Show notes
Jonathan Putnam’s Lincoln and Speed series brings to life the young Abe Lincoln, as a freshly minted lawyer in Springfield, Illinois, solving murder and mayhem with the help of his own Dr Watson in the form of his true life best friend Joshua Speed.
Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler and today Jonathan talks about re-creating the coming of age years of one of America’s most revered presidents and why he gave up partnership in a prestigious New York law firm to pursue his writing.
Six things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode:
How he heard about Lincoln’s real life best friend, Joshua Speed
Why many readers like Joshua’s sister Martha best
Where to go to imagine Lincoln’s world
What’s next for Jonathan the writer
The writers he likes to read
What he’d do differently second time around
Where to find Jonathan Putnam:
Website: http://www.jonathanfputnam.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jonathan.putnam.338
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Speed_Lincoln
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jonathanfputnam/
What follows is a “near as” transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions.
Jenny: But now here’s Jonathan. Hello there Jonathan and welcome to the show, it’s great to have you with us…
Jonathan: Well thank you, I’m thrilled to be part of the show.
Jonathan Putnam – author
Jenny: Now beginning at the beginning, I always like to ask this first up: was there a “Once Upon A Time moment when you decided that you wanted to write fiction and, if there was a catalyst for it, what was it?
Jonathan: When I was in college I spent all my time, virtually all my time, writing for the student newspaper and virtually none of my time going to class and I thought at the time I was going to become a writer of some sort. I ended up in Law School, I ended up as a lawyer and 20 years passed and I had a very good career as a lawyer but writing was always the path not taken for me.
And so a number of years ago, I had just turned 40, I had been a lawyer for almost two decades and I asked myself if I was sure I wanted to be lawyer for the next two decades and the answer was I wasn’t sure and there was always this path that I had not taken and that was to become a writer and so I decided that I wanted to give that a try.
Jenny: That’s fantastic. Now how did you move from that general desire to the very specific choice that you’ve taken to write a mystery series based around the young Abe Lincoln? That’s a big jump for anyone to take.
Jonathan: It is. There was definitely an ‘aha’ moment about that. I always loved history and I loved reading historical fiction and they say write what you know and I knew about being a lawyer and being a trial lawyer because that’s what I had done professionally for twenty years. So all the way back in 2006 I was brainstorming with my sister about potential famous lawyers in history that I could base a historical mystery book on and my sister was a very good person to be brainstorming about this with because she is an actual historian.
Her name is Lara Putnam and she is a well-known historian and the Chair of the History Department of University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. Lara and I were brainstorming about possible famous lawyers in history, either American history or world history, and we had gone through a number of them and Abe Lincoln was one obvious possibility. I think most students of history certainly or lawyers would know that he was himself a very prolific lawyer before becoming a politician.
The young Abe Lincoln
And my sister said “Oh, you should make the books told by his best friend” and I had never heard of Joshua Speed who in real life was this well-born son of a wealthy Kentucky plantation owner who had left his family, moved to the frontier and met the young Lincoln in Springfield, Illinois in 1837 and had ended up becoming best friends with the great man when both of them were in their 20’s.
I had never heard of the young Joshua Speed but as soon as I started looking into him I said to myself ‘aha I have my Dr Watson, I have the way to tell this story.’ It was four years from that conversation when I finally got up the nerve to resign from the law partnership that I had worked very hard to achieve, and another five years after that that I actually sold and published my first book. But that was the start of the journey.
Jenny: Yes, that was a God gift, Joshua Speed. He probably wasn’t generally well-known to Americans. Out of interest I’ve looked in the indexes of several of the books that I’ve got here on the period and his name does not register in the indexes.
Jonathan: Yes, he is very obscure historically, undeservedly so in my opinion. I think in real life he had a very profound impact on the young Lincoln and is a pretty interesting historical character, but in a way that was perfect for my purposes because Abraham Lincoln himself is so well known that I didn’t think I could make him the centre of these books.
