Wes Browne talks with George Singleton about crime fiction, encountering characters in the courtroom, and his latest novel

When it was published in early January, Wes Browne’s second novel They All Fall the Same sparked instant buzz online. The Southern noir thriller brings back Burl Spoon, a central character from Browne’s 2020 debut Hillbilly Hustle, whose cannabis empire is still going strong in Jackson County, Kentucky after three decades. But all is not well for Spoon behind the scenes. His family is falling apart, and following two tragedies, Spoon retaliates against another drug kingpin, setting up a chilling, brutal conflict. Readers hailed the novel for its “authentic Kentucky characters” and fast-paced plot, labeling it “crime fiction at its best.” In late January, Goodreads agreed, naming the novel as one of “2025’s Biggest Mysteries & Thrillers.”

Browne talked about the book, his love of film and his experience in the courtroom with beloved Southern author and raconteur George Singleton, whose latest book, the essay collection Asides: Occasional Essays on Dogs, Food, Restaurants, Bars, Hangovers, Jobs, Music, Family Trees, Robbery, Relationships, Being Brought Up Questionably, Et Cetera, was published in 2023.

■■■

GS: It’s probably bad form to compare a novel with movies, but They All Fall the Same has everything: The French Connection, The Fugitive, Django Unchained, Bonnie and Clyde, Hatfields and McCoys, even Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Are there any particular movies that, looking back, may have inspired you?

WB: The book Winter’s Bone is a masterpiece, but I saw the movie long before I read it. My friend Mark Westmoreland has said They All Fall the Same is a little like Winter’s Bone from Tear Drop’s perspective. I like that idea. I do know I was influenced by it.

There’s a book blogger named Scott Lovelace who posted a video about They All Fall the Same where he compared it to A Time To Kill, which I hadn’t thought about, but I can see it. I didn’t read the book, but I saw the movie. Maybe that was in my head a little.

I’m a huge Paul Newman fan, so there could be some Hud in there. Charisma and cruelty in one package. I didn’t think to give my protagonist blue eyes.

They’re in series, not movies, but two characters I love are Walter White from Breaking Bad and Tony Soprano from The Sopranos. There’s no doubt in my mind I was inspired by those two characters. Both are objectively bad guys with family issues that complicate their lives, and just enough humanity in them that you hold out hope for some redemption.

GS: You’re a complex man, Wes—attorney, restauranteur, and writer. Lacrosse coach, bon vivant, music lover, University of Kentucky athletics enthusiast. Do you sleep?

WB: Fitfully and not enough. I say this in all seriousness. Reading and writing help me. I’ve had trouble falling asleep since I was a kid because I have racing thoughts. I think about work and worries, and at this point, humanity. When I go to bed, I read until the book is falling out of my hands, then, when I finally put the book down, I think about whatever writing project I’m working on until I nod off. Something about that occupies my brain in a way that works like magic.

When I’m in the thick of writing a novel, I nap in the early evening so I can write into the late night and early morning. If you love writing, you make time for it no matter how busy you are. And I love it. It’s been my passion since I was in the fourth grade. I make time for it no matter how busy I get.

GS: Burl Spoon was a character in Hillbilly Hustle. What made you want to flesh out his story? Also, have you encountered such characters in the courtroom?

WB: Shew. Long answer. I was done with the story in Hillbilly Hustle, but I kept thinking about Burl and what his life looked like apart from that. He’s so commanding and seemingly untouchable, but what would happen to him if he got touched? I thought about writing a character similar to him, but that didn’t make any sense. I already had his rhythms down and he still fascinated me. So I wrote this new story from scratch. If you know both books, they’re completely different. Aside from Burl, there’s not much connecting them.

I’ve seen all kinds in the courtroom, but not many like Burl. Usually, if someone of his stature is brought to justice, it happens in federal court. I don’t really like federal court. Too formal for me.

I initially based Burl on several people. There was a guy in a county I worked who would go see the judge before court each week, and the people he wanted to get help, were helped. Nobody questioned that. The judge he saw wound up in federal prison, by the way. There’s some of that guy in Burl.

