The Ricochet Podcast - The Selfie

Episode Date: July 25, 2013

Direct link to MP3 file We get wordy and reflective this week with our guests, authors Andrew Klavan and C.J. Box. Of course, we talk about Weiners, wives, and the death of shame, but also some insight into the work habits of writers, James meets a radio legend, and Rob discusses his alleged coarsening of the culture. Andrew Klavan’s new book A Killer in the Wind is available here. C.J. Source

Anthony's made some horrible mistakes. I love him. I have forgiven him. I believe in him. Let me just reiterate to my wife how sorry I am that I did these things and how sorry I am to the people that got these messages. We are moving forward. This is nonsense.

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lalix in Minneapolis, and it's Novelpalooza today. Two of our favorite writers, Andrew Klavan and C.J. Box, will be discussing Wyoming and wieners and everything in between. Let's have ourselves a podcast. There you go again. And the podcast that we're having is number 177,

if you're making hash marks on your cell wall. It's brought to you by, hold it, no, not who you think. It's brought to you by Tonks. Who are they? It's the coffee company that sources their beans directly from the growers, roasts them, and then ships them where? To the store? No. To the coffee house? No.

To you, which guarantees the freshest beans you can find. Ships them to you within 24 hours of roasting. We'll be talking about that more. And sipping some Tonks actually on the podcast, all three of us. But you've got to go to tonks.org for more info. And I didn't mean to suggest or insinuate by any means that Audible isn't still with us. We are. Love them.

Audible.com, the leading provider of spoken audio information and entertainment on the web. Listen to audiobooks wherever and whenever you want. Don't put up with those companies that insist that you listen to them on their schedule. No, Audible lets you do it. Audiblepodcast.com slash Ricochet for a free audiobook and a 30-day trial. And we welcome, of course, as ever, the founders of Ricochet. Their faces noble and upturned like those on Rushmore, Long and Robinson. How are you doing, guys?

Noble and upturned. I like that. I like that, too. I am doing very well, James. I will be slightly slow. I had a late evening. So thank God for Tongs Coffee. That's all i can say thank god for tonks coffee well noble up in uh in in upturned is you know like the face of somebody in a paper mill town wondering exactly what that aroma is but uh peter are you did you also uh stay out late night like rob debauching yourself so you're going to be uh no i come by my talks honestly this morning uh no no

no actually i had an early evening of it and i carved out a little time to spend with our youngest letting her watch any movie she wanted well she knows there's and we ended up watching a scooby-doo and i could really hardly believe how stupid it was. Was this the animated one or the live action one? No, it was the live action one. I hadn't seen them try Scooby in live action. Anyway,

but she just loved it and I thought to myself, yet another, speaking of Upturned, upstanding example of the product of Rob Long's industry. Oh, we're going to get into that now? Enriching America. No, what I want to know is what was your late night for?

I have a question. One is Rob Long's late night and the other is James Lilac's trip to Massachusetts. I want to hear about both. I'm going to answer the question you didn't ask. There was a member feed post called Coursing the Culture One Sitcom at a Time, and I've been meaning to write a response to that. I am going to do that, but I'm going to do it on the member post because I feel like – I thought it was a really good post by the way, and I should say that at the top. It was very well put together. I liked the conversation that ensued. I just didn't have time to join in. I kind of didn't

want to join in when it was going on because I kind of felt like that might unfairly Your big footing in it is what you mean. Yeah, a little bit. I fairly stopped the conversation so now I want to restart it again. I want to do it on the member feed because I feel like that's

kind of in the family and then if we want to move it over we can move it over. We should have a little ricochet conversation. So my late night was – speaking of coursing the culture, I took – I have a couple of my colleagues and I went out and had a little – we wrapped our season last week. And so we went out and had a little celebratory dinner at a little place around the corner from my house and then ended the evening, um, in my home smoking cigars till late in the night and telling more stories. So, um, so that's why, that's why I have a scratchy throat.

Got it. You, you, you, you, you, you, you,

you've, you've wrapped it. Now what do you do? Now do you move on? Well, I wrapped it, but I, I wrapped one and I'm now in pre-production for this,

uh, for this other project I'm doing for FX that, uh, so I'm in casting for something else and I'll be, I got, we got a couple, bunch of scripts to write for that, so. Casting? Casting? Have you ever seen me in right profile?

Casting, Robert? Are you casting? I've seen you in all your profiles and I just, I just, there's nothing in this particular project that suits you. But I do have all of your – I do have your headshot on file. And we love your work.

You have a stillness. Quiet dignity. Speaking of quiet dignity, did anybody see that excruciating wiener presser a couple of days ago? And this is one of the few times, as I noted on Twitter, that you can use the phrase excruciating wiener presser in people for days ago and and this is one of the few times as i noted on twitter that you can use the phrase excruciating wiener presser and people for once you know what you're talking about um i that was mortifying for a variety of reasons one of which is you you listen to this man and you realize that he is missing both intellectual acumen and charisma he's a he's a he's a dry banal babbling. And yet he seemed to have been a hair's breadth or the breadth of something else from the mayoralty of one of the greatest cities in America. I don't understand that at all.

And the second more defying thing was the performance of his wife, who he put that through. Andrew McCarthy over at National Review. Any sympathy you have for her may dry up quite quickly as you realize that perhaps she is not exactly the put-upon, noble, bearing-under-all-circumstances wife, political wife that she seems to have made out to be. What a peculiar couple, and what an odd scene. Peter, I'll ask you, since I know how much you love to talk about people sending that kind of pictures and that kind of behavior, what was your take on this and its meaning towards American politics? I just – well, I'm with you.

I just could hardly believe – it doesn't surprise – I mean in New York, there's always one freak show or another going on. It's a great big boisterous crazy city. But that he was leading in the polls just shook me. Everybody knows who he is and what he is at this point. And he was still leading in the polls. I just could hardly believe that. The sheer, I don't know. To tell you the truth, I couldn't listen to it or watch it.

