One Drink Book Club | Gideon's Revolution by Brian Carso

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the One Drink Book Club. Today we're going to be discussing Gideons Revolution, an historical fiction about a soldier in the Revolutionary War who was tasked with capturing Benedict Arnold and bringing him back to George Washington so he could be put

[00:00:21] on trial for treason. My guest tonight is Brian Carso, the author of Gideons Revolution. Thanks for joining me, Brian. Jamey, it's a pleasure to be on the podcast with you. I really like historical fiction and I also really like this time period. So congratulations

[00:00:36] on the book. I really enjoyed it. I know it's your first. How did it feel to kind of put the final touches on this book? It is a good feeling. I've written academic books before, but there's something about

[00:00:48] a novel that you just have a bigger audience. And I did an event at a bookstore in Mystic, Connecticut on Tuesday night. I got to the bookstore a little bit early and I

[00:00:58] heard the bookstore staff saying, oh, we got to prepare for the author event. And I tapped them on the shoulder and said, hey, I'm the author. And that's what every guy who writes a book just waits for that moment.

[00:01:08] So I'll bet. Well, one of the things to get out of the way here for the One Drink Book Club, I usually make a cocktail that is or a drink of some sort that's based

[00:01:18] or inspired by the time period in the book. So I did a little research on Revolutionary War cocktails. And unsurprisingly, many of them had to deal with rum. But I decided I was flip flopped a couple of times on different ones, but I decided to go with the

[00:01:35] Rattleskull primarily because I thought the name Rattleskull sounded cool. You can't go wrong. You can't go wrong. And so the Rattleskull is 12 ounces of porter, one and a half ounces of rum, three quarters of an ounce of lime juice and then a little bit of brown sugar,

[00:01:54] simple syrup inside there and then a little bit of nutmeg on top. And so that's exactly what you want to drink before leading a revolution, quite frankly. I don't have a drink in front of me, but one of my favorites from the period

[00:02:06] is the rummer, which is dark rum, some apricot brandy, some peach brandy and a cherry. If I use maracino, I put a little cherry juice in there to sweeten it up. But that I got from Colonial Williamsburg.

[00:02:20] I was having dinner down there and then I asked, well, how do you make this? So well, you know, it's funny you say that because I was looking around for what I was going to use as a glass. And then I remembered I actually have this

[00:02:34] pewter cup is from Colonial Williamsburg. Perfect. There you go. From about 25 years ago, 1998 was when I got that cup. So we were both there. Excellent. So clearly you've done an immense amount of research on Benedict Arnold. What kind of led you to this character, this person?

[00:02:53] What was compelling to you about him? Well, Jamie, you're right, an immense amount. And I'm going to betray something about how old I am. I really started looking into Benedict Arnold nearly 30 years ago. Wow.

[00:03:04] I was a law student and I had to write a review, a note for the law review. And I decided I'd write about the treason clause of the Constitution, which is the only criminal law in our foundational document.

[00:03:14] And that, of course, led me to Benedict Arnold and so forth. And then some years later, I went to get a PhD in American history and ended up writing my dissertation on treason from the Revolution through the Civil War, a legal kind of illegal history.

[00:03:28] But of course, there's a chapter on Benedict Arnold. And as I was doing the research for that chapter, I came across a little known because it's a spy mission. So of course, it's a little right. But a little known spy mission to capture Benedict Arnold after he betrayed

[00:03:45] Washington and the Patriot cause at West Point. And I made a note to myself, I said, someday either write a little academic article about this or a really cool historical novel. So finally around 2015, I got around to writing the historical novel.

[00:04:00] And it was just it's such a great story that people don't know a lot about. A lot of everybody has heard of Benedict Arnold, but, you know, a revolutionary era spy mission to capture a trader. It just had all the elements of a great story. I agree.

[00:04:16] And I didn't know much about Benedict Arnold and clearly he's synonymous with being a trader, but I really didn't have much knowledge of the man. What I thought was really interesting was how revered he was as a good general before he committed treason. He was very successful.

