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Jim Nesbitt, author of the Ed Earl Burch novels

Author Interview + Book and Author Info + Author Pet Corner!

Find out more about Jim Nesbitt, click the link here for his guest post.

The Dead Certain Doubt by Jim Nesbitt

Revenge, Guilt, Redemption & Gunsmoke

When Doubt Is Your Only Friend

Ed Earl Burch, a cashiered Dallas murder cop, is a private detective facing the relentless onslaught of age, bad choices, guilt and regret. Smart, tough, profane and reckless, he’s a survivor who relies on his own guts and savvy and expects no help or salvation from anybody. But he’s also a man who longs for the sense of higher calling he felt when he carried a homicide detective’s gold shield. He seeks redemption and a chance to make amends to a dying old woman he abandoned decades ago when she needed him most. When he sees her again, she has the same request — save her granddaughter from the vicious outlaws on her trail and bring her home for a final goodbye.

Easier said than done because the granddaughter is a hardened hustler and gunrunner, hellbent on avenging a lover who got chopped up and stuffed into a barbecue smoker by cartel gunsels and a rival smuggler. To fulfill the old woman’s last request, Burch heads back to the borderlands of West Texas on a mercy mission that plunges him into a violent world of smugglers, cartel killers, crooked lawmen, Bible-thumping hucksters, anti-government extremists and an old nemesis who wants to see him dead.

The odds are long and Burch has his doubts — about himself, the granddaughter, old friends and the elusive nature of grace from guilt. Truth be told, doubt is the only thing he’s dead certain of.

Grace Or A Desert Grave?

To purchase The Dead Certain Doubt, click the following links: Paperback & Kindle

Interview with Jim Nesbitt, Author of Hard-Boiled Thrillers

Tell us about Ed Earl Burch, private detective and protagonist of The Dead Certain Doubt:

When I wrote my first novel, The Last Second Chance, I didn’t intend it to be the first in a series. Nor did I know whether Ed Earl Burch would be a durable protagonist for four or five hard-boiled crime thrillers. Turns out he’s stronger than a Missouri mule, a survivor built to last, about to carry a fifth book. But I didn’t know that when I created him.

What I did know was that I wanted him to be a deeply flawed and scarred character, a guy who has a code he sometimes forgets to live by until crunch time. He’s tough, relentless and cagy, but he’s not super smart like Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe. He’s more of an Everyman.

In earlier books, he self-medicates with pills and bourbon to keep the demons and night terrors at bay from an earlier case. But when you meet him in this book, he’s kicked the Percocet but kept the bourbon. He’s also managed to dig himself out of a financial hole, ditching a shyster lawyer who kept him in the red, enjoying the comfort of a fat bank account and no debt. He’s an aging tough guy—with all the physical decline, regrets and emotional baggage that entails. I didn’t want to make him a poster child for Geritol but I was interested in how he would adjust to life in his late fifties, staring at sixty. Turns out, living a comfortable life revives and sharpens the sense of loss he’s carried through the decades since being forced to turn in his gold shield as a Dallas homicide detective. He managed to bury that with booze and pills, but now that he’s semi-sober, that longing comes roaring back. He misses that sense of higher calling and the adrenalin rush of a manhunt that ends in either an arrest or a showdown. He also wants to make amends to people he has wronged—in particular, a dying old woman he turned his back on when she needed him most.

They meet and she asks him for the same favor from decades ago—save her granddaughter from vicious gunrunners, cartel killers, white supremacists and bent lawmen. That puts Ed Earl on a collision course with Big Trouble in West Texas, a harsh land where more than a few people want to see him dead.

The Dead Certain Doubt takes place in the West Texas borderlands. Describe that location and the role geography plays in the book:

It’s desert country, harsh but starkly beautiful, a land where mountain ranges collide and look like the bones of the earth ripped open for you to see. That makes it perfect for a violent tale of revenge and redemption. It’s also a cultural no-man’s-land—not really part of either the United States or Mexico but an imperfect amalgam of both countries. That’s what makes it outlaw country—historically and today.

Back in my journalism days, I was always fascinated with the impact of the land on its people, how it shaped them as they were trying to wrest a living from it. As a novelist, I think the sense of place you create should be strong enough to become a character unto itself. Easy to do with West Texas and its unforgiving beauty, country that puts a hard bark on its people and gives them little in return.

Is there anything you would like readers to know from the earlier Ed Earl Burch books?

The short answer is that all of these books are about revenge and redemption.

I also tell people this is an accidental series, not something I planned. And I’ve written them all as stand-alones, so you don’t necessarily need to read them in order, although a Texas buddy of mine, reviewer Kevin Tipple, says that’s exactly what you should do. Take your pick. I guess there are three or four essentials that run through all four books.

First off, they’re not Sunday School fare—the sex and the violence are graphic and explicit. No euphemisms, please. The language is raw, profane, colorful and frequently hilarious. All the characters are fairly well defined, even the minor ones. No cardboard cutouts, please. The women are stronger, smarter and sometimes more lethal than the men. And now, a word about that hackneyed phrase— ‘character development.’ The people in my books aren’t nice and there isn’t that much difference between Ed Earl and a cartel killer. So, you won’t see a wife, kids and a dog to temper the action with domestic bliss.