Peggy Noonan wrote a column about this, not about Wiener, but about the general notion I could – to tell you the truth, I couldn't listen to it or watch it. Peggy Noonan wrote a column about this, not about Wiener, but about the general notion of what you ought to do after you disgrace yourself in public maybe two weeks ago. It's a story we all know. Profumo, right. John Profumo, exactly. And it's worth reminding ourselves. John Profumo, what was the year? Late 50s, early 60s, engaged in a sex scandal, young call girl in Britain. He was a member of parliament. And at the same time that he was

employing her services, a high-ranking military attache to the Soviet embassy was employing her services. Obvious potential there for spying, transferring information. He was questioned about it. It does, doesn't it? He was questioned about it. It seems so tame now. It does, doesn't it? He was questioned about it in the House, House of Commons, and he lied about it. He was startled, he panicked, and he lied. And within, I believe, it was just a couple of weeks, he reversed himself, he told the truth, he resigned, and he spent the rest of his life doing good works for charities for poor people in East London. He simply disappeared and did the equivalent, the modern-day equivalent of living the rest of his life in a monastery, eating bread and drinking water.

And at Margaret Thatcher's 80th birthday party, I believe, he was known. People still knew of him. And Margaret Thatcher invited 80th birthday party, I believe, he was known. People still knew of him. And Margaret Thatcher invited him to her birthday party. Now he was an old man and seated him next to the queen after decades of self-effacing service. It is in our culture in which Bill Clinton is held up as the very picture of charming Bon Ami, the elegant man about town, and Anthony Weiner can take the lead in the New York mayoral race. It's just inconceivable. And Spitzer rehabilitates himself too to answer the question that nobody was asking. What was the woman's name, the escort?

Keeler? Something Keeler, yes. I want to say Edith Keeler. Christine. Christine. I'm not sure if it's Christine. Edith Keeler was Joan Collins' character in a Star Trek episode. Rob, do you find this as symptomatic of our complete and utter moral collapse or being the jaded California that you are, is this sort of a realignment to the new norm of morality?

No. Well, I mean, I don't know. He hasn't won yet. He's got name recognition, so I understand why he's ahead in New York I suppose. I find it astonishing – I mean first of all, I find it astonishing that New Yorkers don't have a colorful functionary running ahead of him. That's what they've had for years for their mayor. I guess the Onion headline is what I find the most interesting, which is the – when he – the second press conference, he – I forget the actual headline, was sort of like he was not the most humiliated and embarrassed person on the dais. That was obviously Huma or whatever her name is, although there's some dispute about that I guess. But how – what would you be embarrassed about in 2013?

What should – what is there left to be embarrassed about? I mean, I mean, I guess I'm thinking I'm thinking. Yeah, that's right. It's like I don't really know any question. He can't be embarrassed by this again. Right. Because he's already done it. So this is just. Yeah, I'm doing that thing again. I used to do. I mean – No, you're right. If he was sending it to minors, that would just be an extension, so to speak, of what he'd done before. Well, yes, it would, but he said that there was something else out there.

So he warned everybody. I love that. I love giving himself blanket absolution in the future for what he does. That's a great trick. You get caught over the body, draining the blood the last few ounces, and then after you've admitted to it, you say, I'm not saying that there's not more bodies out there. So don't come looking at me when they go in the crawl space and they find nine of them covered with blood. But also remember, for these guys, this is their public service. They think they're so perverted.

I mean, the most perverted thing that Anthony Weiner does isn't the sending of the photographs. It's the thinking that he's doing good works by running for office. That's the creepiest thing he does. All normal people see that as simply an ego-driven power grab for some kind of creepy guy who doesn't have a real job no he's doing this because he has a vision for the future of new york and its middle class he speaks yes we know right which which it is but he speaks frequently of this and somewhere though in the back of his mind there has to be the recognition in this man that there's absolutely nothing else in the world that he can really do that all he can do is to go someplace and push buttons and spend other

people's money uh what skill set does he have exactly other than chest waxing and sexing to anonymous – oh, lord. No, I'm sorry. I don't buy – there's a story that we were linked to I think on the site that a lot of New York women are just baffled at Newman's loyalty. I think she just wants to be in Gracie Mansion. I think that's all there is to it. She wants the power and the position. God, that sounds like the worst job ever. But I just think that she wants to be the mayor's wife.

I think that's all there is to it. It's a fine, select club, and I think she wants to be one of its members and known as such. But what do I know? Let's talk to a New Yorker. If only we had a New Yorker handy. Hey, wait, we do. Andrew Klavan, award-winning author, screenwriter, media commentator. He's the author of such internationally best-selling novels as True Crime,

which was filmed by that Clint Eastwood fellow. Great job there. And Don't Say a Word, a film starring Michael Douglas. He's been nominated for the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award five times, and he's won it twice, and he had to win it five times more. His latest book is a killer in the wind. We welcome back to the podcast our old friend Drew Klavan. Hey, Drew, how you doing? Hey, James. It's good to talk to you.

You're on with Rob and Peter, of course. We were talking all things Wiener-esque and his various peccadillos. I really don't want to think about Wiener's peccadillos, but you wrote a little elsewhere that... Well, give us your whole take on what Wiener Spitzer

means to American culture at this point. Well, first of all, I just want to say that in tribute to Wiener Spitzer means to American culture at this point. Well, first of all, I just want to say that in tribute to Wiener, I'm doing this entire podcast naked. And in tribute to Eliot Spitzer, I'm charging you $4,000 an hour. So that's a long podcast. You know, I'm always very, very slow to condemn people for their sexual peccadillos, because everybody's got something. I mean, we don't want to bother Rob about what he does. Nobody gets hurt but the farm animals. And you know

what? I eat them later. So it's okay. But however, it does seem that when you're picking your leaders, I don't feel like these guys that Spitzer and Wiener have to be hounded forever for what they did. And I hope they can go on and live their lives and thrive when you're picking the people to lead New York, you know, to be the guys who it's representative government when you're picking people to represent you. Do you really want a couple of narcissistic perverts whose perversions actually do say something about their characters. I mean,

it really does take a special kind of person to continually take pictures of his, of his shorts and send them to women over the public mails. You know, I mean, it's just, it just tells you something about it. And in Wiener's case, I have to admit, I have to admit, I hold a special animus toward the guy, uh, for his slandering of Andrew Breitbart. When Breitbart. Right. That's right. That's right. Yeah.

When he first exposed him for exposing him, you know, Wiener was like, oh, this Breitbart character, this lying Breitbart, you know, and of course, the mainstream media piled right on. And Breitbart was right in every particular as Breitbart had a habit of being. And so I just find this guy such a weasel, you know, such a weasel. I mean, these Democrats and their women, they accuse conservatives of waging a war on women. But I really think that the Democrat slogan from now on should be, women, we treat you like crap, but at least you can kill your unborn children.

