An Interview With Beau Johnson, Author of Like Minded Individuals

 Beau Johnson is an annual guest here, and the blog is better because of it. Beau is always entertaining and gives thoughtful answers, no matter what kind of goofy questions I throw at him. He also knows more about cheese than is considered healthy by most people.

His new book, Like-Minded Individuals, drops on Monday.

 

One Bite at a Time: Welcome back to the blog, Beau. It’s always a pleasure catching up with you.

Your new book is titled Like-Minded Individuals: A Bishop Rider Book. Bishop has been away for a while; I won’t say why. What brought him back?

Beau Johnson: Hi, Dana. First off I want to thank you for lifting the ban! That was a tough couple years, and I apologize for the misunderstanding. I’m glad we could sort things out and know that never again will I mistake pillows for something they are not! I kid, of course, but it’s always nice to throw a John Candy reference out there when I can. So, Bishop Rider. If I’m honest, he’s not really back. He’s still dead last time I checked.  But as ever, his ghost looms large, ensuring his war continues.

OBAAT: A couple of years ago you said in an interview with the This is Horror web site that “horror and crime are cousins of a sort.” Would you care to elaborate?

BJ: It’s a fine line I think.  A balancing act.  The monsters Bishop Rider fought and the ones Jeramiah Abrum continues on with, they do more than just go bump in the night. The rapists, the pedophiles, the human traffickers. They’re real. They aren’t made up. Not really. The crimes Bishop Rider and Jeramiah Abrum attempt to abate as scary-horrible as they come.

OBAAT: You specialize in short stories, though you are also a not infrequent contributor to Shotgun Honey, which I consider the pre-eminent venue for crime flash fiction. What is the appeal, and what are the challenges, to going even shorter than usual with your writing?

BJ: The challenges of flash are the same as a short story in my opinion, only compacted. You have to get in, get out, but tell a coherent story all the same. My own goal or mantra when writing anything is ‘set the hook, omit the boring parts, and stick the landing’. I’ve gotten better at it over the years, but as with a lot of things, I have much to learn.

OBAAT: Reviewer Michael Patrick Hicks wrote this about Bishop Rider and Jeramiah Abrum: “They aren’t good guys. But they may be the necessary guys, the right guys, the ones needed to fix — or at least send a message to — our neutered justice system, the bastard cops, and an immoral country that caters wholly to the white, wealthy, and powerful.” Care to comment?

BJ: I’ve always stated Bishop Rider was the bad guy.  This hasn’t changed.  He believed it, struggled with it, but did what he felt he had to all the same.  Jeramiah is a different breed, choosing to see things through a lens Rider never could. In other words, Jeramiah believes he’s the good guy. The way things are going post-Rider, how they’ve escalated, I suspect he always will.

OBAAT: If memory serves, and correct me if I’m wrong, you were talking about quitting. We’re all glad you didn’t, but what changed your mind?

BJ: Well that is very kind of you to say, Dana.  It is. Truly. But yes, I did quit. The whole endeavor lasting a grand total of ten months until some very kind people helped me change my mind. It started with Shawn Cosby and went through to Paul J Garth, Laurel Hightower, Steve Stred, and too many others. The food for thought I was given, it was enough for me to realize I was doing a disservice to myself because of what I’d become focused upon. My most popular book then (and now) is my third, All Of Them To Burn. The absolute failure of Brand New Dark, my fourth book, is what brought around my decision to hang up the pen. In hindsight, however, I sometimes think maybe it had to happen. For the story to go on, I mean. It doesn’t paint me in a favourable* light, no, as I never thought of myself as a quitter, but here we are, two books past my self-imposed ‘retirement’ and I have to admit I’m still having fun. All told, I remain indebted. (* - Read with Canadian accent.)

OBAAT: The inevitable cheese question: what cheeses would you include in the ultimate macaroni and cheese recipe?

BJ: Have we ever talked about Havarti?

 

Sticking It to the Man

 I’ve made no secret of my disenchantment with the publishing industry. Last year I cancelled all my contracts and resolved to self-publish again. I had just about finished moving everything over to Kindle Direct Publishing when Amazon owner Jef Bezos showed how craven he truly was and began to humiliate himself more each day paying fealty to the incoming Felon-in-Chief. I have now pulled everything from Amazon, though the listings still survive due to used bookstores. Books sold under my name in Amazon will NOT send any money my way. Please ignore them. I have a better deal for you.

All my books, as well as a handful of short stories, are now available for free download on my web site. Three formats are available: PDF. MOBI (for Kindles), and EPUB (for Nook and other e-reader platforms). Go to the page with the book you want (links below), click the appropriate button, and the book will download to your computer, tablet, or phone at no cost to you.

