Musician Charley Crockett's Road From Busking To The Grammys

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This is Fresh Air.

I'm Terry Gross.

My guest Charlie Crockett is a songwriter, singer, and guitarist whose music ranges from country to rhythm and blues, cowboy songs, outlaw ballads, and the song by Mir Bis Duchain.

Now I don't know exactly where that song fits in, but his version is so much fun, I'm definitely playing it later in the interview.

If I had to choose one word to sum up his music, it would be Americana, because I'd be backed up by the Americana Music Awards.

He won Emerging Artist of the Year in 2021, and two years later, he was nominated for Artist of the Year, Album of the Year, and Song of the Year.

This year, he was nominated for a Grammy.

He learned to perform while busking on the streets, including in New Orleans, Dallas, Paris, Copenhagen, and on the New York City subways, and those passengers can be a tough crowd to win over.

That was during a period when he was pretty much broke and crashed in squats in other people's homes.

Crockett grew up poor in a Texas trailer park.

His new album, Dollar a Day, was released last week.

It's the second album in his sagebrush trilogy.

The first, Lonesome Drifter, was released earlier this year.

He's on tour now.

At the end of August, he'll begin a tour with Leon Bridges that's spilled as The Crooner and the Cowboy.

Let's start with a song from the new album Dollar a Day.

The song is an outlaw ballad called Santa Fe Ring.

They sold me out

to the Santa Fe Ring.

There wasn't any trial

where justice was no such thing

upon Sierra Harimosa

Only the strongest last

But they'll never catch me

I'm too fast

They come right near,

just about to break up dawn.

Caliche on their jackets,

for they had journeyed long.

I didn't need to ask them,

I knew a reason why

they brought so many men

just to watch me die.

That was Santa Fe Ring from Charlie Crockett's new album, Dollar a Day.

Charlie Crockett, welcome to Fresh Air.

Such a pleasure to have you on the show.

And thank you for bringing your guitar with you and singing for us soon.

So let's start with Santa Fe Ring.

What do you love about outlaw ballads?

Anytime I run into people, you know, around around the country these days,

they say,

Charlie Crockett, what are you doing here?

And I say something along the lines of, I'm running from the law.

And they go, Really?

Say, no, I'm just fooling.

I'm running from some people a lot more dangerous than that.

And then we take a picture.

Are you really running from anyone?

No, I I've been accused of that, but I always

feel that

I am running, but I like to think that I'm running towards something, not away from anything.

So you wrote the song, right?

Yeah, I did.

How did you come up with the story?

Because good outlaw ballads need a good story.

Have you ever heard of the Santa Fe Ring?

Do you know?

No, I have no idea what it is.

Is it a thing?

Yeah, it was a thing.

It's historical.

The Santa Fe Ring was a loose, shadowy syndicate, basically a bunch of landowners fighting over the New Mexico territory in the 19th century.

And I remember hearing when I was younger that Bob Dylan was really obsessed with Billy the Kid.

And one of the people that got caught up in that whole that whole range war was none other than Billy the Kid.

So Billy the Kid had been pulled into the fight.

You know, these cowboys, these outlaws were really pulled into these conflicts as basically mercenaries.

And maybe, you know, it's partly fact, partly fiction, but I had kind of realized or thought that maybe Dylan's interest in Billy the Kid maybe had to do with the forces that he was dealing with as he rose to prominence as a folk singer in America in the 60s.

And

I like to take stuff like that and turn them into stories.

You've played in many different styles.

You do cowboy songs, Country Western, Rhythm and Blues.

What music were you most exposed to growing up in South Texas?

A little bit of everything?

Yeah, Terry, you know,

I wish I could tell you I

came out of the womb playing Hank Williams songs.

You know, could pick up Dylan's songs by ear hearing them one time, but I'd just be lying to to you.

You know, I didn't learn how to play banjo until I was, you know, in my 20s.

But, so, you know,

who could escape the ubiquitous dominance of corporate radio?

But

so I was listen, you know, inspired by all kind of, just everything.

I guess my first influence really would have been Freddie Fender.

