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Come see me and Cuzin� Jerry Barksdale at the Catfish Literary Festival in Athens, AL. We’ll be telling tall tales, talking about writing and tempting you with a few books.

My review of Shaun Assael’s The Murder of Sonny Liston:

With an arresting title that slaps a felony tag on an infamous death that was never officially declared a murder, Shaun Assael’s grim and vivid portrait of the violent and predatory life of former heavyweight champion Sonny Liston builds a strong, circumstantial case that he was a man plenty of people wanted to see dead.

If you’re expecting Assael, a former investigative reporter for ESPN, to definitively prove his case and single out Liston’s killer, you’ll be disappointed and miss the point of his excellent book. Ignore the title and enjoy a low-rider ride through the 60s and early 70s as the author recounts Liston’s rise and fall, his ties to mobsters, his one-punch dive to give up his title to Muhammad Ali, his star-crossed attempts at a late career comeback and his descent into a disturbingly natural thug life�

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The Mule talked to an old friend about writing � what else did you expect?

I caught up with an old friend the other night, an ex-journalist from my Atlanta days, and the conversation took its inevitable turn to the writing game. For both of us, journalism is a rapidly diminishing speck in the rear-view mirror. But the words still matter.

She’s writing poetry. I’m writing hard-boiled crime fiction. No matter. What was interesting to us both was how the same skills and fascination with words and how to make them dance is at the core of how we create in these very different writing forms.

For me, writing a novel isn’t that much different than writing the long-format journalism I practiced for much of my career. It is vastly different from the formulaic stuff I crank out now as a utility industry flak. But when I was in the journalism game, I used the tradecraft of literature to tell my stories and was mindful�

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[image error]Fellow author Carol Bradley just penned this five-star review of THE RIGHT WRONG NUMBER, available at or :

Ruthless and raucous, a no-holds-barred tale perfect for Quentin Tarantino fans, The Right Wrong Number takes readers on a rip-roaring ride through the seedy underbelly of Texas, New Orleans and northern Mexico. Ed Earl Burch is a rode-hard ex-cop with a bad liver and a limp who struggles to overcome a few really bad instincts while pursuing a Houston financier turned criminal who happens to be married to Burch’s bawdy ex-girlfriend. The plot is full of surprise twists —including a stunner of an ending � and along the way author Nesbitt riffs hilariously on American culture. No one emerges unscathed and Nesbitt’s writing is so startlingly vivid I found myself rereading entire passages just to savor the black humor and caustic cadence. Serve me up some more Ed Earl Burch, please!

Here’s the Mule’s review of Carol Bradley’s Last Chain On Bill: How One Extraordinary Elephant Escaped The Big Top.

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Carol Bradley’s Last Chain on Billie: How One Extraordinary Elephant Escaped The Big Top tells a tale from America’s not-so-distant past, an era when traveling circuses were splashy entertainment in small towns and sprawling cities and elephants trained to do tricks were a main attraction.

It was a time well before the animal rights movement, wildlife sanctuaries and heightened awareness of the cruel practices of too many trainers � not just of elephants, but of dogs, horses and big cats also caged to ride the circus circuit.

Taking center stage is a female Asian elephant named Billie, a resilient animal that endures decades of confinement, neglect, travel in the freezing cold and blazing heat and pain, all to make a buck for circus owners and the trainers who force Billie and other elephants to learn tricks that wreck their ponderous bodies.

Bradley shows the underbelly of the circus world and zoos that used to trade animals in a symbiotic relationship linked by money. However, she paints a word picture that isn’t just black and white, but includes the nuanced shades of gray � the good-hearted trainers who love their animals, but still subject them to captivity and treatment that seem so cruel by today’s standards.

That’s the strength of this book. Bradley is clearly on the side of the angels, but she refrains from hammering the reader with incessant preaching. And she doesn’t judge the human characters of her story by today’s standards in the retroactive and damning style of less gifted writers.

