The Bookshop Podcast
The Bookshop Podcast
Paul Levine: Midnight Burning
In this episode, I chat with Paul Levine about his new novel, Midnight Burning.
A physicist, a comic genius, and a city on the brink—Paul Levine joins us to unpack Midnight Burning, a high-velocity historical thriller that brings Albert Einstein and Charlie Chaplin into the crosshairs of a real fascist movement in 1937 Los Angeles. We open with a personal note, then dive into the craft and conscience behind turning buried history into a page-turner that feels startlingly current.
Levine traces his path from Miami Herald reporter to trial lawyer to television writer, revealing how courtroom rigor and the writers’ room taught him to build lean scenes and dialogue that pop. That muscle powers a story grounded in documented realities: the German-American Bund, the Silver Legion, Nazi bookstores in L.A., a Hollywood hit list, and a citizens’ spy ring that gathered evidence without firing a shot. We talk about Georgia Ann Robinson, LAPD’s first Black female officer, and the moral compromises of studios navigating German censors like Dr. George Gyssling. Along the way, Levine explains how he balances verifiable quotes and biographies with credible invention, keeping Einstein’s dry humor and Chaplin’s political courage intact while pushing them into danger that tests their wits and resolve.
If you love smart historical thrillers, legal-sharp dialogue, or the hidden history of Los Angeles and Hollywood, you’ll find much to savor in Midnight Burning. Subscribe, share with a friend who loves page-turners with purpose, and leave a review to help others discover the show. What moment surprised you most?
Hi, my name is Mandy Jackson Beverly, and I'm a bibliophile. Welcome to the Bookshop Podcast. Each week I present interviews with authors, independent bookshop owners and booksellers from around the globe, and publishing professionals. To help the show reach more people, please share episodes with friends and family and on social media. And remember to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to this podcast. You're listening to episode 310. Okay, well, first my apologies for this episode coming out a little late. Our beloved dog of 13 years passed away. And uh honestly, it's been really sad. The house feels empty, and even the cats miss him. But uh yeah, so that was hard. I was reminded about this beautiful saying: wipe the tears of grief from the loss of your dog onto the soft fur of a new puppy. So at some stage soon that will happen, uh, but we're not quite ready yet. In Author News this week, I will be speaking with author Bruce Holsinger about his book Culpability in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. On Saturday, October 25th, I'll be moderating a panel called Fates Entwined, Changing Fortunes and Futures. It's about historical fiction. And that's going to be at the Boston Book Festival. And the participants on my panel will be Princess Joy L. Perry, Nalini Jones, and Allegra Goodman. If you're in Boston and planning to go to the Boston Book Fair, I hope to see you there. Okay, and here's this week's interview. Edgar Allan Poe, award-nominated author Paul Levine, crafts thrillers where law, history, and moral courage collide. Whether it's linebacker-turned lawyer Jake Lassiter roaming Miami courtrooms or Albert Einstein and Charlie Chaplin battling fascists in Hollywood, Levine delivers suspense with heart and bite. Winner of the John D. MacDonald Fiction Award and nominee for the Edgar McCafferty International Thriller, Seamus, and James Thurber Prizes, his novels appear in 23 languages. A former trial lawyer, Levine wrote 20 episodes of the CBS drama Jag and co-created First Monday, starring James Garner and Joe Montagna. His international bestseller to Speak for the Dead launched the Jake series, and Early Grave was named the third best legal thriller of the 21st century by Best Thrillers.com, just behind Michael Connolly and John Grisham. He also pens the critically acclaimed Solomon vs. Lord legal papers. His newest novel, Midnight Burning, opens the Einstein Chaplin Historical Thrillers. A member of Penn State Society of Distinguished Alumni and a graduate of the University of Miami School of Law, Levine lives in Santa Barbara, California. Here's a synopsis for his latest book, Midnight Burning. It's 1937 and clouds of war gather over Europe and American fascists march at home. While the FBI chases suspected communists, Nazi agents plot an armed insurrection. When the world's two most famous men, Albert Einstein and Charlie Chaplin, uncover the scheme, which includes the assassination of Hollywood's biggest stars, they fight back with nothing but their ingenuity, raw courage, and the fierce resolve of Georgia Ann Robinson, LAPD's first black female officer. A dangerous chase takes our heroes into the heart of darkness, a fascist encampment in the San Gabriel Mountains north of Los Angeles, where a militia armed with machine guns plans its attack. Batten the Hatches is Brains versus Brawn in an explosive, unforgettable finale. Historical fiction inspired by a true story. Hi, Paul, and welcome to the show. It's great to have you here.
