Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan, novelist Jay McInerney, and David Graham gather for SiriusXM's "Dedicated with Doug Brunt" to recommend nine books, including Christie's "And Then There Were None," Himes' "A Rage in Harlem," Deighton's "Berlin Game," Exley's "A Fan's Notes," Salter's "Light Years," Millard's "The River of Doubt," McGuire's "The North Water," and Penny's "The Broken Cord." Discussing genre challenges and enduring literary legacies, the trio concludes with a book swap, exchanging two titles each to celebrate Father's Day. [Automatically generated summary]
We are doing some slick new video inside the SiriusXM studios.
So, if you want to see me fixing the cocktails and having conversations with our awesome guests, go to YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, or the SiriusXM app, and you can see us in studio.
Welcome to Dedicated with Doug Brunt.
You have just gained access to an exclusive insider's look at the lives and works of some of your favorite authors and hear conversations with the world's greatest writers as they discuss their writing lifestyle, creative process, latest work, and behind-the-scenes revelations.
Welcome to a special episode of Dedicated.
Today, we're going to bring you not just a list of the best books, we're going to bring you the best list of the best books for Father's Day.
And to do that, we have brought in three of the world's greatest writers who will each recommend three books.
So, at the end of the show, you have nine books on your list.
We are joined by Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jay McInerney, author of the decade-defining novel Bright Lights Big City, and David Gran, who has carved out a permanent piece of real estate on the bestseller list with his books, The Wager and Killers of the Flower Moon.
Esteemed authors, welcome.
Thank you.
Thrilled to have you here.
We are going to be sipping champagne while we build our list of nine.
And SiriusXM is so happy to have you three in the building that I'm happy to tell you we'll be drinking Christoph.
Cristal, well, right, moving up in the world.
So, I'm going to open this without making too big a mess.
As long as it wasn't shaken, and I know this is sort of a Father's Day.
You know, the timing of the release is kind of Father's Day, and books are kind of a stalwart.
But what are some other Jay?
You're sort of a watch collector, that's not a bad thing.
You could saber it.
Oh, if I had a saber, that would really.
I think that might be the last show we do here.
Yeah, I've seen so many people try and fail to do that that it might not be worth the effort.
I just saw a clip of that online where it just shattered the bottle.
Oh, man, terrible, terrible.
But, Jay, you're a watch collector, right?
That's a Father's Day.
That's a very nice watch, actually.
It's a little more expensive than a book.
Yes, unfortunately, it's an expensive habit, especially.
How many watches do you have?
I'm about 20.
I recently traded in five or six.
Do you have any?
The trouble is, you know, there's only so many watches you could wear, so I'm narrowing it down a bit.
Do you have special watch purveyors that you like to go to?
Yeah, I have a book dealer, several watch dealers, and several wine dealers.
The Harlem Dog Soldiers Mystery00:15:35
There we go.
All right, we are in.
All right.
All right.
Cheers.
Great to see you all.
Cheers.
Thank you for having us.
Cheers.
Yep.
Cheers.
Yum.
Might turn out for most of the foam.
I'm already going back for more.
So, Jenny, may we start with you?
Yes.
And your three books.
So I went with a crime theme, and I'm going to actually go as it happens in chronological order, starting with Agatha Christie.
Obviously, as we all know, Agatha Christie wrote many books, and this is, in my opinion, her best.
I haven't read all of them, but I'm interested.
I'm fascinated by whodunits and sort of what makes a whodunit work.
And in a way, it feels like there are many boxes that you need to check to have a successful whodunit.
One is, you know, obviously, is the killer a surprise, but not just that, because ideally, before we get to that surprise, we fall through what I've sort of come to think of as a series of trapdoors.
People that we think are the killer, and then boom, we fall through that, and then we think it's this one, and boom, we fall through that.
So achieving that, and then the final surprise is really important.
But in a way, the even harder thing that I think is so rare for a whodunit to achieve is to have enough kind of psychological acuity that we actually want to reread it.
I mean, think about it.
How many times do you ever want to reread a whodunit?
Very seldom.
This one, I think, actually achieves all of those things.
I can't say too much about it, of course, because it's the nature of a whodunit that you have to be pretty mum in describing the plot.
But what I will say is that it's a Poirot mystery.
And he comes in as a sort of unexpected element.