Bradley doesn’t take cheap shots. With a reporter’s impartial eye and neutral tone, she gets out of the way of her story and lets the facts speak the truth. Along the way, the reader is treated to rich sidebars about the capture and training of elephants as beasts of burden and the strong bond some elephants developed with their trainers

Ultimately, Billie’s tale is one of redemption and freedom. After decades as a circus performer, burdened by the label of being dangerous, she is rescued to live out her years in a sanctuary. Old habits learned in captivity die hard, though, and Billie clings to the past she had to live for far too long � one last chain before she could become truly free.

The author provided a copy of this book in return for an honest review.

The current flu epidemic reminds the Mule of what he learned when working on a series about pandemic preparedness for the News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C. As part of that 2006 series, I took a look at the monster of them all, the Spanish flu pandemic of 1018-20. Known as the Blue Death, it killed millions worldwide � estimates range from 50 million to 150 million. You could feel fine at breakfast and dead by supper. And it could happen again.

Here’s the piece:

By Jim Nesbitt

JACKSON, N.C. � In the sun-splashed autumn cool of 1918, Mabel Allen Boyd, the teenage wife of an Army soldier, was on the brink of bringing a new life into a world at war. Pregnant for the first time, she was living with her husband’s parents, staying at the Boyd family farmhouse in the Mount Carmel district of Northampton County, just a few miles northeast of Jackson, the county seat.

Raymond Rochelle Boyd, a sergeant and cook she married three days before Christmas of the previous year in a quick, wartime wedding, rushed home on emergency leave from an Army training camp on Long Island to be by his wife’s side as she gave birth.

She was 19, a dark-eyed brunette on the verge of motherhood. He was 23, a ruddy, round-faced farmboy with a thin mustache, pinched by the high-collared tunic of a soldier and nervous about becoming a father.

Both were stalked by a stealthy killer that would dwarf the carnage of the Western Front and the other far-flung battlefields of World War I: the silent virus of the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-19.

With a fast-striking and deadly reach that spanned the globe, the worst influenza outbreak of the 20th century is more than a sepia-toned and horrific sidebar of history. It is also a harbinger for a future influenza disaster that medical researchers say is inevitable and long overdue, a grisly example of the worst nature has to offer.

Raymond Boyd looked healthy when he stepped off the train and arrived at his parents� house. Fresh from one of the crowded military posts that served as ready incubators for a viral monster that wiped out millions, he was unaware he was already infected and highly contagious, said his daughter from a second marriage, Kathryn Hamill of Jackson.

As the flu suddenly struck and ravaged his bed-bound body, his young wife cared for him. Soon, the virus struck her down. In separate bedrooms of his parents� farmhouse, each struggled to live.

She died. So did their baby.

His parents, worried that word of his wife’s death would kill him, sneaked her coffin out of the house, covering it with hay in the wagon they slipped past their son’s bedroom window. They hid his wife’s death from him until the day he climbed out of his sick bed and insisted on seeing her.

Grief-stricken, he spiraled into a relapse that almost killed him.

“He blamed himself for Mabel’s death,� Hamill said.

Mabel Allen Boyd was one of at least 13,703 North Carolinians killed by this hyper-lethal flu virus, a mutation that still baffles modern-day scientists. Eighty-eight years after her death, she is still the face of the Spanish flu pandemic for Leon Spencer, 101, who lives in the Whitaker Glen retirement community near Five Points in Raleigh.

Before she married Raymond Boyd, Mabel lived about a mile down the dirt road that ran in front of the Spencer family farm just east of the railside Northampton County town of Seaboard.

“I was kindly stunned because she was almost like a family member,� said Spencer, who was 13 in that deadly fall of 1918. “I was sorry because I thought she was a pretty young woman. I was sad.�

Until he married again, Raymond Boyd honored his young, dead wife by wearing a simple gold signet ring that bore her initials on his pinkie finger.

For almost every North Carolinian buried by this remorseless killer, there was a parent or orphan, a spouse or sibling � a loved one left behind, stunned by immediate grief and saddled with the long-running guilt of a survivor.

Just like Raymond Boyd.

‘Worst case�

In truth, no one knows for sure how many died during the three waves of a universal outbreak nearly eight decades gone, because record-keeping was rudimentary.

