Backlisted - Deadwood by Pete Dexter

Episode Date: December 13, 2021

Authors Shawn Levy (A Year in the Life of Death, Rat Pack Confidential) and Erica Wagner (Chief Engineer, Gravity) join us to discuss US writer Pete Dexter's second novel Deadwood (1986), described by the Washington Post on publication as 'maybe the best Western ever written'. In addition to enjoying this unpredictable and uproarious historical novel, we investigate the differences - and notable similarities - between Dexter's work and the classic TV series of the same name that followed a decade later. Also this week, John has been reading Katherine May's life-affirming memoir, The Electricity of Every Living Thing, while Andy pays tribute to Nina Simone's Gum by musician Warren Ellis, a book that asks profound questions about what it means to be divine.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)12:28 - Nina Simone's Gum by Warren Ellis. 20:01 - The Electricity of Every Living Thing by Katherine May. 27:14 - Deadwood by Peter Dexter* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance. Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. so so Sean, have you seen West Side Story yet? I have not. I'm so far out of the film critic game that I actually have to pay and queue up.

That's not like the old days. No, it's not. You saw everything, man. The only thing I got to see, oh, Last Night in Soho, which is insanely great and features our collaboration. In the opening sequence, when the Tasman Mackenzie character is dancing around her home in Cornwall, she has on her nightstand a copy of Ready, Set, Ego, our book. No way. nightstand a copy of ready set ego our book no yeah way that's a book that you wrote that i edited that we took as long as we could over because we so enjoyed doing it it basically

involved do you remember sean we went we drove up to cliveden yes because you wanted to get as close as you could to where Profumo things had happened. We peeked over a fence because the guest house that Profumo and Christine Keeler consummated their affair in was fenced off from the public. It was the private bit of the ground. And we actually climbed the fence a little bit to peer in. Like the rebels we were. but that was the 90s. Anything went then.

But do you remember we went for a full English? Sean is a great Anglophile, and we went for a full English breakfast either before or that or after. Sean, we still talk about an element of that full English breakfast, which is I love taking Americans for full English breakfast which is that on it i love taking americans for full english breakfast and sean didn't disappoint he went we sat down he was looking at the menu and he went okay you got eggs you got bacon you got and he looked like i see his look on his face and it went you've got fried bread right and we were like, yeah, fried bread. And he went, what, is that just bread that's been fried?

And it had never occurred to me before that that's what fried bread was. Fried bread was this thing, but it was seeing it through your eyes. I realized, oh my God, that is, that's just bread. What's lying around that I could just fling into the pan? Oh yeah, biscuits or bread or something. It is. How can we take this neutral food and enrich our cardiologist? Is it just not a thing in America?

No. No, we have, you know, we'll dip bread in an egg wash and fry it and call it French toast. So it's basically like a fried egg a round bread but at there there is a native american dish called fry bread um which is which is a thing that i only became acquainted with you know living in the northwest um and that's that's a whole culture and and it's sort of like tacos or or or pasta to it you know to to the various ethnic groups that produce it. But it's not the same thing as y'all's fry bread.

Although, and this touches on what will be the subject of our main discussion, because fry bread isn't really a Native American thing. It's a U.S. government thing. And when we come to talking about that aspect of Deadwood, we may touch on that. This is so good. Nicky, I reckon you've got some, no pun intended, fried gold there that you could build a short section out of.

But we've warmed up though, right? We've warmed up. So that's good. Let's do it. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books today you find us somewhere in the black mountain hills of dakota in the spring of 1876 we're on a train of 70 wagons we've just crossed the whitewood creek we're making our way towards a makeshift collection of huts and storefront The mud is thick and rank. Miners stagger out of bars. A bulldog runs alongside us, barking.

I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And we're joined today by two guests, Sean Levy in his backlisted debut, by two guests, Sean Levy in his backlisted debut, and Erica Wagner, who has been on arguably, yeah, no, that's right, four previous episodes talking about Alan Garner, Randall Jarrell, Dennis Johnson, yeah, and Antonia White. And she also featured on the recent backlisted special on Alan Garner's new novel, Treacle Walker.

Hello, Erica. Hello, Sean. Treacle Walker. Hello, Erica. Hello, Sean. Hello, Andy. Hello, John. And hello, Sean. Hello, guys. Erica, it's been weeks since I've listened to you on an episode of Backlisted. Absolutely.

And I want to say I'm still in recovery, actually, from learning that it's Randall Jarrell. It's never ceased to shock me. Do you remember that? Do you remember that? It's not Maurice Sendak either. It's Maurice Sendak. Do you remember? Even as I say it, I feel foolish, but that's how you want me to say it. Sean Levy is the author of 11 books, including the bestsellers Rat Pack Confidential, Paul Newman Alive, and The Castle on Sunset. His 2016 book, Dolce V Pack Confidential, Paul Newman A Life and Castle on Sunset. His 2016 book Dolce Vita Confidential was named Sunday Times Stage and Screen Book of the Year

and a Book of the Year by The Spectator and The Irish Examiner. His most recent work is A Year in the Life of Death, poems inspired by the obituary pages of the New York Times, which I'm going to ask you about in a minute, because I absolutely love that, Sean. Congratulations on that book. It's wonderful. And that book we followed in... You write books, man. You don't just sit around like I do,

saying you're about to write one. You actually write them. You've got another book out in the spring, In On The Joke, the original Queens of stand-up comedy. And he's also currently beginning work on a biography of Clint Eastwood. Sean is the former film critic of the Oregonian

newspaper and KGW TV in his hometown of Portland, Oregon where he serves on the board, and this is where Sean and I part ways. Operation Pitch Invasion, a not for profit group that builds, restores and maintains soccer fields and futsal courts in public parks and schoolyards.

So you are very sporting, Sean Levy, and yet you and I have managed to sustain a friendship over many years. How have we done it? I don't know. I brought you to a premiership match at Loftus Road and you didn't even know it was a premiership match. That's absolutely true. If anyone needed further proof of my bona fides as a non-sporting person, an American man took me to a premiership football match.

Sean, this book, A Year in the Life of Death, how long were you working on that? Approximately five years. I had the idea to write poems inspired by a prompt somewhere in the obituary pages of the New York Times every day for a year. And it turned out to be this cataclysmic year, 2016, when we lost David Bowie and Prince and Merrill Haggard and Leonard Cohen. And in two weeks, Arnold Palmer, Gordie Howe and Muhammad Ali and Nancy Reagan and John Glenn and Fidel Castro and Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds.