And

from where you grew up, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We were so I was born in

the Rio Grande Valley, where the where the Rio Grande River comes out at the Gulf of Mexico, and

in a small town of San Benito, Texas, which

only reason most people would know outside of that region is because of,

yeah, Freddie Fender.

Born Balda Mar Huerta.

Do you want to play a few bars of a Freddie Fender song that influenced you in your formative years?

Sure, I'm going to just play this right here for you.

Wasted days and wasted nights.

I have held you on my mind.

Now you don't belong to me.

You belong to someone else.

That's a great song.

Yeah, it really is.

You know, he sold a lot of records, Terry.

Yes.

You were self-taught on guitar, right?

Can you tell?

No, no, it's just that.

Stop this fooling you.

Okay.

I know you can.

I just always wonder, like, how people can teach themselves.

I'm wondering, like, if you developed unusual habits not having a teacher, and if you had to, like, unlearn things in order to have the technique that you needed to do what you wanted to do.

Yeah.

Well, it wouldn't be a secret to anybody that knew me well.

When I was a kid, I really struggled in school.

And when I got a guitar, when I was trying to learn the straight-ahead chords, or maybe what I would refer to these days as cowboy chords, like

this open C chord, you know, or

nice F here and just G

145.

Took me way too long to learn the number system and all that, but I couldn't hold any of those cords.

They hurt my hands.

And

instead of playing through that in the beginning, like probably most people would,

I just didn't have any interest in it.

And I started out and I went straight to this

and the reason is I call it choking the chicken you can't see me but just imagine if I had my my hand around a chicken's neck

what I'm doing is I'm with my thumb and my middle finger I'm choking the chicken on that on that fifth fret.

And I never knew the chords at the time and didn't know a number system

or anything, but I slowly figured out if you're playing here in this say fifth fret position,

well, if I tried to go here

for the next chord, I knew that didn't really make sense, but eventually I found the four chord here.

The D minor, you know.

And then the five.

You wouldn't believe how many people in the music business coming up told me those are not the correct chords.

You're playing a major and a minor, and you can't do that.

Can you play us a song where you use the chord progression that you just played for us?

Yeah, let me think about that for

13 diamonds round my neck,

one silver eagle on my chest,

Been trying to find a wild ace,

but I still ain't seen one yet.

Lone Star is a man.

One night right in

for the brand.

Greenback dollar

in his hand.

Lone Star makes his stand.

Something like that, yeah.

That's the first style that I ever came up with and really leaned on that forever You know, I learned all that stuff first, you know like that or these

these kind of chords

people see me doing all that kind of stuff on the street and think i had a lot more command over the instrument than i maybe did at the time

i think it's funny that you started you started teaching yourself the complicated chords instead of the easy ones

yeah i'm sure there's uh

a lot to know about me by that statement there yeah well those are darker chords too i mean they're more interesting chords i think

yeah i

you know, I

I've liked playing in the yeah, I like playing in the dark keys.

I like playing in the minor

keys.

Uh,

you know, people always say I sound flat when I sing, so I figured I'd go ahead and, you know, flap my fists.

I drink them, too.

You learn to perform on the streets, busking, in some very non-cowboy territory, like the New York City subways.

I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and would love to hear about when you played in the subways, in the stations, and on the trains.

What did you learn about how to get the attention of people who just wanted to catch a train and not be bothered?

Lord of mercy.

First place I played outside in New York City was Central Park.

And

there were all these incredible musicians who had already figured out where all the money was.

And I wasn't any kind of anything at the time.

And And I remember wandering further and further into the park until I found a tunnel that had very little foot traffic and there was nobody there.

And that's where I started playing.

And I would continually revisit that spot throughout the years that I'd come, you know, in and out of New York.

Played a hundred yards from there with Willie Nelson not too far back on the summer stage.

But from the very first time that I sat down in that tunnel, immediately just sitting there messing around with my little rink-a-dink songs, people were throwing chains in my case.

And it's not like I was making a mountain of dollars or anything, but I do remember that first two hours that I ever sat down there and just fooling around with one song.

Probably oftentimes out of pity or novelty, I think I made $4 or $7 or something.

