.org/event/kim-lepucki/

Blood & Whiskey: this month featuring "coast"-themed books, drinks, and music

Neal Thompson — Sun, 01 Oct 2023 18:48:07 GMT

Hello friends and readers,

A punch in the face from Covid and a cross-country move back home to Seattle plus a couple writing deadlines delayed this month’s newsletter a bit. But the Pacific Northwest rainy season has begun here (aka the Big Dark), and I’m eager to dive into primo read-and-drink season and share the results. (Next up: Ben Fountain’s Devil Makes Three and The Hank Show by Mackenzie Funk.)

At the tail end of my summer in Boston, I read two books set on that other coast: The Stolen Coast, by Dwyer Murphy & The Midcoast, by Adam White.

Let’s start with Dwyer, who’s also editor of the fantastic Crime Reads at LitHub. This is Dwyer’s second novel (after last year’s An Honest Living, which I reviewed here), and it was the perfect read during a trip to Cape Cod. Set in the overlooked coastal village of Onset, it’s the story of Jack (no last name), who works for his father, a retired spy, in a murky family business that helps crooks who’ve crossed a line disappear. It’s slow work and not much happens until Jack’s captivating and evasive former lover, Elena, comes to town. Together they plan a diamond heist, but this is both more than (and maybe less than) a typical heist novel. I appreciated the laconic pace, which felt intimate, personal, lived. Murphy is hyper-attuned to the odd particulars of coastal life, the September tourist purge, the beaches and bars, the fish and the boats, the late-summer deer drunk on fermented cranberries — and the humans drunk most of the time.

We don't always see Jack doing his "work." But we know it's not above board, or safe. There’s an undercurrent of unseen threats and dark deeds. Jack is someone who knows off-piste people — a West Virginia inn-keeper, a Miami boat captain. Elena’s edgy humor and sarcasm offset Jack’s ennui. He’s also sad. What does Jack really want? He and Elena are drawn to each other, but it's not love, exactly. They understand each other, but they’re wary. The vibe is taut, tense.

Murphy is a thoughtful, careful, precise writer. Very controlled and capable of some great lines. I especially enjoyed the Kennedy references. (I shit you not, I was reading in an AirBnB not far from the Kennedy compound at Hyannisport when Murphy mentioned Chappaquiddick. I lifted my eyes and saw on a bookshelf the yellow spine and red letters of Chappaquiddick: The Real Story.)

If it felt slow at times, I also didn’t want it to end. The final 50 or so pages were pure joy, every sentence a gem. A beautiful sad and haunting ending.

For more, check out reviews at NPR and in the New York Times.

The Midcoast by Adam White was an ideal companion to The Stolen Coast. Set in the small town of Damariscotta on the coast of Maine, Andrew and his wife have returned to his former hometown. In the opening pages we see Andrew reunite at a party with the host, Ed Thatch, the son of his one-time boss, who was a lobsterman when Andrew was a teen, then graduated to thief and then drug runner, but has since become the town big shot. Ed’s married to Steph, the elected town manager. They’ve both grown from poor to prominent, and Steph wants to keep it that way. But Andrew’s curiosity creates problems.

Andrew (like White) was born in Damariscotta and has returned, somewhat reluctantly, to teach English and coach lacrosse. As he reconnects with Ed and Steph — their daughter Allie is a lacrosse standout, now at Amherst — Andrew becomes fixated on the family’s mysterious rise to wealth, an obsession that eventually becomes a book project. In time, Andrew unravels dark secrets about the Thatches and the entangled complicities of family and friends.

I’ve seen the book described as a small-town riff on The Great Gatsby, which both oversells and underserves this nuanced tale of class, jealousy, greed and ambition. Angie Kim (see below) called White’s debut “a suspenseful, funny, and chilling uncovering of small-town secrets within a propulsive family drama.”