It was madness. But when you read the obit pages, you also come across obscure figures like the fellow who put the at sign in your email address and a guy in Long Island who took the weather three times a day for 85 years and sent a report to the National Weather Service. So the book, and it became very personal too. There were a couple of people who I knew who died that year, the novelist Catherine Dunn among them. There were people who meant things to me personally, to my parents. So it wound up being something very different from what it began as. And so it's sort of your first piece of work as a poet.

And it's also, obviously, there's an emotional connection, whether you knew the people or not. But was it also like a journalistic? Did you develop an appreciation for the obituary writers of the New York Times? Have you ever done that as a journalist? I have. When I was working at a daily newspaper, which I did for 20 years, we would write obituaries as the news came over the wire that someone important in the world of film had passed. But we also banked obituaries in

advance. It became clear that Paul Newman, Marlono elizabeth taylor these people were going to die so we wanted a major story prepared in advance and just a few details could be left for the day of the news uh to be filled in age place of death cause of death etc but their achievements were were more or less complete at the time i wrote about them. Well, I really, really, I love the book. Thank you. I think every time a friend gives you poetry, you're nervous. But fortunately, it's absolutely terrific. So thank you for writing it.

And thank you for giving me the pleasure of reading it as well. We're also joined today by Erica Wagner. Erica's latest book is Chief Engineer, Washington Roebling, The Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge, published by Bloomsbury. She received the Eccles Centre and Hay Festival Writers Award in 2014, when that book was a work in progress. Erica was the literary editor of the London Times for 17 years. I said innings. That was a stretch. And is now a contributing writer for the New Statesman and consulting literary editor for Harper's Bazaar.

She's the author of Ariel's Gift, Seizure, Faber and Faber, the short story collection Gravity, Granter, and the editor of First Light. That's right, everybody, Unbound. A celebration of the work of Alan Garner. She's senior lecturer in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths and Lead Editorial Innovator at Created Inc. Her new book, Mary and Mr. Elliot, about Mary Trevelyan's friendship with T.S. Elliot,

will be published by Faber and Faber next year. Erica, do you look forward to the publication of the book? I try and keep a kind of neutral balance of expectation. I'm always interested. You work for so long on something and you want to see how it's received in the world. I think how I feel about things also depends on whether it's fiction or nonfiction, because you talk about those things in different ways with nonfiction. Nonfiction in some ways is easier to talk about because you're always, you know, you can talk about something else. You're not talking about yourself. So, but essentially, I'm interested always. I'm

fascinated by what I do. I relish the opportunity to talk to people about it if they are interested too. So that's something I do look forward to when books are published. And when will you be out on the road in your wagon? For Mary and Mr. Elliot, I guess. I guess from September. It will be published in the U.S. by Farrah Strauss the following year, early in 2023. So, yes, I will be hitching my wagon to the Elliot star come the autumn of next year. Thank you for picking up the metaphor. We're going to keep that metaphor rolling

through the show ahead. Mitch, take us in. The book that we're here to discuss, if you haven't already guessed, is a Western, Deadwood, by Pete Dexter, first published in the US by Random House in 1986. But before we sink up to our oxters in mud and start dodging stray bullets, Andy, what have you been reading this week? I've been reading a book I really, really enjoyed called Nina Simone's Gum by Warren Ellis.

Gum as in chewing gum. gum as in chewing gum warren ellis is uh probably known to listeners as sidekick collaborator and producer of nick cave he's also of course a musician in his own right he was in uh and is in a group called dirty three we've been going since the 90s but he's played in with nick cave in both the bad seeds and grinderman and they've composed a string of soundtracks together and also warren is the close collaborator on the run of nick cave records over the last few years starting with push the sky away and skeletonleton Tree and Ghostine, which have totally taken Nick Cave's work into new areas.

So he's a great musician, arranger and collaborator. It's interesting. It's a short book. It's quite hard to tell you in a nutshell what it's about, other than to say it's about Nina Simone's gum. nutshell what it's about other than to say it's about Nina Simone's gum. Nina Simone played a concert as part of the Nick Cave Curated Festival in 1999. She gave a performance at the Festival Hall, which as it turned out was the last performance that she gave in Britain. After the show, Warren Ellis snuck onto the stage and retrieved the piece of chewing gum that Nina Simone had stuck to the top of the grand piano before she started singing. And he got her towel and he took the chewing gum and he put it in the towel and he wrapped the towel around it and he stuck the towel in a Tower Records bag and then he hid it away for decades. And in 2019, Nick Cave said, I'm doing this exhibition called Stranger Than Kindness in

Holland, in the Netherlands. Have you got anything that we could put in the exhibition? You know, think he might say a violin or because he's a violinist. And Warren said, I've still got that piece of Nina Simone's gum. So why don't we put that in the exhibition? And Nick says, yeah, we could put it in and we'll put it on a plinth and we'll light it from the top.

And so it's quite a nice, it's a funny idea. But once they start thinking about and talking about how to save the gum transport the gum take a cast of the gum in case the gum were to get stolen the book takes on these whole new levels of inquiry into what we get from the transition from performance to memento. What do we get from a relic? What power is invested in something so little as a piece of chewing gum that from it you can extrapolate the gestalt experience

that everyone had in the room that night they saw Nina Simone and that night passed into legend? And you'll have heard me say on backlisted before that I think it's a really silly uh reviewers cliche to say of a book it makes us ask profound questions about what it means to be human I always laugh when I see that because it's the it's the it's the it's the last resort of the scoundrel, that particular phrase. But Nina Simone's Gum by Warren Ellis makes us ask profound questions about what it means to be divine and to witness a miracle. How do we transfer the experience, the spiritual experience, into the physical realm?

Why do we need Nina Simone's gum? Now we no longer have Nina Simone. So I'm just going to read a bit from the day of the concert. I'll keep this short, but there's a couple of things here that you'll love, I think. Warren writes, the day of the concert, 1st of July 1999, I'd heard via David Sefton, the director of the Meltdown Festival, that there would be only a guitarist, a percussion player and a drummer performing with Nina. Nina Simone would be on the Steinway. He'd heard a rumour that she'd fired the bass player on the plane on the way over. I emailed David in April 2020 for his memories of the show and the technical aspects of the production. And David writes in his email, the first thing I remember was the letter of agreement and the instruction to always refer to the artist as Dr. Simone.