He's a sort of next door neighbor who gets involved in trying to solve the crime.
And it's told in the first person.
It has a wonderful kind of narrative voice.
It's one of her early books.
And the one that I've enjoyed the most of all of her.
I love that the complexity of the plot because now these days when I half the shows I see on Netflix that are meant to be whodunit mysteries, I finish it and I'm like, why did I just waste it?
It feels like it was written in about a day.
The ending makes no sense.
They cannot land it.
So this sounds direct.
Well, the thing is that I think that can happen really easily because to find someone who hasn't been a suspect, someone that the reader hasn't thought of, you know, how does it, how do you hit that amazing mix of surprise and inevitability?
And in a way, it's a challenge that I think one has with any work of fiction, but it is crystallized in the Whodone It because if it's too far afield, you have surprise, but it's nonsense.
So the inevitability is missing.
If you have too much inevitability, it's exactly who the reader thought was the killer.
So very hard to pull it off.
Is this one of the ones where she uses the setting as kind of a device?
You know, like the 10 little Indians are on an island or murder on the Orange Express are all in a train.
She often puts them in a place where they are sort of trapped and it's all happening.
It is in a stately home, but they are not entirely trapped.
And I think that's one reason I really like it because I find those kind of entrapment settings to be a little too much like door A, door B, or door C.
This is in a community.
And I think maybe, actually, I hadn't thought of it.
That, I think, is why I like it better than a lot of those famous ones, which of course work so well for a movie because you've got everyone in one place.
But to me, that insularity on the page often results in a kind of almost a mathematical kind of dryness.
And this has more color to it.
And a lot of humor as well.
So anyway, so that is, I highly recommend.
Number two is Chester Himes, A Rage in Harlem.
So wonderful crime writer.
He actually did write Whodun Its, but this is not a Whodun It.
But his novels all take place in Harlem.
He was writing in the 40s and the 50s.
He was a very successful writer.
In fact, he had been imprisoned for many years for a crime that he did commit, but he began writing in prison and became very successful after he got out.
He has a pair of detective police officers who are African American and working in Harlem.
Their position is very tricky because they are policing their own community.
What I love about Arage in Harlem, I will also say for audiobook lovers, Samuel Jackson is the narrator of the audiobook of this, and he is dynamite.
This is actually a comic crime novel that also has elements of horror.
It's quite grotesque in moments, sort of hilariously grotesque.
And what I really love about it is that the grotesqueness is very unexpected, as is the comedy.
So, what Himes does is he sort of sets up a series of expectations, which are that this is going to be a kind of light-hearted book.
It feels like it's sort of silly in a way because it involves a guy who is a very gullible protagonist who is immediately fleeced of money by people who tell him that they can turn $10 bills into $100 bills by putting them into an oven and sort of turning it on.
It's called the blow.
And the idea, and unfortunately, of course, what ends up happening is that he loses all of his $10 bills and he works in a funeral parlor.
So, in his wild efforts to try to reclaim this money, he ends up stealing from his boss and sort of getting deeper.
He gambles and loses.
He gets deeper and deeper and deeper into trouble.
And it feels as though, you know, nothing can really go wrong here because he's such a lovable figure.
But he also has an identical twin brother who is a heroin addict who dresses up as a nun and raises money on the street for the Sisters of Mercy in drag.
And so this he enlists his brother to help him, and wildness ensues.
It is, I mean, it's a very short novel and it is a wonderful kind of wild ride.
The last thing I'll say about it, and the really unexpected part of it, is that in this kind of comic, crazy world, what ultimately emerges very unexpectedly is some pretty searing social commentary about life in Harlem.
And so it's a kind of stealth, a stealth manifesto almost, which never appears as such, but leaves us with a really strong impression of racial injustice.
But it's delivered with sheer delight.
That's a lot to do in one book.
Number three, published in 1981, A Flag for Sunrise by Robert Stone, one of my favorite writers.
I feel like he has been a bit eclipsed.
He died in 2015, and I don't hear his books talked about very much.
And I would love to have that change.
I think he really was a wonderful writer.
This is also a crime novel of sorts, but Stone has a kind of approach that he uses in many of his books, which is that he follows several different points of view as various individuals converge in a kind of climactic, violent situation.
And the setting for this is a fictional Latin American country on the verge of revolution.