You know, I mean, what are they offering women? This is a little too long for a bumper sticker, but you're a wordsmith. You're a wordsmith. I mean, this is what it comes to for Democrat women is sitting there nodding like Tammy Wynette and smiling and hoping they can get into a position of power by being a betrayed woman. And, you know, it really is. It really is a leftist point of view that women are victims. Black people are thugs. When they talk about black people, they never talk about the business owner, the honest guy who's getting mugged by thugs. They always talk about the rapper or the thuggish young man who is the worst representative of those people.

And I think they do the same thing with women, the women they hold up to us, the Hillary's, and now the whatever her name is, Hummus or whatever. Maybe that's a bean thing. But, you know, these are always women who are being betrayed and kicked to the curb, and that they rise in the Democrat Party on that image, on the image of betrayal. Whereas the Sarah Palins, the women who make it on their own, who become successful on their own and who represent strength and self-actualization, they're just absolutely excoriated by the left. So I just think this is something that women ought to be thinking about. This is not just, you know, you keep hearing, I keep hearing Democrat defenders of these people saying, well, all men cheat and all men are like this and women just have to deal with it.

It's just not true. I mean, we have it going on out here in California in the San Diego mayor has. Right. Right. You know, he has a habit of putting women in headlocks and saying, I love you, which always works. I try that. Yeah. That's never failed for me. And there are women coming out and defending him. Well, he's an older guy, so he's kind of from that Mad Men era. I've never seen anyone do that on Mad Men. You forgot that scene, right, where he wraps the girl in a headlock. And I really do think this is degrading.

I mean, I hate to sound like a feminist because I'm not a feminist, but I feel it is degrading to people to drag them out in the public square like this with your betrayals and your and your it's weird. It's not just like cheating on your wife. It's not just falling in love with some other woman. It's this complete narcissism, this complete focus really on yourself. And I just think New York can do better. I hope New York can do better. Well, also, you have to really, it's the total immersion of the self in politics. When you're sexting with somebody who says to you, your speech is on the house floor about health care really made me hot. If somebody

is getting sexually aroused by a speech that you make about the move to socialized medicine, then we're talking people who really have taken that personal is the political and the political is the personal a bit too far. There's no room in these people's lives for anything that isn't completely

occupied by the helium of their politics. It's lefty girls are easy. You know, they don't want a man to take care of them. They want the man to take care of them. And I really do think this is a situation in which you throw nature out the door and it comes back in through the window. It's this idea that the family, old family structure was no good because women were taken care of by men.

But you've got to pay for our health care because we can't do it ourselves. You've got to pay for our birth control because we can't do it ourselves. It's a very, very strange philosophy, and this repeated display, this repeated show of women standing there nodding at their pervert husbands as they're humiliated in public. It's weird. What I don't understand is that we were – just before you got on there, Drew, we were talking about, I understand Hillary Clinton. I understand

wanting to be first lady and have the ambitions of your own, and Hillary Clinton certainly had them. She was senator from New York, and now she's the secretary of state, and she's got presidential ambitions of her own. Huma Abedin isn't going to be much i mean she's a functionary well what what on earth what's the upside for this woman well i don't even understand why this is well i suppose being first lady of new york is something i mean you get the grace really because i guess i don't know i mean well you're the one without you're you're the one who's not wearing pants would you be first lady of new york i i guess uh you know i guess that's what it is and it's you don't want to uh

you don't want to be the the woman who like walked out on this guy uh you don't want to be the one who's sort of turned away and then he becomes mayor uh you're and you're nobody. I don't know. I mean, look at what what Republican woman has risen to power on this kind of publicity. You know, you talk about Hillary Clinton and she has had a distinguished career on paper, though she hasn't accomplished very much. And she got that career basically by lying to the public about this vast right wing conspiracy and protecting her husband. And I think that that's a very, very strange path to power. And when you see the kind of people like the governor of Arizona, the kind of women who have risen on the right, they really are much more self-actualized and much more, you know, independent.

And it's it's just a fascinating thing, I think, repeatedly true on the left, that politics is everything. Politics, you know, winning more power for the state is everything. And it really doesn't matter how individuals are treated. And, you know, I hate to make it that serious when you've got a guy named Wiener, you know, sexing his junk. But, but I mean, it does come down to that. It does come down to you sitting there going like, in what world is this OK? In what world is it? Do you want the mayor to be this guy? And on top of everything else, I just want to add that Anthony Weiner looks like a turtle who has been pulled out of his shell.

And I think that alone could disqualify him as the mayor of New York. Well, wait. OK, so. All right. Fine. So you went you went there. Actually, before you go on, Rob, he reminds me of Horshack from

Welcome Back, Cotter, actually, after some human growth hormone has been injected. He passed away, by the way. Anyway, Rob, you were saying. No, no, let James just dangle out there with that one don't use the word dangle when we're talking about this guy rob you were saying let me ask you drew though because you know we uh uh you and i have talked a lot about the the uh you know what's happening in the world

right right is it is it possible that we're entering the new era of unembarrassability? I mean what we're saying is his – Elliot Spitzer's crime – no, no, no. I'm sorry. Anthony Weiner's crime is that he is not appropriately embarrassed by his ridiculous behavior, right? Well, I suppose. I mean it is sort of intrusive. Some of the stuff he was doing with some of these girls pretty young, I mean, uh, underage. No, you know, I don't think that's his crime. I think his crime is his betrayal of his wife,

uh, his betrayal of his word, uh, his life. This is the thing that has made sex so complicated. I mean, I think this is what you're getting at. I mean, since the advent of birth control, since the advent of, you know, reasonable birth control, you don't have the old fallbacks of a kind of morality based on practicality. Don't sleep around because you get pregnant and there's no one to, you know, there's no one to pay for that baby. And then everybody's stuck and it's awful. You know, you might get a disease. With the advent of penicillin and the advent of birth control, a lot of those practical arguments for morality disappeared. And that's the world we've inherited and that's the world we're living in.