So I've set that up. So we're now on the day of the concert. We're in the festival hall. Nick appeared and introduced Dr. Nina Simone, his face etched with measured disbelief and awe. He was wearing his prescription glasses, which struck me as peculiar as I'd never seen him wear them on stage. He looked fresh and scholarly, like he was the responsible one one she appeared on the side of the stage smoking a cigarette there she was she moved painfully into the wings and then with great difficulty she walked to the front of the stage and she just put her

clenched fist up in the air and just went yeah just that. And I think there was this kind of a reply like, yeah, back, back to her. And I remember nothing came out of my mouth as I attempted to reply. And then she did it again. Yeah. The sound of 2000 people gulping and their breath being sucked out of them. She raised her fists and started playing, hammering the piano. I can't remember what the first song was. Maybe black is the color. Maybe only her and the piano, hammering the piano. I can't remember what the first song was. Maybe Black is the Colour?

Maybe only her and the piano, the band watching on. She was hacking away, trying to sing. It was almost painful to watch. She was struggling to hit notes. She looked pissed off, reaching for something, hammering the keys violently. You could sense the audience hanging on to whatever they could to will her on, heartbreaking and apocalyptic, like watching a car crash.

At the end of the song, she got up and walked to the front of the stage again and put her fist up in the air and gave this, yeah, again. And there was some sort of semblance of a softening in her face. Something shifted. She went back to the piano and sat down. She launched into the second song, and the most incredible transformation took place. Her voice lifted and she seemed reborn. She pounded the keys and her voice rallied in defiance against her body. You could see her acknowledging the audience's screams and adulation. You could see her absorb it,

the audience's screams and adulation, you could see her absorb it, fuelled by it, tapping into the genius that had defined her all her life. A total transformation and transcendence beyond the physical kind of problems she was having. Shed of those problems, some inner force taking over, summoning herself to her own rescue, Dr. Nina Simone. That sounds brilliant. Sounds brilliant. I thought it would be fun, and actually I found it very moving and stimulating, and it took me to all sorts of places I wasn't expecting. So that's Nina Simone's Gun by Warren Ellis, and that's out now from Faber & Faber.

John, what have you been reading? I've been reading a memoir, an account of a, I suppose, an account of a walk on some level, but it's much more than that. It's called The Electricity of Every Living Thing by Catherine May. And it's, I suppose,

it came out of my reading and the work I've been doing, looking at the brain and in particular particular the whole neurodiversity thing, which I've become kind of fascinated in discovering people who are neurodiverse writing about their experiences directly rather than sort of being a collection of pathologies and being written about by somebody else. It's really beautiful, quite difficult to read in places,

but because it's painful. She's 38. She's got a small child and husband, and she decides she wants to do the Southwest Coastal Path, which is kind of 630 miles. And the idea is she's going to do it. She's going to do 25 miles a month for 18 months. And the walking, the walking helps her. She's always felt slightly 25 miles a month for 18 months. And the walking helps her.

She's always felt slightly different from other people. She finds that the electricity in the title is really this idea that she feels that people are electric and people's presence is electric and uncomfortable and difficult. People transmit this sort of surge. She finds it difficult being touched. Anyway, she's kind of, I mean, a few months into the process and she hears somebody discussing Asperger's syndrome. And it strikes so many different chords, what she's been talking about, particularly the sensual kind of overload idea,

that she goes and gets diagnosed and finds out she's on the spectrum, autistic spectrum. Although, in a way, what this book really is about, as I'll read you a little bit in a moment, is that it isn't a spectrum. A spectrum is two-dimensional. She calls it a constellation, I think, which is beautiful. The whole point of it, really, is not me telling you what her life's like.

It's about her telling you in her words. And she's a beautiful writer. And this book, people who liked Rainer Wynne's Salt Path, will kind of, I think, respond to this. It's both brilliant, I think, on what it's like to be neurodiverse in a world that isn't built for neurodiverse people, but it's also just a fantastically, I think, honest account of having a small child, having to deal with a small child when you're neurodiverse, having to try and find a way of making sense of yourself. As she said, passing, she has to pass as a neurotypical person in order to get through her life.

Can I just declare an interest that Catherine is a friend of mine and she lives down the road. So I've met her and that child and can vouch for their existence. And she's good. She's such good news, Catherine. It's so great that this book is being widely read. It's such a good book. I'm going to just give you a little bit now. This is Catherine talking from towards the end of the book. There is talk of an epidemic of autism. Some people who are wrong blame vaccines. Some who are also wrong express a mildly eugenic concern about geeky people breeding in Silicon Valley. Some blame over-diagnosis by anxious parents who think ASD is the ticket to an educational upgrade. Well, if we will insist on running our education system to the advantage of such a narrow set of people, then we must not be

surprised when people find ways to have their children's talents acknowledged. I would lay a hefty bet that there's nothing remotely new going on here. We have perhaps acquired a different language through which to talk about it. We have perhaps started differentiating between varying qualities and causes of disability. We have even started to glimpse some of the ways in which we can improve lives that were formerly written off. But for me, at my place, in a very big spectrum, I think something else is going on. We've always been here, people like me, applying our detailed brains to problems that need precise solutions and noticing things

that would lay outside of neurotypical fields of view. We're not an evolutionary accident, but an adaptation. We are not what you think we are. We are useful, valued, loved. We're the scientists and artists, the dreamers and the engineers. We're vital to all of it. We've been pushing it forward and holding it together while the extroverts take all the glory. I despise the modern habit of posthumously diagnosing prominent figures from history with whatever psychological condition is currently piquing our interest. That's why I would never dream of suggesting that my great impossible heroine, Jean Rees, or the belligerent vicar of Morwenstow, or the visionary Samuel Parliament, to share any traits with me. But I will unashamedly say that difficult, complicated people