You can really stretch that out, you know when you're squatting you know sleeping on couches or staying up at night and sleeping in the park during the day and I was really happy for that first seven dollars or whatever it was but on the trains like you played the stations but you also played on the subway cars those cars shake a lot

and I don't even know like if you're playing, you're probably standing up.

It's hard to stand up without holding onto a pole, which you can't do if you need two hands to play guitar.

So, can you talk a little bit about what it's like to play guitar on a moving train and what material actually got people to pay some attention as opposed to seeing you as

a nuisance?

Yeah, well, some people still do.

Keep in mind, I wasn't in New York constantly.

You know,

we would move, and it was pretty ideal to move down to New Orleans, you know, when it was cold.

It was in New Orleans that I was really

starting to get a hold of traditional music

and started learning stuff like Worried Man Blues or Driving Nails in My Coffin, stuff like that.

My bucket's got a hole in it.

Those were early songs that I could get a hold of.

I brought that with me back from New Orleans, and I remember being there and maybe on

the F-train somewhere down on the Essex platform or something, and I noticed visually people starting to pay more attention to me.

Driving Nails in my coffin was one that I had learned on Royal Street in front of Rouses.

I learned the Ernest Tubb version.

It was first cut maybe by Bob Wills.

A lot of people have done it, but that one, I mean, I could still go out there right now with a song like like Driving Nails and probably really haul it in.

Yeah, so play a little bit of that for us.

I'm just driving nails in my coffin.

Every time I drink me and bottle of booze,

I'm just driving nails in my coffin.

Honey, driving these nails over you.

You know,

I don't do it too much anymore, but used to play it a whole lot.

That's a good song.

Well, I'm going to switch up the musical mood and play something from your new album that's more rhythm and blues.

All right.

It's called Destroyed, and it was written by Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham.

And

do you want to say why you chose this for the album?

I had found out about Dan Penn

years back, but he's a Memphis guy.

And,

you know, what I was really struck by is I thought he was a black man

when I first heard his songs.

And honestly, I couldn't believe he was white.

That's probably the first thing that caught my attention about him.

And then

when I was looking at his catalog, you know, he...

Maybe it's a Memphis thing.

It's definitely a South thing.

You know, he just naturally

moved between, you know, rhythm and blues and soul and country music.

And Destroyed was a song that I'd found on like a bigger box set of his fame recordings that I had never heard before.

Fame was at the studio where he worked.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

Anyways, I found Destroyed, and I thought, man, how is this not a hit?

You know, and I guess when you're as prolific as a writer as he is, you know, they can't all be hits.

And so I thought I would.

Actually, we just had a little bit of tape left, honestly, with Shooter at Sunset Sound on this last recording just earlier back in the winter.

And we were all tired, and I really didn't have any more gas in the tank.

You know, I was all out of diesel, and we were about to hang it up, but we had Bob Globb, this really amazing, you know,

legendary bass player, played with Linda Ronstadt and a number of other people for decades who was playing on those three or four sessions because my buddy Kyle Medrigal had gotten sick and he couldn't make it.

And I just didn't, I couldn't bring myself to leave the studio without doing one more thing with him.

And then I remembered Destroyed.

And we got in there and it was late night and I was just far beyond exhaustion.

Actually, my voice was really blown.

But when the band started working it up, I got so excited.

It's one of those weird weird things where you hit a

gear that you don't know you have,

and

you know, it made the record.

It came out good.

So let's hear it.

This is Destroyed from my guest, Charlie Crockett's new album, Dollar a Day.

I'm weak as a lamb, and my head's spinning like a tie.

Oh, what a kiss.

It felt like an H-bomb drop.

Destroyed,

cool, baby, destroyed.

You got me, baby.

Your good, loving girl.

It's really got me destroyed.

I said, something you got has me out of my mind on you.

And like an old hound dog, I'm barking and I'm hollering too.

Destroyed.

Who is baby?

Destroy.

You got me, baby.

Yo, good loving girl.

It's really got me destroyed.

Love is a funny thing.

That was destroyed from my guest, Charlie Crockett's new album, Dollar a Day.

We need to take another another break here, so let me reintroduce you.

My guest is Charlie Crockett, and he's got a new album.

We just call it Dollar a Day.

We'll be right back with more of Charlie Crockett and more of his music after this break.

I'm Terry Gross, and this is Fresh Air.

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Your first album was self-released.

It was called Stolen Jewel.

And

it has one of my favorite of your recordings because it's just delightful.

And your music is usually pretty dark, which I gravitate to.

But

this is just delightful.

The song is by Mir Bisti Shane, not not a cowboy song.

It's a song from a 1930s Yiddish musical.

And Sammy Khan and Saul Chaplin, who wrote a lot of songs for movies, and Sammy Khan wrote a lot of lyrics for Sinatra.

They took this Yiddish song, wrote an English lyric for it, and made it a little more

pop jazzy than it probably initially was.

And you turned it into this kind of swing song.

Just say a little bit about how, like what you wanted to do with this song.

It's another one that I picked up in that river of bourbon whiskey flowing through the French Quarter.

In New Orleans?

It's not the place I'd expect you to find a song that was originally a Yiddish song.

It was a hit for the Andrews sisters.

I heard that song getting played by different bands.

I'd hear them out on the street on Royal.

And then one night I was in the Spotted Cat on Frenchman.

And the band

on the bandstand there

was playing it in a swing style that I just really liked.

And I loved Bayamira Bis Du Shane.

I loved the swing of it.

I was getting a hold of a lot of that stuff.

I learned a lot of Jelly Roll Morton songs, a lot of Louis Armstrong stuff.

You know,

St.

James Infirmary was one we used to play the mess out of.

And like I said, I'm not a, I don't ever, I never thought I was a great musician or

or anything, but that, those traditional styles of folk music, which is all these things,

that's all New Orleans for me mostly is where I picked it all up.

And as soon as we started playing Buy Mirror Bistu Shane,

you know, the whole

thing we were doing like took a whole

we leveled up tremendously off the one song.

And

giving you another example of something that when we, next time we showed up in New York City

and some other towns, when we started playing that by Mir Bistou Shane

on the subways, we started turning those subway cars over, emptying out their pockets, and they were glad to do it.

All right, let's hear why.

This is Baimir Bustu Shane from Charlie Crockett's first album, the album called Stolen Jewel.

One, two, a one, one, two, three, four.

I'm here, Mr.

Shane.

Please let me explain.

I'm in Bristol Shane, ain't got your brand.

I'm in Bristol Shane.

Again, I'll explain.

It means that you're the fairest in the land.

I could say better,

that bella.

Even one of our

slang with you then.

Only that you know how grand you are.

I tied plain, but I'm in this new shame.

Just that my letter say you understand.

You have to wait, do what, do I?

That was by Mir Bristol Shane from Charlie Crockett's first album, which is called Stolen Jewel.

His new album is called Dollar a Day.

I'm going to ask you to do another song.

And the song is from your Lonesome Drifter album, the first in your Sagebrush trilogy.

And it's This Crazy Life.

Would you sing that for us?

I'd be delighted.

The more I

think about it,

the less I'm really sure

that I know

just what I'm doing

in any

of this folk.

But I hold

myself together

for

all the things

I love.

I will try

to make sense of

this crazy life

This crazy life

Will lead you down

a long

and winding road

It will break your heart Tear you all apart

But it's the only

way

to go

and darling

you know I care for you though I'm not too

good with love

I will try

to make sense of

this crazy life

thank you that's Charlie Crockett singing for us that sounded sounded really good.

Speaking of crazy life, you had heart surgery about six years ago.

What was wrong, and how did you know you were in trouble?

Oh,

yeah, I was born down there in Cameron County, southernmost county in Texas.

And,

You know, I don't think they knew a whole lot.

Be surprised how little they even knew about a lot of things with heart conditions, I guess, in the 80s.

But I knew I had, I was born with Wolf Parkinson's white disease.

Basically, it's a

electrical problem in your heart.

And so I knew I had that.

And it caused arrhythmia, caused my heart heart to go out of rhythm and speed up, speed up and speed up and speed up and speed up until you shocked it back into regular rhythm.

And those doctors down there told my mama that, you know, it wasn't life-threatening.