So you start to have to look at these things almost from a spiritual point of view. I mean, what is this guy doing in his relationship with his wife, in his relationship with the public? And he's lying. He's betraying. You know, he's demonstrating a kind of narcissism that really does go beyond any hope that you're electing a guy who's going to care about New York rather than what's in his shorts. You know, and I think that that's, you know, that's really how you have to start to parse

this stuff. You look at a Mark Sanford and you think like, well, he only cheated on his wife. I mean, it's like the way these guys behave. That's not so bad. But this guy is really perverse because you don't have any more. You don't have any more of the immediate practical reality that sexual morality used to carry with it. You don't have the unwanted child. You don't have the unwanted child. You don't have the disease or

whatever, you know. So I think you're right in some ways that these guys can brass it out. If Anthony Weiner can just say, you know, don't judge me. My wife forgives me. You should forgive me too. And if New Yorkers can be played for their sophistication and their pride in their sophistication, their pride in their tolerance, he may make it. He may be the next mayor of New York and God help him then. Yeah, but here's the pushback, right? I'm not advocating this. I'm just sort of suggesting it. He should be embarrassed.

He's not embarrassed. This is like creepy personal behavior. I have no doubt that Mike Bloomberg does a lot of creepy stuff, that he doesn't even know how to work the iPhone. But if somebody explained to Bloomberg how to take a selfie, he'd do it. Geraldo took a weird

creepy selfie last weekend. We all saw that if you were following on Twitter. No, no, no. He didn't. Yeah, he did. Of his face, of his pictorial region. You just Google it, James. I'm not helping you out with this one. All right, here we go.

But he did, okay? So this is me just the devil's advocate in many ways literally in this case. Okay, and I want to push you back. But this is public service. He's in public service to be in public service. It's OK to have a few private peccadilloes. He's trying to be he's going to be a great mayor. And he's all he's trying to do is is is serve the public.

Well, why are we going to hold this against him? Right. You know, you mean that's the argument yeah for him uh you know i i have to say that i think that you you have to deal with a certain idea of representative government the guy is representing the city of new york the guy's representing the people of new york uh i i'm not sure that you want that that's the guy you want and the question comes to mind is there nobody who can do the job? I mean, New York is a hard job. It really is. It's probably the hardest political job in the country, second only to the presidency.

Is there no one else who can do it better? Is there really no one else? Okay. Hey, Drew, Peter here. This leads me to you. You grew up in New York. No matter how long you live in California, I've observed of people who grew up in the – I grew up upstate. They never really leave New York.

You, you've never left – you write for City Journal. You're writing about New York, talking about New York. You're traveling to New York. You have – your daughter was teaching in New York for a time. OK. So here's the question. Two questions actually. Actually, I would put it to you that although Rob just took a couple of shots at him and although we all are annoyed about the nanny state aspects of his mayoralty banning supersized. I just I just I just stumbled across the selfie.

The that Michael Bloomberg has actually been a pretty darned good mayor of New York City. The economy has grown. The city has been safe. He's backed up Ray Kelly in the stop and frisk. Crime is way down. When the bombers hit, they hit Boston, not New York. Michael Bloomberg hasn't added a single line item of any significance to the budget. So question number one, will you buy that? And question number two, all that said, isn't it a terrible failing of his perhaps, but certainly for the city of New York, that absent a man worth 30 or $40 billion who's doing it because he can't be bought and simply wants to, absent that kind of extremely unusual figure, there is just no politics in New York other than the politics of lunatics and crazy people.

Drew? All right. I would like to put forward the following pattern that I have noticed in free nations, all right? In free nations, leftist politics, the politics of take everybody else's money and give it to as many people as possible in order to buy yourself power, continues and continues until it drives a nation or a municipality or a polis into complete disaster. Then along, if you're lucky, if you're very lucky and God is smiling on you, along comes a sheriff who runs these bad guys out of town, turns the ship of state around, and suddenly the sun is shining. No one can understand it, the New York Times is absolutely baffled, you know, what on earth has happened?

And everything is fixed after that guy. So obviously the examples I'm thinking of, you can think of Britain before Thatcher, you can think of America before Reagan, and most importantly, you can think of New York when I lived in it, when you could not walk down the street to buy a pack of gum without fearing for your life in some of the most, now whatever some of the most safe areas of the city. New York before Giuliani. New York Giuliani was a cesspool.

And, you know, Mayor Koch was not a bad mayor, but he didn't really do enough to clean it up. It was Giuliani who came in with his police chiefs. Right. He cleaned up the city. After that happens, after the Thatcher, after the Reagan, after the Giuliani cleans up the mess that the left has made, in comes a caretaker, a Bill Clinton, a John Major, a Bloomberg, who lives off the credit that those guys have created. That right- wing governance creates such prosperity, such goodness, such peace that some clown like Bloomberg or Clinton or John Major

can sort of, you know, coast along on it, living off that prosperity. You know, what did Bloomberg, what did Clinton ever do? Clinton never did anything. You cannot think of an achievement. He stayed out of the way. He stayed out of the way, stayed out of the way. And Bloomberg, except for telling people what kind of muffins they can eat, because he's some kind of narcissistic nutcase, except for doing that, has largely stayed out of the way of Giuliani's achievements. After that guy, Peter, after that guy comes in, he then, the Clintons and the Bloombergs reconstitute some kind of respect for the leftist destroyers, the roaches, the locusts who come in and eat all this stuff. And then chaos has come again. Then you get Obama.

Then you get whoever the next mayor of New York is going to be because whoever he's going to be, looking at the array of clowns out there, whoever he's going to be, you can bet he's going to be one of these locusts who comes in and tears up the crops that Giuliani planted and that Bloomberg didn't destroy. So that's what you see happening. I think it's a pattern. I don't think, I don't know whether it's breakable or not. I just see it happening again and again. Yes, well, you know, Drew,

when you speak of the old New York, I remember it too. I remember going to Herald Square where they had the Martinique and the McAlpin. The Martinique was a welfare hotel. And you could feel the dysfunction, the violence, and the unhappiness emanating from the building in great spiky waves. And the dirt in the streets. I remember going to Chalk Full of Nuts Coffee. And I was happy because as a Midwestern boy, I'd heard the jingle.

I knew this was an iconic brand for New York City. Better coffee, Rockefeller can't buy it. until, of course, the Rockefellers complain. And then it was better coffee. Millionaires can't buy it. And I sat down and I had my first cup and I had it regular, which meant it had milk in it, which I didn't really want. But I'm not going to complain. And, of course, the lady brings it over with her hands shaking and half of it's in the saucer. And she gives it to me and it's kind of cold.

And I drink it and I ask for a refill. And she looks at me like I'm from another planet, which I am, of course, being from Minnesota. And then she gave me another cup of essentially institutional roast coffee, and there I was having my quintessential New York experience, and the disappointment was great and grave and heavy. But to this day, sometimes I will look at a chock full of nuts and think, you know what? I might give that another try. But then I think, no, I want that new boutique brand, But that shade grown or that fair trade grown or all these other coffees, they all have to be better than that stuff that I get at the big chain, which is just burnt.

