Books Over Drinks
Two authors bond over cocktails and a passion for detective fiction
By Ashley Warlick
A couple of months back, Steven Tingle became my martini friend.
We’ve decided, over martinis, to meet regularly for martinis, and to lightly and loosely discuss the art and craft of being fiction writers while drinking martinis. In testing this idea, we discovered we share a deep and abiding love for the hard-boiled detective fiction of the 1940s, writers like James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler, books like The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep. We get another round.
Steven grew up in the shade of his parents’ second lives; they married when he was a toddler and settled down in Cruso, North Carolina, in the foothills of the Smokies, where his father built a golf course. This golf course became something Steven managed as his parents aged and later became fodder for his novels.
His first, Graveyard Fields, was published in 2021. It’s the story of an ex-cop, Davis Reed, a man with some anger-management issues and a pill problem, escaping to the little town of Cruso for some “peace and quiet.” He finds nothing of the sort. Rather, a lost set of keys opens the door to a twisty mystery, with a little slapstick humor on the side. Think Carl Hiassen here, but in the mountains, and with the possibility of buried treasure.
Davis is back in Buried Lies, publishing in October. He hasn’t made it far in the book he’s writing, so when wealthy retirees Vance and Lana Roth want him to educate them in the art of private investigation for a price, Davis takes their check. Respected real estate attorney Prentiss Wells seems to have caught a golf ball to the head in exactly the wrong way, but the Roths don’t think it was an accident. As Davis begins to dig, the lies are just beneath the surface, and they just keep going.
If possible, this book is funnier than the first one. There’s a biker gang Davis keeps eluding, a crazy-like-a-fox mechanic named Floppy making mayhem on the sidelines, a crisply attractive CPA who might have all the answers and Davis’s number to boot.
It’s a rare thing, to write a second act. We’ll be raising a glass to that real soon.
This story is printed in our Fall 2024 issue.
Steven Tingle will be in conversation with BLAIR KNOBEL at M. Judson Booksellers, October 15th, 5:30 p.m., to celebrate the launch of his second novel, Buried Lies. For more about Steven and his writing, go to steventingle.com.
