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Welcome to Dedicated. Today we're with Megan Abbott. She is a best-selling and award-winning crime fiction novelist. She's won the Edgar, the Barry, and the Anthony Awards. She's also written

for television. She was showrunner for the show, Dare Me, which is based on one of her earlier novels. Her latest novel is called El Dorado Drive, and I devoured the advanced copy that I have here. It's totally terrific, and you will also love it. Megan, welcome. Thank you so much for having me. It's great to have you here. And your choice for the drink today I'm excited about is the gimlet. Yes, a serious one. So if you're out to the restaurants in New York, it's a gimlet. It's a gimlet, you know, if I'm going the cocktail route, I mean, yeah, I mean, you know, it's a dangerous cocktail. It's strong.

It's not a martini, but it's getting in that realm of, you know, one will do me, but it is my favorite.

It's sort of got a crime fiction, history. It was famously Philip Marlowe in the Raymond Chandler novels.

That's right. Yeah.

That's right. Yeah. He talks about a gimlet and how it should be prepared.

Right. He has a specific line on how to put it together. It's like half gin, half.

It's very heavy sugar. Like it's half roses lime juice. And I prefer lime juice.

Like roses. Yeah. Rose's lime juice has mostly sugar. But yeah. I'll put a little simple syrup in or? I think so. Yeah. It's just in honor of Raymond Chandler. So that until early on, um, I made that my drink in honor of him. And it turned out to be my favorite anyway. So is he one of the early inspirations for you?

Yeah, he was a big one.

I'd never read anything like that.

So it was so atmospheric and all that mid-century crime fiction, mid-last century.

Dashil Hammett?

Yeah, completely, completely.

I want to, we'll get it.

I have in my notes to ask you about your debut book, which is actually nonfiction, about this kind of stuff. So, uh, we'll get into that because you were talking about sort of that hard boiled, I don't know, maybe sort of overly masculine language around it, or not overly, but just, it's a way.

Hyper masculine. Hyper masculine, yeah.

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