SPEAKER_00:Mandy, it's great to be here. Most writers love talking about their work because we we work in isolation so much to have a book come out and have somebody actually ask questions about it. It's a treat.
SPEAKER_01:I loved your book, Midnight Burning. It was a lot of fun. Being Australian and being raised in Australia, I had a little understanding of the strength of the Nazi Party in New York, but I did not know about the strength of it in Los Angeles during the late 30s. Reading Midnight Burning took me down rabbit holes of history from fascism to baseball. My husband is an avid Dodgers fan, and also he enjoys reading about the history of baseball. So while I was reading the book, I was also asking him questions. For example, was there a Wrigley's field in LA during this time? Did these two teams play together?
SPEAKER_00:Right. Well, we do have a minor league baseball game, and people may think that I made a mistake. It's the Los Angeles Angels versus the San Diego Padres, but that that was the name.
SPEAKER_01:And it's information like that that excites me because it has me asking questions, which also makes me want to read more of your books. So that's a good thing.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you. Yes, uh, we all have backlists, and new books sometimes do that. Uh new readers say, Oh, what else has he or she written?
SPEAKER_01:I am a big backlist reader, and I also love to reread books. Every time I reread a book, I find something different in it. Uh, but I'm always amazed at the amount of people that aren't rereaders.
SPEAKER_00:I I do that and have done that for years with John D. McDonald, one of the great Florida writers, whose writing and whose Travis McGee character influenced me in writing Jake Lassiter, a Florida character who bears some resemblance to Travis McGee.
SPEAKER_01:Ah, interesting. Well, I have a lot of questions, so let's get started. I'd love you to walk us through the journey from newspaper reporter to trial lawyer to novelist. And I wondered if there were pivotal moments that nudge you towards fiction, or was it more of an organic evolution?
SPEAKER_00:Um I was a criminal court reporter for the Miami Herald. That was my first job a week out of Penn State University, where I edited the student newspaper. And they threw me into criminal court when somebody else left. I knew nothing about it. I'd never been in a courthouse. I was 21 years old. So I was learning on the fly from the prosecutors, the defense lawyers, became friendly with the state attorneys, the public defenders, and watched a number of trials, hundreds of trials. And something stirred in me that I wanted to do what they were doing as opposed to watching them do what they were doing. And something I didn't realize, maybe many people go to law school, don't realize it till they're out. I'm seeing the final product there in the courtroom. I wasn't seeing all the hard work, the research, the preparation that went into getting ready for trial. But I went to law school, I practiced for 17 years, and at some point, call it a midlife crisis, call it a profession crisis, whatever, whatever you wish. I became disenchanted with the practice of law. And I started imagining this character who I've referred to, Jake Lassener, who was kind of a night school lawyer. He was not as smart as me, but he was a lot physically tougher. He was an ex pro football player who went to night law school, graduated, and proudly graduated in the top half of the bottom third of his night school class. And I just thought I could have some fun poking fun at what he calls the so-called justice system, a fellow who says, I always presume my clients are guilty, it saves time. And it was, it was either that or going to therapy. And that's what led me into writing fiction with a series of legal thrillers, um, none of which bear any relationship other than learning how to write to midnight burning the new book.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I have a son who is a lawyer, and he was always an avid reader as a child and teenager. But when he got out of law school, he I asked him, you know, are you still reading fiction? What are you reading? He said, Mom, I am so exhausted. I've done so much reading. It's going to take me a while to get back into reading for fun again. And I found that so sad.
SPEAKER_00:And I think it's not just lawyers, but uh whatever profession you're in uh requires, even while you're out practicing it, um so much attention to that profession, keeping up with new trends, all of that, continuing education. And you add the internet to that and social media, and yes, we've seen a precipitous drop-off in um in reading. Interestingly, this would be a completely different topic. Women are better readers than men these days, particularly of fiction.
SPEAKER_01:I wonder if it's because we women love to escape. I'm not too sure. Um, but anyway, let's get back to you. How did your training in journalism and the courtroom shape your voice as a storyteller?