And we have gunrunners approaching there with ammunition hidden in a shrimp boat.
We've got a kind of psychotic Coast Guard Service member who has resigned, killed his dogs, and left his child, and we don't know what is going on with him.
We've got a nun who is part of the revolutionary process and a sort of anthropologist who finds himself in the middle of all this.
It feels, you know, it feels of its moment in the best way.
So, published in 81, what we really feel is the presence of the Vietnam War still in a way that we don't really feel the weight of that today in the same way.
It certainly comes across as raising questions about American interventions.
But finally, as with any really good book, it's just exciting and full of, I think, what I think of as Stone's signature element are just these wonderful set pieces.
There's a moment where the anthropologist dives under a coral reef and sort of feels the presence of some tremendous darkness, some sort of shadow of danger, or we don't know if it's sort of natural or supernatural or just psychological.
And the scene of the gunrunners who end up employing the kind of psychopathic ex-Coast Guard guy who ends up being very attracted to the wife of the couple and the gunrunners, you can imagine.
Exciting stuff.
Really recommend it.
Do you remember when you first read these or when these were first introduced to you somehow?
A Flag for Sunrise, I think I read not long after it came out.
I think I read it.
I was, you know, I sort of arrived in New York in 87, I think already a Stone fan.
So I read that sort of contemporaneously with its publication.
Chester Himes, I read in the last few years because I've gotten very interested in crime fiction.
And I actually taught it a year ago at the University of Pennsylvania in a literature course I was teaching.
And that was a lot of fun, actually.
It was a really, it was an interesting book to teach in that, to teach in a literature course, but also a way to think about genre and the ways, what genre, how it works, how it sort of sets up certain things that we know will happen.
And then in a way, the success of a genre novel lies in what ways it can kind of surprise us despite those rules.
And then Ackroyd, I think I read that actually also in the last like five years.
I had read many Agatha Christie's, and this was one I hadn't read, and I just loved it.
Well, these are terrific.
Thank you.
By the way, as your lists were coming in, I realized I am 0 for 9 on all these books.
I haven't read anything, which I'm excited for.
My list has gotten massive now of books to read.
I agree about Robert Stone.
He should be more read.
He was actually a pretty good friend of mine.
I first got hooked on Dog Soldiers.
Yeah, that was a really good book.
I think the prior novel, but his books are, I mean, they're like on the verge of being really literary thrillers, but they're not whodunits.
They're just suspenseful and violent and scary.
Yeah.
Any book to film on these?
I don't know, actually.
I think they, I wouldn't.
I think Dog Soldiers was meant to film.
Dog Soldiers has been.
I don't know about A Flag for Sunrise.
I wouldn't be surprised if all of them have been, but obviously not successfully enough that we know about it.
But I think they may all have made it to the screen in one form or another.
I know a number of Heimes novels, I think, did.
Great.
Jay McInerney.
Well, I'm going to start with my crime thriller because I actually am not really a reader of crime fiction and suspense novels.
But I think for Christmas, my friend Morgan Entrican, who's the publisher of Crow of Atlantic, gave me this Len Dayton novel called Berlin Game.
And of course I'd heard of Len Dayton.
He's one of the most successful novelists of all time.
But I'd never read one.
And I just found myself somewhere where that was the book I had in my hand.
And once I started it, I couldn't put it down, as we often say, of very suspensible books.
But I was so impressed with the writing because one writer whose suspense writing I have read is John Le Carre.
And this struck me as every bit as good as Le Carre's better work.
And I mean, the granularity of the observation and the writing.
I mean, the plot is very compelling, but the way that scenes are set, characters are drawn, even the dialogue, it was so impressive to a novelist such as myself.
And I couldn't, yeah, I just couldn't turn away.
And it's a very intricate plot, which involves, of course, a spy.
And he's somewhat in the mold of fictional spies, and that he's a little cynical.
You know, he's a little down at the heels.
His career is kind of on the skids, whereas his wife is on the way up in the same agency.
And basically, he is charged as a sort of last hurrah.
He's charged with finding a mole in the agency.
And it is indeed surprising.
I think this answers all of your requirements.
So it's a fairly different.
Who's done it, meaning who's molecular?
Yeah, but in the end, you say, oh, yeah, of course.
But you don't say that in the beginning as to who the mole is.