can achieve great things if they're allowed to create their own conditions and if they're allowed their time alone by the sea. Perhaps Asperger's syndrome is only meaningful in a certain time and place after all. Our ways of seeing in this world are profoundly contingent on the eras in which they occur. The competing urges for solitude and social contact and the angry frustrations that made Jean Rees a marked woman would be almost ordinary now, their extreme edges blunted by a society that would have allowed her to be clever and given her a Twitter account on which to share her thoughts and incoherent rages. Well, maybe, anyway. Meanwhile, I would not have been so

strange in a previous era. In a quieter world, a less hurried one, without the whine of mobile phones and the ceaseless electronic drone of voices from the radio and the TV, without the noisy surges of hand dryers and the bleeping of train doors, without the flat plastic unknowable surfaces and the dry air containment of office life, without pulsing lights and the ceaseless sense of personal availability. Without all of these things, I might have been different. Walking would have been part of ordinary life, like learning the names of trees and flowers and identifying birds by their song. I would have written with ink on soft paper and read in the evenings and heard music only when somebody sat down to play it. I would have seldom encountered

the chaotic press of too many bodies in one place and perhaps my nerves would have been steadier for it. As a woman, of course, there are a few points in history where I would have felt the advantages of this great sensory freedom and so I must content myself with the noisy, demanding present day and be grateful for it. But that is why we need diagnosis like ASD, so that people like me can explore the strange ways that we might fit into this brave new world. It's a lovely book. We are offering listeners three absolute copper-bottom fantastic books today, as far as I'm concerned i agree catherine's book

nina simone's gum and the book coming up they're all terrific so thanks for bringing that one john great the book chat will continue on the other side of this message sean you chose this book we always ask people on batlisted where where they first encountered it. When did you first encounter Deadwood by Pete Dexter? You know, it seemed to me I had read it many years ago. And then I came across a quote that I had in an exchange of dialogue in one of the later portions of the book that I tweeted as a joke. And I was able to trace the tweet. And it turns out I only read it two years ago. But of course, in 2021, two years ago feels like a lifetime ago. And I read it because I'm a fan of sort of pulp Westerns. I've read all of Elmore Leonard's Western writing. I've read a shelf of

Max Brand. But that skews into literary Westerns, Peter Carey's book about the Kelly gang and Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy. And I did not know that Pete Dexter had written a book about Deadwood until in 2019, the Deadwood sequel movie was released. And somewhere in the writing about it, I saw a reference to Dexter, whose work I did not know. And I immediately found the book at Powell's bookstore and read it, you know, instantly. I just devoured it. And we just want to say upfront here and now, Deadwood the novel is not the same thing as Deadwood the TV show. We are going to talk about the TV show later in the podcast, but we very much want to concentrate on the book first and

foremost. And so Erica, did you, had you read this before? I had, and yet I will briefly mention the TV show because I first found this book after watching the original series. So that was the original three seasons. So that was some years ago now. I read it in the kind of mid-2000s. That was when I first encountered it. So this was a reread for me. But like Sean, you know, I'm interested in the pulp slash literary Western. I'll also, I would, you know i agree uh about peter carey john and i were

talking about a wonderful book called the collected works of billy the kid by michael andachi that i think people who think they know michael andachi might not expect this book from him true grit by charles portis so i'm i've always been interested in this territory. I think it's very interesting, John, that, I mean, this book was published in the UK, but it came out seven years after the US edition as a paperback original. I'd never heard of it until I knew we were going to be reading it for batlisted had you had you come across it you know i don't think i had and which is odd because i'd read paris trout and brotherly love back in the day and really enjoyed there was a launch party in a in a

gym for for um brotherly love in west london boxing yeah. It's a boxing book, isn't it? And I like boxing books. And then I sort of lost track of Pete Dexter. He's written a couple of books since, but the one that everybody talked about because it won the National Book Award was Paris Trout. Okay, so let me go to you first, Erica, then. What does Deadwood by Pete Dexter have?

First, Erica, then, what does Deadwood by Pete Dexter have? What are its particular qualities that distinguish it from other versions of this story or stories like it? I think it has a tremendous kind of here and there and here again, as if you're walking down the main street of Deadwood. have an episodic feeling it's centered on the murder of wild bill hickok by the coward jack mccall but that doesn't actually happen until quite late in the book and you meet this revolving cast of characters some of whom are real and a couple of whom are invented or composites, but they all have their kind of original vital life. One of the things I think is interesting about the novel too is the center of the novel is not Wild Bill Hickok, who's this legendary figure of the European West, but his friend Charlie Utter, who's a kind of an ordinary guy. He's nothing special. He's not a great gunslinger. He's trying to make his way in this new world on the frontier as it was then. And there are many perspectives in this

book, but his is really central. And he's a very moving character. So you have all this kind of crazy stuff going on. But Charlie at the center of it is a kind of linchpin of the book. Sean, how about you? Did you go into the book thinking, I kind of know whatpin of the book. Sean, how about you? Did you go into the book thinking, I kind of know what this is going to be, and then you were surprised? Yeah, there are a couple of things. So many Westerns are focused on the landscape

and the natural elements. And this is an urban Western, even though Deadwood is sort of a settlement and not a city,, even though Deadwood is sort of a settlement and not a city. It's called Deadwood. And you're really in the place. And people make excursions out. There's a moose hunt and a pony express race.

But he passes, you know, Dexter passes through the scene setting of those things very quickly. And he's much more interested in the curious interactions of people who are thrown together in this place where they sort of are trapped and are striving against one another. The little attempts people are making to establish businesses and a theater and relationships amongst themselves. I was also quite taken with Dexter's sense of humor, which, you know, he'll tell a story and it's an odd little side story to the main narrative. And then suddenly there'll be a sentence at the end of a paragraph that just twists like a scorpion's tail. And there's the joke. And then you almost forget the little anecdote that led up to the joke, because the joke is so pointed and the phrasing is so particular. It's somewhere between wise guy patter and frontier

argot. And that I just find charming as hell so there's a line here which i which i specifically made a note of to share with you uh and regular listeners will know i'm very i'm a big fan of sentences entirely made of monosyllables of which this is one and the gag here is just spot on. This is Charlie talking about Wild Bill Hickok, so it's Wild Bill being described by Charlie in terms of Wild Bill's rise to prominence. The world was not without make-believe long, however. A few months later, there was an eyewitness