People wouldn’t believe if I put Lincoln’s life in jeopardy because they know Lincoln doesn’t die in 1837, they know he becomes President, and there are also a whole lot of things that I don’t think readers would accept about Lincoln, especially if I’m writing as I want to, you know, realistic historical fiction, something that gives you a sense of what it would actually have been like to be there. For example, I don’t think readers would accept Lincoln as a lawyer defending an obviously guilty client, because I think people have this image of Lincoln as standing for probity and truth and justice and so I think while he’s a very interesting historical figure and I think also a very interesting figure in historical fiction, I didn’t think that I could make him the centrepiece alone of a historical mystery series.
Joshua Speed, Lincoln’s best friend
Nobody knows who Speed is or where he lives. No-one has a stake in Speed, so by making Speed the character in the foreground and the protagonist I could move Lincoln slightly to the background and make him the secondary character and thereby tell that story in a way that’s interesting and exciting for the readers and makes use of the historical figures without being stuck with them.
Jenny: I gather also in the third book you mention that Lincoln was assailed by depression and you have a scene where Speed hides knives and unloads his gun. That probably is much better told from the point of view of a side kick like Speed than to have Lincoln monologuing on it isn’t it?
Jonathan: Well that’s exactly right, and I think one thing that people enjoy about the books is to get a close look at the young Lincoln and as you say, short of a monologue you couldn’t have Lincoln telling that story. But Speed is the first person narrator of the books so the journey that I am hoping to take readers on is the following: “What would it be like to be the best friend of the most famous person in American history, to be sitting across the table from them at the Globe Tavern, to be sharing a room with them every night, to be sitting in the front row of the courtroom as that person stands up and pleads for the life of his client with the big proviso, the big circumstance that your best friend is the most famous person in American history but no-one knows it yet.
These books are set when they’re both in their twenties, they’re both young men trying to make it on the frontier. We know the history. It’s impossible certainly for an American audience, I would think for any English-speaking audience to look at Abraham Lincoln’s character and not know what’s going to happen to him, but of course the characters don’t know that history, and that’s really crucial to the way I’m telling the story.
As much as possible, I want you to forget about that history at least when I’m telling you the story. Forget about what happened later on in these characters’ lives and just focus in the time period that I’m telling the story. They’re two unmarried men, trying to make their way. They don’t know what the world holds for them. They’re living in a wild and untamed place on the American frontier. There are uncertainties about life around them, there are uncertainties about their own lives, and it’s sort of a moment of becoming, a moment of discovery where they are not bordered with the knowledge of what comes next and as much as possible in telling the stories I try to recreate that sense of potential, that sense of becoming-ness. In some ways it’s sort of a coming of age story that I try to tell.
Perish The Dead, Book 2 in the series
Jenny: When you started did you have a series in mind?
Jonathan: Sort of. I mean I definitely had in mind that I would base the murder mysteries on actual cases that Lincoln handled in his legal career and each of the books is more or less accurately based on actual cases that he handled, some more directly than others. And he was a very prolific lawyer, he handled something like 5,000 cases in his career. So I knew that if I could make the format and the concept work there would then be lots of individual mystery stories that I could tell within that format.
Jenny: Sure. But that leads on to the interesting issue; have you given a thought to how long you’re going to prolong it? You’re going to stick with that ‘while they’re still young’ pre-presidential period are you?
Jonathan: Yes. In real life they lived together for four years from 1837-1841. They shared a room in the second storey – Speed was a shopkeeper in Springfield, he owned a general store, and like many storekeepers he literally lived above his store so there was a narrow second floor room above the Speed store where Speed lived.
Lincoln shared living quarters with Speed for four years, again 1837-1841 and each of my books thus far – the third one, Final Resting Place just came out last month – has been set during this four-year window and I would envision that each of the successive books will be as well. Again, to me it is integral to the concept of what I have is this notion that they’re both young men with their future lives ahead of them and we get to witness them trying to make that future a step at a time.