How Burl talks is based on a maintenance man I know. This guy will ask me for a favor, and if I say, “no,” he’ll say, “well, fuck you then,” and laugh about it. That’s just his way. Coarse as hell. But then he has this softer side to him that comes through now and then when he talks about his family and stuff like that. That’s Burl Spoon.  

Writing someone who is fundamentally not a good person, and doing it in a way that readers still pull for them, kind of epitomizes what I like to do as a writer. There’s humanity and potential for redemption in just about everyone. So you have to find subtle ways to get that across without losing the character’s essential nature. If I think about it, that’s what I’ve done as a criminal defense attorney my entire adult life. Try to convince people that someone who’s done something bad has potential for good in them. Burl is just another client, I guess.

GS: Crime fiction seems to be undergoing a certain renaissance. Do you have any favorite past masters of the genre? Who’s at the top of their game at the moment?

WB: I was brought up on Elmore Leonard. I grew up about thirty minutes from where he lived in Michigan. My mom used to go to a lot of author events and she met him. She got him to sign me a copy of Out of Sight, and he wrote “Good luck with your novel” in it. I was in my early twenties, but I was already working on one. I finally published Hillbilly Hustle when I was forty-six, so you can see how long it took me to figure it out, but I treasured what he wrote in that book. I haven’t read all of his books, but I’ve read most. I don’t write just like him, but his influence is there.

S.A. Cosby is kind of the pinnacle of the business at the moment, and there’s a reason for it. Everything he writes is gold. What’s lovely about his success is, he’s such a wonderful and generous guy. He gave me notes on this book that helped me and his blurb graces the cover. I get compared to him some, but I know for a fact I can’t do what he does. I just try to do what I do and hope people like it.

Some other contemporary masters I admire are Jordan Harper and Megan Abbott. Those two both awe me. If you’re talking more rural noir, your buddies Tom Franklin, Ron Rash, Chris Offutt, and of course, Donald Ray Pollock, are role models. And then there are my buddies, David Joy, Eli Cranor, Kelly J. Ford, and David Heska Wanbli Weiden, who are also at the top of the game. I could go on.

GS: In Chapter Twenty-One, Burl Spoon’s son Darron says to his father, “…You belittle everyone and everything that doesn’t bend to your will. Everyone’s beneath you because they don’t have the money and power you have. You don’t bring anything to this world…And it doesn’t matter how much you have to cheat so long as at the end of the day you feel like you’re winning. …” Is there any way that Trump came to mind as you wrote this? Or Napoleon (seeing as Burl is short in stature)?

WB: Not consciously, but I can see how you could draw that conclusion. The reason people don’t quite turn on Burl all the way is that here and there his love for others bleeds through. Though he rarely does it, he has the capacity to put loved ones before himself, and he has some well-buried empathy in him that can be coaxed out. The other thing about Burl that is imperfect, but exists, is his love and respect for women. He’s certainly no role model, but if you pay attention, it’s women who coax goodness from him, it’s women who elicit his most generous nature, and it’s women who are his salvation.

GS: I despise myself for asking this question, but it seems to be the first question whenever there’s a Q&A at a book signing/reading: Do you have a process?

WB: I come up with a beginning and an end, and then I just make stuff up until I get to the end, and the end typically is not what I thought it would be when I started. Elmore Lenoard talked about pushing his characters out the door and seeing where they go. That is probably his biggest influence on me. So my process is pretty damn loose. I don’t believe in plotting in advance too much, because people’s lives are built on how things play out and their reactions to that. How am I supposed to figure out all those reactions in advance if I haven’t been through them with the character yet? If I do my thing the right way, you’d think I plotted the whole thing out meticulously. That’s the magic. When it comes together as if I had a plan all along.

I have a very short attention span, so I’m constantly trying to build tension, conflict, and suspense, and set up lots of mini climaxes and set pieces on my way to the final climax. But a book can’t be all pyrotechnics. That’s actually very boring. You need stretches of quiet to make those dynamic scenes pop. You’ve got to do a lot of character building and story building, because if readers aren’t made to care about the characters, there’s no stakes in what happens to them, so that’s what I do between this and that popping off. I make readers care. But each time I’m in a quieter part of the book, I’m looking ahead thinking I’ve got to have something sexy happen soon or I’ll lose people. Hell, I’ll bore myself writing it.