story in harper's weekly of how bill had wiped out all 10 of the macandus gang and after that everything he did got immortalized if he ate pork he shot the pig at high noon in the street if he ate pork he shot the pig at high noon in the street i mean i that's what i mean there's a string of of shots of single syllables going off there but also like you said sean what what a lovely joke to land right in the middle of that paragraph it's iambic pentameter that that last bit um he shot the pig at high noon in the street but you're right he's always doing that and i mean again without straying ahead into what we're going to talk about erica the dialogue does a lot of work in this novel doesn't it so much character and rhythm both those things are being pushed forward

with dialogue yeah and you learn a lot about the characters through their action and through their think, and you're going to have to work out whether they really mean it in the circumstance. But there's wonderful passages of dialogue in this book. Yeah, it's one of the really terrific things about it. Oh, that's such an interesting point, Erica. Charlie is introspective. Yes, Charlie's. He's the only really introspective character. And it's worth reminding ourselves how young the characters in this book are. We tend to think of them, or I do anyway, as kind of grizzled characters. But Wild Bill is 39. And Charlie is 37, which I have to say seems to me now very young. But there's a description of Charlie who had lived 37 years, most of them unworried and natural. You know, so he's presented as this quite plain thinking,

plain spoken character, but he is the one, you're right, who's doing the thinking. I don't want to spoil the reveal on which character he is, but there's a female character where one chapter ends with the line, she was 19. Yes.

Which is eye-popping in context. That thing about Charlie's inner light, which is eye-popping in context. That thing about Charlie's inner light, I mean, he is definitely the emotional heart of the book, isn't he? The pulse. What I love about it is if you're expecting the mythologising tropes of the West, how many men he killed, how quickly. He doesn't indulge any.

I love what you said, Sean. It's one of the most intimate Westerns I've ever read. It really is all taking place in rooms and in small spaces. I'm going to read the blurb off the back of the book in a minute. Before I do that, this is just a little clip of Pete Dexter talking to Scott Simon. This is relevant to what I think we've just been talking about and the way Pete Dexter writes fiction. What makes a good column and a good columnist?

I think your instinct has to be to confront. If you're the kind of guy that comes to a peaceful lake and, you know, there's birds floating around on it and it's early morning or something, and you're happy just standing there looking at that beautiful sight, then maybe you're a photographer. But, you know, if your instinct is to toss a rock into the pond and watch the birds come up and watch what it does to the surface of the water, to me, it's that interruption of quiet, which is not just about what column writing is about, but it's about what writing itself is kind of about when you think about it. How great is that? Brilliant.

That's fantastic. The idea that what you do is you take your characters like they do early in the book, and then you put them through something, and then the rest of the novel is exploring the ripples from that event. So let me just read the blurb on the back of the book. This is the vintage contemporary US edition. And this is to place it for people, for listeners who haven't read it. the Black Hills town of Deadwood, fresh from Cheyenne, fleeing an ungrateful populace.

Bill, ageing and sick, but still able to best any man in a fair gunfight, just wants to be left alone to drink and play cards. But in this town of played-out miners, bounty hunters, upstairs girls, Chinese immigrants and various other entrepreneurs and miscreants, he finds himself pursued by a vicious sheriff, a perverse hall man bent on revenge, and a besotted calamity Jane. Fueled by liquor, sex, and violence, and that ain't no lie, listeners,

this is the real Wild West, unlike anything portrayed in the dime novels that first told its story. That's an excellent blurb. I've got a different blurb. My blurb is very different. Let's hear it. While Bill Hickok is getting old, but he can still shoot

a shot glass off the head of a bulldog at 30 paces. He's come into the brawling boomtown of Deadwood to do some gambling. Dogging his footsteps are Calamity Jane, who is crazy in love with Bill, and the vicious sheriff Boone May, who is looking to make a name for himself any way he can. Until Bill is quietly playing cards, holding aces over eights, and Boone's weaselly little friend Jack McCall walks into the bar with a look in his eyes

that says kill those are two good blurbs maybe it's just because the book's so great right do you remember this novel coming out in the uk i mean i like i say it came out but absolutely not not at all i have no recollection of this no all. But I do remember Pete Dexter. And presumably, Erica, when you were, you know, working the Sunday Times beat, you would have come across Pete Dexter because that Paris Strat was big news here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not just in the States, but here as well, wasn't it?

The Times, dear, not the Sunday Times. But yes, I do remember. Sorry, forgive me, yes. If we were in Deadwood now, Erica, we'd go off to the woods to fight. We would. We'd have a punch up over that. Shoot you in the shin. So, Sean, could you share a bit of the Dexter prose with us, please, so that we can hear how he does this, performs this trick?

um sure there's there's a um a scene where where wild bill and charlie utter are are sort of uh shanghaied onto a moose hunt by a fellow called captain jack and captain jack assures them he knows a place where the moose are just standing there waiting to be shot and they just need to get in a canoe and go out to this island. So the three of them ride out and quite drunkenly set off on this hunt. And this is the passage. Captain Jack got off his horse and tied her to a sapling. Bill leaned in the saddle and dropped a line of spit to the ground. It's right down here, Captain Jack said. He'd hidden the canoe under some branches 50 feet from the water where it wouldn't wash away in a flood. The branches were arranged in such a way that you'd have to be blind not to notice something

was hid there. The canoe was stub-nosed and narrow, not really a canoe at all. It was fastened together with nails and rawhide and baling wire. It looked exactly like half a dozen Indians had built it all at one time without checking to see what each other were doing. The Sioux were not a great nation of boat builders. You know, what's great about that is the reason it's funny is because he never loses the truth of the scene he's so good at painting plausible scenarios to put his characters into that it seems to me that the humor just kind of flows from that and the phrasing too you know it just dawned on me as we were talking that the phrasing reminds me of Damon Runyon, also a newspaper man, also a humorist.

But he wrote about sort of deplorable people, gamblers and prostitutes and gunmen in New York City in a later era. Guys and Dolls is taken from his work. But the sentences at the end of the paragraph have a way of sort of tumbling onto the table, like a thief showing what he's gotten, what he's ransacked from a house, and here are the goods I've found. And there's an energy to the end of a lot of Dexter's, the passage you read previously, Andy, about the pig and this one I just shared. They end on this kind of everything's there, but we don't know how it's going to fall out. And that's the joke.