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LA, Los Angeles Roaster. Here's what they do. You subscribe, you sign up, and they roast the coffee and within 24 hours, within 24 hours, it's at your door. It's not one of these places where they roast it here and ship it across the country and maybe a month, maybe three later, they grind it up and serve it to you.

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And that's what Tonks serves up. Now, the people that I've talked to who've tried this also say that they like the fact that it's not one of those things that's going to make you feel like, you know, you're licking the wall of a Turkish prison. It's not that dark and acidic and mean. It's really just a good cup of coffee.

Now, it's subscription only, but they're offering a free sample to our listeners. Now, if you use the URL tonks.org slash ricochet, how hard is that? Tonks, T-O-N-X dot org slash ricochet. Get some for yourself. Try it for yourself. Send it to someone you know who loves good coffee. Tonks dot org slash ricochet. And this is the point, of course, where we ask Peter and Rob try it for yourself send it to someone you know who loves good coffee tongs.org slash ricochet and this is the point of course where we ask Peter and Rob to suggest an audio book based on coffee no wait a minute

I want to say that tongs coffee is so delicious I'm enjoying it right now that as I was enjoying it I was enjoying your segue and I was enjoying it so much that I didn't even want to interrupt your segue which by the way was pretty masterful it was the best segue I've ever heard in my entire life. I have a cup of Tonks right here, and I'm here to tell you that perhaps the quality of the segue was enhanced by the aesthetic

lift that you get from this. I am having it in a Fiesta cup because coffee this fine deserves to be had in classic American drinkware and a green Fiesta cup, the lengths of which Agent Dunning hit on an episode of Fringe last night, it's just exquisite. And so that's how I recommend that you drink your coffee. It's kind of a great idea too. Like the idea of like you drink – you basically drink the same amount of coffee all the time,

right? Right. I mean I don't go through periods where my coffee intake is pretty regular. And they sort of calibrate that. And so you never have to go get coffee. They just send it to you, which is brilliant. And it's good coffee. And it comes in a vacuum sealed thing

and it smells good. Yes, and also it's nicely designed. The package, everything about it just says you're going to get good coffee. But you know what? It's not pretentious. And here's the thing before we go to our next guest that I got to say. We'll be talking about Tonks in the future, and I'll be drinking it happily on the show.

It doesn't have that aura of you are a foodie, a precious foodie. I mean, it just – you know what I mean? That sort of irritating – what's the word I'm looking for? Insufferably pretentious feel that you get sometimes with boutique items. It's just – it's guys who love coffee making coffee for people who love coffee. So that's talks, talks.org slash ricochet. Get your free sample.

You know, I believe that we still have drew with us. Drew, you there. I'm still here. Oh, Grant, listen,

um, stay where you are because, well, this will be the greatest assemblage of writers we've had in the podcast for some time, because in addition to drew Clavin and, and Peter Robinson is working on a book and Rob long, who's written books. bring in cj box new york times best-selling author of 15

novels his latest book is the highway and he's familiar of course to all our ricochet friends and members cj welcome back to the podcast well thank you very much i'm pretty excited about this now um we've all been talking before you got here about the next book that we have and how brilliant it's going to be and how it's going to just knock it out of the park. And we've been discussing something that our listeners love, which is our individual working habits. Myself, it's quill and parchment. You, how do you work? I'm not quill and parchment. No, I just go to work every morning. I work, do like 1,500 words a day, try to. Keep at it. I'm just about in the last 80 pages of the book that will come out next March.

And I've got a new one called The Highway coming out next Tuesday, actually. Boy, do I hate you, CJ. This is Peter Robinson. actually boy do i hate you cj this is peter robertson you know a writer a writer who's not only not tortured but just matter of fact i just go to work and i just write every day and i produce one bestseller after another and it's just little oh cj well it's tougher this week though because we've got cheyenne frontier days going on here in Wyoming and I'm involved with the rodeo and and stayed up last night way too late having a drinking contest how are you involved with the rodeo um I was a volunteer the whole whole thing it's the largest outdoor rodeo in in the world and uh it's got

2,000 volunteers and I was one of them. And I'm still a volunteer. I was on the board of directors for eight years, and I'm still – I don't have a job anymore. I used to run shoot number two with all the bucking events. CJ, just stop right there because I would like now to ask Drew Claven to defend himself because Drew writes novels about America, and yet he lives in Montecito, California. How can you, how can you even, how can you permit yourself to be on the same podcast with a man who runs shoot number two, Drew? Well, you know, it's kind of, it's kind of like that picture of the earth taken from the moon. You know, you step back far enough, you get a bigger view. So when from Montecito, I can see the entire country from a distance. It's actually quite a good picture.

You can see the whole country in your glass of sherry. Exactly. The reflection of it. It's a beautiful, beautiful thing. So, CJ, let's get the obvious stuff done here. Okay. Liz Cheney or Mike Enzi? Mike Enzi is running for his third term. As far as I can tell,

I don't live in Wyoming. You do. But as far as I can tell, Mike Enzi is a thoroughly conservative, effective senator who is also a good human being. And suddenly, Liz Cheney, vice president's daughter, who's bought a place in Jackson Hole, so I guess she's now formally speaking a resident Wyoming, has announced that she's going to run against him in the primary. And CJ is going to tell us whom we should support. Well, first of all, Jackson Hole is not Wyoming. Even as Montecito, it's not America. Go ahead.

Right. I mentioned in the post I wrote on Ricochet that I think Liz Cheney deliberately did not show the Tetons in her video announcement because that would have instantly turned off everybody in Wyoming. But I think we've – two ways to look at it. One is I think we've got a – we're going to win either way. It's two very conservative candidates. This is a very conservative state. But it is unusual. I can't recall ever in my lifetime somebody taking on an incumbent from the same party. And in Wyoming, there's only really Republicans. So that's unusual. And Mike Enzi is well-liked. He's a hard worker.

He comes home every weekend. He does town halls and listening tours, as he calls them, around the state, even when he doesn't need to. He's very accessible. You know, I'll look up and just see him in a room, any kind of event that's going on. As far as, you know, being in touch with people and voters, no one can accuse him of being out of touch. I can't see how unless there's some kind of weird stumble where he wouldn't probably just win re-election very easily in Wyoming.