But most modern-day historians say the body count was vastly underplayed for a pandemic now believed by some to be more lethal than the Black Death, the plague that ravaged Europe in the Middle Ages � or the AIDS virus. They peg the American death toll at 675,000 people and the worldwide estimate between 50 million and 100 million � about half of them adults in their 20s and 30s with robust immune systems, a marked difference from the usual victims of seasonal flu: infants and the elderly.

Unlike other worldwide outbreaks, this misnamed plague did its deadliest work in two dozen weeks, not decades or centuries.

Overshadowed by the carnage of World War I, the Spanish flu pandemic now serves as the “worst-case scenario� for state and federal public health and emergency management officials scrambling to prepare for a future global outbreak of influenza. If history were to repeat itself, federal health officials say more than 2 million Americans would die and 90 million would be infected � an Armageddon of disease that would swamp hospital systems and quickly exhaust limited supplies of medicine and equipment.

For modern-day public health officials, the Spanish flu pandemic provides a graphic object lesson of the lethal price of not responding swiftly when a future global health disaster strikes. At the time, it was ignored or downplayed by public officials and military leaders who let rallies and massive troop movements take place well after they knew the disease was on the march, aiding its rapid spread.

The reason for this colossal blunder is rooted in the war fever that dominated the times � it made officials in North Carolina and elsewhere fearful of being seen as unpatriotic slackers. As a result, Raleigh civic leaders didn’t cancel a huge Sept. 30, 1918, Liberty Loan parade and rally or a big revival on the same day at Tabernacle Baptist Church, then on South Person Street � even as flu deaths started to accelerate dramatically in the city.

There’s a crucial reason to heed the warning of yesteryear’s mistake.

When the next flu pandemic strikes, it will take up to six months to produce a vaccine that specifically targets this new virus. That will force public health officials to rely on the same old-school measures that weren’t applied soon enough in 1918-19 � isolation, quarantine and the quaintly named tactic of “social distancing,� which includes the closing of schools, churches, shopping malls, theaters, concert halls and sports arenas.

Until a vaccine is developed, these time-worn tools will be the primary weapons in the battle to dampen the spread of this viral killer.

Still a mystery

For scientists, the pandemic of 1918-19 provides a tantalizingly chilling challenge because they still don’t know what made this strain so lethal and lightning quick � infamous for claiming victims who felt fine in the morning but were dead by nightfall. Nor do they know why this murderously efficient virus arose simultaneously in Asia, Europe and the Americas.

“It’s always been something of a mystery why that flu pandemic was so much deadlier than other pandemics,� said Dr. Richard Frothingham, an associate professor of medicine at Duke University who specializes in vaccine research. “It was not just that it was new, but was there something else going on in the structure of the virus itself that made it so deadly?�

Researchers are feverishly studying the protein and genetic structure of reconstructed versions of the 1918-19 virus, the biological grandfather of all Type A flu viruses circulating among humans, hoping to resolve these unanswered questions. They hope those answers will help them develop a new vaccine for a future pandemic.

“It’s the most lethal pandemic we know about. � Unfortunately, we’re still so ignorant about how these viruses work,� said Jeffery Taubenberger, a senior investigator at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who has isolated the 1918-19 virus from preserved tissue samples of the pandemic’s victims.

The specter of the 1918-19 pandemic also haunts the scientific watchdogs monitoring the Asian bird flu virus they think is the most likely source of the next pandemic. It’s known by its genetic call sign, H5N1, but has yet to mutate into a form that can be readily passed between humans.

As they nervously eye this virulent strain that is particularly deadly to the several hundred humans who have caught it, physicians and scientists are seeing some of the same quick-striking, lung-clogging symptoms that marked the 1918-19 virus. It turned its victims a deep blue-black color as blood and other bodily fluids choked off their oxygen supply.

This is the result of what scientists call a “cytokine storm,� an out-of-control reaction by the body’s immune system to an utterly alien virus, a stealthy invader able to penetrate deep into the lungs before detection.