SPEAKER_00:Well, I kind of think that storytellers are born, but then you learn how to tell the story. Uh, we're still using the three-act structure that Aristotle handed down. And when I wrote in television, we were wrote in a three-act structure, even though with commercials on network television, it was called four acts because of where the commercials were. And um, journalism taught me to get facts right, but then my imagination started with those facts and then learned about structure and was able to do stories with a beginning, a middle, and hopefully a satisfying end.
SPEAKER_01:Now you just brought up television. So when you transitioned into TV, what aspects of the process surprised you most? Whether it was the collaborative nature of the writer's room, the pace of production, or the constraints of the medium?
SPEAKER_00:All of that. And as you're suggesting, uh the collegial nature, a writer's room, depending on the show and whether it's a drama or comedy and how the showrunner runs it, might have six or seven or eight writers in it. Now, I worked on JAG on CBS, and there we were much more independent than on many other shows. Uh, we would pitch our story ideas to the showrunner, Don Belisario, who created the show. He'd give it a go, and you'd go off and you and you'd write, and you might hand it to the other writers or use them as sounding boards as as you go along. There's also, and you use the word constraints, you're working on deadlines that the novelist, the the novelist deadline is in his or her own mind. You want to get this thing done and off to your agent and then off to the editor and in the publication process. But if you're working, particularly in network television, as opposed to now the streaming, you're on really tight deadlines. You you can't say, oh, I need another week for this because they're going to shoot this a week later. Um, it was it was a uh an interesting experience, but it also helped my writing, Mandy, and I'll tell you why. It improved my dialogue, it shortened it, it sharpened it, because you don't have time to waste in television. So I'm thankful for those experiences.
SPEAKER_01:And of course, then when you get on set and you're watching your dialogue and everything come alive, is when you actually see the importance of the pause between actors and the action going on while your dialogue is or isn't being spoken. I think it's so helpful watching that. Did you find that?
SPEAKER_00:Well, when I'm writing a novel, I see the scene as if it's being shot so that uh I write short chapters. Each one's basically a scene. Um have a beginning, a middle, and end, hopefully, some conflict if you're writing a drama, a dramatic thriller. Um and therefore, maybe that made it easier for me when I went into television, because certainly when you're writing a script for television or feature films, you better be imagining what it looks like. And is this dialogue realistic? Are we moving the plot along? Are we balancing the amount of character development with plot development? The the two skills, while different, fiction writing and writing for the screen, have a lot of similarities.
SPEAKER_01:Let's talk about Midnight Burning. What first sparked your interest in telling this story through the lens of Einstein and Chaplin? And were you drawn to them for their iconic cultural stature, their roles as outsiders, or their unique relationship to politics and art?
SPEAKER_00:Well, sometimes I'm unable to answer that question. This time there's a really, really clear answer, and it goes back 15 years or more. I came across a photograph of Charlie Chaplin and Albert Einstein in tuxedos walking together into a movie theater. And I was like, what is this? Arguably, and this was 1931, and they're going in to see the premiere of Chaplin's great film, City Lights. Arguably, they're the two most famous men in the world at that time. And they're going to the movies. Well, yes. Chaplin invited Einstein to go to the premiere. They became friends. So I researched that and I found, wouldn't it be fun? I was later to learn there was a lot more work in the fun. Wouldn't it be fun to write a book, a novel, a buddy picture, call it, with Charlie Chaplin and Albert Einstein. But I had no story. And it was years later when I learned about this startling fascist movement in the United States, and particularly Los Angeles, in the 1930s and the run-up to World War II, forgotten mostly, because World War II sort of erased the memories of the 1930s. And I learned that Charlie Chaplin was on a hit list, that is a list of Hollywood celebrities to be assassinated by a fascist group in Los Angeles. And the FBI with Jandar Hoover was there for quite a long time, uh, was chasing communists. They didn't care. The LAPD was basically corrupt from its police chief, Ed Tugun Davis. And I thought, well, now it's credible that these two friends can use their own unique skills that no one else in the world has to fight this fascist group in Los Angeles.
SPEAKER_01:And how did you balance fact with invention when placing such recognizable figures in a fictional narrative?
