“I think you always want to write about the most interesting period in your history. “I went for a bike ride and there it was, totally unchanged,” Walter says. He learned that the city experienced an enormous population explosion in the early 1900s, which sparked serious tensions Spokane’s police chief was assassinated in his home in 1911. Back when he was a reporter at the local paper, the Spokesman-Review, he’d occasionally trawl through the archives. His first glimpse of the story came long before he started writing fiction at all. Though Walter grew up in a pro-labor household - his father was the longtime president of a steelworker’s union - the Wobblies’ experience in Spokane wasn’t part of his young consciousness. Though it’s set more than a century ago, the echoes of the present day are hard to miss: the cantilevered economy of a gilded age, a justice system that targets the poor, a polarized political mood, and a ravaged ecosystem where profiteers “killed the world and called it progress.”

Walter, whose last novel was the acclaimed Hollywood satire “ Beautiful Ruins,” funneled his interest in working-class adventures into “The Cold Millions,” a robust work of historical fiction. For a working-class kid, there was a bit of romance about it.” “Something about the two connected with me. “He used to tell me how to hop a train, and he was telling me these stories at the same time I’m reading ‘Treasure Island,’” Walter says via Zoom from his home in Spokane. Walter’s grandfather arrived in Washington from the Dakotas in the 1930s.

So perhaps it was inevitable that he’d wind up combining the two in his new novel, “ The Cold Millions.” Growing up in Spokane, Wash., novelist Jess Walter read a lot of adventure stories and listened to a lot of family lore about his blue-collar roots. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores.

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