The House That Tasteless Tonic Built

St. Louis, 1890s (Missouri Historical Society)

The doctors gave it to Edwin Grove straight. The St. Louis smog was eating away at him. The haze aggravated his bronchitis and left him wracked with chronic hiccups. He was ailing, sleep-deprived, and filthy rich. The doctors said it was high time he sought clean mountain air. 

This was 1897, and Grove had to admit the doctors were right. He needed a summer retreat. And it wasn't as if he had St. Louis in his bones. He'd grown up in West Tennessee and built his pharmaceutical business there. As his sales boomed, he began moving the operation to St. Louis in 1889 to scale production and build nationwide distribution. By the 1890s, Grove and his Paris Medicine Company had become an industrial powerhouse. 

The industry? Patent health elixirs.

In Grove's case, the anti-malarial Grove's Tasteless Chill Tonic. Grove's tonic had moved ahead in a crowded field of patent-fever medicines, products like Ayer's Ague Cure and Hostetter's Bitters. By 1890, his tasteless tonic reportedly outsold a popular new concoction of coca leaves and kola nuts known as, well, Coca-Cola. Grove was winning because of his marketing machine, but his tonic backed up the hype. Unlike the snake oils of the day, his tonic was genuinely anti-malarial.

Except there was a catch.

Malaria was still a major problem in the U.S., especially across the South, and would remain so for decades. Grove experienced malaria's impact on a personal level, losing a daughter and his first wife to the disease. At the time, the standard treatment for malarial symptoms was quinine powder, an aggressively bitter compound. Quinine could kill the malaria parasite and reduce fever—if you could convince someone to endure the dose. 

Grove's idea was to make quinine palatable. Instead of the traditional powder, he suspended his quinine in syrup with lemon. Was it tasteless? Mostly. Did it have the claimed broad health benefits beyond chills and fever? It did not. But his tonic was soon everywhere, in pharmacies, on corner stores shelves, as mail-order. 

In 1897, it was Grove who needed a cure. Sweet mountain air, and he knew just the place: Asheville, North Carolina.

By the late nineteenth century, Asheville had a burnished reputation as a natural health retreat, with luxury sanitoriums and comforts for the wealthy visitor. Tucked in the French Broad River valley, Asheville offered wide spaces, altitude, a dry climate, and the promise of clean, forested air. America's rich had been coming for treatment but staying for the atmosphere. 

And off Grove went. He bought property in Asheville and summered there while Paris Medicine Company churned out the tonic. And he'd chosen well. The North Carolina climate soon helped relieve his respiratory problems. With a clear head and a good night's sleep, his attention turned from convalescence to opportunity. 

This time, the product was Asheville itself. The town lived up to its billing: healthful and skilled at catering to the wealthy. As the summer estates went up, an entire community of designers and artisans set up shop downtown. Asheville was so attractive that even the artists decided to stay. 

And the land was cheap. 

Grove bought entire swathes of Asheville real estate. By 1908, he was selling his first lots at a sprawling development on the lower slope of Sunset Mountain north of downtown. Grove Park, it would be called, and it wouldn't be just a neighborhood. Grove Park would be a lifestyle. Grand houses, wooded roads, hillside views, and common spaces to enjoy the restorative air. Money didn't buy happiness, but it could buy a lot in Grove Park, and a Grove Park lot promised a healthier constituion. 

Empty hills and hype wouldn't convince Grove's educated buyers into signing contracts. Closing a sale meant proving that his development was more than a pitch--and, of course, that he had the financial muscle to deliver.

Grove needed big and thought big: a mountain inn centerpiece overlooking the development. Part lodge and part spa, an impressive inn could serve as a draw and convenient housing for potential buyers. Its design would advertise Grove Park's planned aesthetic from on high. 

There was a problem: Grove's vision for the inn was so singular that no architect captured it to his satisfaction. The big firms brought him urban refinement, symmetry, a city hotel or a sanitarium perched atop Sunset Mountain. No, Grove said, the inn must be carved into the mountainside, a part of it.