I was really struck there in the bit that you read. He does a neat trick, it seems to me, which is that he... He does a neat trick, it seems to me, which is that he... I couldn't swear that characters in 1876 would always talk in the way that some of the characters do. But he protects himself by introducing old-timey language into the prose descriptions, not the dialogue. It's a really interesting and clever way of making it feel.

So, in other words, he has the freedom in how the people express themselves to do one thing, but he's making the scenery feel absolutely authentic. Like the use of the word hid, when I said hid there. feel absolutely authentic. Like the use of the word hid, when I said hid there, hid is a very specific choice of old American word to bolster the otherwise quite snappy dialogue. Yeah, it's the Uncle Charles principle that Hugh Kenner describes in James Joyce, that characters are described by the omniscient narrator in the language that they would use to describe themselves. So the narrator is sort of this voice hovering near them, sort of stealing their thoughts to describe them.

Also that hid, that's a very good example because the danger is always you don't want something to sound antiqued in any way so you're just trying as a writer if you're writing historically in a certain way and that's what pete dexter is doing here i think to remind the reader of the flavor of the time. But then, especially in dialogue, you want people to sound as they would sound to each other, which is naturalistic. You know, it's the funny thing of when you go to a movie and set in Russia

and everyone is talking in the Russian accent. And you think, but that's not how they would sound to each other, is it? And that's one of the things the dialogue accomplishes here, I think. This is a challenge for all historical fiction, isn't it? How do you make the dialogue sing and feel it's got life in it without sticking?

And I think you're right. It's a very existential novel. It's a very psychologically intense novel in that he sets the thing in motion about the killing of Hickok very early on in the book. You know that Bill Hickok's going to be murdered, and you know who he's going to be murdered by. There's no mystery element to this. It's what the murder of Bill Hickok does to all the other characters around him that Dexter's interested in. And in the end, I suppose what I'm saying is it's not a historical novel. I mean, it's not attempting to create the sense of the wild, you know, a detailed sense of the Wild West. It's about love and it's about

death. It's about, what's the phrase, Andy? You ask profound questions about what it means to be in Deadwood, I think. It does. And I think that's why it's so satisfying. The novel is split into five sections, the biggest of which is the first one about Wild Bill Hickok, just called Bill.

And then the following sections are called The China Doll, Agnes, Jane, as in Calamity Jane, and then Charlie at the very end there's a little postscript and Erica I wanted to talk to you about the third section Agnes which is about while Bill Hickok's wife or in fact widow who we meet very briefly

for me that was my favourite if I had to choose a section of the book the novel that would be the section I would choose what an extraordinary character to sketch so economically to arrive into the novel. All the women in this novel are really extraordinary and the way that they relate to the male characters to bill and i think there's there was a section i wanted to read which is actually an interaction between

agnes who has this marriage we you know we never see the marriage of agnes lake and while bill hickok except in these letters that are written back and forth but we never see them together and there is a sense that this is an unreal relationship. That certainly Bill was wanting something. That he had an idea of marriage that he could never be suited to. novel in love with Bill and sees herself as a sort of rival to Agnes, who we only meet after Bill is dead. And there's this remarkable encounter between the two of them that I thought was one of the loveliest things in this book. I absolutely agree. Have you got it for us? I do. I do. Brilliant. So, yes, Bill is dead. And Agnes has arrived. And Calamity Jane has already had an argument with Charlie, claiming that she was married to Bill. And Charlie has been trying to keep her out of the way of Agnes, so she doesn't say this to Agnes,

but as Pete Dexter said, you know, the stone thrown into the pond, this is going to happen. There was a movement in the circle of guests then. Jane started, pointing the weapon at a dozen different people, and then Agnes Lake stepped out of the circle. She stood half a head taller than Jane, twice as strong, wise as the Bible. Her dress was a red color, and her face was smooth and calm. Well, well, Jane said. She lowered the pistol halfway to her side and stared at Agnes. Charlie saw the chance to take it away, but he stood where he was. I heard you claimed you as the wife of Wild Bill Hickok,

Jane said. Agnes didn't move her answer. She looked as if she were trying to decide what this was in front of her. Jane looked around the room as if she had just noticed where she was. I better get some answers, she said to the guests, not to Agnes. Bill never told me about nobody else. Jane straightened herself as she spoke, trying to match Agnes Lake's height. She put her bottle back in her pocket and pulled the brim of her hat down until it bent the tops of her ears. She brushed at some of the weeds sticking to her coat. Then she considered Agnes Lake again, who still hadn't moved. Jane took a step backward and someone laughed out loud. She pointed her gun in the direction of the sound, but without an intention to shoot.

I am Agnes Lake, Agnes said then. Her voice was slow and even. Charlie noted the change that came over her in the presence of violence. It was the opposite of Ms. Langrish's change. I married Bill Hickok in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in the spring of this year, she said, and he took me back to my home in St. Louis until he could locate a proper position. Jane shook her head. Bill would have mentioned it, she said.

He never said a word. The guests began to notice Jane's smell and edged away, smiling at each other. Charlie said, let me take you somewhere else, Jane. She looked at him as sorry as she had ever been in her life. Where? Somewhere else, he said. She looked at him a long minute and then turned back to Agnes Lake. Bill loved me, she said.

Me and him were partners. Then she said, he was my husband as much as yours. She had dropped back to normal height and was leaning against the doorframe, her crutch, and the cork to her bottle on the floor at Agnes' feet. One of the guests laughed. This time, Jane didn't bother to point her gun. Somebody give me my damn crutch, she said. This ain't my kind of party. Charlie stepped towards the crutch, but Agnes Lake bent first. She handed Jane the crutch and then patted her shoulder.

Jane jumped at the touch. A man like Bill, there must have been a lot of us that loved him, Agnes said. Jane shook at the words. And he loved us back, Agnes said, in his own way, each of us different. Jane blinked and wiped at her eye. Charlie thought she would cry. You ain't too bad for a fancy jane said i'm surprised bill didn't mention you and then still holding a gun and in front of 40 witnesses calamity jane cannery bowed her head and did as much of a curtsy as her bad leg would allow oh superb she sure lights up a room you know guys that's what that's such a great example of a thing where a writer has engineered a scene they know is good and you can feel coming off that the sense of their excitement at delivering the scene it's so good because the confidence of the delivery and the lines land where they should and don't you think sean it's like the confidence of the delivery and the lines land where they should.