SPEAKER_00:Well, fortunately for me, the main characters in the book, Chafflin, Einstein, uh Charles Lindbergh, who is somewhat of a villain because he was in real life, uh, their lives were so documented, excellent biographies of each of them. And it was so easy to find things they really said. So I tried to use as much actual dialogue documented what these characters said, but shape it into my story. Now, beyond that, this is fiction, it's a fictional story. My my rule of thumb is it doesn't have to be 100% real, but it has to be credible. You don't want to get a letter saying Albert Einstein would not have said that. Well, and if somebody writes that email to me, I can say, well, actually he did say that. You know. But but there has to be some poetic license, and you have to know so much about these characters that you know how far you can take it. Einstein had a great sense of humor, just a great sense of humor. So when I do a scene where Charlie Chaplin takes him to his first baseball game, even though I'm moving the plot along because there's a fascist uh photographer there documenting what they're doing, I have a lot of fun in the baseball game because Einstein, who can tell you the physics of a curveball, what makes a curveball curve, and we can have some fun while we're in the in the bleachers with them.
SPEAKER_01:I thoroughly enjoyed that baseball scene. It was really fun. Uh now, your research revealed startling truths about Los Angeles' role in the Nazi movement. Can you talk about one or two discoveries that truly shocked you and perhaps even shifted the direction of your story?
SPEAKER_00:The first discovery was that there was a fascist movement, not just in Los Angeles, but across the country in the 1930s. And as Hitler came to power in 1933 and then consolidated power between 33 and 39, there were these, I'm gonna call them fan clubs in the United States. It's not a really good description, but the German-American Bund, the Silver Legion of America, these were groups that wanted to emulate what was going on in Germany, and some of them to do it by violent means of an insurrection and take over the government. You know, the the pre-publication reviews are saying basically this is unfortunately timely. And I do think that no matter what your political slant might be, we I think we could all agree that authoritarianism is probably not a good idea. And that our democracy has always been based on a certain amount of self-restraint by the executive branch, that there are norms that shouldn't be violated. And it's interesting because right in the middle of the decade, 1935, switching back and forth from now to then, uh Sinclair Lewis wrote a book, It Can't Happen Here. Well, it was an ironic title because it did happen here in his novel, where a populist became president and began abolishing Congress and taking power and becoming an authoritarian. And actually, things going on that we would just say, this is crazy, the Madison Square Garden uh Nazi rally with 20,000 people uh saluting Hitler in in New York, uh, Hitler youth summer camps across the country. And again, it's like this is almost a forgotten piece of history, but it all fit into uh Midnight Burning, where Albert Einstein and Charlie Chaplin, and assisted by another real character, I don't want to leave her out, Sergeant Georgia Ann Robinson, the first black female on the Los Angeles Police Department. Now she was real, but of course I'm putting her in this fictional situation. And there are three trail-blazing, almost outsiders. Einstein born in Germany, uh Chaplin, uh born in uh London and never became a citizen, Georgian Robinson, the first black female cop. Um and that's how that all fit together for me.
SPEAKER_01:Paul, you've touched a little bit about what Los Angeles was like in 1938-39, but can you paint a little more in-depth picture of Los Angeles in those years socially, politically, and culturally? How did the city's openness, its port and its entertainment industry, make it both vulnerable to infiltration and also uniquely positioned for resistance? Of course, I had to go down another rabbit hole and learn all about this openness of the port of Los Angeles. I found that fascinating and terrifying.
SPEAKER_00:Well, it was bustling and it was growing. And the Hollywood entertainment industry, which would have been movies at the time before television, was a powerful cultural force. And of course, the studio heads were overwhelmingly Jewish, and that made them targets. LA also had a very large population of uh now German Americans, but Germans who had emigrated, many of whom had served in World War I for Germany, fighting uh the Allied powers. So it was sort of a natural place for a hotbed of at first sort of German friendship, you could call it. And there obviously the large German American population, 90 some percent would have had no interest whatsoever in overthrowing the US government. But there was uh this fellow named William Dudley Pelley, who was the head of the Silver Legion of America, who called himself the American Hitler, ran for president in 1936, um, only got a few votes, but he preached violent insurrection to people who were willing to listen to this sort of thing. And they plotted knocking over armories and stealing machine guns. They had some sympathizers in the U.S. Army, not a lot, but it doesn't take a lot to start uh a revolt or or an insurrection. Um, other than that, uh, what I really what I like about Los Angeles in the 1930s was the uh the trolley car system, the red cars, the electric uh uh the electric trolley cars on the streets. You mentioned the port, the growing port of Los Angeles uh was booming with international trade. It um the nightclubs on the Sunset Strip were were going strong. We had some wonderful, colorful American gangsters from New York coming out, Bugsy Siegel, Mickey Cohen, who was from Los Angeles. It was a wild and crazy place.