[00:04:35] He was daring. He was a charismatic leader. And you don't know about those things because it's so his whole persona is so dominated by this treasonous behavior. That's what made his treason in 1780 so shocking and meaningful

[00:04:53] to citizens of the new United States was that here was somebody who was so highly esteemed if he had died at Saratoga, where he was gravely wounded in the fall of 1777. If he had died from his injuries, we'd have statues of Benedict Arnold

[00:05:11] and half the town squares in America, and we'd celebrate him on the in the pantheon of great American Revolutionary War heroes. So there's there's that he was our best battlefield general at Saratoga. Arnold was charging across the battlefield on his horse, waving his

[00:05:28] sword in front of his men while Horatio Gates was in a cabin about a half mile away, writing orders to be delivered. So Arnold was that kind of guy. And there's a story I tell in the book where one of the characters

[00:05:42] is recounting going to Quebec with Arnold. Arnold and Richard Montgomery led what was an ill fated mission to capture Quebec City in the fall and winter of 1775, 1776. And it's a true story because a lot of what I put into this novel

[00:06:02] I take from from true facts and try to imagine them and give them some more life. And I was reading a journal about written by a soldier who was on this march to Quebec, and they were starving.

[00:06:14] And some some got smallpox and they didn't have food and they were starving. And they came across a butcher, a French Canadian butcher who gave them meat. And then a little while later at the next farm, they cooked the meat and they ate the meat.

[00:06:26] And the soldiers said I didn't eat any more than I usually would have eaten. But I got horribly sick because my stomach perhaps had shrunk. I just hadn't eaten in so long and he couldn't march anymore.

[00:06:37] And he sat by the side of the road and he knew that then Colonel Arnold would be coming up at the end of the line and he fully expected Arnold to whack him with his sword and discipline him. But and this is true, Arnold got off his horse,

[00:06:50] walked with this soldier to the river, hailed a French Canadian farmer from across the river, paid him in good silver coins, take care of my soldier and when he's better, he can walk back and join us. That's the kind of guy that the good Benedict Arnold was.

[00:07:07] Wow. Well, I remember that story. That was obviously in there. I think it was Taggart that that happened. Correct. That's right. That's right. Yeah. He seemed to be incredible. You know, one of the things that struck me is at this time period,

[00:07:20] I mean, when I think of traders in kind of modern day traders in terms of the US history, I think of Alder James, I think of the Rosenbergs, those kinds of people. And what I thought was interesting is that in 1780,

[00:07:34] where they've declared independence, but they haven't won independence, it's a little murkier in terms of there were clearly a lot of colonists who were still loyal to the crown. And so was it as clear cut as it is today? I mean, clearly we have a country.

[00:07:49] It's pretty obvious when you betray it here. I feel like clearly the British thought everybody who was fighting against George Washington was a traitor. Everybody was a traitor. And so the fact that he was a loyalist, was it just the fact

[00:08:01] that he had been a general for the revolution and then switched sides? Or was it was there something else that made him such the poster child for being a traitor? Jamie, that's a great question. And as story, we know we don't have census records and good data,

[00:08:17] but we generally suspect that a third of the population was pro independence. A third of the population wanted to remain loyal. And the middle third wasn't really sure. It just depended which army was in town at that moment. So yeah, the politics were really murky in that regard.

[00:08:33] I think what makes Benedict Arnold's treason so well-defined and so clear to us is the very reason that upset so many continental army soldiers and other Americans at the time is that he wasn't just a corporal.

[00:08:48] It wasn't just a ho hum citizen, but he had risen to such a high point of esteem. Mercy Otis Warren was a woman who lived in Boston, a very important family in Boston, close friends with John and Abigail Adams.

[00:09:03] And Mercy Otis Warren really wrote the first sort of kind of journalistic accounts of the American Revolution. And early in the revolution, she said, two great figures are going to emerge from this revolution, George Washington and Benedict Arnold. And because he is such an important figure,

[00:09:22] his fall is seen as being particularly egregious. And, you know, by 1780, as is the case so often, people were getting pretty tired of the war and the enthusiasm for independence in 1775 and 1776, what they call the rage military.