In my mind, giving a character a wife and kids is a pretty cliche version of character development. Better to show their humanity through how they interact with people they meet during the chase. This doesn’t mean Ed Earl won’t get a dog or a fourth wife. But if he does, you can bet it’s in service of the story—not to check some character development box.

What does “hard-boiled crime thriller” mean to you?

I mean hard-boiled in the sense that Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett did when they yanked crime fiction out of the drawing rooms of English country manors and from the well-manicured hands of amateur sleuths using deductive reasoning and put it smack dab in streets, bars, apartments and office buildings of an American city.

Hard-boiled is unflinchingly realistic and unsentimental. It’s a uniquely American art form. The cases are in the rougher hands of an American shamus—often an ex-cop—who is tough, cynical and shows little emotion. He meets plenty of people who are built the same way and he expects most of them to lie to him. He has a code he tries to live by—sometimes he fails, sometimes he ignores it. That’s what I kept in mind when I created Ed Earl Burch.

He’s a chicken-fried tough guy, very hard and cynical. I’m also very aware that my books really aren’t whodunits. I’m too much of a pantster to write a carefully plotted mystery. My books are slam-bang thrillers with Ed Earl in pursuit of a bad actor but it isn’t a mystery who that is.

Before starting your life of crime … fiction, you were a journalist. How does that background impact your writing?

I was lucky to start my newspaper career during an era when long-format journalism was the rage and there was a high demand for writers who knew how to ditch the inverted pyramid template and tell the hell out of a story, using all the tricks of the trade found in fiction and, dare I say, literature.

I come from a long line of hillbilly story tellers and was pretty successful at this form of journalism for a long time. I was also on the road for almost 20 years, knocking around the West and the borderlands in Texas, soaking up a lot of knowledge, sights, sounds, characters and culture I used in my stories and kept in the memory banks for future use. It wasn’t a big stretch to try my hand at fiction—hard-boiled crime fiction, of course.

What are you working on now?

I’m starting to think about my fifth Ed Earl Burch book. I’ve got a working title—The Fatal Saving Grace—and have a broad notion about what the book will be about. But more than likely, I’ll do a brief outline and some character sketches and just start writing. Gotta keep yourself open to the magic and characters that rise from the page and take over the story.

Words of Wisdom for Aspiring Writers:

The first is dead simple—keep your butt in the chair and write, even on days you don’t feel like it. Keep that routine and physical discipline. It’s okay to walk away and take a break, but always come back to that chair.

The second is my raging hatred for the dumbest thing anybody can say to a writer—write what you know. What a writer should be told is take what you know and expand your knowledge, do your research, dive deep. Facts are your friends and though you don’t regurgitate what you’ve learned, it will build a strong foundation for your writing, giving it a power and authenticity it would otherwise lack. I find that the stronger that foundation is, the more my writing really flies. Kinda counter-intuitive when you think about it, but life is full of these schizophrenic contradictions, no?

I agree! I always say write what you can learn. Great advice, Jim Nesbitt! Thanks for hanging out with us on my blog.

Author Pet Corner!

My wife, Pam, and I lost our two elderly animals a couple of years ago—Marley, a 16-year-old Chihuahua-type, and Milo, a 22-year-old orange tabby tom.

After a suitable period of mourning, we got Daisy, a five-year-old rat terrier, and, more recently, Max, a three-month old black-and-silver tabby.

Daisy’s a sweetheart and an accomplished moocher. Max is a ball of fire and rarely slows down.

Jim Nesbitt

Jim Nesbitt 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, a Silver Falchion finalist; THE RIGHT WRONG NUMBER, an Underground Book Reviews “Top Pick”; and, his latest, THE BEST LOUSY CHOICE, winner of the best crime fiction category of the 2020 Independent Press Book Awards, the 2020 Silver Falchion award for best action and adventure novel from the Killer Nashville crime fiction conference and bronze medal winner in the best mystery/thriller e-book category of the 2020 Independent Publisher Book Awards. His latest book is THE DEAD CERTAIN DOUBT, which was released in early March.

Nesbitt was a journalist for more than 30 years, serving as a reporter, editor and roving national correspondent for newspapers and wire services in Alabama, Florida, Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Washington, D.C. He chased hurricanes, earthquakes, plane wrecks, presidential candidates, wildfires, rodeo cowboys, migrant field hands, 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.

His stories have appeared in newspapers across the country and in magazines such as Cigar Aficionado and American Cowboy. He is a lapsed horseman, pilot, hunter and saloon sport with a keen appreciation for old guns, vintage cars and trucks, good cigars, aged whiskey and a well-told story. Nesbitt regularly reviews crime fiction and history on his blog, The Spotted Mule, and his author web site, as well as Facebook, Amazon and Goodreads. He now lives in Athens, Alabama.

To learn more about Jim Nesbitt, click on any of the following links: JimNesbittBooks.com, Goodreads, BookBub – @edearl56 & Facebook – @edearlburchbooks