The most intriguing book of recent weeks was Happiness Falls, by Angie Kim, the follow up to her acclaimed 2019 debut, Miracle Creek, which won the Edgar Award for best first novel. The new novel is also a story of family secrets, this time a seemingly close-knit Korean American family in Virginia searching for their mysteriously missing dad. The only family member to witness Adam Parson’s disappearance from a nearby park is his 14-year-old son, Eugene, who suffers from severe autism and a developmental disorder known as Angelman syndrome. Unable to speak, Eugene can’t tell his family what happened.

The sly mystery here isn’t just what happened to Adam (did he have cancer? was he having an affair with Eugene’s doctor?), but really… who is Eugene? And what happened between father and son at the park? The story is told by brilliant, cocky older sister Mia, a driven student and musician who’s home from college due to the Covid pandemic. She and her more likeable twin brother John search for clues in their father’s experiments into happiness, and his notebooks and files lead them to shocking revelations that have more to do with who they are as a family. The book takes on a lot, and detours often into science, immigration, race, language, linguistics, genetics, and especially the nature of disability and how it’s viewed by society — and often misunderstood and mistreated. It’s packed with footnotes and occasional charts and diagrams. There’s also an overzealous cop here, who thinks Eugene may be violent and dangerous. But at its core are questions about family. Do we really know our loved ones?

My sister Maura had Down syndrome and our family experienced the many challenges that come with outsiders’ fears of (and, at times, cruel mockery of) an intellectually disabled person. Those reactions can affect family members differently and Kim captures those tricky dynamics well. I give her credit for making Eugene such a fully-formed and complex character.

For more: here’s a review in the NY Times; and Goodreads interview.

I’ll be interviewing Angie Kim and Edan Lepucki (Time’s Mouth) onstage at the Portland Book Festival in November. If you missed my recent Q&A with Edan, check it out in the Interrogations section of Blood & Whiskey: HERE.

Up Next:

I mentioned up top journalist Mackenzie Funk’s The Hank Show, out Tues (10/3), which you can get a taste of in this New York Times excerpt. It’s the story of Hank Asher, drug smuggler and DEA informant turned computer programmer and data-tracking billionaire. He’s described as “the most important person you’ve never heard of,” and his influence affects all of our lives, every day.

Last month I forgot to mention Seattle author Garth Stein’s latest work, The Cloven: Book 2, the next in his graphic novel mystery series about Tuck, the genetically modified human/goat hybrid. Erik Larson calls it “wildly, dizzyingly imaginative, and grimly allegorical …. and the art is spectacular.” It’s drawn by Matthew Southworth (co-creator of the comic book series Stumptown).

Also aim to get to: Angie Kim’s Miracle Creek and Edan Lepucki’s California (both debuts); Distant Sons, by Tim Johnson and The Secret Hours, by Mick Herron; but not before Ben Fountain’s long-awaited second novel, Devil Makes Three. (His debut, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, is one of my favorite books.)

Also: Traitors Gate, by Jeffrey Archer — this London-based jewel-heist mystery is book #30 from 83-year-old Archer, who I’ve not read before am curious to try. (Here’s a story about Archer’s views on writing and AI, in Australia’s Sky News.)

Watching: NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts. I dip into these now and then, and recently enjoyed the surprisingly intimate and sweet show by Post Malone. These stripped-down shows at NPR’s DC office let you really see the talent and the joy. (The show’s creator, Bob Boilen, has said he’ll soon retire.) I’m also hooked on the Otherppl podcast by , who manages to interview everyone.

Drinking: The apartment we stayed in this summer had no coffee maker - the first time in my adult life I’ve lived in a place without one. Instead, they had a fancy espresso maker. Initially miffed, we became espresso converts. We just bought a starter espresso maker at home. (Americanos for me, lattes for Mary.)