Don't you think, Sean, it's like the pleasure of the book is almost somebody knowing they're really working at a high level. And it's also, these are historic figures. There was an Agnes Lake, there was a Calamity Jane, and the idea that you would know these things and say, okay, I'm going to build an encounter and what would that be like? Because in American mythology, these are sort of Robin Hood or the Knights of the Round Table.

They're characters who many people have written, sung, authored about in some medium or another. And this is such a delicate moment. You can certainly see it as it's written. It's not internal to anyone charlie has a couple of internal thoughts but they're quickly passed over it's just staged it's it's really remarkable let me just say a little bit about um pete dexter so pete dexter is 78 he's still alive he was born in michigan and he he worked mostly for many years as a newspaper columnist. We heard a reference there earlier to What Makes a Good Column. Tell us why he started writing fiction. But I just need to tell you that he had recently published in 1981 a column in the Philadelphia Daily News about a murder involving a drug deal gone wrong.

And he'd been offered a meet with one of the people he'd named in the column. So here's Pete Dexter talking about what inspired him to start writing fiction. And he's going to pick up the story for us. So we walk in there and I started talking to this guy about philosophy and how nobody's safe in this world and how you've got to be enough of a person not to get into this mob. Anyway, I was really improving him a lot. And then this little guy ran out the door, and within two minutes,

that place was full of 19, 20, 21, 22-year-old kids with softball bats and reinforced steel and tire irons. reinforced steel and tire irons. And, you know, we tried to, it's a very hard thing to scare 30 people away when they got tire irons. And we went outside, and Cobb got hit over the head first, but he just slipped down.

I should have known that he wasn't hurt, and I tried to, I figured we were both dead. So I thought, well, it was just sort of a parting gesture. I was going to get the guy that got him and then I just saw this kind of slow motion, this bat just swinging into my vision and the next thing I knew this voice woke me up screaming, if he's dead so is every one of you and Randall had somehow gotten over me This voice woke me up screaming, if he's dead, so is every one of you.

And Randall had somehow gotten over me and just screaming, scared enough of these people away that we were able to get to a hospital. And I don't really buy that it changed my life. It certainly ruined the evening. But what it did do though was for a long long time after that, 15 years, nothing tasted the same to me. I started to like seafood all of a sudden, and but alcohol had a very bitter taste, almost like battery acid. And I really couldn't drink anymore. And it's not much fun to go into bars if you can't drink.

So with, you know, eight, ten extra hours a day, as I was saying, I started to write a book. And in that sense um it got things going erica don't you think that's like a scene from deadwood yes it is yes it is we have to choose whether we believe it entirely of of course, but it's set up just like one of these scenes. You know, he brings us into the event and lets the event unfold for us rather than just telling us what happened. And like any great raconteur,

that line about it ruined the evening. I mean, that's great. I've been reading his newspaper columns written around the time that he suffered this beating. And they are brilliant. They're collected in a book called Paper Trails. And they are filled. They're shocking. Some of them are so frank. He talks about his wife and his marriage in ways that I can't believe a tabloid newspaper in Philadelphia published in the 1980s.

race. He's writing about a funny thing that happened on the corner and finding the human piece of it. And there are a couple of jokes along the way, and then he'll land on, you know, the profound lesson of what it means to be human. But this is the genius of the newspaper columnist to be able to do that in, you know, 600 words on a two-day deadline. There's a continuity between Dexter's between Pete Dexter's journalistic career and thinking, well, what if I applied some of those techniques to people about whom we have a lot of information and just take it up a step? Bill actually talks about this very early in the novel. He has a short bit of dialogue. I wish there was a general reluctance to bring my name into things.

He said the trouble is accuracy. You can't explain what you did to anybody, especially a reporter, because things don't come out the same in words and the words you give them. They get it wrong. I tremble to think what the writers do after a body dies yeah yeah yeah that's so good well we've held off from talking about deadwood the tv show and there's a couple of reasons for that but let's let's remind ourselves so while bill is in the novel deadwood by pete dexter and he's obviously in the TV show Deadwood. And Al Swearingen is in

both novel and TV show. We might talk about the difference between the characters once we've reminded ourselves of how Al Swearingen and Wild Bill Hickok are presented

in David Milch's amazing TV series. As to where my path might have crossed yours previous, and as to how I might have given offence, that you'd stay in this camp not 50 feet from my joint and never once walk in. You know poker. Is it that simple? Dan, dismantle the titty corner and set up a poker table. Not necessary, Mr Swearengen.

I always felt poker slows a joint's action, but certain people do respect. I always felt poker slows a joint's action, but certain people do respect. I want listeners to know that I edited that scene quite heavily to make it broadcastable while keeping our clean rating. And that includes the phrase, titty corner. I mean, you've no idea what I had to let go. So how did you feel about the TV show after you'd read the novel for the first time? Sean, because I know you had come to the novel because of the TV show.

I was shocked. I didn't know Al Swearengin was a real person. Reading the novel made me look the fella up as soon as he appeared in the novel. I was like, what? Wait, when was this published? Who? What? And I'm racing around the internet trying to say, well, this is real. Solomon Starr, Seth Bullock, there are a number. Merrick, the newspaper man, both David Milch and his collaborators and Pete Dexter are drawing from the same historic annals. And the characters in many ways are coincidental, their deeds, their characteristics. But I was immediately struck by how much of the TV series mirrored what I had read in this novel, the sort of the parsiflage that some of the characters spoke in, the parsiflage that some of the characters spoke in this, you know, heightened but uneducated language, the mud and the grime and the frank and coarse sexuality and violence and, you know,

sort of the larcenous hearts of these people. And I share with Pete Dexter the belief, David Milch and company swear that they did not know this book. But I share with Pete Dexter the belief, David Milch and company swear that they did not know this book. But I share with Pete Dexter the belief the hell they didn't because it's just... This is not a case of Darwin and some guy in Australia in a pre-publication era coming up with a similar idea. This is a book that was published in New York City by a big publisher that was reviewed in daily newspapers. And I can't believe while developing

a show for HBO, nobody told those people that this had happened. Yeah. I mean, it's impossible to know. I agree with Sean that it seems odd that no one would have come across this book. At the same time, at the same time, these are historical characters, and I would say that many of them

are extremely different in the book than they are in the show. Notably, Al Swearengen. So I think the television series is extraordinary. I think it is very distinct from this book, and it has its own life, and it's very much own rhythms of writing. Both of these very much own rhythms of writing. Both of these works are extremely textural, but I do believe they have very different linguistic textures.