Finally, Grove let his son-in-law have a shot at the design. To be clear, the son-in-law, chemist Fred Loring Seely, had no architectural experience. He'd been busy running much of the Tasteless Tonic business. But he understood Grove and the objective, and he wanted a chance to pitch a design. 

The folklore goes that Seely brought Grove a design for a raw stone lodge built around a grand hall. In reality, Seely seems to have drawn on earlier proposals. Either way, he had a winning concept. From the front, the inn would look broad, low, and deliberately simple, a lodge as old as the Blue Ridge chain itself. At the rear, the inn extended six stories down the mountain, with rooms positioned to maximize the mountain views. Grove tasked his son-in-law to make it happen. 

The inn broke ground in 1912. Seely had no background in construction, either, but he had logistical know-how and Grove's deep pockets. Seely quickly hired professional engineers and four hundred men at high wages and set everyone to work. Both Seely and his crew lived on Sunset Mountain while the Inn took shape. They pried granite from the immediate area and used it in its natural shape, cracks and lichens and all. Stones that men or donkeys couldn't move were incorporated into the design. 

About a year later, the Grove Park Inn was finished. Grove, however, was not. Until his death in 1927, he continued to develop Grove Park into one of Asheville's premier addresses, which it remains to today. The inn grew into a hospitality complex, and his patent medicine business grew to add brands such as Laxative Bromo-Quinine (for colds), Dr. Porter's Antiseptic Healing Oil, and Pazo Ointment (for hemorrhoids). Bristol Myers bought the company in 1957. 

Before all that, though, was a terrible case of hiccups and the doctors' order for a tonic baron to get some damn fresh air. Go to the mountains, the doctors told Grove. He took his ambition with him. 

From X to His First Mystery Novel

Photo by Ishaq Robin on Unsplash

My wife was invited to speak at a fundraiser a few weeks ago for a literacy program run in a small town here in North Carolina. I tagged along because I’d never been to that particular part of the state, and because my role in these dramas is to carry the nuclear football.

A few hours before Denise was to go on, the organizers asked us to meet with a group of people at the used bookstore their program runs. The store was a small, cozy spot located on a sleepy Main Street.

Within the memories of people who are much younger than me, the factories in this area that used to employ most of the citizens shipped jobs overseas. What remains are a military base, a vegetable canning plant, meat packing plants, and slaughterhouses. Many of the hams and turkeys destined for American holiday tables are cranked out in this county.

I expected to breeze through the shop for a brief show and tell. But no. When we walked into the bookstore, I was stunned to see a group of people sitting in a giant circle in front of the bookshelves, while the checkout counter had been stocked with an abundance of water bottles, fruit, and snacks.

I was not expecting a party. But that’s what they had planned for.

One by one, people took turns introducing themselves and explaining how the nonprofit literacy program was making a difference in their lives.

The youngest people there—the bookshop’s interns—were students at the local community college. They loved working at the store. They were glad to be given the chance to work in some capacity in retail. Some alluded to being held back in their dreams because of their disabilities. They did not share the nature of those disabilities, and the reporter in me had taken a leave of absence that afternoon, preferring to just listen.

One young man told us that he hoped to attend culinary school someday. He was already whipping up batches of candied brittle at home. “It’s good,” he said. “It’s got great flavor and it doesn’t stick to your teeth.” Some of the people in the program were helping him research how to take his products direct to customers.

At the store, much of the interns’ work days consisted of sorting the used books that donors brought in, researching the titles, setting aside the occasional choice rare-book picks for online sales, and stocking the shelves with books in the best condition, which the shop felt would sell quickly.

Everyone hated dealing with ex-library books. Too many stickers! Ironically, ex-libs in relatively good shape were often the first to get snapped up by buyers because they were cheap and their dust jackets had been long protected by those plastic covers.

The older folks had a different story.

Mr. Sam, who was in his seventies, was a thin, wiry Black man dressed in blue jeans, an ornate brass belt buckle, and a baseball cap.

Ages ago, when he’d gotten his first job, Mr. Sam didn’t know what to do with his first paycheck. He took it to a bank, where a teller instructed him to sign the back. When he told the person behind the counter that he didn’t know how to write his name, he was told to simply write an X.

This he did for decades until very recently, when one of the literacy volunteers helped him learn how to write his first and last name. At first, those were the only things he could write—the only things he needed to write—to conduct his personal business.

There was another adult learner in the group, but she was not as loquacious as Mr. Sam. For several minutes he explained how he managed to get by in the world without knowing how to read. Street signs were a mystery, so he listened carefully when someone gave him directions, and did exactly as he was told. That’s how he got around on foot in town and any place he ever visited. Behind the wheel of a car, he did the same, memorizing and following verbal instructions to the word until the places he needed to go were ingrained in his mind. He did not have much use for road signs, and often got lost in strange places. He knew, for example, that the red sign meant STOP. In supermarkets, he stuck to brands whose packaging he recognized by sight.

Based on his age, I guess he might have had kids or grandkids. Did they read? Did they help him figure out the meaning of the words he encountered in his everyday life, but could not decipher?

I don’t know.

As he spoke, I found myself thinking how many books, how many words, I’d consumed in childhood alone. I remember learning to sound out words for the first time in first grade. But what came after—the plodding steps that led to reading a book on my own for the first time—are lost to me. My identity from early on was so entwined with reading and writing that I cannot imagine not having those skills. I first read for fun, later for work, and now for both.

Hearing Mr. Sam’s story made the struggle real.

Some of the literacy volunteers who had helped Mr. Sam attended this meeting in the bookstore. They were former teachers, recent retirees from the public school system, who wanted to make a difference with their newfound free time.

They had taught him and the other adults the alphabet, how to write those letters and form words, and finally how to write their first and last names.

Mr. Sam was now in the process of reading his first novel from start to finish. A “big” book, he said smiling. For grownups.

It was a mystery novel, and it was sooo good.

After working their way through children’s books, the volunteers liked to start their charges with something in this genre because, as Mr. Sam explained, “The way it’s written, you just want to keep reading to find out how it ends!”

I was choked up by this point, but when he said that, I burst out laughing. Probably a little too loudly.

“How long has it been since you’re been learning all this?” Denise asked him.

“Four years.”

“So, in four years you went from signing your name with an X to reading a novel?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Mr. Sam, who is 77 years old.

It was a nice visit. Eventually, we all moved on to snacks, and later, hugs.

We needed to get back to where we were staying to get ready for the evening program. If the rest of the afternoon and night had not been so mapped out, I think we would have stuck around longer. The store was cute, with sculptures of a tree and jungle animals in the children’s section. And the people were inspiring.

Later, at the fundraiser, some of the store’s interns were running a rare-book silent auction at the back of the room. When the aspiring chef saw me, he reached out to fist-bump me.

I asked if I could take a picture of him and his colleagues.

They were cool with it, and stood up from their post.

“Smile and say brittle,” I said.

They laughed as I snapped away.

On the long ride home the next day, I thought about the experience in the context of the larger national conversation about literacy. Some months ago, I saw (as many of you probably did) the troubling August 2026 story in The Atlantic that argued that the age of reading is dead.

When I first started paging through the article by Rose Horowitch, I expected to be able to dismiss it easily. Yet, unlike so many of the stories of this type, it turned out to be short on fluff or manufactured hysteria. No—what made it so chilling were the brutal statistics.

And yes, the writer noted that we have more bookstores today than a few years ago. But she also writes:

Text is thriving among a dwindling proportion of the population. Just 20 percent of adults accounted for more than 80 percent of all books read last year. “It’s becoming a kind of niche hobby, like stamp collecting or growing orchids,” Leah Price, a historian of reading at Rutgers University, told me.

Without reading, humans find it hard to think abstractly or comprehend difficult concepts. And when it’s so easy to watch a video, scroll through headlines, or listen to a podcast or a rant in a social media short, why would you choose to read complex text to make sense of your world?

But you are incapable of making that choice if you cannot read in the first place. So I guess I found it comforting that the human craving for story can still drive that desire. I left that town greatly moved by our short visit to the bookstore on Main Street. And equally proud that our genre still evokes such a strong reaction from new readers:

“The way it’s written, you just want to keep reading to find out how it ends!”

Yes, Mr. Sam, yes! That’s exactly what mysteries do! Long may they ever.

***

You may encounter a paywall if you try to read The Atlantic story. Contact me offline and I may be able to help.

This article brought to mind one of my favorite essays on childhood reading, by Anna Quindlen. You can read "Enough Bookshelves" here.

See you next time!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

joedenise.com

Bad, Bad, Spy

 I do love Mitchell and Webb. Here is their version of an espionage flick.  

  

Back to the Future

Noir is a reflection of its time. I think you can argue that Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde is proto-noir, published in 1886, and clearly psychological fiction, even if not characterized as such. But classic noir is identified with the immediate postwar era, from 1945 into the early ‘50’s.

The immediate precursor, both for style and for a gleeful moral ambiguity, is the gangster picture of the 1930’s – Warners the studio that capitalized most heavily on the raw energy of actors like Cagney and directors like Walsh. I couldn’t say where the distinction, or definition, comes into play. The Maltese Falcon came out in ‘41; is it noir, exactly? The Big Sleep came out in ‘46, but Bogart has ration tags on his windscreen, so it dates to the end of the war, not after. The picture most people would agree on is Double Indemnity, released in ‘44. Barbara Stanwyck comes down those stairs? You know Fred MacMurray is toast. My own favorite would be Out of the Past, 1947, which is clearly deep into noir convention, by that point. The exchange on the beach, when Jane Greer tells Mitchum she’s a bad girl, and not to be trusted, and Mitch has the classic comeback, which could serve as the epitaph of so many dumb clucks, from Garfield to Burt Lancaster: “Baby, I don’t care.” (The source novel is Build My Gallows High.)

Kiss Me Deadly, from 1955, is beginning to slide into different territory - a little Them, with its radioactive ants. Cold War noir is genre in itself, culminating in The Manchurian Candidate, or Eddie Dmytryk’s hallucinatory Mirage. Kiss Me Deadly is still pretty relentlessly weird, Ralph Meeker completely unsympathetic, but so determined, and Gaby Rodgers, who didn’t get much traction, after this picture, as one of the more extreme psycho femme fatales of all time. Don’t open the box!

There’s a pretty clear demarcation, between the first Bond, Dr. No, in 1962, and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, released in ‘65. Ian Fleming knew from derring-do, he’d been a Royal Navy spook, mounting false-flag operations in Nazi-occupied Europe, but Bond was total moonshine. He was also an archetype, predatory and calculating. Le Carré’s sensibility was a course corrective, unglamorous and weary, and there were quite a few real spy-handlers, in CIA and MI6, who actively disliked the way le Carré peopled his secret world. They accused him of moral relativism, but it was also so un-Bond, shorn of imperial carelessness.

The noir world is arbitrary and violent. You can draw a direct line between Dick Powell in Murder, My Sweet and Elliott Gould in The Long Goodbye. Powell is more the wiseguy, and Gould the more passive, but they both affect not to care, as if they could let the world go about its business – but they in fact feel it very deeply, hiding an abiding empathy under a veil of scorn. And if I prefer Powell, in black-and-white, it may simply be that his disguise slips when you least expect it. Powell represents his era, just as Elliott Gould does. Powell, or Mitchum, or Bogart – I’m thinking particularly of his astonishing performance in High Sierra – are both brittle and resilient. Gould just seems stoned, half the time, which makes the ending of The Long Goodbye even more shocking. You don’t realize how much Marlowe has invested of himself, until that last moment.

So, what to make of the neo-neo-noir, such as Sicario, or Don Winslow’s border trilogy? You could call it brutish and nihilistic, in keeping with Age of Trump, but it still seems to me inherently conservative, in that a rough justice prevails, a balance is restored. The resolution of Sicario is disturbing in the extreme, and its sequel even bleaker, and yet, as cruel as it is, it’s dramatically satisfying: it sets things right. We may not agree with it, but it brings a kind of order out of dystopian chaos, a reckoning.

My point, here, is perhaps that we get the noir we deserve. If it settles the score, baby, I don’t care.

BAMS BSP

Opening my computer signaled a typical day. A radio station in England and a book club in Hartford, Connecticut, threw electronic elbows, jockeying for my attention. Both were desperate for me to appear. In elaborate detail, the emails slobbered over my first book. They warned that a collective paroxysm might sweep through their listeners and readers if I didn’t reply promptly and agree to appear. Lives were at stake.

Like the rest of the writing community, I get a lot of AI-generated scam emails these days. At first, they enticed me. Then, they entertained me. Now, they’re weeds.

So, I nearly missed the email from Steph Cha notifying me that my story, “Slow Ride,” would be included in this year’s The Best American Mystery and Suspense.

I carefully checked its authenticity before replying. They’d spelled Steph Cha,

Megan Abbott, and my name correctly. They got the story’s title right. They hadn’t suggested that my book, “Slow Ride,” had real movie potential. It seemed genuine. With trepidation, I replied. Then I waited for the follow-up email requesting credit card information. Instead, I got an author copy with my name included on the Table of Contents. (It’s there, near the bottom. That’s what happens when your last name starts with T.)

Of course, my name shouldn’t be there alone. Fellow Sleuth, Michael Bracken, had the idea for a series of novellas about a Dallas-based car theft ring. (In 2025, Joseph S. Walker scored The Mysterious Bookshop’s Best Mystery Stories of the Year for another tale in the series.) Michael invited me to submit a proposal. I threw him two. One centered on a stolen car with a space alien in the trunk. I described the other as “Charles Dickens meets Saw IV.” It felt like a good elevator pitch.

It worked. Michael asked me to write that one.

“I’ll get started right away,” I said.

But first, I had to watch Saw IV.

Thanks, as always, to Michael for turning my comma-spliced submission into legible prose. Thanks also to Betty, my traveling companion and first reader. She wouldn’t watch Saw IV with me. She didn’t need to. Betty intuitively understood the premise. Create a bad scene, then ask, “How might I make this worse?”

Thanks to Megan Abbott and Steph Cha for including my story in the collection. I look forward to thanking you in person at a conference down the road.

Proving that writers never waste anything but time, Barb Goffman emailed some months later, seeking a holiday story for a July issue of Black Cat Weekly. She said you can do Independence Day if you want, but it’s okay to feature an obscure holiday. A quick Google search taught me that World UFO Day is July 2^nd.

Barb and I have corresponded before. I knew this one wasn’t a scam.

I wrote back. “How about a thief with a space alien in the trunk?” 

As these things go, the story ended up taking a different direction than I envisioned when I originally pitched it to Michael. But the finished product found a home.

Now, I get emails from a book club in Sydney, Australia that wants to talk about it.

And I have to read them. Because every so often a surprising message lies hidden among the weeds. Finding it can make your day.

Until next time.

*****

I’m traveling during the week that this blog posts. Apologies in advance for a delayed reply.

Microexpressions and The Diplomat

I had a dream the other night that was all about microexpressions. We hear a lot these days about microexpressions: those tiny “tells” that allow an expert poker player to crack the code of another player’s supposedly inscrutable poker face.

In crime fiction, certain detectives have a gift for interviewing suspects who are determined to give nothing away. These skilled interviewers read the microexpressions that betray the suspects as they exercise their right to remain silent or reply to every question with, “No comment.” Estelle Ryan’s brilliant protagonist Dr Genevieve Lenard, in an art-themed series set in Strasbourg, and Laurie R. King’s latest protagonist, San Francisco Homicide Inspector Raquel Laing, both have this gift. On TV, the series Lie to Me (2009-2011) comes to mind.

I woke up (no, sorry, folks, not with the whole plot of a new novel) realizing that screen acting, with its many closeups and visual moments with no dialogue, relies heavily on microexpressions. This may sound obvious, but in the past, I’ve missed it. I know this because there have been many occasions on which the screen has focused on a character’s face, or the faces of two characters saying nothing to each other for an extended period, and I’ve been bored. I might have compared the pace to that of paint drying. I might even have clicked and turned off the show on the grounds that nothing was happening. The other morning, my insightful unconscious pointed out to me that I was wrong. The actors were acting, conveying what was happening within and between their characters through microexpressions. Sherlock Holmes might have said to me, as he did to Watson, “You see, but you do not observe.”

It follows that the better the acting, the more use the director and editor can make of microexpressive moments. Obversely, good actors tend to make good use of microexpressions Our appreciation as audience may not be entirely conscious, but the proof is that what’s happening onscreen engages us fully. The Diplomat on Netflix is an excellent example.

It stars Keri Russell as the American Ambassador to the United Kingdom and Rufus Sewell as her loose cannon of a career diplomat husband, both brilliant actors at the height of their careers. In the current Season 4, Hal Wyler (Sewell) has become Vice President of the US, with Allison Janney giving a bravura performance as Grace Penn, a President of the US going off the rails, making increasingly reckless unilateral decisions that put world peace in danger and off-with-your-heading anyone who disagrees with her like Alice in Wonderland’s Red Queen herself. The first three seasons played on the big stage typical of a political drama. Creator Debora Cahn chose to make this season a kind of chamber opera, focusing closely on three couples: Kate and Hal Wyler; the President and the First Gentleman (Bradley Whitford); and Ali Ahn as the CIA London Station Chief and Atoh Essandoh as the Deputy Chief of Mission of the US Embassy in London.

I wasn’t sure this character-focused version of the show would work, but it did. For one thing, the dialogue crackled with life. In a sense, The Diplomat is a child of The West Wing, as I guessed the first time I heard that familiar, “Ya think?” as a sardonic comeback. Debora Cahn is listed second after showrunner and lead writer John Wells after creator Aaron Sorkin left The West Wing. And Allison Janney and Bradley Whitmore were so memorable in their West Wing roles that to this day, if I mention Janney or Whitmore to my husband, who tends to forget actors’ names, I can say, “You know, CJ and Josh,” and then he’ll know who I mean.

The story is compelling, to say the least. Apparently Cahn didn’t mean to parallel the headlines, but this season avoiding the moral questions of today’s reality “became absurd.” It wouldn’t work, though, without the superb acting of the principals.

Microexpressions come into play during scenes like a gala and a meeting of the G7 heads of state and top diplomats, when the Wylers watch President Penn across the room as she smiles, shakes hands, and kisses cheeks and they try to discern how far she’ll go to pursue her agenda. And Kate Wyler’s face is never still as she juggles the increasingly unstable balls of her loyalty to the country she represents, her obligation to the country to which she is ambassador, her marriage, her friendships, her professional relationships, many with people who are also her friends, her ethics, her impatience for solutions, and her desire to do the right thing.

Crime Scene Comix Case 2026-11-040, Fall Guy

Once again we highlight our criminally favorite cartoonist, Future Thought channel of YouTube. We love the sausage-shaped Shifty, a Minion gone bad.

Yikes! In this Crime Time episode, only one outcome is possible.

 

 

 

 

© www.FutureThought.tv

 

That’s today’s crime cinema. Hope you enjoyed the show. Be sure to visit Future Thought YouTube channel.