Disagreeing with: I've been on both sides of the blurb machine, giver and receiver. I thought this piece in Esquire (“Book Publishing's Broken Blurb System”) was too full of doom-snark. I actually like being asked to endorse someone's book, and love to be endorsed. I’ve made and sustained friendships through blurb swaps. And I always read blurbs to help me decide what to buy and read, albeit with healthy skepticism and bullshit detector on high.

Seething over: Facebook/Meta/Zuck’s use of pirated books (including three of mine) to train AI. Read The Atlantic’s expose HERE and HERE. Writers, sign the Author’s Guild petition HERE and learn more HERE.

Cocktail of the Month

This summer, I kept things simple and forced myself not to load up on too many bottles that I’d just have to transport back home to Seattle. This is about as simple as it gets:

Classic Tom Collins

2 ounces gin (I used Old Tom gin from Hayman’s)
1 ounce fresh lemon juice
½ ounce simple syrup (optional — I skipped it)
splash of club soda
Maraschino cherry, to garnish

Shake gin, lemon juice and simple syrup in cocktail shaker; pour over ice in a tall Collins glass; top with soda, stir, garnish with cherry.

Also, in honor of the passing of Jimmy Buffett and all things beachy (also in memory of the devastating Maui fires), I share Susan Orleans’ New Yorker story about Harry Yee, The Bartender Behind the Blue Hawaiian. Also, my aunt Carolyn sent me this story about Hawaiian rum distilleries.

Playlist of the Month

"I wish I had a pencil-thin mustache so I could solve some mysteries, too."
— Jimmy Buffett

I spent a lot of time with Jimmy Buffett’s songs, learning some in my attic bedroom in high school, playing some with my buddies in our acoustic trio during college. Still, I was surprised at how sad I felt when Buffett died. I spent an afternoon drinking Tom Collinses and listening to these two dozen favorites:

Thanks for reading Blood & Whiskey. Please share this post with friends.

Blood & Whiskey is reader-supported, gluten and dairy free, and very well intentioned. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber, or share with friends, click the “like” button, and definitely buy some of the books listed above.

Until next month…

-Neal

Find me @ Instagram; sometimes Facebook, LinkedIn, Goodreads.

Blood & Whiskey #27

Tue, 22 Aug 2023 19:15:14 GMT

Hello friends and readers,

I grew up an hour outside New York and have never lived in LA. For most of my adult life, though, I’ve been drawn to LA fiction — especially crime fiction — far more than New York stories (despite my love of Colson Whitehead’s latest).

If you’ve read more than a few Blood & Whiskeys, you’ve been exposed to this bias. From older classics (Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, Dorothy Hughes) to modern masters (James Ellroy, Walter Mosley, Percival Everett, Michael Connelly, Don Winslow, Kem Nunn) to the next-gen revealers of LA’s underbelly (Ivy Pochoda, Jordan Harper, Joe Ide, Steph Cha), I’m constantly lured by stories from the southern half of the (gritty) Golden State.

Though she lives in and fully captures Los Angeles, I think of Edan Lepucki as an all-California writer. (Hardly fresh insight: her debut novel was California.) And in her third novel, Time’s Mouth, Lepucki again shows a Steinbeck-like sense of the 31st state in the 21st century. This book is packed: weed farming, Y2K, urban oil rigs, the history of microfiche, Vin Scully, LA architecture, film location scouting, Reichian psychoanalysis and orgonic energy. Her Google searches must be insane and probably on some FBI watch list.

The story spans decades, beginning with East Cost Ursa’s escape to Northern California, where she develops a cultish following of young women at the rural mansion where she practices her ability to travel back in time. When her son, Ray, runs off with Cherry, the daughter of one of Ursa’s “mamas,” the story shifts to 1980s LA, where Cherry gives birth to mysterious baby Opal.

Teenaged Opal was my favorite character — funny, smart, weird, snarky. Lepucki is keen observer of teen girls and sassy teen dialogue, with an eye for the weirdly funny. While this story isn’t mystery, per se, it goes deep into the mysteries of family secrets and betrayals. It’s about trauma and parenting and how the two are often the same thing. Also how family can be a cure, too.

At times this was bit of a horror story, too. I finished the book in Covid fog, which oddly worked just right. Lepucki is a visual, visceral writer and her characters are appealingly flawed if not fucked up. Like all of us.

If you missed my recent Q&A with Edan, check it out in the new (and evolving) Interrogations section of Blood & Whiskey: HERE.

Also… it’s looking like I’ll be interviewing Edan and Angie Kim (Miracle Creek) onstage at the Portland Book Festival in November. More on that to come.

Crook Manifesto (Doubleday), by Colson Whitehead

This is Book 2 in Whitehead’s planned Harlem Trilogy featuring Ray Carney, the furniture dealer and stolen goods fence we first met in Harlem Shuffle. This is a book to linger over, sentences dense with action, mood, poetry, and violence. I loved the image of the Twin Towers “looming over the city like two cops trying to figure out what they can bust you for.” And I especially loved Carney’s hulking, violent partner, Pepper, who takes center stage in part 2 of this 3-part story (1971, 1973, 1976), working security for a Blaxploitation film shoot. Pepper, who lives by the “manifesto” of the title (“those who subscribe to lesser codes are cockroaches”) deserves his own sitcom. I was glad he was back for part 3, as he and Carney confront more thugs, crooked cops, and racist punks, trying to survive the chaotic ‘70s of a crumbling city.

Here’s Whitehead (plus S.A. Cosby) on Fresh Air.

The Last Ranger (Knopf), Peter Heller

Heller is so good at capturing the tensions between the natural world and the world of commerce, tourism, and politics. Federal land vs. private property; laws vs. “freedoms.” He’s also attuned to the economics of the wild, the pros vs. the posers; Carhartt vs. Arcteryx. This book is all about these tensions, which roil into anger and violence. It’s class warfare in the wilds of upper Wyoming.

National Park Service ranger Ren Hopper — widowed, wounded — takes on stupid tourists and dangerous poachers while trying to protect his neighbor and eventual lover, Hilly, a renowned don’t-mess-with-me wolf biologist who’s soon being taunted by said poacher. The real character here is “The Park,” as in Yellowstone — part theme park where tourists clutter and try to pet the buffalo and part wilderness where grizzlies roam among wolves.

I don’t know of anyone better at conveying the raw beauty of the wild. “Rich scents of wet earth, swollen creek water, rain-sweetened grass … mist spumed in tatters off the rocky cap of Druid Peak and off the wet black cliffs farther north … clouds splayed like empty linens blown off a line.” Love it. Also eagles that gyre over a river and bull elk that bugles in the dark like “an untuned fiddle bowed in an echo chamber.”

This book taught me why reintroducing wolves is good for the ecosystem and even the climate. It also made me question the sanity of my species. Heller has no beef with humans enjoying Yellowstone’s paradise, he just wishes they’d skim the instruction manual, maybe leave the guns and drugs at home.

I’m hoping to have an “Interrogation” Q&A with Heller to share next week.

On my shelf/radar: Evergreen, Naomi Hirahara; The Stolen Coast, Dwyer Murphy; The Midcoast, Adam White; The Rabbit Hutch, Tess Gunty; An Honest Man, Michael Koryta; Devil Makes Three, Ben Fountain (September); Happiness Falls, Angie Kim (September); The Secret Hours, Mick Herron (September); Distant Sons, Tim Johnson (October)

Watching: Ozark (finally getting back to this, thanks to a touch of the Covid); Oppenheimer & Barbie; William Friedkin’s trippy-great Sorcerer.

Listening: Smartless (so hooked!); Abbott Kahler’s podcast, “Remus: The Mad Bootleg King”; the detective voice on Waze (“Take a right, even if it feels wrong.”)