[00:09:41] This idea of we can do this, we're going to form our own country. It was fading. And a number of historians have looked at Arnold's trees and they say, well, in 1781, Arnold betrays the cause. It kind of reinvigorates everybody to say, hey, we've got to look inside ourselves

[00:09:59] and say, are we worthy of this fight? Are we worthy of self government and forming a democratic republic? So, yeah, I mean, even though the politics were really murky and loyalties went back and forth, Arnold had done such a good job

[00:10:15] of gaining this reputation that the fall was specially precipitous. It's really interesting that his actions really spurred, you know, kind of a new motivation on the other side. I mean, he essentially was the first one to give him locker room, something for the locker room bullish and bored.

[00:10:31] And you know, we got to go out and beat this guy. And inadvertently, that's what he did. Your main character, Gideon, who is the vehicle to talk about a lot of these things and is kind of a narrator for those things.

[00:10:42] I thought the idea that he would be sitting with him in that Saratoga or that New York hospital when he was recovering after the Battle of Saratoga. I thought that was a really good device in order to bring out a lot of the history

[00:10:55] and how Benedict Arnold is what he's thinking about, how he's feeling. Is Gideon based on anybody real or is he a combination of different stories kind of rolled into one character? Yeah, Jamie, great question. A lot of the characters are real.

[00:11:10] And let me let me preface my answer by saying this. Over the years, I've met and talked with a lot of authors of historical fiction. My first question to them is always how faithful are you to the facts when you're telling your story?

[00:11:22] And some people on one end of the spectrum will say, well, I use historical facts to the extent that it illuminates my story in some way. My day job is as a history professor. So I took the other extreme.

[00:11:34] I said, I'm going to use every known fact that I can find and then try to bring those to life using informed imagination and filling in the gaps because it's a spy mission in the middle of novel. And what can we fill in that we don't know?

[00:11:49] And so a lot of like John Champ in the spy mission is a real person. But Gideon Wheatley is a composite. I read a lot of journals of Continental Army soldiers and British Army soldiers, Hessians soldiers and civilians and so forth.

[00:12:03] And I needed to create a narrator who could take us across the whole spectrum of Arnold's behavior. And part one, Gideon Wheatley gets to understand Arnold and witness him as the battlefield, great battlefield general in the war hero.

[00:12:18] And part two, as you mentioned, Wheatley is in the hospital, kind of looking out after Arnold, who was gravely wounded on his deathbed for several days at Saratoga. And in that four months that he's flat on his back with his leg

[00:12:35] that's broken in several places contained in a fracture box, the doctors built a box around his leg. And every couple of weeks they pull the leg apart and try to put it back together better when Arnold's ultimately done. His leg is two inches shorter than it was.

[00:12:50] And then part three is the spy mission. And then part four takes us 20 years later. And Gideon Wheatley is a composite that allows us to see this arc of Arnold's behavior and also help us get inside Arnold's head.

[00:13:04] Right? One of the great questions in American history is, right? Why did Benedict Arnold do this? And so, you know, I wanted to get inside his head and Wheatley helps me do that. Definitely. I thought I really did like him. I liked him as a character.

[00:13:17] And I also appreciated his insights. And, you know, I realized that you need some sort of device to get that information who is going to be your fly on the wall. Right. And I thought he was a good, good way to do that.

[00:13:29] One of the things I thought was very interesting is that Gideon Wheatley was not happy about being given this assignment to be a spy and to pretend he was going to defect to the British in order to capture Arnold and bring him back.

[00:13:43] It seemed as though the idea of a spy in the Revolutionary War, these guys were not very honorable. They weren't necessarily people that you wanted to emulate. And it's so different than how we think about spies and James Bond,

[00:13:58] who is not only a cool character, but also clearly an honorable person in whatever cause you may have. And so I thought it was interesting that how spies were looked at like that. And I assume that that is based on fact. Yeah, it's true.

[00:14:15] I teach a course at the college where I teach on spies, traitors and saboteurs. I was just going through the book list for next spring and, you know, picking a couple, you know, World War Two spies, Cold War spies.