Even though it had almost killed me a couple of times the first month I was alive, they were saying that as I grew older that it would be an annoyance, but

never life-threatening.

But

as I got older, actually, it's kind of a strange thing: is like in my 20s,

my heart wasn't going out of rhythm, or it seemingly wasn't going out of rhythm as much as when I was a kid.

And then in my 30s, it

my as when I turned 30, it like it started coming back more

kind of than ever.

And

I didn't even really realize what it was, but

I would be sitting there on like the back of the tour bus,

you know, and

I would just be, I was getting dizzy a lot, you know, I'd be blacking out,

getting really lightheaded all the time, you know.

And

I didn't know even then that it was anything more serious.

And I remember one night I was playing at

the Shady Grove there.

It's KGSR was the radio station.

Now it's ACL radio.

And my my heart went out of rhythm like in the middle of the show.

Of course, I didn't stop.

I played it all the way through the encore.

But by the time I ran off the stage, I was, you know, Alexis Sanchez plays guitar in my band, said I was just truly like the color blue.

And it never went, I could never get it back into rhythm for like 24 hours.

When I went to try to go see this doctor, I hadn't had health insurance as an adult, still didn't at the time.

I went to the doctor there, and I ended up going and getting an echo.

Dr.

Chop, that was his name.

And it was like 7:30 in the morning or whatever.

And I'm laying there on the table sideways, and they're putting that hot gel on your chest and moving the scope around you.

And

I could see that the lady,

I could see the concern in her face.

You know, they're not supposed to tell you anything, but it was weird.

I knew something was wrong.

Then I kind of forgot about it.

By the time I got home that morning,

about an hour and a half, two hours later, I get a call from Dr.

Chop and he said, Hey, buddy,

you know,

you've got aortic valve disease, you know,

and

that heart's going to shut down on you on any time, you know, anytime, you know.

Hey, you're dying.

So, you, you needed surgery and you got a valve transplant?

Is that what you got?

Yeah, they wanted to put a mechanical valve in there,

and that's all they offered me, actually, at first.

As opposed to a pig valve, they didn't tell me anything.

But you ended up with a pig valve, right?

No, not a pig valve.

Not a pig valve.

I ended up with a cow valve.

A cow?

Oh, I didn't know they do cows.

Okay.

Does that not make me a cowboy?

That's funny.

And true, right?

It's true.

Literally park cow.

Different car and a cowboy.

Charlie Crockett, thank you so much for singing and playing for us and for talking with us about your life.

I wish you good luck on the tour with Leon Bridges, and I wish you good health.

Hey, I appreciate that.

Miss Terry,

I'm gonna put that in my pocket.

Charlie Crockett has a new album called Dollar a Day.

His tour with Leon Bridges begins August 26th.

The popular movie Alien now has a prequel in the form of a new TV series called Alien Earth.

It just premiered on FX and is streaming on Hulu.

Our TV critic David Biancoule will tell us what he thinks of it after a break.

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Noah Hawley has created successful, well-received television adaptations of the Cohen Brothers movie Fargo, Five Seasons to Date and Counting, and of the Marvel comic book character Legion in a series that ran for three seasons.

Now he's bringing another piece of intellectual property to TV by presenting his take on the Alien movie franchise.

His new series, a prequel to the original Alien film, just launched with two episodes on FX, and it's streaming on Hulu.

Our TV critic David Biancouli has this review.

The first alien movie, the one with Sigourney Weaver trapped in a spaceship with a mutating apex predator from outer space, was in 1979, more than 45 years ago.

Since then, there have been several movie sequels and even a few prequels.

Alien Earth is a prequel too.

It takes place two years before the events of the original alien film and starts in space on a science vessel that is returning to Earth with five new alien species aboard.

But this prequel is different.

It's the first entry made for television.

And with Noah Hawley, who created the TV versions of Fargo and Legion in charge, it's bound to be a bold, deep variation on the already established alien themes.

And based on the eight-episode first season, Alien Earth is precisely that.

In the opening scene of the premiere episode, the science vessel is being overrun by the deadly alien specimens, and the ship crashes on Earth.

