In his latest work of historical fiction, novelist Don Swaim explores the culture and chaos of the Roaring Twenties.

Don Swaim, a storyteller since childhood, exhibits a particular talent for writing historical fiction one might describe as “thrilling and engrossing.” For evidence, look no further than his most recent novel, Jitterbuggin’ with the Renaissance: A Jazz Age Epic. Swaim chose the Roaring Twenties—“an era of profound fascination for me,” he says—as the setting for his gripping story, the title of which draws inspiration from a Langston Hughes poem.

“Prohibition, gangsters like Al Capone, the rebirth of the KKK, flappers, F. Scott Fitzgerald—what could go wrong?” adds Swaim, whose name may be familiar to some from his career in broadcast journalism. His prior novels include The Assassination of Ambrose Bierce: A Love Story, Man With Two Faces, and The H.L. Mencken Murder Case.

Your protagonist in Jitterbuggin’ is a memorable character named Taggart Booker Asquith III, Gart for short. Why did you choose to tell the story through his eyes?
Every novel needs a hero, and mine is Gart, a mixed-race cub reporter at the Baltimore Sun who attaches himself to the newspaper’s mainstay, H.L. Mencken, the leading intellectual of the period. Gart is dispatched by Mencken to suss out scoops on some of the period’s key events: rumrunning in Cuba, a serial killer in silent-screen Hollywood, and hanky-panky in the nation’s capital. He falls in love with Zora Neale Hurston, one of the figures of the Harlem Renaissance. All the while, Mencken pontificates on the major cultural episodes of the time.

Each novel of yours is incredibly textured, and often quite humorous, with an almost head-spinning amount of detail about the period and the people who lived through it. Tell me about the kind of research that goes into writing your books.
I love the research. As a long-time broadcast journalist—working in newsrooms in New York and Baltimore—I rarely write autobiographically, preferring the fact-finding, study and analysis of significant figures of the past, such as Ambrose Bierce. My [novel] The Assassination of Ambrose Bierce: A Love Story sprawls over nearly 75 years beginning in the 1840s. Man With Two Faces is set during the Great Depression. An early novel, also featuring Mencken, takes place in the 1940s. I love how one facet of history intersects with another and the way individuals converge.

You had a rather colorful career in radio prior to becoming a novelist, with your most notable work probably as host of the nationally syndicated Book Beat. Tell me about it, what you liked about it, and why it was important.
A loner as a child, by the age of 6 I’d ask my mother to type my little stories and poems—until she told me to do it myself. Envisioning a career as a writer, whatever that might be, I turned to journalism in college—journalists write, don’t they?—which led to broadcast jobs both on and off the air. This allowed me to indulge my passion for literature by doing regular interviews with many of the leading authors of the time. Those interviews have been digitized by the Ohio University library, which houses my audio archives, and can still be heard online. I see it as a small way of helping to illuminate the culture of that period.

Jitterbuggin’ just came out. What do you have planned next?
I’m putting the finishing touches on a novel about the start of the rock ’n’ roll era in the ’50s and ’60s, which deals with radio, disc jockeys and payola. I’ve been struggling with this effort for years, a bittersweet story of ambition, cupidity, ignorance, but also redemption plus the romance of radio.