[00:14:28] And we do we kind of whether in fiction or real life, we celebrate those who kind of look out for our national security, right? And do some spying. Totally different attitude towards spies during the Revolution.

[00:14:41] One of the reasons we celebrate Nathan Hale is that he was the rare individual who was willing to do this work of going behind the lines. But yeah, that is what you've identified, Jamie, is one of the two tensions in the book.

[00:14:55] The one tension is getting inside Benedict Arnold's head. What is he thinking? The other tension is Gideon Wheatley does not want to be a spy. As he says at one point, you know, there's no upside to it.

[00:15:07] If you if you succeed in your mission, nobody will ever hear about it. And if you fail in your mission, you'll be hanged from the nearest tree. So, you know, it was a very dangerous thing to do.

[00:15:17] And when Arnold betrays Washington and the Patriot cause and flees to the British in Manhattan, he issues a proclamation calling on continental army soldiers to desert from the Continental Army and join Arnold's American Legion in Manhattan that will fight with the British.

[00:15:36] And Washington gets one of these a copy of this proclamation says, all right, well, let's send somebody to go do that. Let's have somebody feign desertion. Get close to Arnold, study his habits and then communicate with Washington spies in Manhattan as to when we can grab Benedict Arnold.

[00:15:53] Put him at a boat and roam across the Hudson River where the Continental Army will arrest him and try him and hang him for treason. And it was dangerous work. The soldiers, the idea of fleeing, you know, deserting from your own army,

[00:16:09] they were then chased through the night that we know that's true. And once they get over to Arnold's side, they know if they're if they're found out by the British, they will be hanged. If they're captured by their own side, the Americans, who knows what'll happen

[00:16:25] to them as well? And in fact, one last point, even when Benedict Arnold goes over to the British for the rest of his life in war and then in civilian life for the next 20 years when he's living in London,

[00:16:40] he's not really trusted by the British because once you've betrayed somebody, who's to say you're not going to betray me or not that you're not going to be dishonest in your commercial dealings or whatever. So to spy was definitely seen as a dishonorable thing.

[00:16:57] I'll tell you one more quick story about that, Jamie. In the novel, you'll know that the certain messages are passed to Rivington's coffee house. James Rivington was a figure who had a coffee house and a printing press in Lower Manhattan, and he was perceived during the British occupation

[00:17:16] of Manhattan as being a loyalist who's very friendly to the British. But in fact, he was passing information. He was one of Washington's spies. And he knew that once the Americans won the American Revolution, he was toast. But don't you know George Washington shows up in Manhattan

[00:17:35] and makes a very conspicuous display of George Washington, who wasn't all touchy feely, but walks out kind of with his arm on the shoulder of James Rivington and walks up the street so everyone knows. Well, look at that. Rivington was actually on our side. So it was important.

[00:17:54] And that didn't happen to everybody. That not everybody had George Washington put his arm around you and vouch for your character. Well, I thought that the daring aspect of it where if you weren't killed by your own men because they perceived you as defecting,

[00:18:09] getting the other guys to trust you. But I thought it was an interesting lesson in psychology that the people who were spying and going into capture Benedict Arnold, they really fed the psyche of Benedict Arnold. Oh, yeah, we're like all these guys. Everybody believes you, you know,

[00:18:30] they just told him what he wanted to hear. And it was interesting how receptive he was to those those things. I mean, I guess we're all like that. We want to hear that, you know, lots of other people agree with us.

[00:18:43] And because clearly you don't make the decision that he made thinking you're going to end up on the losing side. Yeah, he wanted people to show up for his American Legion. Imagine how humiliating it would be. You know, I believe around 200 soldiers did in fact affect again.

[00:18:59] The politics and the loyalties being what they were. And he was disappointed in the number, but it was something. You said that you've written academic books about this. I would think one of the biggest challenges to writing a novel

[00:19:11] is doing the dialogue and getting the dialogue right for the time period. And I thought you did a really good job of making it sound accurate, but still conversational and still understandable for a modern reader. How many revisions did you have to do? What was that process like?