GS: DeeDee, Burl’s daughter, succumbs to fentanyl-laced heroin. I know that your region’s been plagued with meth and fentanyl, along with the rest of America. Do you think there’s any hope on the horizon?

WB: I don’t know. At least there’s some recognition of the problem, but it’s a little like plugging cracks in a dam. Another always opens up. Fentanyl is getting put in everything because it’s cheap and it makes people feel good. It’s like the MSG of drugs, but it can kill you so easily. People know about it being in heroin, but they’re finding it in vape cartridges that are supposedly THC. People think they’re getting weed, and they’re getting fentanyl. That’s just one example.

One place I see hope is in the emphasis on treatment over punishment for users. Users are victims themselves. Punishment without treatment is just further victimization. We need to concentrate on getting the victims well, not incarcerating them, and that’s taken hold to some extent.

I didn’t set out to write an “issue” book, but I made a conscious decision to write about opioids touching a family, and specifically touching a family with the money and means for treatment, and how even with that, you can lose someone. I hoped to get people to think about the scope of the problem and how it could impact them and their loved ones.

GS: I suppose They All Fall the Same could take place in Montana or Connecticut, but the Kentucky/Tennessee area seems perfect. I know, also, that you hail from Michigan. Talk about what Kentucky means to you when it comes to setting.

WB: I try to be really open about my background. I always joke that I don’t want to be the Rachel Dolezal of Appalachian literature. I’m fifty-years-old, but I moved here when I was twenty-two to go to law school and have been immersed in the culture and the legal system since then.

For me to write this book, Kentucky was the only option. This is the place I know the best. I know people who get into the kind of trouble I write about, who have the types of relationships I write about, and who see the world in the way my characters see the world.

I’ve traveled all over the region practicing law. When I go different places, I like to hang around, eat in local restaurants, go to convenience stores and junk stores, and talk to people. Then there’s the courthouses. I’ve spent hours on end in back rooms killing time with other attorneys, courthouse staff, police officers, defendants, judges, just shooting the breeze. Add to that what I’ve seen and heard in jails. I could write about somewhere else, and I do, but right now, Kentucky and Kentucky characters come the most naturally.

GS: There are strong, three-dimensional women in this novel: Colleen, DeeDee, Whitney, even granddaughter Chelsea. I remember in old, old crime novels, sometimes the female characters were treated as an aside. While you were writing, did you say, “I have to make the women in this novel stronger/more rational/more sympathetic than the men in their lives?”

WB: One reason I don’t love all of the crime classics is because the way women are written in some of them is pretty terrible. They show up, they’re thinly-sketched props, and they go to bed with the protagonist, or they get murdered, or both. It’s all so predictable, and it panders to readers’ worst natures. Fortunately, the genre is headed to a better place, and we’re seeing less of that.

And yes, I did try to make the key women in this book more virtuous and rational than the men, because in my experience, it’s so often true. So I think it’s realistic. There are some women in the book who are less so, but I didn’t dwell on them much. Burl is a man who is allowed to exist, and who thrives, in a negative way due to the complicity and acquiescence of other men. It’s mostly the women in his life who stand up to him, who demand better of him, and who ultimately preserve his humanity.

GS:  What’s next?

WB: I’m doing what I like to call my “Elmore Leonard pivot.” I’ve already published two novels set in Kentucky that are very much books of this region. My next one I went somewhere completely different, like Leonard did, but I anchored it in my own background and researched the hell out of it.

It’s a fish-out-of-water book about a former Michigan State Police sharpshooter recruit who becomes disenchanted after his sister passes away, quits the academy, and moves to Las Vegas where he joins a high-end theft ring. Eventually he sours on that as well, ends up flipping on his co-conspirators, lands on probation, falls in love, violates his probation, crosses a crime boss, and ends up on the run from hitmen, the law, and a guard from a women’s prison who hates him. The working title is Twentynine Palms Highway. ■