That’s why the 1918-19 strain claimed so many young adults as victims � their vigorous immune systems responded so violently to the threat that the reaction helped kill the stricken patient. That’s what makes the H5N1 avian virus so scary.

“It was horribly devastating, unbelievably lethal � particularly among young adults,� said Taubenberger of the virus that is the focal point of his studies. “And that was unprecedented.�

Victims everywhere

The 1918-19 pandemic’s relentless second wave slipped ashore in North Carolina in late September, probably carried into Wilmington by steamship � possibly from Boston, site of the outbreak’s first major attack in the United States, or Philadelphia, another port city where thousands eventually died and steam shovels dug trenches for mass graves.

On Sept. 21, 1918, Wilmington’s first Spanish flu victim died � William A. Wright, 28, a popular merchant and one of at least 223 New Hanover County residents killed by this deadly virus and at least 7,000 who became sick.

As September slid toward October, the pandemic quickly spread to the Piedmont and beyond, riding the rails and roads, carried by soldiers, sailors and salesmen. It fooled the best scientific minds of the times, men and women who thought they were dealing with a bacteria and wouldn’t discover the pandemic’s viral roots until the 1930s.

In the Tar Heel state, the prominent and the plebian were struck down by this ravaging virus and the deadly, bacterial helpmate that often followed in its wake � pneumonia. Victims included Edward Kidder Graham, 42, president of the University of North Carolina, and his interim successor, Marvin Hendrix Stacy, also 42, who died in January 1919, struck during the pandemic’s wintry third wave.

Like a scythe, it cut down Lucy Page, 37, and Eliza Riddick, 24, two Raleigh volunteers who tended flu-stricken students at N.C. State University. It also snuffed the life of Bessie Roper, 29, of Asheville, a volunteer who nursed flu-stricken students at UNC.

A water-fountain memorial was built in Riddick’s and Page’s names and once stood in front of the old Wake County courthouse. Riddick’s 21-year-old brother, William, described in newspaper accounts as a well-known man-about-town nicknamed “Rout,� died Oct. 8, 1918, a week before his sister did.

Another Raleigh volunteer, Ernest Royall Carroll, 41, died Nov. 15, 1918 � two months after registering for the draft � after serving in a soup line for flu-sickened refugees at his church, Tabernacle Baptist. Carroll, who formed one of Raleigh’s first Boy Scout troops, was one of 30 church members killed by the pandemic, including four deacons and a former pastor, a history of the church notes.

Signs in obituaries

While the virus was killing scores of people in Raleigh, Winston-Salem, Charlotte, Wilmington and Fayetteville, the front pages of North Carolina newspapers were dominated by reports of American troops launching a bloody offensive in the Meuse-Argonne sector of the Western Front � leavened by flu stories only on occasion.

As a result, the telltales of the pandemic’s lethal assault in North Carolina are buried in the funeral notices of the society pages or relegated to inside stories that invariably emphasized the rosy belief of public officials who claimed the worst had passed.

Even this muted coverage is stark and sobering. Roxboro had more than 600 flu cases by Oct. 8, 1918, and 13 funerals for flu victims on a single Monday.

There were 32 flu deaths in Durham by Oct. 17; 36 deaths in Raleigh by Oct. 15, including at least five N.C. State students. Raleigh’s death toll rose to 82 by Oct. 21 and 100 by Oct. 24, with a canvass of 3,561 homes revealing 1,380 flu cases.

In one house, canvassers found the body of a man whose wife was recovering in bed from the birth of their 4-day-old child, unable to find anybody to prepare her husband’s corpse for burial. The dead in Raleigh included James E. Moore, 22, an engineer on the Seaboard Air Line railroad, and C.W. Robbins, a student at Shaw University � like Wright of Wilmington, young victims who were the preferred demographic of this pandemic.

“We’ve almost forgotten the horror of the war in the seriousness of the influenza epidemic,� wrote Ray Tillinghast in a letter archived at Duke University and written to her cousin Carrie, a young Fayetteville woman who was serving as a nurse in France with the American Expeditionary Force. “The country has never known anything like it.�

The death toll of the Spanish flu pandemic is staggering, even by the crude statistical measures of the time. It was enough to carve a dozen years off America’s average life expectancy; enough to cause North Carolina’s 1918 influenza death rate to leap to a level 20 times higher than 1917.