[00:19:28] Because that's different than writing an academic book about the time period to actually have to step into the time period and make believable dialogue. Because I think that's one of the most challenging things. If you're writing a script, if you're writing a play, whatever you're doing,

[00:19:42] writing a novel is to make the dialogue not sound oaky. And then if you add in, you've got to use the time period, colloquialisms and everything else. It's even more challenging. It is. And I tried to walk a fine line.

[00:19:57] I've read novels about the colonial period in American history where the author chose to really be dialect heavy and it's a little bit throws off sometimes. So I wanted to find this balance between giving a sense of the time period

[00:20:12] in the dialogue, but also make it very accessible. I didn't want anybody scratching their head saying, well, what is he really saying here? But the details, yeah, I mean, you know, I've got so many books on the shelf about stuff that we don't really know the details.

[00:20:26] Like what is it like to spend 45 days sailing on a wooden sailing ship across the Atlantic Ocean? What is your day to day life like? What do you eat? Where do you sleep? Or what's it like to be on a British warship? You know, what's it?

[00:20:42] What was lower Manhattan? I went to all these places that I could go to. I went up to Quebec and I met a military historian up there. We walked the streets and figured out where Arnold had been. Same thing in lower Manhattan for Ticonderoga, Saratoga, Albany,

[00:20:58] where that hospital was Richmond, Virginia. I wanted to get inside Benedict Arnold's head. And part of it is I talked to museum curators, historians at national park sites when I needed to, Gideon Wheatley, when he goes to London, has a leather bag.

[00:21:15] And lots of conversations went on with people who know more about material culture in the 18th century than I do. Should I call it a satchel of a lease or portmanteau? Right. So just getting all those details right so that it sounds right,

[00:21:30] but it actually also is what the people would have called their equipment and how they would have used it and so forth. And it's appreciated as a reader, you know, part of what I enjoy history

[00:21:41] and I feel like historical novels are kind of the the spoons full of sugar that makes the medicine go down. You get to learn a lot about if it's good and the author is true to the facts and true to the time period.

[00:21:56] You really get a lot of knowledge of it, but you get it in kind of an enjoyable storytelling way, which is, you know, I'm sometimes a little lazy. There's a great quote from Hillary Mantle who wrote all these great

[00:22:08] historical novels about Henry VIII in that period of English history. She says, if you want to know not just what the past was, but what it felt like from the inside, then you turn to a novel because it allows us to understand the feelings.

[00:22:26] What makes a person tick? You know, what are their hopes and dreams? What keeps him awake at night? What makes them lie in bed staring at the ceiling? So these are all the human connections that we like to make and a lot of purely historical academic books.

[00:22:40] You know, you're studying economics and politics and battle plans and so forth. But at the end of the day, it's all about the human beings who participated in it. And what are their wants and what are their fears? And the novel form helps us to think about that.

[00:22:57] I mean, that's why, you know, I've read everything written about Benedict Arnold, but it was I learned I got inside his head better for writing this novel this way, for doing this sort of imaginative exercise. Well, that's great.

[00:23:11] Now, I have a couple of questions and I'll do a spoiler alert for listeners to the podcast. I think Brian's done a great job of giving us an overview of the book. As I've said, I really enjoyed it.

[00:23:22] If you like historical fiction, if you like revolutionary war history, I highly recommend the book. But there's a couple of things here. If you haven't read it, maybe you come back and listen to this part. But one of my questions was Gideon has two opportunities

[00:23:37] to kill Benedict Arnold in the book. The first one is when he realizes that their ability to capture him is going to probably not happen. And so he knows that he could kill him and he kind of backs off because Washington had told him not to kill him.

[00:23:54] But then you have later in the book, 20 years later, Gideon, who has basically his life was changed by this whole event because people did think he was a loyalist, that they did think he was a traitor. And even though people said, no, no, he was working for us.

[00:24:10] Don't worry, he's a good guy. There was always doubts. His his fiance had kind of left him. He never got married. So his whole life was altered by this experience. And he goes back 20 years later and finds Benedict Arnold in London

[00:24:25] with the object of poisoning him or with the goal of poisoning him. And you find out, you know, there's kind of this twist where you find out he decides not to. And so I'm just curious what why number one, did something like that happen?