Jenny: Sure. Because we have the benefit of hindsight I’m curious as to whether – I think you say they did remain good friends for the rest of their lives. How did it go during the Civil War because Speed’s father was a slave owner with about 60 slaves wasn’t he, so what side did Speed take in the Civil War and did they manage to remain friends during that very fraught period?
Lincoln’s Springfield ILL home, where he lived for 17 years, now fully restored and managed by he National Parks Service for public visits.
Jonathan: It’s a good question, and it’s actually a very interesting issue. They lived together for four years, then Lincoln stayed in Springfield and Speed moved back to Louisville, Kentucky where he was from and they each got married shortly thereafter, so they were then married and living about 250 miles apart and obviously there was no telephone, no email, so it was hard to communicate.
You could write letters, and I think at the time at least men were not all that inclined to write personal letters back and forth. They did stay in touch, not that well. They frequently in their letters would argue about slavery, because Lincoln obviously was very much opposed to slavery and was becoming more and more involved in the movement to limit or end slavery and Speed grew up in a slave-owning family, Speed later in his life himself owned slaves. He did not of course when he lived in Illinois with Lincoln because Illinois was a free state, but Speed later in his life did own slaves and they argued quite pointedly in some of their correspondence as the nation got closer to civil war on the issue of slavery.
Abe Lincoln election poster
Then Lincoln runs for President, opposing slavery of course. Speed voted for one of Lincoln’s opponents. It’s hard to imagine being best friends with someone, sharing a room with them for four years and then they run for President and you vote against them, but Speed voted against Lincoln for President but remained very cordial with him, and one of the things I found in my research in the Library of Congress was a letter that Speed wrote Lincoln immediately after it had become known that Lincoln had actually won the election, had won the presidency where Speed very graciously congratulates Lincoln and tells him that he’s not surprised that he won and he is happy that the nation is going to be in his hands despite their political differences.
And then Speed actually becomes a significant adviser to President Lincoln for all of their disagreements.
Nowadays in the US we sort of think that the Civil War was inevitable, that especially once Lincoln was elected, the South was going to secede and there was going to be a war, but Lincoln very much tried to head that off, and he wanted to create a Cabinet, a group of advisers, who would balance between free states and slave states.
So shortly after he was elected President, Lincoln called Speed to join him at a hotel in Chicago and offered Speed the position of Secretary of the Treasury. Speed had in the intervening time gone from being a mere shopkeeper to being a very successful businessman and he’d been a bank president so it was not crazy to think that he could be Secretary of the Treasury. In any event, Lincoln offered him that position, but Speed turned it down. Nonetheless Speed ended up as an important unofficial adviser to Lincoln during his presidency and became quite a supporter of Lincoln’s during his presidency.
Jenny: And so I presume that means, did he also take the Union side in the war?
Jonathan: Well again a very interesting situation. Kentucky was what’s called a ‘border state’. It was a slave state but it did not secede from the Union. It remained sort of neutral in the Civil War and it was a very important state. Lincoln is supposed to have said early in the War “I hope to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky on my side.”
And Speed as a prominent private citizen in Kentucky ended up as Lincoln’s personal agent in Kentucky, trying to keep the State from seceding and trying to bolster the Union forces, because there were both Union forces and Confederate forces in Kentucky. They were, both sides, trying to lobby the State Legislature to formally declare for one side or the other and Speed, despite the fact that he was originally opposed Lincoln’s political position, ended up working very closely with the Union forces in Kentucky, to try to run guns to them, running ammunition to them and generally keep them from seceding.
The Peacemakers 1868, a famous George Healey painting that hangs in the White House, showing President Lincoln with his Union Generals Grant and Sherman near the end of the Civil War.