And it's also, you know, it's also set in that, I don't know, I don't want to say romantic, but that kind of storied period of espionage in Berlin, where all the major powers were...
Like early Cold War.
Early Cold War, where all the major powers were sort of fighting for turf and spying on each other.
And really, really compelling.
The good news is if you really like Berlin Game, there's about 34 others, including two more in this trilogy.
So, yeah, I just, I was really blown away.
And as I say, I feel like now I'm going to start reading more of these types of books, but particularly with Len Dayton.
Let's see, my next novel is A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley.
Quite a different genre, if indeed it's any genre at all.
It's very curious.
The author himself, Frederick Exley, couldn't decide whether it was a memoir or a novel.
Selling Autobiographical Stories as Novels00:03:05
He went back and forth in describing it.
But it is clearly highly autobiographical.
And it was published in 68, at which point he was 40 years old.
And it's very interesting.
It is a successful novel about a man realizing that he will never be a success, that he will never finish his novel, and that he's a miserable failure as a human being.
The title refers to the fact that one of his few passions is Frank Gifford in the New York Giants.
And every weekend he goes, he drives an hour from the town where he lives and teaches high school in order to drink all day at a bar and watch the Giants play.
He actually, just quite coincidentally, he went to USC at the same time that Frank Gifford was a student there and an athlete.
And he becomes obsessed with Gifford.
His own father was a student athlete in Watertown, New York.
And he was locally famous.
He was a big man around town and actually was obsessed with the idea of becoming famous, of somehow becoming like his father, Frank Gifford.
And yet, he sabotages himself at every turn.
For one thing, he's a stone-cold alcoholic.
And you'd think that would be very depressing.
And at times, I suppose it is.
He also spends a fair amount of time in mental institutions.
Did you ever get to meet this guy?
I never did, unfortunately.
I corresponded briefly with him before.
I think he died in...
I think he died in the early 80s.
But he was...
But I am not the only person who was just blown away by the honesty of the book.
Also, he's a real stylist.
But it had shades of a million little pieces.
You know, that book that came out and it was about rehab and all those things.
And I think he tried to sell it as a novel, and then that didn't work.
Then he sold it as a memoir, and it did work.
And then there was the whole Oprah exposure of Which is Which.
Yeah.
So did he sell it as a novel though?
Well, he was quite clear about the fact that it was a highly autobiographical document.
And I think eventually it was published as a novel.
But it's clearly very documentary.
And there's something strangely exhilarating about watching this guy trip over his own feet and sabotage himself at every turn.
I suppose in part because it's so beautifully written.
And I know, you know, I've sort of bonded with quite a few people over this book, including the man who became my editor, Gary Fiskon.
It's really extremely compelling.
My last book is Light Years by James Salter.
Rhythms of James Salter's Writing00:15:51
And James Salter is, I think, one of the great, great stylists of certainly my lifetime, and he's a great novelist.
But he was always called a writer's writer, and it used to drive him crazy.
Meaning I don't sell?
Well, yeah, meaning he said, how about I have your sales and you, we can call you a writer's writer.
He was in the Air Force.
He was a ski racer.
He was a very interesting character.
His books are highly literary.
And his gifts as a stylist are just incredible.
Nobody writes sentences like James Salter.
Almost all the writers that I know revere him and almost everybody else hasn't read him.
I could have picked a number of his books, but for instance, A Sport and a Pastime, which is one of the most erotic books, literary books I've ever read, set in France in the 50s.
Lightyears is also set in the 50s.
And I just love that.
Although the couple in the book, Nedra and Viry, very strange names, they live on the Hudson, and he kind of commutes in and out of New York as an architect.
The book presents this idyllic marriage, at least from the outside.
And they have dinner parties, and they have these two lovely kids for whom they make toys and art and so on.
Of course, eventually it turns out they're both having affairs.
And it's an extraordinary portrait of a marriage, but the marriage does fall apart in the end of the book.
And the funny thing is, the first time I read it, I didn't remember that they got divorced because the portrait of the marriage was so good.
But I think they present such a beautiful picture from the outside that the thought occurs to one that, you know, they couldn't possibly be experiencing it that way on the inside.
And it is okay if I just read a short passage.
I had to put this on my phone because I forgot the book today.
This is from the Salter book.
But this is from Lightyears, and this is about Nedra, the wife.