[00:24:39] Did somebody go and have an attempted murder in London? And two, what was going through Gideon's head on why he decided not to in London? You know, I wanted to make a strong, right? There's any good novel has a moral component.

[00:24:54] What is the what are the moral decisions that the characters have to make? That's what makes it a story really interesting. And in the first case, right? And this is true about the spy mission to Washington and his orders

[00:25:08] said, do not assassinate Benedict Arnold when they get to New York because to assassinate him was what also have been seen as dishonorable. Washington said, we're not a rogue army. We don't do that kind of thing. But Gideon Wheatley finds himself in a position where if he were

[00:25:25] to kill Benedict Arnold at that particular moment, he's thinking, I could spare maybe a hundred soldiers from dying on the battlefield or I could make this war end sooner. And he makes a decision in a split moment not to kill him.

[00:25:41] And to think about, you know, I was reminded Hamlet, you know, goes to kill Claudius and he finds, you know, he has the perfect opportunity. Claudius is on his knees in the bed chamber by himself and he's praying.

[00:25:57] And Hamlet hears his prayers and go, I can't kill him now. And something happens in that moment on the stairway where Gideon Wheatley says, well, I can't kill Benedict Arnold now. And it's a really hard thing. And part of it is that Gideon Wheatley really admired Benedict Arnold

[00:26:12] before. Yeah. That's the reason. And then in the end, Gideon's life has been kind of ruined by the fact that he played the part of a traitor in order to help Washington and help the American cause. And he's not able to kind of recover his reputation.

[00:26:30] And he's bitter about that. And he goes to find his friend, Henry Taggart, and he finds out some stuff that happened to Taggart. And he says, you know, I have to go make it right. And he crosses the ocean to go find Arnold.

[00:26:43] And I think that what he observes about the enormity of nature, the unknowns of life and death while he's on that 45 day crossing and the relationship he has with the family that he stays with, when he read Saroon, sure, all combines in his head.

[00:27:02] And at the moment when he he meets Arnold at the coffee house and he's prepared to pour a little vial of arsenic into Arnold's coffee. And this was fascinating. I thought the British only drank tea. They had more coffee houses in 1800 in London. The New York has Starbucks.

[00:27:19] It was unbelievable. And he's prepared to poison Arnold. And at that moment, he's got to make this moral decision. And it's that line where he says he answers Arnold. Arnold says, am I murdered now? And Wheatley says, we are all murdered.

[00:27:33] And I think there's something had changed about Wheatley as he thought about what he was going to do over the course of the Atlantic crossing and as he lives with this young family as well.

[00:27:45] Well, it also seemed as though Arnold at that point was a pretty beaten man. He was not triumphant. He had had basically suffered. Wheatley and his commercial activity was down the tubes. No one really trusted him still. Right, right.

[00:28:02] Speaking of coffee houses in London, I also did not know that until I read History of the World in six glasses. I think that's the name of it. Have you ever read that? I know, I've heard of it, but I haven't read it.

[00:28:14] It's a really interesting book, but they go through beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea and soda as their influence on culture throughout the world. And that's what I learned that the British had first went crazy over coffee before tea even showed up.

[00:28:32] And it was much later than you would have guessed that tea became popular in. It's really interesting. The little things like that have a little impact. There are historians who say that the prevalence of coffee in London helped move the industrial revolution along because you would have

[00:28:49] business meetings in these coffee houses and the coffee back then was like mud, like caffeinated thick strong. And these merchants would get together for business meetings and they'd all get like hyper caffeinated and be like, go, go, go.

[00:29:04] Well, that was the first the first stock exchanges were in coffee houses in London. Really interesting. Sorry, off topic there. I get a little tangent. So my other spoiler question to you is so, yes, Gideon was at this boarding house. There was a young family there, this woman.

[00:29:22] He kind of befriends. She's pregnant. And while he's waiting for Arnold to be ready to see him, you know, he spends a couple of weeks where he's helping her at the market. He's spending a lot of time with her.

