Jim Nesbitt is a lapsed horseman, pilot, hunter, and saloon sport with a keen appreciation for old guns, vintage cars and trucks, good cigars, aged whisky without an 'e', and a well-told story. He is the award-winning author of four hard-boiled Texas crime thrillers that feature battered but relentless Dallas PI Ed Earl Burch -- The Last Second Chance, The Right Wrong Number, The Best Lousy Choice, and The Dead Certain Doubt. For more than thirty years, Nesbitt was a journalist, chasing hurricanes, earthquakes, plane wrecks, presidential candidates, wildfires, rodeo cowboys, neo-Nazis, and nuns with an eye for the telling detail and an ear for the voice of the people who give life to a story. A diehard Tennessee Vols fan, he now lives in enemy territory -- Athens, Alabama -- and is working on his fifth Ed Earl Burch novel, The Fatal Saving Grace.
Jim and I bonded over our shared love of private eye fiction
and Deadwood, so it’s a treat to have him on the blog today.
One Bite at a Time: Jim, welcome back to the blog.
It’s been way too long. (2018,
to be precise.)
You’ve written four books in the Ed Earl Burch series. Where
did the idea for Ed Earl come from?
Jim Nesbitt: Jeez, Louise -- he emerged from the
mists so long ago, I had to dig deep into the cranial archives to find the shop
manual for the boy. So, on Page 156 of the Chassis section, it says: When I
started writing the first Ed Earl book, The Last Second Chance, I knew I
wanted to write an Everyman character, somebody who would strike a chord with
readers because they could identify with his strengths, weaknesses and quirks.
I also wanted to create an anti-hero, a terminal smartass who has big problems
with authority and a permanent chip on his shoulder, somebody who only uses The
Book as a door stop and would just as soon shoot you as cuff you. Author buddy
Michael Ludden once described Ed Earl as "smart, tough, profane and
reckless." Author Robert Ward once said Burch is "nobody's hero,
nobody's fool." That's about right.
OBAAT: How much of Ed Earl is you?
JN: People accuse me of having an alter-ego in Ed
Earl all the time. And I'll cop to indulging some Walter Mitty fantasies
through Ed Earl's frequently lethal antics. But I prefer to think that I'm his
daddy. He's inherited some but, lucky for him, not all of my physical,
biographical and psychological particulars, quirks and ailments.
Here's the tale of the tape:
We're both bald, bearded, beefy guys with bad knees and
wounded livers. We both favor Colt 1911s in .45 ACP with a mix of hardball and
hollow-points in the magazine. We're both built like beer barrels on
toothpicks. He's got three exes, I've got two. He drinks Maker's Mark bourbon
on the rocks, I used to but have switched back to George Dickel, Tennessee's
better whisky (no e), now that I live about an hour south of the distillery. He
likes to put a boot on the bar rail when he drinks; I'm a retired honky-tonker.
He still fires up Lucky Strikes with a Zippo and chews Levi Garrett on
stakeouts. I gave up Luckies a long time ago and finally ditched cigars, pipes
and chew after a recent triple bypass. I've never been a cop and have never
killed anybody. Ed Earl drops a lot of bodies -- as a cop and a P.I. He's a
native Texan; I'm a lapsed wannabe who used to live in Dallas.
In truth, Ed Earl is a composite character, a hundred-proof
mix of me and cops, lawyers, politicians, saloon sports and ink-stained
journalists I've known through the years. He's also got a little bit of two of
my favorite fictional characters, James Lee Burke's Clete Purcell and the late,
great James Crumley's Milo Milodragovitch.
OBAAT: Ed Earl is not your garden variety private
eye. Tell us a little about his personality, the cases he works, and why he is
the way he is.
JN: Burch is hard-shelled and cynical but his scar
tissue covers some deep wounds we all either have or know something about. The
deepest of these is losing the gold shield of a Dallas homicide detective.
Being a cop gave him a higher sense of purpose, a calling bigger than himself.
Harry Bosch calls it Blue Religion. Burch mourns this loss but keeps it buried,
for the most part, admitting it only to himself and only occasionally. Until
he's offered a badge in the latest book, The Dead Certain Doubt, and has
to take a hard look at whether he still wants to be a lawman or has been a
semi-outlaw for so long that he needs be honest with himself and ditch the
fantasy. That struggle is at the center of the in-progress Ed Earl book, The
Fatal Saving Grace. He's got a badge again after two decades as a P.I. and
is trying to remember the dance steps of chain-of-command, playing well with
others, taking orders from idiots and being sharp and smart about the rules he
bends or breaks. I'm still writing this one and will be just as surprised as
the reader by the choice Burch makes.
I don't really write mysteries. I write hard-boiled crime
thrillers, throwing Ed Earl into the briar patches of West Texas and northern
Mexico to see if he survives. So far, he's been pretty unsinkable but usually
winds up with more physical and psychological scars than he started out with. In
The Last Second Chance, he chases down a drug lord who killed his
partner and practices a weird mix of voodoo and Aztec heart sacrifice. Burch winds
up with a broken jaw and vivid nightmares about winged serpents, Aztec jaguar
knights and having his own heart carved out of his chest that he hoses down
with Percocet and bourbon. It's the only way to chase the demons back into
their holes so he can work a case.