There is one I cannot believe. And if you look at the Ellen Barkin portrayal of Calamity Jane, I cannot believe that the Calamity Jane character, which is very similar, the alcoholism, the kind of the sort of the rankness and the physical rankness, the obsession with curing people, just feels, I mean, I went back and looked at the historical kind of background to that. Whoever wrote that Calamity Jane character in the TV show must have read the novel. Because I just can't believe that you could get to those two things, like you say, like Leibniz and Newton. It doesn't feel possible.

I was kind of dismayed when I read the novel. Because John and I both absolutely love, we've talked on this podcast about how much we love the TV show, right? And initially I was quite dismayed. But I thought, well, you know, Erica, you're right. There is kind of a whole Rococo element to the TV show, particularly in the character of Al Swearengen and some of the extraordinary speeches that he's given.

And listeners had to learn overnight, which is one of my favorite Deadwood facts and was always on the money. But I thought it would be fair to hear from Pete what Pete Dexter thinks about this. This is an interview that he gave to Vice in 2009. And the interviewer says, did anyone from HBO ever contact you or try to get you involved in that show? And Dexter says, no. And I mean, they obviously stole at least the first scene from the book. The guy who took credit was the producer, some guy named, and the interviewer says, David Milch? Milch, yeah. And you know, there are pieces about him in the new yorker and stuff his take was that he wanted to do a western forever he had everything available about that area at that time and

yet had somehow missed my novel which came out over a decade before he started working on the show which has the same title as the show and which has the same historical characters as the show swearingen bullock soul star and so on though represented very differently as the show they can say it's all historical and so it's just a coincidence but they'd have a hard time explaining the way charlie utter is so prominent in their show because in the history of the west before i wrote about him he was just a dot i turned him into a major character of my book, and then they made Charlie exactly the same way I did, only they gave him an English accent

so that you wouldn't know they'd stolen it. When the series came out, nobody would do anything. I got hold of a lawyer to find out how much it would cost to sue them, and it was astronomical, and I'm not interested in that. And then I got calls once in a while from newspapers wanting to know about the language. And the interviewer says, what, the profanity in the TV series?

This is the killer. Yeah, says Pete Dexter. People made a really big deal out of the fact they had cursed a lot. Now, look, the reason they had put mofo in there every other word was because it worked on the sopranos but if you said that shit back in the 1870s in the dakota terror you get shot in the head for it he's like in other words the distinguishing trait of the TV show that we all love, Dexter's saying, but you couldn't do that in, you know, I'm a journalist, I'm true to my source, and my source suggests you would never get away with that.

And Milch's defense, by the way, is also a very good one. Yeah, let's hear it. Which is that, you know, putting in kind of archaic, there's nothing that dates quicker than swearing and if you put you know to to to carry the emotional charge that you needed to for the language you had to use swear words cuss words which were contemporary so that anachronism is sort of baked into the series and it's it's one of the things that is most memorable about the series you know particularly particularly swaringen i mean suddenly lovejoy is appears in the middle of in in the middle of the the west and is the most

foul-mouthed perverted difficult i mean it's just brilliant brilliant bit of casting i have no idea uh if american listeners will be familiar with lovejoy but it's just brilliant, brilliant bit of casting. I have no idea if American listeners will be familiar with Love, Troy, but it's probably not a fair trade, to be honest with you. I read this whole book. You remember that episode of The Simpsons where they go on a road trip to the ruins of the World's Fair, and at one point they go to see Andy Williams in concert and there's a tracking shot across the front row

of Bart looking incredibly bored and Nelson in raptures, right? I read this whole novel looking like Nelson Musk. I was utterly, I enjoyed it so much. Me too. I've read other books this year, which I've also got a great deal from, but I think of the books we've covered this year, John, I don't know how you feel. I just, I wanted to live in that book forever. I was really sorry when it came to an end. Well, I'm afraid that is all we have time for. Huge thanks to Sean and Erica for inviting us to ride out with them, to Nicky

Birch for playing piano in our saloon, and to Unbound for the Smith & Wessons. Partners, you can download all 151 previous episodes. Has anyone said the word partners in a more English way than that? They really haven't. Never. Partners. I will, partners.

Thank you. Oh, dear. You can follow links clips and suggestions for further reading by visiting our website backlisted.fm and we're always pleased if you contact us on twitter and facebook and now in sound and pictures on instagram too you can also show your love directly by supporting our patreon and patreon.com forward slash backlisted we aim to survive without paid for advertising your generosity helps us to do that all patrons get to hear backlisted episodes early and for less than a quarter of rye at the gem lock listeners get two extra lock listed a month our own rootin tootin all

night speakeasy where we play music sing so tunes watch magic lantern slideshows and discuss the books we've been enjoying so i'm going to ask both our guests as now is traditional. Erica, is there anything you would like to say? Was there anything you want to put on the record about Debwood by Pete Dexter before we say goodnight? I would like to say that everyone should read this novel. I agree with you, Andy, that this is a book you just want to be inside. Yes, it has some problematic things in it, but it's absolutely an immersive read and a book that deserves to be rediscovered.

Okay. Sean Levy, is there anything we didn't cover that you feel you need to share with us? I just want to underscore how funny it is. It's violent. It's coarse. It's problematic, racially, sexually, and yet page after page you will laugh sometimes out loud. Yeah, I agree. I agree. John Mitchinson. All I'm going to say is this. Charlie Utter hugging the wife of his dear friend, Bill Hickok, says, and he loved her for all the lost parts of his

life. I actually stopped and wrote that down. It's just a beautiful, beautiful line from a book, I think, which, as everybody said, is totally worth reading. Well, we're going to say, see you down the trail, listeners. We'll see you next time. see you down the trail listeners. We'll see you next time. If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts, you can sign up to our Patreon. It's www.patreon.com

forward slash backlisted. As well as getting the show early, you get a whole two extra episodes of what we call Locklisted, which is Andy, me and Nicky talking about the books, music and films we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight.