美国国家公共电台 NPR Barack And Joe Solve A Murder Mystery

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DON GONYEA, HOST:

If you missed the news on Monday, President Barack Obama and his former vice¹ president, Joe Biden, were spotted² out at a Washington, D.C., cafe rekindling³ their Oval Office quote-unquote "bromance," catching⁴ up over sandwiches and fennel salad - for real. But there's also word of another meeting between the two former running mates in which they team up to solve a murder. OK, maybe that part didn't happen, but it is the plot of a fun new book, "Hope Never Dies: An Obama Biden Mystery." Andrew Shaffer is the author, and he joins me now from Lexington, Ky., to tell us more - but not too much, of course. Spoilers, you know.

Andrew Shaffer, welcome to the program.

ANDREW SHAFFER: Thanks for having me, Don.

GONYEA: Let's start with a little reading because I think it'll really give the audience a sense of the noir, gumshoe flavor of this book. You open with Joe Biden, former vice president of the United States, sitting at home in Delaware with nothing to do basically and seething⁵ with envy over Obama's awesome⁶, post-presidency⁷ vacation pics with the likes of Richard Branson and Bradley Cooper. I'll have you pick it up from there.

SHAFFER: I called to my wife, I'm letting Champ out. She didn't answer back. I could hear the TV playing in our bedroom - Law & Order. I should've been watching with her. Instead, I opened the back door. As soon as I did, Champ raced across the lawn and tore off into the woods. The motion light over the back porch should've kicked on, but the bulb was burnt out. It was an old one, I guess. Old bulbs were meant to burn out. The moon was full enough to light up the backyard. Our 7,000-square-foot lake house sat on four acres of property. Late at night, it was possible to imagine you were all alone in the world. Tonight, however, I wasn't alone. A head in the woods was the pinprick of light. And now I smelled tobacco, a familiar brand, Marlboro Reds. Don't get your hopes up, I told myself. Hope is just a four letter word.

GONYEA: (Laughter) OK. That is the arrival, of course, of Barack Obama into the pages of your book.

SHAFFER: Of course. That's - it's a dark, mysterious arrival of the former best friend. And the book is really about two people sort of reconnecting after they've had a little bit of time apart.

GONYEA: The entire book is first person, told by Biden himself. Why Biden, not Obama?

SHAFFER: I tried to get into Obama's head, but you just can't do it. You think there's so much going on in there. And as soon as you start poking⁸ around, it just sort of demystifies that, and he becomes, you know, just a regular guy. And we spent eight years watching him in the White House not as a regular guy. But to me, Joe Biden has always been a regular guy. That's part of his own mystique - is that, hey, I'm just Uncle Joe. I'm Amtrak Joe.

GONYEA: The Biden-Obama relationship has been described as a bromance. When did it occur to you that it would make a good foundation for a full-length whodunit⁹ like this?

SHAFFER: You know, I thought about it for years - doing just a book about Joe Biden nor a narrator. You could imagine him in the vice presidency with nothing to do, sort of daydreaming¹⁰ a Walter Mitty-like existence through his aviator¹¹ shades. But that really never got off the ground. And it wasn't until they were out of office for a week that I was like, oh, well, I need to have them together because those bromance memes had been going around the Internet where it was Joe Biden, like, pulling pranks¹² on the incoming president in the White House and Obama going Joe, stop it. Joe. And so you really had to have them together, I realized, to have a compelling story.

GONYEA: And the basic premise¹³ of this plot is that an Amtrak conductor from the Wilmington Station - Delaware, Biden's home state - is mysteriously murdered or found dead.

SHAFFER: Right. So you have someone who's close to Joe in the story is found dead, and then Obama shows up mysteriously one night and says, oh, I have some information here that you may want to hear about.

GONYEA: And even though we're talking Amtrak here and the mystery that surrounds this death, you keep the book away from political third rails. You're not touching¹⁴ anything too controversial.

SHAFFER: Yeah. Yeah, I think, you know, some of the most controversial stuff in the book might be the defense¹⁵ of Amtrak that Joe Biden gives in it because he's very passionate¹⁶ about that. But yeah, like I said, it's really down-to-earth. And it doesn't go over the top. I mean, although, there are parts where, you know, Joe Biden might be hanging off of a speeding train by three fingers. You know, it does go to some sort of wild places like that.

GONYEA: Surely that's happened (laughter).

SHAFFER: Surely, at some point. They don't call him Amtrak Joe for nothing.

GONYEA: All right. Andrew Shaffer. His latest book is "Hope Never Dies: An Obama Biden Mystery."

Thanks so much for joining us.

SHAFFER: Thank you, Don.