Consider this: More Americans died during the Spanish flu pandemic than were killed in battle during all of America’s wars � from the Revolutionary War through the Civil War, both World Wars and the current conflict in Iraq.

And during World War I, 80 percent as many soldiers and sailors died of flu and pneumonia as those who died in combat, historians say. Military flu victims died by the thousands � in troop ships crossing the Atlantic and base camps in France.

But training camps in America were the real killing ground for this ruthless virus. Tents and hastily constructed barracks were overcrowded with soldiers and sailors who shuttled across the country before shipping out to France as part of an unprecedented, worldwide migration of millions driven by the demands of war.

This was an ancient precursor to the global transportation network that spans the globe today and would guarantee the wildfire spread of a future pandemic.

Worse than war

The pandemic’s onslaught fostered fear and isolation, wrote Samuel Lewis Morgan, pastor of First Baptist Church in hard-hit Henderson when the pandemic struck.

“The disease struck terror everywhere. � Soon I learned the tragic loneliness of the people,� Morgan wrote in memoirs archived at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Morgan, who also led churches in Creedmoor, Smithfield, Lillington and Ramseur during a 38-year career, tried to combat this isolation by visiting members of his church before they or their loved ones became gravely ill.

But the flu struck him down and doctors ordered him confined to his bed, isolated from the rest of his family. Only his wife, Isabelle, could enter the room � and only if she wore a mask.

He listened to the church bells of Henderson celebrating the Nov. 11 end of World War I from his sickbed.

“The epidemic I remember with more horror than the war,� Morgan wrote. “It killed some lovely people and pillars in the churches.�

For Leon Spencer, who now lives in Raleigh at Whitaker Glen, the killing horror of the pandemic is captured in a farmboy’s memory of his parents naming the dead, the dying and the suddenly stricken.

In the five autumn weeks that marked the worldwide outbreak’s deadliest peak, Spencer and his siblings listened to a daily toll of friends and neighbors so routine, yet overwhelming, his parents forgot to shield their children from the unrelenting reality.

Spencer’s grandmother, Mary Smith Spencer, died of pneumonia in March 1918 after a bout with the flu, a likely victim of the pandemic’s relatively mild first wave.

But at a time when death seemed like the commonplace passage of fall into winter, Spencer remembers his grandmother’s passing because her burial took place on his father’s birthday � not as a blood-close reminder of a global health catastrophe.

For Spencer, still sharp and active after more than a century of life, the pandemic he lived through in his teens was a time of shuttered churches and schools, a town doctor on the run from dawn until midnight and the names of the suddenly departed passed between his parents.

“There were a lot of people getting sick and my parents would talk about people dying,� Spencer said. “That lingers with me. I didn’t know them all personally, but I knew they were young.�

Just as young as Mabel Allen Boyd

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That’s what fellow writer Carmen Amato, author of the Emilia Cruz mystery series, calls the Mule’s gritty and relentless Ed Earl Burch crime thrillers. Here’s what else she said in her recent review:

“A brisk pace, sliding points of view, shades of gray crooks, and dialogue spit out of the corners of everybody’s mouth make this series a real gem for hard-boiled genre fiction fans.�

See for yourself at

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The Mule had a blast getting interrogated by fellow mystery writer Carmen Amato, author of the stylish Emilia Cruz mysteries set in Acapulco, for her Mystery Ahead blog. Check out the interview below or go to:

And make damn sure you check out Carmen’s books and buy one or three. She’s a great writer who knows how to tell a killer story that has both style and grit. I reviewed her Pacific Reaper and it is a corker.

by | Jan 6, 2018 |

A warm welcome to Jim Nesbitt, author of the hard-core hard-boiled Ed Earl Burch private investigator series. Ed Earl Burch is a not-quite washed up Texas cop turned PI with a notch collection on his bedpost and bad knees. Ed’s world is crude and rude and he punches through it with a pack of Lucky Strikes and a glass of Kentucky bourbon. A brisk pace, sliding points of view, shades of gray crooks, and dialogue spit out of the corners of everybody’s mouth make this series a real gem for hardboiled genre fiction fans.