One story that I discovered in some old Speed family memoirs that I came across during my research is pretty amazing. There was a Union general named William Sherman, who later on in the War became very famous, who was at the time in 1861, right as the War was starting, the official general of the Union responsible for holding Kentucky and he couldn’t get enough material, he couldn’t get enough guns or enough men to defend Kentucky.
He kept sending letters to the President in Washington – “I need more men, I need more guns” – and they were ignored. So one day General Sherman ran across Speed in Louisville, heard that Speed was friends with the President and explained his plight, and Speed said, well give me a list of what you need. So General Sherman wrote out a list of what he needed, Speed got on the next train, travelled to Washington and returned two or three weeks later with a signed order from President Lincoln granting General Sherman everything he wanted. And General Sherman was stunned.
He said to Speed “How is it, Sir, that you a private citizen can get the attention of the Chief Executive where I, his General, cannot? I should resign my command and turn it over to you.” And Speed looked him in the eye and said “General, your only mistake was not asking for more.”
Jenny: Do you think that history would view Lincoln differently if his life had not been violently cut short? Is there a tendency for us to make a kind of iconic figure out of a man who suffered that fate, and particularly the timing of it, right at the end of the War?
The President’s assassination – the end everyone knows about, but was his work done?
Jonathan: Maybe. I think Lincoln’s achievements are indelible in American history. He ended slavery which was the great moral stain of the founding of America – a lot of people would refer to it as the original sin of America – and he kept the Union together. He achieved those things.
I contrast it to President Kennedy who was elected exactly 100 years after Lincoln and also assassinated in the prime of his life and I think people sometimes compare the two presidents and President Kennedy in general is much loved and much remembered in America, but his legacy is more potential: What could he have done had he lived?
Whereas Lincoln actually did things. I don’t mean to say that Kennedy didn’t. Kennedy also did things. But with Lincoln, I don’t know that his legacy would have been that much different if he had lived another 30 years because he still would have, again, freed the slaves and saved the Union and America would be a vastly different country today if he hadn’t done that
Jenny: Certainly. If readers want to visit Abraham Lincoln’s sites in the US, say they’re reading your books and they think, oh that would be interesting – are there places that you would recommend they go? I mean, we all know about the Lincoln Memorial but the lesser known places, I see there is something called the Kentucky Heritage Trail. Is that worth taking a look at?
Jonathan: The two that I would recommend most are – there’s a state historical site in New Salem, Illinois. New Salem is a town about 30 miles down the river from Springfield where the young Lincoln lived in the early 1830’s and in my most recent novel “Final Resting Place” a lot of events that took place in Lincoln’s time living in New Salem come rushing back at him. It was a difficult time in Lincoln’s life, but an interesting time and they have there a recreated historical village. They’ve recreated what the town would have looked like at the time of Lincoln living there and that’s very interesting.
Lincoln’s Springfield home as it is today.
Jenny: Oh, that sounds great.
Jonathan: The other thing I would definitely recommend is Springfield, Illinois, where Lincoln lived from 1837 until he became President. New Salem actually doesn’t exist anymore, it’s only this historical site. Springfield remains the state capital of Illinois so it’s an actual ongoing, bustling city but there are a wealth of Lincoln sites there because Lincoln spent two and a half decades living there. There’s his Presidential Library and Museum which is very much worth going to, the house that he lived in for 20 years is a National Parks Service property you can visit which is very interesting.
You can walk around the square and see all of the places that Lincoln walked, which are all of the places that I recreate in my books. Unfortunately you cannot visit the store where Lincoln and Speed met and where Lincoln and Speed lived together because that was long ago torn down, but you can visit the spot where the store was and there are a lot of plaques all around downtown Springfield with information about Lincoln’s life and times and the places that Lincoln frequented in Springfield and the people he dealt with there.
Jenny: I guess your readers are probably historical fans, but what do they tell you they like best about the series? You don’t have to be mad about history to enjoy the series. They are good yarns with interesting characters, regardless of who they were in real life, so what do people tell you they like about the series?
