Bistro Nights

Steve and Mie are a pair of globetrotting journalists, based in Paris, who make up fanciful stories about strangers they see at nearby tables in bistros, bars and brasseries. When they start spinning yarns about a waitress, Mireille, and a down-and-out American novelist named Cavendish, they find themselves peeking into a pair of tempestuous love triangles. 

One love storm—among Mireille, her possessive lover Serge, and Cavendish—takes place in present-day Paris. The other ill-starred romance forms the plot of Apache Dance, Cavendish’s work-in-progress. His novel harks back to the Paris underworld a century ago, when gangsters—known evocatively as apaches—commanded the streets. 

Bistro Nights intertwines the troubled trio of Mireille, Serge and Cavendish with the fictional triangle of Fifine and Nick, chief of an apache gang, and Fifine’s heartsick secret admirer, Maxim. 

The contemporary drama of Cavendish and Mireille, hounded by a jealous Serge and observed—off and on—by two nosy journalists, leads the reader through an intimate tour of real-life Parisian restaurants and cafés, from Le Petit St.-Benoit to the Rosebud Bar. Meanwhile, flashing back in time, Bistro Nights unveils vividly the spectacle and squalor of a bygone Parisian demimonde. 

As he struggles with his love for the unattainable Mireille, Cavendish finds inspiration in Serge—whose jealousy and violence are the model for Nick, in Apache Dance. The sad Maxim, of course, is Cavendish’s own alter ego. 

Nick holds Fifine in his brutish thrall. Maxim prepares a desperate, fateful measure to save the woman he loves. But then, after a botched and bloody carjacking, a police dragnet forces Nick into hiding long enough for Fifine to escape. Or does she?

As these twin triangles mount to separate climaxes, Steve and Mie find their own cool and stagnant romance rekindled and they tumble irresistibly toward the heat, lust, grace and danger of the danse apache.

David Benjamin began his career as a storyteller in Mrs. Poss’ second-grade class at St. Mary’s School in Tomah, Wisconsin. His fictional memoir, The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked, originally published by Random House, was reprinted by Last Kid Books in 2019. His Last Kid Books include a collection of his essays, Almost Killed by a Train of Thought, two  short story anthologies, The Melting Grandmother and Other Short Works and Christmas in a Jugular Vein and sixteen novels, Three’s a Crowd, A Sunday Kind of Love, Summer of ’68, Skulduggery in the Latin Quarter, Black Dragon, They Shot Kennedy, Fat Vinny’s Forbidden Love, Witness to the Crucifixion, Choose Moose, Bistro Nights, The Voice of the Dog and Benjamin’s Jim Otis mystery series, Jailbait, Bastard’s Bluff, Woman Trouble, Dead Shot and Cheat. As a journalist, Benjamin has edited newspapers, published and edited several magazines, and authored SUMO: A Thinking Fan’s Guide to Japan’s National Sport.

Since its launch in 2019, Benjamin’s publishing imprint, Last Kid Books, has won more than forty independent-press awards. These include, for They Shot Kennedy, the Midwest Book Awards’ 2021 grand prize for literary/historical/contemporary fiction, and a 2022 Silver Medal for Humor to Fat Vinny’s Forbidden Love in the Independent Book Publishers Association’s prestigious Benjamin Franklin Awards.

Benjamin and his wife, Junko Yoshida, have been married for ages. They live sometimes in Madison, Wis., and the rest of the time in Paris.