SPEAKER_01:And of course, there was a lot of racism too during that time. Uh I think the story that you have within the book, within the story of the young black reporter, is disturbing and heartbreaking.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, the the Los Angeles Sentinel was and is a real newspaper. It's it's a uh an African-American newspaper that covered in the 1930s and still does today the black community of Los Angeles and is a very important cultural force. And uh one of the characters uh in Midnight Burning is a young reporter who gets a lead on this insurrection plot and is utterly fearless, perhaps uh too fearless in tracking down the leads, which take him to the uh the Nazi consulate in uh Los Angeles. Oh, the other thing, and I should have said this by your prior question, there really was a plan, I referred to it in dialogue, to have a Western office home for Adolf Hitler. Um for those who thought that Germany would win the Second World War, and that Germany would occupy the United States either by friendship, which some of the Lindbergh followers wanted, or by force. So they were looking for places where Adolf Hitler might be able to have fun in the Pacific Palisades or wherever.
SPEAKER_01:Oh my.
SPEAKER_00:I know it's it sounds crazy.
SPEAKER_01:Let's talk about Steve Ross's book, Hitler in Los Angeles. He said of the resistance, quote, they stopped this without ever firing a gun, without ever using a weapon. They used the most powerful weapon of all, their brains. End quote. How did this principle shape the way you portrayed your character's choices in Midnight Burning?
SPEAKER_00:Yes, that's uh Professor Stephen Ross uh at USC, and he wrote a book called Hitler in Los Angeles, which again, when it hit people, what what what is it? And that's nonfiction, I should say. And what he was talking about was almost a citizens committee, uh citizens undercover operation started by a lawyer named Leon Lewis, who uh plays a large role in that book, who was a World War I veteran, American, uh one of the founders of the Anti-Defamation League. And when he saw what was going on at these German American friendship clubs uh at Deutschhaus downtown, and the Nazi bookstores, that there were three or four uh that were peddling uh hate information in Los Angeles and in the valley, he recruited a number of World War I veterans, most of whom were not Jewish, because they had to infiltrate these groups. And they successfully did it. And that's, I believe, what uh Professor Ross is talking about when they did it without guns. So they were eventually able to gather the evidence that the FBI wouldn't go after and present it to um, I want to say Navy intelligence, army intelligence, and go at them that way and finally get the FBI involved.
SPEAKER_01:There was such a lot of planning involved because of course the Nazis also had their spies everywhere. And this brings me to my next question. Do you see parallels between the resistance of the 1930s and 40s and today's forms of resistance, whether through art, intellect, or activism?
SPEAKER_00:Well, I think that in any generation we need to be aware that democracy is not a given. The democracy is because we've had uh our countries from 1776 or whatever, uh that doesn't mean that we will always have a democracy. And that the struggle between tyranny and democracy is is ongoing. So at the very least, let's be alert to any inroads that would fracture what we have enjoyed and almost enjoyed without thinking about for so long. So, yes, I I do see parallels.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I do too. Um, there was one figure in the book who I would like to talk about because he had such an interesting arc, and that is Dr. George Gisling.
SPEAKER_00:Uh uh yes, George Gisling was the Nazi console in Los Angeles, real character. And as I uh portray him in the book, one of his main jobs was to get the scripts from the Hollywood studios and censor them with a red pen. If the Hollywood studios wanted to show their films in Germany, they had to pass his muster. Germany was a huge foreign market in the 1930s. And I I'm saddened to say that the uh executives, the moguls, many of whom were Jewish, just rolled over and said, Okay, we'll take out this reference in um the movie Three Comrades, uh, that has a positive Jewish character, and it will just take him out of the script. And this went on for years. Chaplin did not submit his scripts to the Germans, and uh certainly when he made the Great Dictator in 1940, uh a brilliant film, uh mocking Hitler and Mussolini, uh he uh he did not submit that uh for censoring. But Giesling is a very, very complicated character. He was not a diehard Nazi, he was a bureaucrat. And it came out after the war. Not relevant to the events in my book, but this is true, and it's probably why I I made him do some things that a diehard Nazi wouldn't do, helping Chaplin and Einstein and something. Uh he was passing along German military information to an American uh businessman in Chicago who passed it on to the War Department. And that actually saved Eisling from being prosecuted after the war. And he lived a long and happy life, I presume. In Spain.
SPEAKER_01:And were there particular challenges in rendering Summon as well documented as Chaplin and Einstein in a way that still felt fresh and human?
