Blood & Whiskey #10
Special edition: THE FIRST KENNEDYS; a Boston cocktail; a Boston playlist
Hello friends and readers…
Allow me to interrupt our regularly scheduled crime fiction newsletter with a special one-off edition featuring my forthcoming sixth book, THE FIRST KENNEDYS. Twenty years in the making, it’ll hit bookstore shelves — and hopefully a few of your bookshelves — starting next week.
So, I’m showcasing a bit less blood this month, but plenty of whiskey...
About the book… THE FIRST KENNEDYS: THE HUMBLE ROOTS OF AN AMERICAN DYNASTY is the story of the refugee Kennedys' escape from famine-wracked Ireland and their rough first decades in an unwelcoming America. The first half of the book features JFK's tenacious great-grandmother, Bridget, a widowed maid raising four kids alone in the slums of East Boston, who opened her own grocery shop after the Civil War — a neighborhood shop where she sold her share of whiskey. The second half features her saloonkeeper son, P.J., whose Boston bars and liquor shops helped launch his influential political career.
Tim Egan called called the book a "brilliant recreation of the Irish diaspora succeeding in a city that for many years would not allow them to be part of the American story" and Denise Kiernan called it “a fresh, engrossing, and profoundly relatable look at a family that everyone thinks they know.”
Here's a interview I did with People magazine. (People!) A Boston Globe Sunday Magazine excerpt, and a Boston Globe review. A review in Graydon Carter’s Air Mail. An interview with IrishCentral.com. And the book was picked by Amazon editors as a top-10 Best Books of the Month. (More news and reviews = HERE.)
I’ll be traveling late Feb into March, in conversarion with some favorite writers, mainly in Boston and Seattle but also stopping in NJ, NYC, MS, NC, DC, and PA. You can check my tour schedule HERE. (I’m especially excited to speak at my alma mater, the University of Scranton, on March 30.)
Meanwhile… please consider preordering? There’s still time…
“This is not just the story of the Kennedys; Thompson paints a picture of life for many Irish immigrants. History buffs should pick up this book immediately.” —Booklist
“Bridget Kennedy emerges as such a formidable woman in Thompson's telling.” —Irish Central
“Now comes Neal Thompson, who in his splendidly heterodox The First Kennedys shows that before the lurid patriarchy of Joe there was the winning matriarchy of Bridget.” —Air Mail
“In this fascinating book, Neal Thompson gives Bridget her due—and in the process, makes us reconsider JFK’s origin story.” —Alexis Coe
“a chronicle that ranks with the richly evocative work of Doris Kearns Goodwin and Thomas H. O’Connor .” —Boston Globe
Since the bulk of the action in The First Kennedys takes place in Boston — and features cameos by Louisa May Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, and others — I thought I’d share some favorite books based in and around Boston:
Two great memoirs: Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, by Nick Flynn, and the spectacular Townie, by Andre Dubus III.
When Robert B. Parker died in 2010 (at his desk, writing), Ace Atkins took over the series featuring the one-named Boston PI, Spenser. Atkins recently announced he was retiring from the Spenser series, after the recent release of Bye Bye Baby, the fiftieth in the series (dating to 1973).
Last month I reviewed Jennifer Haigh’s great new novel, Mercy Street, set in and around a women’s health clinic in Boston. The book has earned rave reviews (including a rare twofer in the Times — one from Janet Maslin; one from Richard Russo.) Here’s an excerpt.
If you get the chance, please read anything by Dennis Lehane: from the epic trilogy about early-1900s crooked cop Danny Coughlin (The Given Day, Live By Night, World Gone By) to Mystic River to his older series with detectives Patrick Kenzie & Angela Gennaro (especially A Drink Before the War, his debut, and Gone Baby Gone).
More… Tess Gerritsen’s Boston detective Jane Rizzoli and medical examiner Maura Isles; Lisa Gardner’s Boston detective D. D. Warren; Anita Diamant’s The Boston Girl; George V. Higgins’s classic, The Friends of Eddie Coyle (which Elmore Leonard called "the best crime novel ever written” — it was a great movie, too, starring Robert Mitchum); and too many more to mention here (including Jhumpa Lahiri, Zadie Smith, Neal Stephenson, etc).
Finally… while not quite Boston, I started reading two excellent new books by two favorite authors, both set further south off I-95 in Rhode Island: Her Last Affair (Mariner Books — also my publisher), by John Searles, and Ocean State (Grove Press), by Stuart O’Nan. Both publish in March. Also set partly in Rhode Island is the long-awaited City on Fire (William Morrow), by Don Winslow, coming in April.
Other books in various stages of being (or having been) read — and enjoyed:
Fortune Favors the Dead (Doubleday), by Stephen Spotswood
Mecca (FSG), by Susan Straight - coming 3/15
Bill Roorbach’s Lucky Turtle (Algonquin) - coming 4/26
Go Back to Where You Came From (WW Norton), by Wajahat Ali*
(*I’ll be in conversation with Wajahat at Politics & Prose in DC on March 26)
Cocktail of the Month…
There are many origins stories behind this classic, but this much is known (and can be found in my book): Martin Lomasney, powerful boss of Boston’s Ward 8 (the west end) through the late 1800s, was a contemporary (and frequent foe) of P.J. Kennedy, the quiet but equally powerful boss of Ward 2 (East Boston). The cocktail is credited to Lomasney’s turf but is more broadly a testament to Boston’s era of upstart Irish-Democratic ward politics.
Ward 8
1 ounces rye whiskey (I used the Heresy rye my wife got me - for Valentine’s Day)
1/2 ounce fresh lemon juice
1/2 ounce fresh orange juice
a teaspoon of grenadine (feel free to use more if you have the good stuff; less if it’s that weird red-dye sugary stuff)
shake with ice and strain into a coupe glass; garnish with cherries
*other versions add some sweetness to offset the citrus tart, so feel free to try a splash of honey, simple syrup or (per Death & Co.) pomegranate molasses.
Playlist of the Month…
This month’s theme? For a Boston-based book: all bands from Boston.
Thanks for indulging me & this month’s focus on THE FIRST KENNEDYS.
If you do read and enjoy the book, please tell a friend or post a pic or give it a review at Amazon or Goodreads. Every little bit helps. Gratefully yours…
-Neal
Find me on Instagram; sometimes on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Goodreads
And it's a battered old suitcase
To a hotel someplace
And a wound that will never heal
No prima donna, the perfume is on
An old shirt that is stained with blood and whiskey…
-Tom Waits, “Tom Traubert’s Blues”