Oh, so is that what you're sensing from folks or what you're hearing at the rodeo? I mean, I just looked at it and thought to myself, what is Liz Cheney's argument? I mean she's obviously highly intelligent, very articulate. You'd love to see her in the Senate. But what's her argument that she's better than Mike Enzi or that Mike Enzi has in any way failed the people of Wyoming or the people of the United States? And from this distance in California, I don't see that she's got an argument. But what do I know?

Has she got an argument in Wyoming? I don't think so. I mean, I think everybody likes her. Everybody loves her father here. You know, I love seeing her on Fox News or, you know, taking it to whoever's on the panel. She's great. She's a great communicator. But it's hard for her to have a case, I think, in this case. Mike, I guess the only thing, and she's kind of dancing around it a little bit and making suggestions that he's just

simply a go-along, get-along kind of guy who is not high profile. Very true. But at the same time, if you talk to an average voter here, they probably had contact with Mike Enzi and no one has had contact or very few have had contact with Liz Cheney until recently. The population is small enough. Everybody has shaken mike enzi's hand at least twice they'd be voting against a friend that's that's how it is looked at um you know it is very personal here i mean i mean i think probably people in a lot of states say that but yeah there's only there's less than 600 000 people you know everybody right um if you don't know somebody you know somebody who knows that person. And it's very,

very close. And strangely enough, this state will elect Democratic governors and has, and they're very well loved, but they won't send those governors to Washington, no matter, you know, even if they, they know better. But no, it's very personal. I mean I was – I've hunted with Mike Enzi, fished with him. And that's the kind of relationship that most people have here. OK. So CJ, let's get right down to it. The truth is he's bought your books in bulk. That's right. He bought my – he has read every single book I've written and he sends me a handwritten book report.

Are you serious? I'm serious. I told his staff that. They couldn't believe it. The most recent one, Breaking Point, that came out in March is about Joe Pickett versus the EPA. And he bought 47 copies of it and gave one to every Republican senator. And many of them have read these books and have now read a bunch of them from what I understand. See, now, if Anthony Weiner just started buying Drew Clavin's novels at home,

please, he did. You could tell he did. You can see that. Have you read any drew's books um this is this is great you could actually influence legislation in the future by drop by dropping in little clues and later having the final mystery be resolved as the fourth codicil to the third paragraph of the law which then uh would uh the uh mr enzi would put in um so hello drew by the way way. How are you? Hey, I'm good. How are you doing, CJ? It's good to hear from you. Hey, do you guys know each other?

I mean, do you guys meet at, like, novelist retreats? We have, in fact. And I was gravitated directly to CJ because he was wearing a cowboy hat, which was kind of like the secret handshake at these things, you know? But nothing else. That was the other part. Yeah, well, that's normal. which was kind of like the secret handshake at these things. Is it just you two in a corner and the rest of them over there doing the Occupy crowd? How does that work? I remember when we met the first time. It was in New York at the Edgar Awards, I think.

There was an after party, and I think we were there with the host, Otto Pinzler. And the three of us decided we were the only conservatives in the room. And we just kind of huddled to the corner and enjoyed that. We're the only ones who don't drop our voices when we speak. There are a bunch of others out there, but they all suddenly whisper when they're talking about these things. But isn't the detective novel, the mystery novel, essentially a conservative form? I mean, in the end, it has to have a fairly black and white morality. It has to have justice and often involves somebody going outside of the law to do something right instead of staying within the parameters of that described by the liberal state.

Shouldn't all mystery writers themselves be, in the end, conservative? You know, all storytellers should be conservative, but the genius of the left is to use essentially conservative forms to sell nonsense, to sell their silly ideas. So what they'll do is where the hero's journey is usually a single guy standing up against the collective. What they'll do is they'll make the collective business, and the guy works for the government. And so they've learned to twist it all around. But I think storytelling in and of itself, and the detective story is, in some ways, one of the basic building blocks of storytelling. I think storytelling is conservative down to the ground. The problem is that most people who write detective novels don't make any money at it,

so it's not a real job. Question for both of you, for Drew and CJ as novelists. I was just talking about this the other day with a friend. I read Christopher Hitchens before he died. This goes back three, four, five years. Wrote a rave review of the novels of Philip Pullman. Philip Pullman is an Englishman who's written a series of novels for children which were intended quite explicitly, he says this in interviews, as an atheist answer to C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia.

I've read them. I've read them. Okay. So, all right. So let me just set it up for, and then my question is obvious, which is, do they work? I will say that I made my way through his famous trilogy, His Dark Materials, and there's a lot of fascinating stuff and interesting care, but somehow or other it doesn't work because there's no clear,

without God you can't have a good and evil, and without good and evil you can't have drama, is sort of my ignorant layman's take. Drew? Yes, I think what happens is the first book works quite well, and then as the trilogy unfolds it becomes very didactic and very silly and the climax, the third book is real, is just bad. It's just not very good and it's not very good because in fact even though I believe

you can tell an atheist story, what you can't do is preach atheism and make it sing and I think that that's the problem. It really doesn't sing at the end and his theoretically triumphant ending is silly and forced and yeah it fails because of its philosophy but unfortunately I think what it really does is it fails because he tries

to stuff his philosophy down your throat and I think if you had done that with religion it might also have failed they made a movie of it hoping that it would be the next Narnia, and it choked. That was a terrible bomb, yeah. CJ, have you read any of this stuff by this man Pullman?

I have not read him, but I do think along the same lines, I agree with Drew. I think any writer who sets an agenda for a novel, I think generally it fails. I mean, I don't write conservative novels. I write novels set in a place with a set of circumstances, and I trust the reader to come down where they may by basically presenting the facts and the arguments and not trying to write an agenda kind of book. And agenda books, as soon as I hit that as a reader, I quit. And as a writer, I try to avoid that because I think the story itself will be – will have conservative tones to it without doing – without preaching. The last book I wrote, I made the EPA the bad guys.

But it was a very personal kind of story as opposed to an institutional one, and I think it worked for that too, is that if you do a good agenda story, like 1984 is an example, the agenda simply becomes metaphorical and it applies to anything. I mean, I think a leftist can call down a big brother just as easily as a right winger. And I think that that's what happens. It just becomes a generalization about oppression. But again, the left is very good at excluding any sense that the left could be the oppressor. They try very hard to keep it out of Hollywood. Sometimes they fail, but they try very hard to keep it out of publishing too. And so if you've made the EPA your villain, you've done – I think you've done a good thing. I think just – Right. It's a the minute you add a message, it just takes the humor away. It takes the story.