It lands in an area of Thailand, now run by one of a handful of mega-powerful high-tech corporations.

Alien Earth delivers the action and the scares and thrills just just as effectively as the best of its cinematic predecessors.

There even are times when you jump with fright or feel squeamish or very, very nervous.

At least I did.

The action and the visuals are first class, and the special effects are a clever mixture of the latest in computer-generated imagery and the old-fashioned type of practical effects used back in the early alien days.

But clearly, Noah Hawley, who wrote or co-wrote every episode and directed directed a few as well, is interested in more than just the scary action sequences.

It's not just the evolution of the alien creatures that interests him, but the evolution of humanity as well.

One high-tech billionaire who calls himself Boy Cavalier and quotes extensively from Peter Pan, is weeks away from unveiling a literally life-changing new product line.

This world of alien earth already has developed cyborgs, and one of them, called Kirsch, is played by Timothy Oliphant, who has done such outstanding TV work in Deadwood and Justified.

There also are synths, which are human-like creations installed with artificial intelligence.

But Boy Cavalier's new breakthrough, which he's just produced successfully in the lab, is a third new form of life called the hybrid, synthetic beings that are downloaded with human consciousness.

His first test subject is a young preteen girl named Marcy, who has terminal cancer.

He downloads her into a synthetic adult body, gives her as-yet-undefined mental and physical abilities, and calls her Wendy, after the Peter Pan character who teamed with the Lost Boys.

Once she's a hybrid, Marcy, aka Wendy, is played by Sidney Chandler, the daughter of Kyle Chandler from Friday Night Lights.

And when she joins Timothy Oliphant's Kirsch on a mission to check out the crashed science vessel, he tells her how he sees her and life from his perspective as a cyborg.

Used to be food, you know.

Me.

Humanity.

Your lives were short and filled with fear.

Then your brains grew.

You built tools and used them to conquer nature.

You built impossible machines and

went to space.

You stopped being food.

Or, I should say,

you told yourself

you weren't food anymore.

But in the animal kingdom, there is always someone bigger or smaller who would eat you alive if they had the chance.

That's what it is to to be an animal.

You're born, you live,

you die.

He's not the only amateur philosopher on this new alien voyage.

Billionaire tech inventor Boy Cavalier, played by Samuel Blanken, tends to take big bites from an apple while pacing his office barefoot and spouting big ideas.

Like this one to his colleague Sylvia, played by Essie Davis.

The fear with artificial intelligence is that

we will build a brilliant machine that will build an even smarter machine and so on

until

so long us.

What we're doing here, Yumi,

is exploding human potential.

Then we'll see what they build before the machines ruin everything.

It's an intelligence race.

But if they don't stay human, then what do we win?

I'm serious.

We did something nobody thought was possible.

We ended death.

Now we have to make the quality of life better.

Otherwise, all we've done is

make consumers immortal.

Downloading the minds of dying children into synthetic adult bodies makes these lost boys and lost girls very unusual heroes.

Kind of like an action film where the immature protagonists are from the movies Big or Freaky Friday.

But it's not played for laughs, and Alien Earth has resonant echoes of other films as well, including Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and Stanley Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey and Doctor Strangelove.

The cast is mostly unfamiliar, though it's a special treat to see David Risdahl, who played Dot's husband on the most recent season of Fargo, featured again here.

After the two-episode premiere, the rest of Alien Earth arrives weekly on FX, and season one ends with a stunning finish that provides both closure and exciting possibilities for the future.

Here's hoping, as futures go, Alien Earth has a long one.

David Biancoule is a professor of television studies at Rowan University.

He reviewed the new FX series Alien Earth.

It's also streaming on Hulu.

After we take a short break, John Powers will review a new mystery novel about a reporter.

This is fresh air.

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The new mystery thriller, The Diary of Lies, is the third volume in Philip Miller's series about a Scottish reporter whose investigations keep making her powerful enemies.

In this new novel, she gets a tip about a high-level conspiracy, and then people around her start dying.

Our critic at large, John Power, says, it's a gripping book about the kind of never-say-die reporters who, not so long ago, were cultural icons.

