And that, my friends, can mean nothing but good things for us, the patient readers anxiously waiting for the thirteenth, fifteenth, or even twentieth John Jordan book, and beyond.

To Michael Lister I would say thank you, for so many things.

To you, the reader, I would also say thank you, on Michael’s behalf. Each and every one of you is appreciated greatly, I know. Your enthusiasm for his work drives him to create.

Here’s to another twenty years of John Jordan, and may we all be a little more like him in our own way.

Aaron Bearden

11/30/16

Land of Blood and Honey

By Enrique Fernández

I knew a guy once who whenever he was asked where he was from would reply, “Grover’s Corner.” To anyone who didn't figure out the ruse, it sounded familiar, except that, where was that town? It was, it is, Thornton Wilder’s fiction from his famous play Our Town. I had the same experience with the town in the first John Jordan novel by Michael Lister. Pottersville. I knew that place. Why, I think I've been there. Many times.

Usually around Christmas. Pottersville is what Frank Capra calls his also fictional Bedford Falls in the film It's a Wonderful Life when the angel shows a suicidal George Bailey what his hometown would become if he'd never existed, a nightmare town filmed using all the atmospheric tricks of film noir. What better name for a town in a violent crime thriller like Power in the Blood, the first John Jordan novel that, like Capra’s movie, deals with the transcendent theme of redemption?

Twenty years into the John Jordan series about a crime-solving prison chaplain, Lister no longer fictionalizes the town’s name, his own hometown, but calls it by the unpronounceable Wewahitchka. It was in Wewa, as everyone calls it, that I met Michael Lister’s work and the author himself. An article in a local electric company mailer told me about a crime novel set in the town, written by a Wewahitchka writer of some renown, though unknown to me. I read it.

Wewahitchka, a one-streetlight town in the Florida Panhandle, had already enjoyed its fifteen minutes of fame, in Ullee's Gold, a 1997 film by Victor Nuñez, who sets all his work in the Panhandle, starring Peter Fonda in an award-winning role as a Wewa beekeeper—the town is home to artisanal Tupelo honey. Many scenes were filmed locally. But Lister, born into a well-established Wewa family, goes deeper. For me, the thrill of reading A Certain Retribution, the Lister novel I first encountered, was how everything happened in places I knew: the bar, once a bikers’ hangout called, precisely, The Bar, but now renamed and less raffish; the houseboats on the river; the one coffee shop in town, where Lister gives himself a cameo appearance. It was not a John Jordan book, but it was certainly a crime thriller, set right here in my new hometown.