It takes you right out of the story. Although that said, we did do one thing where we have a character who gets audited by the IRS and we start the scene with a close-up in the IRS auditor's office of a – right above his desk is a picture of barack obama and the next to the irs commissioner and that photograph is blank um we left that i gotta jump off i'm sorry but it's been uh it's been great talking to you i hope we can do it again drew we'll talk to you soon see you soon and i i have to agree the uh the irs is a timeless villain i was uh watching an old television show in the berkshires um week, a show that hasn't been seen since it was aired in 1956, 57. And the plot revolved around a surprise audit. I hear you looking at something.

You're thinking, what did the IRS have back then? What they had then is what they have now. And that is fear, the extraction of great sums of money and the incarceration that stands behind their – I mean so that's a fairly, fairly constant villain and usually played for laughs because of the uncomfortableness and the sweatiness of the person who's being – but when you do the EPA, you open people's eyes to things. You're absolutely right, CJ. That's something that is not seen as – but they are the ones who keep our water clean. They are the ones who took the particulates out of the air so children needn't have asthma anymore. You know, when I tell people about our simple family business, the gas station goes through with the EPA, how a year's

profit can absolutely evaporate because you didn't build the berm exactly as high as you should to contain all the oil in case of a catastrophic tornado oil spill. The fact that when we go out to fill the trucks, that our trucks are interrogated from satellites, satellites that look down to inspect whether or not a drop of diesel was dumped into this industrial area, which itself comes pre-polluted for your pleasure. What you live under if you are a regulated industry under the EPA is extraordinary. And the idea then that they are this wonderful beneficial organization that has just our lungs and our digestion at the core of their mission. Nonsense.

So, yes, you won't run out of government villains out in that part of the country though, will you? I mean what next might you have? Well, I mean, absolutely you don't. I mean, in this part of the country, and I've written about it on Ricochet, you know, Wyoming is 50% owned by the federal government, one agency or another. You know, states like Nevada are like 80%. The federal government is a part of our lives and has been for years and years and years. And there's a very rough relationship between the private sector and the public sector in states like this that has so much federal ownership. And in effect, you know, our leaders are assigned here or sent here as opposed to elected because they run half of the land.

And so it does create a really contentious kind of view with most people who live here. The square states out in the middle are very, very conservative. It's because they have that daily interaction with the federal government that I think the rest of the country is finding out what that's like now. So yeah, there's never any shortage of villains. Well, there's going to be a shortage of Rob Long in the future though. CJ, you can help us in saying goodbye to Rob. He has to run and he's going to be gone for like a year or something. Rob, what are you? Really? No, that's not even true. I'm just going to, I'm going on the,

I have to take off and I'll be gone for two weeks. But I'll see you, James, on the NRCruise. Absolutely. We've got a night owl to do. We've got a night owl to do. Oh, God. Lord. Hey, CJ, great to talk to you. See you soon. Nice to talk to you. Thank you.

All right, CJ, thank you for joining us in the podcast today. I love the idea of Wyoming being sort of like a Roman province out there that governors are sent to to enrich themselves before they come back to the imperial capital. Get back to that 1500 words per day. 1500 words. What a biker. But they are, of course, marvelous words. And we look forward to reading them collected in your next book. And what's the one coming out on Tuesday? It's called The Highway. It's not a Joe Pickett novel, but it's a standalone, and it's by far the scariest thing I've ever written. Whoa, it's not a Pickett novel. couple of standalones called Cody Hoyt, who is a really kind of off-the-charts bad cop. Oh.

But I love writing that character. And in this one, he's involved once again, but there's some real surprises in it. Can't wait. Because when I mentioned E.Z. Rollins, Walter Mosley would apparently sometimes get tired of writing about his character and then just write about another one who was virtually indistinguishable from the other one. He just dropped, but it was still good. I love Mosley's stuff, except when he got weird and sci-fi and preachy and the rest of it. Don't get weird and sci-fi and preachy, but write whatever you want and we'll read it. CJ Box, thank you for bringing yourself to the podcast today and we'll see you down the road.

Thank you, sir. CJ, take the rest of the day off. Only write 1,200 words. Actually, I'm going to go fly fishing later on today. Oh! Oh, I hate this man. Oh, it's a hard knock life. All right, be off with you.

Go tie your lines and your things. Bye-bye. And incidentally, if any of the books that we've discussed pique your interest, heck, this Pullman character and his golden compass lauded to the sky by Christopher Hitchens, well, you can get that at Audible Podcast. You can. You can get it in an Audible book format that you can take anywhere you want.

It could be synced here, there, whatever device you have through the miracle of the Whispersync technology. If you do not want to read that, however, because you saw the movie and you found the whole thing risable, CJ Box can be found at Audible as well. And you know you can probably find that Drew Clavin there. In addition, everybody who Ricochet loves ends up at Audible, and we love Audible for just that fact. So go to audible.com. What is this again?

You think I'd know after all these years. Audiblepodcast.com slash Ricochet. Audiblepodcast.com slash Ricochet. You can get your free 30-day trial and your free audio book. Peter, you mentioned before that you wanted to know about my trip out east. Yes. I've been writing about this all over the place. Briefly, for those who didn't catch the post earlier on Ricochet,

I'd asked people to discuss lost treasures, somebody whose work that they really admired that had fallen by the wayside. Because, you know, when we look back to an era, the 50s or the 60s, there's always the cliches. There's always the ones that stand out. But alongside every Beatle or Rolling Stone or Lucille Ball or The Honeymooners, there are things that were just as good, if not better. And about nine months or so ago, I found the work of this radio show author named Peg Lynch. And what impressed me about her little domestic sitcoms, very short, 15 minutes, expertly acted, wonderfully plotted, timing and exquisite, was the fact that she performed them as well as wrote them. She really had a skill and she inhabited this character. And true to the demographics,

she outlived nearly everybody who ever played the husband on the show. She rolled this show from Minnesota in the 1940s to the network as Ethel and Albert. And then it was a TV show and then went back to the radio in the fifties as the couple next door and then brought it to monitor and then brought it in syndication, then took it to the BBC. I mean,

she was all over the place with this wonderful idea, essentially just a two person play. Sometimes there'd be other characters. For example, there was an aunt played by Margaret Hamilton in Wicked Witch of the West. I found her work so wonderful, and I looked up on Wikipedia, and what did I find? But nothing, just a very scant entry that said