Writing (with): I usually scribble with Muji pens on Muji notepads. A Wirecutter suggestion prompted me to try the Uniball 207 gel pen. It’s chunkier than my slim Muji’s but I like its roll and flow. Smooth not scratchy. So far so good.

Judging: I judged the Oregon Book Awards (nonfiction) and was impressed with all the finalists but especially liked Leah Sottile’s When the Moon Turns to Blood.

Cocktails of the Month

As my cousin has reminded me, one side effect of these recipes is a liquor cabinet cluttered with bottles used but once. I hear you, Kevin! But let me add one more, this one with some versatility: Amaro Sfumato Rabarbaro — smoked rhubarb amaro. My wine guy talked me into it and I’ve learned it goes well with other spirits — not just bourbon but also tequila and gin.

Sfumato & Tequila (smoky twist on a Manhattan)

2 ounce reposado tequila
1/2 ounce Sfumato
1/2 ounce sweet vermouth
dash of Angostura bitters.

(another version with mezcal, called Thou Shall Not Be Named, from Punch)

Sfumato & Gin (twist on a Negroni)

2 ounce gin
1 ounce sweet vermouth
1/2 ounce Sfumato

For both drinks: combine ingredients with ice in a cocktail shaker; strain into coupe glass or ice-filled rocks glass. Garnish with lemon or orange peel.

Thanks for reading Blood & Whiskey. Please share this post with friends.

I visited the JFK Hyannis Museum in late July for a conversation with my former Baltimore Sun colleague Candy Thomson. The First Kennedys started its life in Hyannis, back in 1999, when I was on assignment for the Sun, covering JFK Jr.’s death. On my way back to Baltimore I drove past the NJ graveyard where my Irish immigrant grandparents were buried, which ignited the idea to explore the origins of the Kennedys. It only took another 23 years. In July, Candy asked me to read this section below, from the final page of The First Kennedys.

Della, hand on percolator, ready for another cuppa…

Bridget Agnes “Della” Fox1, the oldest of ten, raised on a muddy farm outside Roscommon, left home at 20, choosing New York instead of Boston. She worked as a maid and later a seamstress, met and married Patrick Burke, who drove a streamroller and later Texaco trucks. They lived at 125th and Amsterdam, on the west edge of Harlem, and loved to go out to jazz clubs. When Bridget became a naturalized citizen, she changed her name to Della — “She hated the name Bridget,” an uncle would tell me. At 38, Patrick got sick and died of cancer. My grandmother carried on, a poor and widowed immigrant raising my mother, 12, and two sons, 4 and eight months. Ignoring welfare workers’ suggestion to put the two boys up for adoption, she moved out of an airy apartment above a New Jersey candy store into a small public housing apartment, the same complex of subsidized two-story brick apartments where she’d spend the rest of her days.

Here's what I remember about childhood visits: you kept the percolator plugged in all day, drinking strong black coffee until switching to 8-ounce Bud cans2 in the afternoon. You wore house dresses and clunky shoes. You cursed like a dockworker with the staccato brogue of your County Galway. You didn’t open your own shop or become an entrepreneur. But you did raise a daughter who, after helping raise two younger brothers, became the first in the family to attend college, then became a nurse, inspiring her brother to attend college and become a doctor. You always wanted me to be a TV newsman, like your favorite, Dan Rather. I chose print instead, and you died just months after I started my first newspaper job. Like Bridget Kennedy, you created the opportunities that allowed your children and grandchildren to become what they dreamed of becoming. Your story, like Bridget Kennedy’s, is the story of the multitudes of immigrants who “have enriched and strengthened the fabric of American life,” as JFK put it. This book aspires to be the story of all such Bridgets.

One more First Kennedys event upcoming — a (virtual) chat with the fantastic Kate Clifford Larson (Rosemary, Walk With Me) on Sept. 6 (click the image):

Until next month…

-Neal

Find me @ Instagram; sometimes Facebook, LinkedIn, Goodreads.