Jonathan: In addition to Lincoln and Speed there is a third major character, Martha Speed, who is Joshua Speed’s younger sister. Now, I’ve taken some liberties with the history here. Joshua Speed did have a younger sister named Martha but very little is known about her in history. For my dramatic purposes I have moved her to Springfield and set her up as sort of the precocious kid sister of Speed and she does a lot of the mystery solving and her tenaciousness and her intuition are a great help to Lincoln and Speed as they are forced to solve the mysteries that arise in Lincoln’s law practice.
Invariably, people tell me that Martha is their favourite character and although I have basically completely made up her personality because, again, almost nothing is known about the actual Martha Speed, I have modelled her on a number of independent young women at the time. It was very hard to be an independent young woman at that time in American history because women had very few rights but there were some who managed nonetheless to make a real mark on their time and on their society and I have modelled Martha Speed on them.
These Honored Dead – a Lincoln & Speed mystery
Jenny: Oh that’s fabulous. Yes, I must say I am enjoying Martha. She definitely adds a lift to the whole book. Now moving on more generally perhaps away from the specific books to your wider writing career, is there one thing that you’ve done, more than any other, that’s been the secret to your success as an author as distinct from being a lawyer?
Jonathan: I think it’s persistence and refusing to take no for an answer. Just before we started talking, I talked to a young aspiring writer who I know and I was recounting for her how I got published and people kept telling me no, as I think happens with many beginning writers when they start, and I kept not taking no for an answer.
My agent currently is a man who is a partner in a very large New York literary agency, who told me no for about two years before he finally agreed to be my agent and my publisher similarly, the man who publishes me, is a very experienced New York publisher who told me no for about two years as well before he finally agreed to publish. Now all the while I was continuing to write, continuing to get better at my craft, but they said no and I said OK, but I hear you saying that if I keep working at this you might be interested, and they would say, yes, you’ve got to keep working at it and we might be interested. And I kept working and kept going back to them and eventually I got both of them to say yes.
Jenny: That’s great, that really is, and it’s surprising how many authors I speak to and that’s exactly what they say, persistence is what you need to do. Turning to Jonathan as a reader, because this show is about the joys of binge reading, you probably have been a mystery reader in the past if you’ve chosen to write mysteries. Tell us a little bit about the sort of reading you do for your own leisure and enjoyment.
Jonathan: Yes, I love reading. No surprise. And I read pretty widely. If I think of modern day mystery writers, in particular historical mystery writers, a couple that come to mind that I read their works regularly and really enjoy would be David Liss, who writes a very wide range of historical thrillers that I really enjoy. Alex Grecian, who writes the Scotland Yard murder squad books and who I have been very privileged to meet and get to know personally – he’s a great guy. And as well a woman named Susanna Calkins who writes period mysteries set in England that I think are fantastic. A little bit further back in time, Barry Unsworth, a British writer, wrote a book called Sacred Hunger which won the Booker Prize in England, I think back in the 1990’s, that is probably the favourite historical novel that I’ve ever read, just a fantastic book, actually about the slave trade between England and America. Sacred Hunger, by Barry Unsworth. I would recommend that more highly than anything.
Susanna Calkins – one favorite author
Jenny: Oh, that sounds fabulous Jonathan. Thank you. I haven’t seen David Liss so I must have a look for those.
Jonathan: I also read a lot of narrative non-fiction. I love the Erik Larson books – Dead Wake which is the sinking of the Lusitania and In the Garden of Beasts which is about the American Ambassador in Nazi Germany.
I read a great book recently called The Black Count by Tom Reiss about a black general in Napoleon’s army which was a fascinating book and I read another book that really sticks out that I’ve read in the last year, a biography of the author Julia Ward Howe who is an American author in the nineteenth century. She’s probably best known for writing a patriotic song called “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” which is one of the best known American patriotic songs but she did a lot more writing.