SPEAKER_00:Well, that's the double-edged sword of there's so much written about them that it on the one hand, that's really helpful to get things accurate. On the other hand, it it it does pose a challenge because you don't want to get things wrong. And by its very nature, you're creating fiction. You're creating a fictional story with real people. And I haven't done that before. That's that's sort of uh this is my first novel of historical fiction. I've always written legal thrillers. Midnight Burning was a new step for me. But if you read uh really, really experienced and good historical novelists, uh, take Kristen Hanna and the Nightingale, one of the most popular books of the last 25 years. Um, she took a real person, a French resistance fighter, a woman, who would lead Allied pilots who've been shot down over France and lead them over the mountains to safety in uh, I want to say Spain. I hope I'm right about that. Get them out of occupied France, at any rate. And you have a certain amount of leeway, but you also are bound by some of what really happened.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, it's a sensitive fine line for sure. I love reading historical fiction, but it always needs to be grounded in truth for me, because trust me, I'm one of those people that will go back and uh fact check. I know it's crazy. But having said that, I enjoy reading historical fiction with a little magical realism too. Speaking of which, uh during the 80s and nine early 90s, when I was in film, we shot a lot at the Charlie Chaplin stages. And I gotta say, the last time I drove uh up La Brea, I could have been anywhere. I did not recognize the stages at all, which I guess are now the uh Jim Henson Muppet stages, right? I loved shooting at that stage. They just had great areas for hair makeup and wardrobe, I remember that. But there was a feeling there, uh something unusual. Did you ever shoot anything there?
SPEAKER_00:No, we shot at Sunset Gower, we shot on the Paramount lot, we shot out in um out in the valley, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think depending on what department you were in on the film crew, there were definitely stages that you preferred over others, Paul. Ultimately, what do you hope readers carry with them after reading Midnight Burning about history, about resistance, and about the role of storytelling itself?
SPEAKER_00:I always want to entertain. So I hope that at the end of every chapter, people will say, I'm gonna pick up a book. In author's school, they say always hold up the book. There is no author's school, but there should be. But no, I I just one more chapter. You write short chapters. Let me read the next. You get to the next one. Now it's two in the morning. The person is is still reading it. So suspense, entertainment. And I don't like to hit people over the head with theme. I want people to gather the theme. One of the early moguls' uh most famous quotes was if you want to send a message, call Western Union. These days most people won't know what Western Union is. Uh, but I do want to send a message, and I do think, and you've hit on it, Mandy, that that the parallels between the 1930s and today should be taken seriously, and that we should always be on the lookout for threats to democracy and our traditions, our traditions of respect, of both one branch of the government for the other and one branch of people for the other. We should be one people. Um and in real life, Einstein and Chaplin were both committed to social justice. Einstein founded the International Rescue Commission, which helped people get out of uh Nazi-occupied countries. Uh, Chaplin made the great dictator, which lives today, is a great political statement. Um, so without hitting people over the head, that that's what I'd like them to gather.
SPEAKER_01:And you're writing a series of these books with Einstein and Chaplin, right?
SPEAKER_00:Uh yes, this is the first of a series, and the second one is almost done.
SPEAKER_01:Well, Paul, I'm looking forward to the next book because I really enjoyed reading Midnight Burning. And thank you for taking time out of your day to have this conversation with me. Uh, it's been a lot of fun, and I really enjoy chatting with you.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you, Mandy. This has been fun. You know, I made reference to John D. McDonald earlier. He got a fan letter, and he writes back, thank you for your note. Writing is like dropping feathers down a well. Any echo is appreciated. So thank you for the echo.
SPEAKER_01:You are so welcome, Paul. You've been listening to my conversation with Paul Levine about his new novel, Midnight Burning. To help the show reach more people, please share episodes with friends and family and on social media. And remember to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to this podcast. To find out more about the Bookshop Podcast, go to thebookshoppodcast.com. And make sure to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to the show. You can also follow me at Mandy Jackson Beverly, on Instagram and Facebook, and on YouTube at The Bookshop Podcast. If you have a favorite indie bookshop that you'd like to suggest we have on the podcast, I'd love to hear from you via the contact form at the bookshoppodcast.com. The Bookshop Podcast is written and produced by me, Mandy Jackson Beverly. Theme music provided by Brian Beverly, and thanks to Kaylee Dishinger for keeping me organized. I'll see you next time.