And this will give you a sense of the rhythms of his writing.
During the days, she was utterly at peace.
Her life was like a single, well-spent hour.
Its secret was its lack of remorse, of self-pity.
She felt herself purified.
The days were cut from a quarry that would never be emptied.
Into it came books, errands, the seashore, occasional pieces of mail.
She read them slowly and carefully, sitting in the sunshine, as if they were newspapers from abroad.
I mean, I just find that amazing.
I could almost pick any passage, and it would have those same strange rhythms.
But also, his sense of light, of the movement of air in a room, is he writes about light like nobody I know.
When did Salter pass away?
He died, I believe, in 2016.
Okay, exactly.
Pretty recent.
He lived a long life, didn't he?
He lived a very long and productive life.
He also wrote a couple of cookbooks, which I should mention.
Len Dayton did too.
And I'm a.
You're a wine critic.
I'm a foodie.
I was very fortunate that when I was writing the book you mentioned earlier, Brightness Falls, he lent me his...
He used to go to Aspen in the winter to ski, so he lent me his house in the Hamptons to work in the winter.
And it's funny because Brightness Falls was actually influenced by Lightyear's, certainly.
And there I was in the place where it might have been created.
Well, it's a nice tribute to him nine years after his death to have his fiction read here.
And you three have written these iconic books.
Decades from now, people are going to be reading you still.
You've become immortal for your work.
If only.
By the way, I would mention De Reger, but I was concentrating on novels.
A book I admire immensely and read fairly recently.
Oh, thank you.
And there was a wonderful profile of Salter and the New Yorker about, what was that, about five years ago by Nick Pomegar?
Oh, that's right.
And to be honest, that is what prompted.
I had never read Salter, the writer's writer, and went and devoured him as a result of that.
Excellent, yeah.
And also enraptured by the prose.
But I could never, I would never dare try to imitate it.
I mean, it's.
It's very hard.
It's very hard to imitate.
I mean, you know, his sentences don't follow one another the way that other, that most people's sentences do.
I mean, most of us are like, first A, then B, then C. Salter is very sinuous and kind of oblique in his movements.
But like Robert Stone, I hope that he gets, that he continues to be read because it's funny how he was always a little bitter in his lifetime.
Was he a big seller in his lifetime?
No.
No, very small.
I mean, not at all.
A cult writer.
Yeah, he was a co-writer.
And all the right people liked him.
Yeah.
But not enough of them.
I want to just add a couple things about a fan's notes, which I also really love.
One is that it's hilarious.
It's a very funny book.
And I remember vividly a scene of the main character on a job interview, which is just, I mean, you said turning over his own feet.
I mean, you're just sort of dying, and yet it's just, it's laugh out loud, funny.
And then the other thing that I find really poignant is that after the book came out, he and Frank Gifford became friends.
Yes.
So that kind of, that the idolization resulted in a friendship between two guys who were the same age, because as you say, they went to school together.
I find that very sweet.
Yeah, he went on to publish two more books that were not as critically fiction.
Again, kind of fictional memoir.
And they were not as good as this.
But, you know, a lot of people have one book in them, and he had this one book, and it was better than most books are.
Talented writer.
Before we go to David, Jenny, before we got rolling, you were talking about a book recommendation you had made in the Times.
Maybe you could share, retell maybe a little bit of that.
Yes, well, you know, The Times has this feature that they do of like books relating to a certain place.
And they did one about New York City, and they asked me about a few different books, or a few different kind of categories of New York.
And one of them was sort of the publishing world.
And I recommended Jay's book, Brightness Falls, which you just mentioned, as an example of a novel that I think best captures the publishing world as it was when I first began to publish in the mid-90s.
And there's actually a line which I'm going to mangle if I try to quote it now.
I probably will too.
There's a young guy who becomes, who writes a book and he becomes famous kind of overnight.
And it says everyone listens a little bit more closely to everything he says and he listens a little less closely to what everyone else says.
And I just thought, I think that's it.
I love it.
It's so true.
We all know that guy.
David Graham.
All right, well, I'm going to cheat because in listening to this conversation, of course, I suddenly, the brain started to start with other ideas for other books.
So forgive me, but I'll do it quickly.