Why am I no longer making even a token effort to sell my books? The only thing I enjoy about being an author is the writing and discussing the craft with other authors. Nothing – not a goddamned thing – about publishing or marketing gave me any pleasure at all. What was necessary to get my writing to the public became more tedious every day. I wasn’t making any money from writing, and I’m retired, so it wasn’t like I was trying to build a career. I’d rather spend more time writing than wasting it on marketing and the myriad of other publishing-related pains in my ass.

This means there won’t be any more print versions of my books, which is why I made PDF copies available. Whether or not you have an e-reader, if you’re reading this, you can read a PDF file.

For those who feel cheated at not being able to spend money on my books, there is something you can do for me. As I have removed myself from Amazon and Goodreads (an Amazon subsidiary), there is no place to post reviews. If you read a book of mine and like it – or don’t, either way – feel free to post a brief comment on social media; you can tag me if the comment appears on Facebook or Bluesky. Or you can drop me a line at danakingcrime@gmail.com. I promise to get back to you.

Below are all the books available, in order by series.

The Nick Forte Private Eye Novels

A Small Sacrifice. Forte is asked to look into a cold case. Very loosely based on the Jon-Benet Ramsey murder. Shamus Award nominee for Best Indy PI Novel.

The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of. Forte is hired to protect a ham actor, who is then murdered. My tribute to The Maltese Falcon.

The Man in the Window. The most music-oriented of the books, as Forte investigates the murder of a member of the Chicago Symphony. Nominated for a Shamus Award for Best Paperback Original.

A Dangerous Lesson. Forte is drawn into a serial killer investigation.

Bad Samaritan. Forte is inadvertently involved with toxic men’s rights activists.

Off the Books. Forte stumbles onto a human trafficking ring while investigating a fender bender.

The Penns River Novels

Worst Enemies. Penns River rarely has two homicides in a year. Two in a week is a problem.

Grind Joint. A new low-end casino that is supposed to provide economic growth causes more problems than it solves.

Resurrection Mall. A religious-themed shopping center becomes a focal point in a drug war.

Ten-Seven. A seemingly random shooting in the casino parking lot leads to unexpected problems.

Pushing Water. A mass shooting is not as clear-cut as it appears.

Leaving the Scene. A hit-and-run defies solution, as a changing of the guard and competing priorities distract the police.

White Out. A Black officer shoots an apparently unarmed white supremacist. More than a foot of snow and a poker tournament with a million-dollar cash prize coincide with the funeral.

The Spread. A high school football betting scheme leads to murder.

Standalones

Wild Bill. A decorated FBI agent is frustrated when the investigation he thinks will be a capstone to his career is derailed by a mob war. (Not a Western.)

Dead Shot: The Memoir of Walter Ferguson, Soldier, Marshal, Bootlegger.  The “memoir” of a man who lived through, and helped to shape, both the opening and closing of the frontier. (Is a Western.)

Free e-books make great gifts for any occasion, or none. Don’t hesitate to forward the links of those you think people will like, or e-mail them the book file itself. I want folks to enjoy them as much as I enjoyed writing them.

 

What Should a Review Be?

 

My introduction to the publishing industry came through reviewing books for the New Mystery Reader web site. I’d won an advanced reader’s copy of Elmore Leonard’s The Hot Kid in a contest run by HarperCollins, on the condition I write a review for them. I forwarded the result to Stephanie Padilla, the editor of NMR. She liked it enough to bring me on board. Thank you, Stephanie. Everything that happened since is your fault. 😊

I’d never done reviews before, so I did some research into what should be in them. The best advice I found was that a review should tell a prospective reader if the book passes the $25 test. (Of course it’s more now.) The reviewer’s primary job is to help readers decide if the book is worth spending their money, and time, on. (I wish I remembered who said that, but it was a long time ago and I’m old. In fact, today I’m officially older than I was yesterday. I better go lie down.)

Okay, I’m back. Keeping the “Twenty-five Dollar Rule” in mind, what should be in a review? As you might expect, I have ideas.

First, a brief synopsis of the story. Very brief. Do not divulge any plot twists or too much about the characters; “no spoilers” doesn’t apply only to the end of a book. There are many things that happen along the way readers should be able to enjoy without knowing they’re coming.

That’s why I generally don’t read the back covers of books. Many years ago my eyes accidentally came to rest on the back cover of Scott Phillips’s excellent novel Cottonwood, where I learned what was going to happen in the next chapter. It was something I never would have expected; now it was ruined. Don’t tell any more about the story than you have to for readers to know what kind of book it is. It’s a review, not a book report.