Jim books are collecting awards. was a finalist for the IPPY, Forewords INDIE and Killer Nashville Silver Falchion awards last year. It was also a Top Pick and finalist for Novel of The Year for Underground Book Reviews (UBR) and won a best hard-boiled mystery award from the Independent Crime Master Authors group. is a UBR Top Pick this year and is in the running for Novel of the Year for 2018.

1.Carmen Amato: Jim thanks so much for stopping by. Your Ed Earl Burch mysteries caught my eye because of the great tagline: “Nobody’s hero. Nobody’s fool.� Tell us about Ed Earl’s backstory and what makes him tick.

Jim Nesbitt: I think Ed Earl is a bit of an Everyman with whom folks can readily identify. He’s been smacked around by life and carries the guilt of a dead partner he couldn’t keep from getting killed, a couple of ex-wives and the loss of his gold shield, largely because of his own actions. Getting booted from the force in Dallas denies him the source of pride and recognition for the one thing he does best in life, tracking down bad guys and making them pay.

Burch is deeply flawed. Besides being angst-ridden, he drinks too much, he’s fatally attracted to women who leave him an emotional train wreck, and he’s a terminal smartass who never knows when to shut up. He’s also a guy with a code he sometimes forgets until the chips are down. He’s not super-smart like Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe and he sure isn’t super-cool like Steve McQueen in Bullitt. He’s got bad knees, a beard and balding pate, a belly and an empty bank account. He also comes across like he might not be the sharpest knife in the drawer. He’s Columbo without the caricature and people have a bad habit of underestimating him. He makes them pay for that � either with handcuffs or a bullet. Doesn’t matter to him � however they want to deal the play.

At his core, he’s smart, tough, profane and reckless and has been described as a classic American anti-hero. I’ll buy that.

2. CA: Where do you find inspiration for your often damaged and dangerous characters?

JN: My hillbilly cousins and all the journalists I helled around with for four decades. We’re a rude and intemperate lot. I also ran across a lot of colorful characters chasing politicians, crooks, cops, cowboys, loggers, miners and just plain folks while roving the country as a national correspondent out of Atlanta and Washington, D.C.

I’ve always had a good ear for dialogue and an eye for detail that lets me create a keen sense of place. The people I met along the way as a journalist gave me a helluva head start on creating the rogue’s gallery of characters you meet in my novels. So did those hillbilly cousins.

3. CA: How do you use setting to create and build suspense? Tell us about a favorite location that you used in a book.

JN: ÌýI think it’s essential for a writer to create a keen sense of place and too many fail to do what you do so well in your Emilia Cruz series. I come from a long line of hillbilly storytellers who instilled in me the strong tie between family and the land we come from â€� both were steeped in the stories they told about my ancestors, my uncles and aunts, my cousins and my mom and dad when they were young and growing up in the North Carolina mountains. I tried to capture that as a journalist and it was natural that this would carry over to my novels.

I knew I was going to write very stark and violent tales of revenge and redemption. And none of the characters in my novels are nice people, not even Burch � they’re all fairly nasty and violent folk. I wasn’t born in Texas, but I lived there for a while and I spent a lot of time wandering the border between Texas and Mexico and flat fell in love with the harsh beauty of the desert mountains of the Big Bend Country that rise out of Mexico. The mountains there clash and collide in a way that makes it seems like the very bones of the earth are there for you to touch.

What better setting for the tales I was trying to tell? But I was gunning for more than just a backdrop � I think the interplay between people and the land where they live is endlessly fascinating. And I wanted to capture how a place shapes a people and how the land becomes a character unto itself in their story, inseparable from who they are. Texas � particularly the harsh and brooding beauty of West Texas � is more than a backdrop or framework for my novels. It’s a character that adds its own relentless element of foreboding and impending violence and is a big influence on the people in my novels and what they do.