But when he mentioned Lynn Dyton, you know, it reminded me of Eric Ambler, who I think is actually a great Father's Day book and somebody who has kind of been forgotten over time, but wrote early spy novels and really kind of, and you were talking about suspense and mystery.
And I think some consider him the person who kind of invented the suspense novel, but he writes it credibly.
I agree.
And an epitaph to a spy would be a great one to start with.
And I think he influenced Hitchcock a lot.
This idea, and I'm speculating on that, but it was always about this kind of ordinary, it's my favorite kind of mystery and spy novel, which is the ordinary person who suddenly gets caught up in something larger than himself and is trying to kind of make sense of this world.
That's Hitchcock.
Yeah, that's Hitchcock, and that was Ambler.
So in any case, that made me think of that.
And I took my homework very seriously.
So I said, okay, well, what is Father's Day's book?
Now, of course, what is a Father's Day book?
Sometimes people say my books are dad's books.
I'm a dad, but I never think when I'm writing a book, this is a dad's book.
I just write a book and a story that's interesting.
So I think kind of any great story can fit for any of these kind of holidays.
But I did try to project out on this kind of archetypal father.
I don't know if he really exists, but I tried to create one in my mind and picking these books.
So I thought, well, Father's Day, they're always recommending these big, thick presidential biographies, right?
And I will confess that unless it's kind of written by Robert Caro or someone of that ilk and has the psychological dimensions, I don't actually want to read 20 volumes on Garfold or somebody.
But this kind of fits my version of presidential getting working in a presidential biography.
It's by Candace Millard.
It's the River of Doubt because what it really is, is just a hell of a story.
And rather than being a soup-to-nuts bio of an individual, it's just plopping down the president in the middle of a situation, in the middle of a story, which is he's kind of smarting.
Teddy Roosevelt is kind of smarting from a presidential race.
He does one of these, you know, he loves to kind of go off on these adventures.
And this one becomes more than he bargained for in mapping an Amazonian river known as the River of Doubt because it was not fully explored.
And so you kind of learn about Roosevelt, but you learn about him in this kind of tight, more compulsive narrative.
And you get to see someone through action, which is you get to see how they are.
And of course, there's another character that kind of emerges as the real kind of hero in the background, which is a Colonel Rondon, who is a Brazilian colonel who kind of is really kind of leading the expedition.
And Roosevelt almost dies on the expedition.
And so it has, you know, again, I try to take this archetype of this father out here, this projection of what I thought, but I tried to give it a version that I would like, which is to actually have a hell of a story rather than he was born on this day and he died on this day.
So that's The River of Doubt by Candace Molly.
She's also a great writer of nature.
And so The Amazon.
I've never read anything about her, but a friend of mine was just recommending.
She's written a few nonfiction and narrative nonfiction type books.
I think she's really successful.
Yeah, hugely successful.
And the Amazon is actually the third, actually the most awesome character in the book.
I mean, she just brings the nature and the jungle to light.
I read this when I was working on The Lost City of Z, so that's what kind of led me to that one.
And then because I read so much nonfiction for work and research, I actually tend not to read it so much.
I tend to read more fiction.
I read these wonderful novels.
And this is a book called The North Water by Ian Maguire.
I don't even know how to describe you all.
Probably describe it better than I would, but it's a sea novel on a whaling ship in the 19th century that is completely doomed.
And of course, working on The Wager.
Something you know about.
Yes, working on The Wager.
I was, you know, read a lot of sea tales.
But this one is kind of its very own thing.
I always don't like when one compares another novel to bring it to light, but it is a little bit like Cormick McCarthy at sea.
The sea becomes this kind of biblical landscape, testing these human beings.
It is the utter rawness and savagery of human nature, dealing with themes of good and evil.
But I think, and I think you all talked about this in your pics.
I think ultimately what makes a great novel succeed and rise above even its story is the sentences.
And he can really write a sentence.
So that would be the Northwater.
And yeah, but this is a fairly dark, hopeless, grim.
So perhaps my projection onto my archetypal father is probably a little dark like I am, so I don't know.
And then the third one was, again, the mystery.
There's something kind of cozy about a mystery.
I am a total, unlike you, I will read, for my pleasure is like just I'll any, I'm going to read some of these crime novels you had mentioned, which I know, but I just love reading crime fiction.
I love detective work.
I love spy novels.
And I could have picked any one of them.
But I picked this one by Louise Penny.