[00:29:33] And when he leaves kind of in a rush after he had this realization, hey, I don't want to kill him. I'm going to go back home. He leaves money with that family just to be kind and to help them along.

[00:29:46] And you write in this this note when he's back in the United States where he gets a letter from this woman's husband that soon after he left, Louisa has died and the child has died. And I kind of was like, wait, where did that come from?

[00:30:01] Why? Like, why do those poor people have to die? Brian, why did you kill Louisa? It's sort of my Stephen King misery moment. You know, the book in the movie where James Cohn is the writer and he kills off the character.

[00:30:14] So Kathy Bates finds him after an auto accident, ties into the bed and says, you're going to make that character come back to life or else. I sort of feel that way about about that moment. A couple things there, James. Again, I was sticking close to history

[00:30:30] and I knew this how this whole story was going to play out from start to almost finish. And the hardest thing to figure out was the end because as you've alluded to already, Arnold's demise is he's a 60 year old guy who's really sick and depressed.

[00:30:47] And he just dies and there's nothing really, you know, exciting or fancy about that. So I wanted to add some moments of kind of moral decision making. I mean, the question, right? So the reader is left with the question for about five or six pages.

[00:31:05] Did Gideon Wheatley accidentally poison Louisa by losing one of the vials of arsenic? And that resolves itself a little bit later. But for a minute, I mean, there is that question of kind of revenge and collateral damage, right? What is this mission that Gideon Wheatley is going on?

[00:31:23] I mean, we see it in the world today in today's news. I mean, to wage war is to have a relationship with collateral damage one way or the other. And I wanted to introduce that idea. The other thing is in the town where Benedict Arnold grew up,

[00:31:39] Norwich, Connecticut, there is a magnificent 18th century burial ground. And there's about a thousand tombstones all from the 1700s. And about a third of those are children under 10. And you know, it was and you see the medicine in the hospital

[00:31:58] in part two of the book, it was brutal. You know, people died of a lot of stuff. Every historical figure I can read about has some relation with child laws. Or spousal loss or and that, quite frankly, the disease wiped out.

[00:32:16] Benedict when Benedict Arnold was a child, a lot of his siblings died. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And and so, you know, all of these components come together. And I say, well, to get an ending that involves some moral questions about collateral damage, about revenge, about this notion that

[00:32:36] we are all murdered, right? That that unfortunately the loss of this very pleasant character kind of fit the bill there. Sure. So any plans for a follow up book? This is a long process to write a book, especially something like this. Are you taking a break?

[00:32:55] You're going to enjoy the fruits of your labor or do you have any any projects that have been percolating? I have already started another one, Jamie, but not about the Revolutionary War. And this was was a great story to tell.

[00:33:08] And I wanted to tell this story, but I've done a lot of work on a photographer named Robert Kappa, who was a mid 20th century photographer. Hopefully I don't have to get all tied up in whether he carried a satchel of a lease or a portman.

[00:33:24] I'm hoping it took me five years to write Gideon's Revolution. I hope this one goes a little quicker. Well, it sounds good. I am also a amateur photographer, so that would that would also interest me personally. Terrific. That's that's great, Jamie.

[00:33:39] Well, thank you, Brian, so much for joining me. I enjoyed the discussion. Where's the best place for people to buy your book? You know, a great place to go would just be my website, because if you buy it from my website, there's a link to its

[00:33:53] published by Cornell University Press. And there is a discount code on my website that gets 30 percent off the list price, so that's better than Amazon or any place else. But it's on all the bookseller websites. Go to your favorite bookseller or bryancarso.com to get that discount.

[00:34:09] Great. And how do you spell car so if somebody's now watching this? Brian is B R I A N Carso C A R S O dot com. Great. All right. Well, if you are if you like historical fiction, I highly recommend.

[00:34:22] Thanks again, Brian for joining me and for everyone else. Please subscribe, whatever platform you listen to podcasts. And drop me a review or an email if you are interested in hearing about your favorite book on the next podcast. Thank you very much and have a good evening.