Back when Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein helped bring down Richard Nixon's presidency, being a reporter seemed like the coolest, most romantic job in the world.

The young flocked to journalism school.

Half a century on, though, newspapers struggle just to survive.

Media barons kowtow to protect the bottom line.

And governments everywhere work hard to muzzle the press.

Still, there are some intrepid reporters ready to fight the good fight, especially in fiction.

One of these is Shona Sanderson, the Edinburgh-based heroine of a crime series by the terrific Scottish writer Philip Miller.

The third and latest installment, The Diary of Lies, is now out from Soho Crime, and it finds Shona investigating a mysterious cabal whose aims are more than a little sinister.

Far from being one of those cozy British crime stories, this novel offers a lament for a great Britain that's lost its bearings.

Shona is a reporter for the alternative news service Buried Lead, and as the action begins, she's in London, attending an awards dinner at which she's a nominee.

Always a tad prickly, she's bored and annoyed by the event.

even before she's buttonholed by a posh, pink-faced chap named Rhys Proctor.

Insisting he has a story for her, he hands her a card with an address on it.

Go there, he tells her, and ask for bondage.

Although this sounds comical, if not kinky, something about Proctor makes her follow his instructions.

Arriving at a sex shop, yes, that's where he sent her, she dutifully asks for bondage.

And then everything changes.

Not only is Shona catapulted into murder, but she catches wind of a conspiracy called Grendel.

That's the monster in Beowulf, as you'll recall.

And Grendel, for its part, catches wind of Shona.

She becomes a target.

As happens in this kind of thriller, Shona will get help from a clutch of colorful characters.

The apocalyptic hacker who's pulling his family off the grid.

The famous woman artist whose latest work commemorates the Britons who died of COVID, including Shona's father.

Meanwhile, back in Scotland, we follow two other key characters, a nervous PR hack named Hector and an embittered ex-spy, mister Talas.

They both find themselves sucked, unawares, into Grendel's shadowy orbit.

Now, as mysteries go, the Diary of Lies is unsettlingly dark.

Of course, when we call a story dark, we can be referring to many different things, the dreamy small-town violence of David Lynch, or the metaphysical evil you find in, say, no country for old men.

The darkness of the diary of lies is political, closer in spirit to the handmaid's tale than to Twin Peaks.

As Shona flees killers and digs into Grendel, Miller conjures up a post-COVID, Brexitized Britain that is busy betraying its greatest traditions.

Even as the country's services are falling apart, the moneyed class bends finance, government, media, think tanks, and private security to its own ends.

When Shona finally discovers Grendel's master plan, it's a social policy so cruel and retrograde that ten years ago I would have laughed at its hyperbolic preposterousness.

It says something about our historical moment that the scheme no longer seems laughable.

Making things even worse, nearly all the characters we meet feel defeated or worn out by what's happening in their country.

In fact, some of the book's sharpest moments come when characters like Hector and Shona's old bow Ned despair over what they've become.

Casting off their former ideals, they work for people they detest, but feel powerless to resist.

Not so the redoubtable Shona, who has so many bees in her bonnet that you half expect honey to start dripping down her forehead.

Yes, she's standoffish and impatient, but those qualities help make her a great reporter.

She's not one to let things go.

She never stops grieving for her father, her journalistic mentor, nor stops being furious that his death might have been prevented if the government had taken COVID more seriously.

Once on the trail of Grendel, she keeps working relentlessly on until she gets to the bottom of things.

Her sheer doggedness is why, despite all its premonitions of tyranny, the Diary of Lies isn't a bummer.

Even when she's terrified, Shona will always risk everything to get the story out.

She still has faith that the truth will make a difference.

John Powers reviewed The Diary of Lies by Philip Miller.

Tomorrow on Fresh Air, our guest will be Pedro Pascal.

From Cartel Kingpins to Cosmic Battles to the End of the World, Pascal has faced them all on screen.

This summer, Pascal stars in the Fantastic Four, First Steps, Eddington, and the Materialists, and he's up for an Emmy for The Last of Us.

Earlier, he was in Narcos, The Mandalorian, and Game of Thrones.

I hope you'll join us.

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