Jim Nesbitt Books in Order

Jim Nesbitt came to crime fiction after a long run in journalism, and that background is all over his work. For more than 30 years he worked as a reporter, editor, and roving correspondent for newspapers and wire services in Alabama, Florida, Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Washington, D.C. He chased hurricanes, earthquakes, plane wrecks, wildfires, presidential campaigns, rodeo cowboys, migrant field hands, neo-Nazis, and nuns. That is the kind of career that teaches a writer how to spot the one detail that makes a scene feel lived in.

He has said the first stories he really knew came from family voices tied to the North Carolina mountains.

In interviews, Nesbitt has talked about always having his nose in a book as a kid and writing little stories early. He also remembers an eighth-grade English teacher, Mary Bailey, pulling him aside and telling him, very plainly, that he was a writer. She even called his father to say the same thing. He did not jump straight to novels, though. Journalism came first, and he has described those decades as a long apprenticeship.

When he finally turned to fiction, he brought the newsroom with him. He likes hard-boiled crime novels, fast dialogue, damaged people, and settings that do real work. He spent years knocking around Texas and the border between Texas and Mexico, and that time shows up in the books. Dallas bars, dry Hill Country roads, border towns, and West Texas desert mountains are never just background. They push on the characters and help explain why they make the choices they do.

Texas became one of his main characters.

His best-known work is the Ed Earl Burch series, which includes The Last Second Chance, The Right Wrong Number, The Best Lousy Choice, The Dead Certain Doubt, and The Fatal Saving Grace. Burch is a former Dallas homicide and vice detective, now battered, broke, and still too stubborn to stay out of trouble. Readers who click with these books usually come for the hard-boiled momentum, but stay for the guilt, dark humor, rough tenderness, and sense of place. Nesbitt has also pointed to writers such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and James Crumley as major influences, and you can feel both the noir edge and the Western dust in the mix.

The awards came later. The Last Second Chance was a Silver Falchion finalist. The Best Lousy Choice won a Silver Falchion and an Independent Press award, and The Dead Certain Doubt picked up another Independent Press award. Those facts are worth noting, but they only tell part of the story. The more useful thing to know is that Nesbitt kept building the series one bruising case at a time, letting old mistakes, old enemies, and the hope of redemption follow Burch from book to book.

Away from the page, his public bios give you a pretty good sense of the man. He has described himself as a lapsed horseman, pilot, hunter, and saloon sport, with a taste for old guns, vintage cars and trucks, good cigars, aged whiskey, and a well-told story. In one interview he also mentioned long back-road trips with his wife in a 1972 Cutlass Supreme ragtop, which feels exactly right for a writer so tuned to roads, weather, and talk. He now lives in Athens, Alabama, and still writes the kind of crime novels that know a place matters.