Brief excerpts are fine, so long as they don’t spoil anything. It can come in handy to give readers an example of something you particularly liked, or disliked. It allows them to make up their own minds should their tastes and yours not coincide.

This is especially true if you’re inclined to talk about the quality of the writing. I focus on this when I still do the occasional review, as I read less for the story than for how well it’s told. I enjoy a decent story that’s well-written far more than a fantastic story told to ham-handedly. (Of course, there are limits to how bad the story can be.)

You can also do prospective readers a favor by breaking down the craft for them a little. How dialog-heavy is the book? How good is the dialog? How much description is there? How good is it? Are the characters well drawn? What’s the pace? How much disbelief needs to be suspended, and how often? How much internal dialog is there? Is it used effectively? How violent is the book? How funny? Is it truly funny, or is the author merely trying to be funny? How tight is the writing?

I could go on, but you get the point. A proper review should not be a few paragraphs of story summary followed by one about whether you liked the book. Readers deserve more. (And less, when potential spoilers are involved.) We’ve all seen movie trailers that ruined the movie because they gave too much away. Don’t do that with your review.

Does Talent Matter?

 A Facebook meme a while back read, “People who say talent doesn’t matter are those who don’t have any.” (Or something like that. I’m retired, but I still have enough of a life not to worry about the precise wording of old Facebook memes.)

I don’t know if I agree completely, but I’m there at least ninety-nine percent of the way. I’d modify it to read, “People who say talent doesn’t matter are those who don’t want it to,” which strongly implies they don’t have it without being quite so accusatory.

This puts me in mind of what might be the best-learned lesson of my abortive musical career. I was never the best trumpet player beginning any level of school. I busted my ass and became one of the best at that level by outworking everyone else.

Then I went to grad school, where I encountered people with more talent who were willing to work as hard as I did. And a few who didn’t have to work nearly as hard.

I was, and remain, good friends with a player whose skills amazed even our teacher in the Boston Symphony, who said,  “I can’t play some of the shit he seems to sight read.” My friend went on to play Principal Trumpet in Memphis and retired a few years ago after twenty-plus years as Associate Principal in Montreal.

I’m not saying my friend didn’t work at it, but he started on a plane so much higher than mine there was no way I could keep up with him, let alone narrow the gap.

That’s what talent does for you.

Writing is like that. Stephen King once said there are four levels of writers:

1.    Incompetent

2.    Competent

3.    Good

4.    Great

He also said an incompetent writer cannot become competent; there’s something missing in how they’re wired or they wouldn’t be incompetent in the first place. A competent writer can become a good writer through studious study and application of the craft, but a good writer can no more become a great writer than the incompetent can become competent. There’s something missing, and that something is talent.

No one wanted to be a trumpet player more than I did. No one ever worked harder. Music got my best effort and I’m comfortable with the decision to leave. To use a baseball metaphor, I was at best a AA talent trying to play in The Show. I could hang in short stretches, but sooner or later the holes in my game would be exposed.

Writing has been different. There are ways to take advantage of one’s strengths and hide weaknesses that are available to writers that musicians can’t rely upon unless they get to play only the music they choose. I applied the lessons I learned from music and, I believe, promoted myself from competent good on.

And that’s as far as it goes.

I admire the work of Dennis Lehane and James Crumley and Elmore Leonard and Dashiell Hammett and many others. I learn from them. But I know I’ll never write at that level. That’s not a defeatist attitude. It’s a firm grip on reality. I’ve had two publishers, been nominated for two Shamus awards, get panels at every conference I attend, and have the respect of people I respect. If that’s as good as it gets, I’m fine with it.

Kurt Vonnegut was correct: It’s all right to be less than wonderful at something you love. What’s not all right is to have a false idea of where your ceiling might be and make yourself miserable trying to break through it. Life is too short. Take what victories you get from writing and use them to enhance your life.

This is why I don’t believe in bucket lists. I know too many people who have missed out on everyday pleasures because their eyes were too far down the road. They consider themselves failures unless they attain a level of accomplishment that may be beyond their control.

(This does not apply to writers who are still so new they don’t know where they fall on King’s spectrum. People need their dreams. They also need to know when to accept reality.)

I’m not saying anyone should quit if things aren’t going your way. I’m suggesting that, if the frustrations of the industry are sucking the joy from the craft, remember to enjoy the ride, even if you have to find a less ambitious destination.

An Interview With Jim Nesbitt, Author of the Ed Earl Burch Series of PI Novels

 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.