Burch hates divorce work and skip tracing, even though he
becomes damn good at chasing financial fugitives from the savings and loan bust
that ravaged Dallas in the 1980s. He misses the action and moral clarity of
being a murder cop. But that longing makes him a sucker for any chance of being
a manhunter again. In The Best Lousy Choice, he takes on the suspicious
death of a rich war hero, rancher and civic leader that nobody else wants to
touch and winds up nearly getting killed by the murderous gunsels of the local
cartel leader and a nasty group of Houston developers who want the dead man's
ranch.
He also loves the ladies but usually falls for women far
smarter and more lethal than he is. They tend to lead him around by the cojones
until he wises up and gets himself back on track. Case in point: In The
Right Wrong Number, Burch agrees to be the bodyguard of an ex-lover whose
financier husband skips Houston with cash and diamonds ripped from his clients
in the New Orleans mob. Savannah Crowe is a rangy strawberry blonde with a
violent temper and a history of serial betrayal -- for both lust and money. She
seduces Burch to keep him under her thumb until she trades her body for the mad
skills of a Rice University computer scientist who cracks the code to her
husband's offshore accounts. Burch gets a rude wakeup call when she kills two
other bodyguards and skips town, leaving him as the fall guy for the cops.
OBAAT: Elvis Cole has Joe Pike. Easy Rawlins has
Mouse. Spenser has Hawk, as well as Quirk and Belson for cop friends. Who does
Ed Earl run with?
JN: Two people -- his dead partner, Wynn Moore, and
the ever-deadly Carla Sue Cantrell, a petite blonde from East Tennessee by way
of North Dallas who has a taste for muscle cars, high-quality crank and the
terminal double-cross of outlaw partners and lovers. Moore, who calls everybody
"sport model," pops up semi-frequently as a voice in Burch's head,
reminding him of the hard rules of the detective game and scolding him for his
choice of women and reliance on whiskey and pills. Cantrell has a hold on
Burch's heart and has saved his ass more than once when the bad guys were about
to kill him, usually with rounds from her own 1911. Call it a shared love of
Old American Iron. She's the one who keeps telling him his longing for a
badge is a fantasy and urges him to instead become a full-blown outlaw and
partner in love and crime.
OBAAT: Who or what inspired you to write PI fiction
in the first place, and what keeps you writing it?
JN: I've always thought of hard-boiled crime fiction
as an American art form, particularly those that feature the lone shamus with a
hard head, a gun and a shopworn code, sticking his nose where it doesn't
belong. It's a marvelously flexible genre that allows a writer to have his
characters comment on or think about nearly anything in American life, from
politics, neo-Nazis and the tragi-comic disconnect between men and women to the
narrow difference between technical competence and true genius in music. As
long as it helps define a character and doesn't get in the way of a well-told
crime thriller or mystery. I'm a junkie for the old-school pioneers of the
genre -- Hammett, Chandler -- their next generation followers -- John D.
MacDonald, Ross Macdonald, Charles Williams, David Goodis -- and some
latter-day greats -- Elmore Leonard, Lawrence Block, James Crumley and James
Lee Burke. These are the authors I read religiously before I finally got the
nerve to try my hand at fiction so it should be no surprise that I decided to
try and follow in their footsteps. Lately, I've been reading some guy named
King and his killer Nick Forte books. Gotta keep tabs on the competition. Might
just learn some new dance moves.
OBAAT: You’ve described yourself as a recovering
journalist. I get that; I often refer to myself as a recovering musician.
“Recovering” implies some sort of addiction. What was it about journalism that
hooked you?
JN: The juice, baby. The action. I used to love
grabbing a go-bag, a laptop (well, a Radio Shack Trash 80) and a carton of
Luckies to chase hurricanes. Spent 20 years on the road dogging politicians,
rodeo cowboys, neo-Nazis, bikers, poker pros, migrant farm workers and folks
caught up in the issues of the 80s, 90s and early 2000s, keeping the
eyes and ears open for the details and voices that made those stories come to
life. But I also broke into journalism in the late 1970s, when long-format
stories were the rage and you could really stretch out and write, using the
tradecraft common to fiction to tell your tale. It was damn good practice before
I finally pulled the trigger to try my hand at fiction after years of
foot-dragging.
OBAAT: Where can someone find you in 2025, either on
the web or in person?
JN: That's a damn good question. I hope to have the
next Ed Earl book finished by late January and out in February. I'm a horribly
slow writer and am already two years too late with this latest saga. You can
catch up with me online at https://jimnesbittbooks.com or
https://www.facebook.com/edearlburchbooks. You can grab one of the Ed Earl
books at https://www.amazon.com/author/jimnesbitt
. Still hammering out my 2025 road trip schedule but hope to be at Murder In
The Magic City, a two-day deal in Hoover and Wetumpka, Alabama in February;
Killer Nashville in August and, fingers crossed, your gig, Creatures, Crime and
Creativity, in September.