that this woman who was born around the time of the First World War, that she lives in Massachusetts. I thought, well, maybe nobody updated her profile. But sure enough, she's still with us at the age of 97. So I flew out to see her, thinking that I would do a story about this. We corresponded, and I called her up, and she's just a peppery old lady with a wonderful million anecdotes who happened to have been a television and radio star in the 40s and 50s and was utterly forgotten. So I'm sitting in her kitchen with her daughter

and some other friends, caretakers, and her husband, who's also in his late 90s and still with us, and we're watching these television shows that had never been seen since they were aired because there were no tapes. She has kinescopes and she's transferred them, but these were 1950s shows. Now now you want to talk about coarsening the culture one sitcom at a time here is an example of something that doesn't that that doesn't have to rely on that faux sophistication of of of witting no east smuttiness or or wise cracking children smarter than their parents or or bumbling all of that stuff is yet to come and what you have is just pure character and comedy arising from that it starred guest starred basil rathbone

who appeared in two of the episodes yes and he was she wrote him with this imperious this excruciatingly imperiousness in the first one and then there's this delightful chatty little man uh in the second and i asked how you know i swung over after we'd seen the first one. And then there's this delightful chatty little man in the second. And I asked her, you know, I swung over after we'd seen the first one. And I said, so what was Basil Rathbone like? And she said, he was broke. I looked at him, I saw him. His wife spent everything he made three times over. She had to have marble floors and furs and the rest of it. He'd come to town and I'd take him out to Schraff's. You just don't think of Basil Rathbone, the Sherlock, or the character from Robin Hood in that context. So I'm watching these shows and this stuff is lost,

but it's been saved sitting in boxes in her house in Massachusetts. It's going to the University of Oregon, which is going to digitize and make it available for sale to other folks. And her entire career will, towards the end of the twilight years of her life, be available. She'll see other people able to look at the work that has been inaccessible for half a century. So it was a remarkable trip. And I don't think I've ever done anything like that before in my life and can't again. Those who are curious should go to archive.org and just put in the couple next door.

And before they are removed, which I think is going to happen soon, avail yourself of a couple of clips of this show and you'll see what I mean. So that was my trip. And Peter, what are you going to do during our hiatus here? How are you going to manage yourself? I'm going to try to write 1,500 words a day. How's that? And volunteer at shoot number two. What are you going to do during our hiatus here? What are you going to do? I'm going to try to write 1,500 words a day. How's that? And volunteer at shoot number two.

I'm simply – I'm here in California. I am driving around kids who have this event and that event and have to be driven to their summer jobs. It's summer and I'm writing. But on the other hand, things could be much worse than to be in California in July and August driving kids around and writing. Absolutely. I like the driving kids around part. I find it to be a lot of fun. It used to be my daughter and her friends, they grow up and they become more chatty. And you can chart how the conversation, the topics, the important things change.

And I've just been sitting in that seat listening for 12 years. I'll continue as long as I can. And I've got to take her to something in just a little bit here now, so we've got to get out. But we have to tell you that it's a Ricochet 2.0 update in the works. Peter, you know something about this? I know quite a lot about it. We're looking at designs and moving forward.

But what we don't have is we have a rough schedule. But actually, so we've been talking about writing. As best I can tell, this is all new to me, how you redesign a website and move from one platform to another. All this is new to me. But as best I can tell, it's a lot like writing. You have a rough schedule, but then things happen. A little piece moves a little more quickly than you expected, but then a large piece moves a little bit more slowly. In any event, it is in train.

And I have contempt for all of you, frankly, when you say that it's like writing. Try newspapers. Try deadlines. I have them. They cannot be massaged. I can't go to my publisher and say, I'm sorry, I'm stuck on the last chapter of my Cold War book. Can you give me another week?

Can't be done. There's a news hole that has to be filled. All right, Peter? Got it. Got it. I'm kidding. What I'm not kidding about, however, is the fact that this podcast has been fueled in its entirety by Tonks Coffee.

Now, if you tuned out before when we were talking about it, pay attention because this is important and there's more free stuff. Go to tonks.org slash ricochet. You got the T-O-N-X.org and the link will be embedded in the piece. And get the best coffee on the planet, frankly. Delivered to your house every two weeks at what could possibly be easier. Maybe WhisperSync technology, but you can't deliver coffee over the Wi-Fi. You can deliver books, and that's where Audible.com comes in.

We thank them again. AudiblePodcast.com slash Ricochet for sponsoring the podcast as well. Peter, I'm going to miss you for a fortnight, man. You'll be fine. The Highway, CJ Box. I'm preordering that on Amazon right now. And then Drew's next book. What is Drew's next book?

He told us what the next – these guys who – they write faster than I can read is my problem. So C.J. Box, The Highway. It comes out officially on August 15th. But that's not next Tuesday. He said next – whatever it is. Yeah, the official is always after the reel. And Drew's latest book is Killer in the Wind. Killer in the Wind. Okay, terrific.

And Drew also writes young adult fiction, I believe, so you can get that for your kids as well. Yes. Yes, it's a panoply of extraordinarily talented and prolific individuals who hang around Ricochet. But, of course, everybody who hangs around Ricochet knows that. And they're extraordinary and prolific themselves. We'll see you all in the comments and the member feed. We'll see you at Ricochet.com. And thanks, as ever, for listening to this, the Ricochet podcast.

Enjoy the cruise. Can't wait. Then they said to Craig, let him have it, Chris. They still don't know the day, just what I meant by this. Craig fired the pistol, but was too young to swing. So the police took Bentley Bentley and the very next thing Let him dangle, let him dangle Let him dangle, let him dangle

Bentley had surrendered, he was under arrest Let them dangle. Bentley had surrendered. He was under arrest. When he gave Chris Craig that fatal request. Craig shot Sidney Miles. He took Bentley's word. The prosecution claimed there's the jobs of the murder. Let them dangle.

Let them dangle Let him dangle Let him dangle Let him dangle They say Derek Bentley was easily led Well, what's that to the woman that Sidney Miles wed? No guilty was the verdict, and Craig had shot him dead. The gallows were for Bentley, and still she never said, Let him dang go, let him dang go. Ricochet.

Join the conversation. That is lethal and strange Killing anybody is a terrible crime Why does this bloodthirsty chorus Come round from time to time Let him tango Not many people thought that Bentley would hang But the word never came, the phone never rang. Outside once the prison there was horror and hate.