4. CA: You can invite any author, living or dead, to dinner at your home. What are you serving and what will the conversation be about?

JN: The late, great and vastly underappreciated James Crumley whose novels Dancing Bear and The Last Good Kiss taught me it was okay to let it rip with frank descriptions of sex and violence instead of euphemisms that I think insult the reader. And it was okay to drop f-bombs and other profane and earthy phrases. Both of his main characters, Milo Milodragovitch and C.W. ‘Sonny� Sughrue, are deeply flawed PIs who drink and drug too much and chase the bad girls. Neither one toes the line or gives much of a damn about the law, but both have a code they might stray from but always return to in the end. His books also have raucously funny passages where the joke is often on the main character.

All that impressed me because those guys are vastly different from Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, two guys who might bend the rules, but kept to their code and used brains rather than brawn and a gun. And the joke was never on Sam or Phil. Crumley gave me license to NOT lace Ed Earl up in the strait jacket of the hard-boiled detective template.

So, what’s for dinner? Deep whiskeys before and after the main course, which will probably be thick ribeyes served with mashed potatoes swimming in butter. Or maybe something more primal � backstrap venison or elk steaks. Since we’re both good ole� boys, I imagine we’ll sit at the kitchen table with the bottle between us, smoking cigarettes and talking about family, the places that stole our hearts and the women who left us flattened like three-day-old roadkill.

I’d ask him about that interplay between people and the land, the sense of family and place we carry even in a rootless and highly mobile society like the one we live in. Did he deliberately set out to make the sense of place so strong in his novels that it became a character unto itself or did that naturally spill out because he was raised on the same type of stories I heard from my family? My bet is, he’ll say something like: “Hell, bud, I just rared back and let it rip.�

5. CA: What is your best protip? Tell us about a writing habit, technique, or philosophy that keeps your writing sharp.

JN: Well, you and I both know there’s no silver bullet to writing � you just keep your butt in the chair, open a vein and bleed into your computer. Yeah, I poached a Hemingway line there and tarted it up � so, sue me, Papa. What I can tell you is something I learned a long time ago as a cub reporter � facts are your friends and the more facts you have, the firmer the foundation you can build for your writing and the surer and more authoritative and authentic your story will be.

It seems counter-intuitive since we’re writing fiction, but the firm foundation of facts frees up your writing and really allows it to fly. The horrible cliché told to young writers is to write what you know. What you know is only the starting point � and a poor one at that.

Do some research � if your books are set in the late 1980s and early 1990s like mine are, you better gather up all the facts you can about that time. Were laptops and cellphone in use back then? Who was president or governor? What were the political scandals of the day? Was that building you put in Chapter 12 even there back then? You’re not writing sepia-toned history, but you want to get these facts right to give your story authenticity. If your characters carry guns, you better get that right. You’re not going to use all these facts in your story, but they’ll be there underneath your writing.

If you get those details wrong, you run the risk of undermining your story because believe me, somebody will catch it or Google it and call you out. Or just drop your book, walk away and never think of you again. Best of all, if you have the time and the money, go walk the ground of where your story takes place. Most of the scenes in my two novels are set in places I went to as a journalist and that proved invaluable to creating a strong sense of place.

Thank you!

Jim Nesbitt writes hard-boiled crime thrillers set in Texas and northern Mexico that featured a defrocked Dallas vice and homicide detective named Ed Earl Burch. Nesbitt is a former roving correspondent whose assignments included stories on both sides of the border and his novels � The Last Second Chance and The Right Wrong Number � are laced with the sights, sounds and people he encountered while wandering that rugged country. To learn more about Jim’s work, visit his website at .

YOUR VOTE COUNTS: My second Ed Earl Burch crime thriller, THE RIGHT WRONG NUMBER, is in the running for 2018 Novel of The Year at Underground Book Reviews, thanks to a Top Pick review by Anita Lock. There’s an Editor’s Choice and Reader’s Choice category. Here’s the link for you to vote in the latter:

The Mule surely would appreciate your vote for THE RIGHT WRONG NUMBER. Many thanks in advance.

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