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,