This is her newest one, The Gray Wolf.
The plot in this one is a little bit more Baroque.
I actually, I would almost recommend starting at the beginning because she's done a series of these.
The beginning of series.
Yeah, the beginning of these series, because I don't even know what number this is.
I was going to ask how you usually read books.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, I don't cheat.
I don't cheat on my mysteries.
But the thing I like about, they're set in Quebec.
There's always the same detective, Gamash.
And she's got this wonderful little village with these characters who kind of reoccur and reappear in all her little novels.
And they have a mystery.
But you talked about a lot of the trapdoors that make mysteries, and then who is the villain and who is the suspect.
But I think the other element in certainly series of crime novels is who is the detective?
Who is that figure who is piecing these things together?
I grew up kind of reading the Sherlock Holmes stories.
And of course, that was the kind of archetypal detective, but the superhuman rationalist who is almost like a superman of reason, can see everything, looks at the dust on your pants and concludes exactly what your profession is and defines exactly how you committed the murder by a glance while the rest of us like Watson are kind of bumbling about.
But the reason I quite like these Louise Penny novels is Gamash, he's clearly smart, he's very reasonable, he's methodical, he's rational, but there's a decency and a wisdom that kind of permeates his detection.
Listening to Murder Mysteries While Walking00:07:11
And there's just something I would just say living in the world in which we live these days with so much tumult, so much chaos.
And so there's a certain wisdom and almost heart that kind of goes against the kind of way, almost the anti-Holmes in a way, that I find very comforting.
And I will say that I like to walk a lot and I listen to her novels.
I actually haven't read them.
I listened to them.
Does she have the same reader?
Yes.
Well, I will say this was kind of tragic.
She had the first reader of several of her novels, I thought was one of the best readers I'd ever heard and created Gamash in my mind.
And then he passed away.
And so they've had other ones who are great readers too.
But for me, it was actually always a good idea.
It's like James Bond.
He's like, I'm not Sean Connor.
Right, exactly.
He just didn't work.
And so that was always really hard.
But I really liked to listen to these, to listen to Gamash as I walked around.
Isn't there another more American archetype besides Holmes?
I mean, I'm just starting to think about suspense novels, but there's a sort of Raymond Chanlo and Dashel Hammett, archetype of the cynical, kind of down-at-the-heels, tough guy, right?
Yeah, the anti-hero.
The anti-hero hero, yeah.
The person who is tough.
Lee Child says he was writing Reacher as the American James Bond.
That's what he was trying to go for.
And one thing I would say about the Those Americans, you know, Chandler, for example, is that.
Well, although he's British, but.
Oh, interesting.
Yeah, no.
He wrote about the.
No, he moved to L.A.
Yeah.
But funny, I completely forgot that he was a little bit more.
That's so interesting, but in a way, it was...
I mean, Marlowe is like a man without a past or a provenance.
I mean, he's a really, so they're very kind of alienated detectives.
But the interesting thing about all of those books to me is the stories really don't make sense.
These are books about the detective and the atmosphere.
100%.
But there are things that, interestingly, Christy uses, her detectives are really interesting.
Very little atmosphere in her books.
Very little physical description of environment.
William Faulkner, I think, wrote the screenplay for The Big Sleep.
He still doesn't know what it's about.
Somebody knows what it's about.
Somebody said to him, what's it about?
He said, damned if I know.
Try the Maltese Falcon.
Forget it.
It's fantastic, but you don't know.
But it is a little bit of a proof.
You said, if you can reread it, it's a virtue.
And in a weird way, if you love it so much and you don't really yet even fully understand why I still did, is proof of its brilliance.
That it's created some kind of artistic aesthetic.
Yeah, that's true.
It's so fun to hear you guys talk about the work of others because I've read all of your work and to imagine you guys perusing the bookstore shelves and picking one off and taking it home and reading it like everyone else.
You know, it's fun to imagine.
So in the spirit of that...
We are fans first.
Right, exactly.
You have to be.
I mean, the one common threat of everyone who's come on this show, all the great authors, is they're all huge readers.
Everything else, it's a million different ways to do it.
Outline, don't outline, all those kinds of things, but everyone's a huge reader.
So I'm going to top up the champagne and then give you, while I'm doing that, you have a moment to think.
Everyone's going to pick two books.
So you have six to choose from there.