There is a biography of her called “The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe” by a woman named Elaine Showalter. I loved that book, it was a great book. And I’ll add a little bit of a shout out for my Martha Speed character because Julia Ward Howe was a really interesting example of an actual woman who lived in the nineteenth century at a time when it was very hard for women to do anything other than tend to their house and have babies and tend to their children, and she had an amazing independent career.
Jenny: That sounds inspirational. Look, we’re running out of time, so circling from the beginning and looking back over your time as a writer, at this stage if you were doing it all again, is there anything you would do differently, or do you feel that really it’s all happened as it should have done?
Jonathan: I wouldn’t want to tempt fate by changing anything. As I said, it took me four years after I had the idea of the book series to get up my nerve to quit my law firm job and start writing so maybe I would tell my earlier self to get up my nerve a little bit quicker, but I didn’t. And then it took me five years of writing once I did quit my law firm job before I sold my first book to a publisher, but again I was learning a heck of a lot about the writing process and about becoming a writer and the craft of writing during those five years, and I doubt there was any way I could have short-circuited that so I wouldn’t change anything about those years either.
Narrative non fiction a passion
Jenny: Sure. And so what is next for Jonathan the writer?
Jonathan: Well, more historical mysteries, historical thrillers. I love the format of historical fiction to really make the history come alive.
In the case of Lincoln and Speed mysteries to give you this feeling of what it would have been like to be inside this friendship of these two men, including Martha Speed – these three young people on the frontier trying to make their way in a very difficult environment, a very uncertain environment, but a moment both in theirown lives and in American history that was filled with promise and potential.
There are currently three Lincoln and Speed books out and available, on sale at wherever books are sold. The most recent one is “Final Resting Place” which came out last month.
I just came back from an extensive book tour where I had great crowds, really excited about the reception I’ve got for that book and I’m in the middle of finishing off the fourth book in the Lincoln and Speed series. It’s going to be called “A House Divided” and that will come out next summer, the summer of 2019.
Jenny: That’s fantastic. And then, are you thinking about Book 5?
Jonathan: I’m definitely thinking about the next book after “A House Divided”. I guess I have to say I haven’t decided yet if that will be another Lincoln and Speed book or if I’ll strike off into another historical time period but for sure it will be more historical fiction, taking both a combination of famous people from history and obscure people from history but nonetheless interesting people and adding to tat my own invention and trying to add it all together and tell a really interesting, involving, exciting tale.
Jenny: And what other periods attract you? Have you got any favourite periods?
Jonathan: I would say anything before the twentieth century. I think the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. My books are set in the 1830’s which in some ways is a long time ago but parts of Lincoln’s and Speed’s lives in that time period are very recognisable to us and parts are very foreign to us.
For example, the railroad, the embodiment of nineteenth century progress in the world. The railroad had not reached Springfield in the 1830’s and in fact would not reach it until the 1850’s, so nearly 20 years later. So if you wanted yourself to get in and out of Springfield in Lincoln and Speed’s time, or you wanted information to get in and out of Springfield, you could only go as fast as a horse could take you. And that sort of thing very much shapes my mystery stories because people could only move as fast as horses could take them and information could only move as fast as horses could take them.
Jenny: Yes, sure. Well Jonathan, it’s been great talking to you. Where can readers find you online?
Jonathan: My website is www.jonathanfputnam.com. I’m also on Facebook as Jonathan F. Putnam and on Instagram and Twitter and I love to connect with readers at any of those places. I respond to all my readers’ emails. If you go to my website there’s an email address that you can connect with me or if you just Google Jonathan Putnam Lincoln Speed mysteries, all of that will come up as well. I’m always thrilled to connect with readers and hear what they have to say.
Jenny: That’s wonderful. Thank you so much. We’ll have a great deal of pleasure in posting this on line and linking to your site and hope that a lot of other people find you as a result.
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