MICHAEL AMOS CODY chats to Paul Burke about his STREETS OF NASHVILLE, new country music, North Carolina, MTV, tragic inspiration for the novel, why done it not whodunnit and Runion.

In Streets of Nashville, Ezra MacRae has a nearly encyclopedic knowledge of songs and their writers, and he has moved from the North Carolina mountains to Nashville's Music Row with the dream of becoming part of that songwriting world. Yet just as he is out on the town to celebrate his first good fortune after several years of trying-a staff songwriting contract with an independent music publisher-he witnesses the man who signed on the dotted lines with him gunned down with three others outside his Music Row office. The masked gunman spares Ezra. But why?

Michael Amos Cody was born in the South Carolina Lowcountry and raised in the North Carolina highlands. He spent his twenties writing songs in Nashville and his thirties in school. He's the author of the novel Gabriel's Songbook (Pisgah Press) and short fiction that has appeared in Yemassee, Tampa Review, Still: The Journal, and elsewhere. His short story collection, A Twilight Reel (Pisgah Press) won the Short Story / Anthology category of the Feathered Quill Book Awards 2022. Cody lives with his wife Leesa in Jonesborough, Tennessee, and teaches in the Department of Literature and Language at East Tennessee State University.

Author blog on Runion: https://michaelamoscody.com/2019/05/24/runion-north-carolina/

Mentions: David Joy, Cormac McCarthy, Bruce Springsteen, Bob McDill, Thomas Wolfe, James Lee Burke, Heather Levy, CW Blackwell, Monster City Michael Arntfield, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, Charles Brockton Brown, Peter McDade, Don DeLillo - Great Jones Street.

Recommendations: anything by Tony Hillerman and the adaptation of two of his novels for streaming Dark Wind.

Paul Burke writes for Monocle Magazine, Crime Time, Crime Fiction Lover and the European Literature Network, Punk Noir Magazine (fiction contribution). He is also a CWA Historical Dagger Judge 2025. His first book An Encyclopedia of  Spy Fiction will be out early 2026.

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