David, you have six to choose from here, Jay, to take home.
I'm 0 for 9, so I could take anything.
I'll go last.
Jenny, you go first.
Okay.
And we'll go down the line in that way as I top us up.
Interesting.
Well.
This is, I don't know, are we, I don't know if this is even part of the conversation, but isn't the Northwater kind of a whodunit also?
Am I misremembering that?
Well.
I mean, there's a sexual predator.
Yeah, there's a sexual predator, basically a psychopath.
It's horrific.
The beginning actually had the power of it.
It's a little brutal.
Yeah, the beginning is quite brutal.
But I thought it was, I remember it as kind of a whodunit.
It has an element of intrigue and suspense.
I mean, it is a thriller.
There is no question it is completely suspensive because you don't know what is going to happen, what is going to happen to the ship, and then the final collision.
And everybody's kind of up to something.
Everybody's got a dark past.
Everybody's kind of up to something.
I think I always, I thought a lot about.
Well, I don't know if this is really part of this conversation, but just for the hell of it, I thought a lot about the sort of genre of sea stories and the way that it kind of mirrors the noir because in both cases you have an existential threat that surrounds a little enclave of kind of human warmth.
And we're always wondering sort of which one is going to prevail.
So it's interesting when a book combines the two.
That's what's sort of interesting about like a sort of crime thriller set on a ship.
In a way, it's a combination of two genres.
And also, you know, you think of the Christie almost like the lock room.
Well, the ship is like a lock room in a way, right?
I mean, so you have isolated environment.
There's kind of no way out who's going to do what.
And then, of course, there's that situation in the sea stories.
You know, it ultimately just completely tests and explodes their human nature.
What will it reveal about each of them?
Yeah.
Have you ever pick?
Okay.
I'm going to pick two.
So I've read a number of these.
I'm going to pick the Roosevelt, the Candace Millard Roosevelt Amazon.
That sounds great.
Do I do a handoff here or do I just do this after the show, maybe?
Well, we might have the recommender to sign to the picker.
And so you can sign someone else's book and then Jenny can take it home.
Definitely going to pick Berlin Game, Len Dayton, because I love Eric Ambrose.
All right, can we rip it in half?
No, you die.
Jeez.
All right.
We'll have a fight afterwards.
There could be a murder mystery in here.
I want this.
Yep.
It's two, right?
Those are my two.
All right.
Those are my two.
All right.
Right.
All right, Jay, you're up.
I'm going to do the Chester Himes and Louise Petty.
This was a very unfair order.
I wanted the Chester Himes.
My two were just taken from me.
All right.
Well, you'll be getting an Amazon package this week.
Or maybe an independent one.
Oh, yeah.
Exactly.
All right, but I'm very happy.
I want to read The Robert Stone because I have not read that one.
And I love Robert Stone, and I haven't read him in years.
So I'm looking forward to those.
And I want to reread, and I don't have it anymore.
I want to reread Salter.
I want to hear.
You read those sentences.
I want to hear those sentences again.
Here we go.
All right.
Well, I think I will take Agatha Christie because I haven't read this one.
And then.
You know, I had my eye on that Candace Millar one.
But again, going last is not in my pan.
That is much fun.
So I think I'll take.
Did you say you were going to take Agatha Christie?
Happy Father Picks Agatha Christie00:01:04
Dan's note.
No.
That sounds interesting today.
That sounds really fun.
It really is.
And I've got to know Kathy Lee a little bit.
So this.
Does Frank Gifford, is he disgusted here at last?
Oh, God, yeah.
That sounds very interesting.
I mean, this guy's obsessed.
Yeah, I didn't take the Agatha Christie because I think my wife is the only person who's read all of them and probably has them all at home.
Oh, my God.
She's my mother.
Let's see what she thinks of that.
Well, this was terrific.
Any last thoughts on Father's Day before we sign off?
Happy Father's Day.
I hope my kids remember this year.
Kids, I love a book.
Well, cheers.
Thanks so much.
Happy Father's Day.
Cheers.
Thank you.
It's great to see you all.
Thanks for having us.
If you have been enjoying the audio of Dedicated, now we have more for you.
We are now videoing our episodes of Dedicated.
So go to YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Rumble, and the SiriusXM app.
And you can see a video of our episodes dedicated with our awesome guests.