A Night at the Theater

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Last night, I had the extraordinary experience of seeing my characters come to life in a stage reading. Now, as someone who studied and worked as an actress (about 800 years ago) I'm no stranger to stage readings, and I've seen my share of amateur ones in recent years as each of my children has participated in the Maine Young Playwrights Festival. But this one was a first for both the author participants and the Portland Stage Company, our city's professional (Equity) theater.

In conjunction with their latest production, Arsenic and Old Lace, the PSC decided to have a readings-and-conversation night with five Maine mystery authors. The whole thing was kicked off and masterfully organized by our own Brenda Buchanan.

Amazingly, the crowd turned out. It was almost a full house! Now, the fact the theater put on a wine and beer reception with delicious Otto's pizza might have had something to do with it...

...But I think there were a lot of crime fiction lovers who would have come anyway.

 The amazing cast of actors assembled on the stage to read from Brenda's Quick Pivot, Straw Man by Gerry Boyle, The Poacher's Son by Paul Doiron, One Was A Soldier (that's mine) and a suitably scary short story by Chris Holm.

 I didn't get any pictures of the performances because I'm too darn polite to whip my phone out in the theater. But it was an impressive array of talent, both from the actors and from my fellow authors. It was interesting - none of the selections we chose (each author could submit up to three pieces for the director to review) were particularly...mysterious. All of them were character studies, with two or more people connecting - or not - for a moment. I swear, the excerpt from The Poacher's Son could make an excellent one act play with very few changes.

 Afterwards, we answered questions from the audience...

 ...on stage and off.

Fingers crossed, the PSC will be doing this event again. There are so many exceptional crime fiction writers in Maine, wouldn't it be great if all of us could get a turn in the limelight?

Many thanks to the wonderful actors who brought a part of One Was A Soldier to life: Bess Welden as Anne Ellis,

Elizabeth Freeman as Clare Fergusson,





and Whip Hubley (who managed to convey a man wearing only a towel while still fully dressed) as Russ Van Alstyne.

Brenda Buchanan changes her perspective writing TRUTH BEAT

HALLIE EPHRON: Writing her new Joe Gale mystery novel, TRUTH BEAT, Brenda Buchanan made her own journey examining her own faith and biases. The book has the kind of raw energy that only a personally meaningful story can generate. I asked Brenda to talk about how she came to write the book, and how writing it changed her.

BRENDA BUCHANAN:  There’s a scene in the Academy Award-nominated film Spotlight when Boston Globe reporter Sacha Pfeiffer—played on screen by Rachel McAdams—sits by while her grandmother reads the blockbuster story about the Catholic Church’s cover-up of decades of sexual abuse committed by parish priests. Pfeiffer was a tough-minded member of the Globe’s Spotlight Team, which won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing decades of denial and deceit. Her quiet presence at the kitchen table is powerful testament of her love for her devout grandmother, who was devastated to learn the church she loved had closed its institutional eyes and ears to the sexual abuse of children.

The scene is more than a poignant touch in a film that successfully demonstrates why good journalism matters. It shows a seldom-visible side of the news business—a reporter’s empathy for someone stunned by a difficult, disturbing story.

When I was a college student working at the Boston Globe it was my job to write about missing teenagers, car crash victims and young families driven from their homes by midnight fires. The old hands in the newsroom taught me to be human in my interaction with survivors, explaining that professional detachment could be misunderstood as insensitivity.

I relearned this lesson when writing Truth Beat, my third Joe Gale Mystery, which was released February 1.

Truth Beat is about the death of a Catholic priest more than a decade after the clergy abuse scandal exploded. I began constructing the plot when I heard about the closing of parishes in my Central Massachusetts hometown and in Southern Maine, where I now live. As the crime and courts reporter at the fictional Portland Daily Chronicle, I thought, my protagonist Joe Gale would have written about the allegations of abuse in the Portland diocese. When empty pews led shrinking parishes to be shuttered, he would have covered that, too. The plot outline wrote itself.

Father Patrick Doherty—who insisted people ignore his title and call him Patrick—is found dead in the rectory’s garden. The police soon conclude he was murdered. Patrick had gained local fame when he publicly criticized his church’s defensive approach to the priest abuse scandal. A decade later, the bishop took him down a peg by putting him in charge of consolidating failing churches. Overnight, adulation turned into enmity.

It had all the ingredients—good characters, strong conflict and a topic about which I had plenty of knowledge, having been raised Catholic and educated by nuns. I jumped right into the writing, but after a few chapters ran headfirst into a bias that demanded examination.

I left the church decades ago for a variety of personal reasons. After the abuse scandal broke, I was surprised that some of my friends and family members continued to go to Mass. I had conversations with a few, steered clear of the subject with others. Because I’d made my decision long ago, I didn’t work particularly hard to understand their perspective.

The process of writing Truth Beat forced me to do exactly that.

The still-faithful Catholics who were an essential part of the story were coming across as either haughty and sanctimonious or depressed and pessimistic. I struggled and fought with those passages until I took my newsroom mentors’ long-ago advice and looked for a connection with those characters. It took some soul-searching, if you’ll pardon the expression, but the result was Peggy McGillicuddy, one of the book’s crusaders against parish consolidation. During an interview, Joe asks a grieving Peggy about her dedication to the cause:

“Why have you stayed with the Church, Peggy? Why do you put so much time and energy into an institution that infuriates you?”

She fingered the silver cross around her neck while considering her response.

“Because my Catholicism is central to who I am. I’m not mad at God. I haven’t lost my faith. My anger is directed where it should be, at the abusers and those who turned a blind eye to it. I’m not willing to cede my church—my beloved refuge—to them. They stole the innocence of children. They stole the consolation of the Church from the faithful. Now they’re trying to steal the holy places themselves, the walls that witnessed so many happy times—weddings, baptisms, confirmations—selling them off to pay for their sins, though those are literal payments for literal sins, not the kind of sins they’ll answer for some day.”

I’d heard Peggy say similar things at public forums over the years, but never at close range. Had her Church been willing to ordain women, she’d have been a natural in the pulpit.

Peggy McGillicuddy started out as a minor character in TRUTH BEAT, but she soon took on a central role in the story. Her voice is familiar from my Catholic girlhood, a person of faith who isn’t blind to human failure, but accepting of it. Through writing Truth Beat I gained a new level of respect for all the Peggys who have stuck with the Church, and a deeper understanding of their struggle.

I didn’t expect writing a book about a murdered priest would leave me with a changed perspective. It is a bit of grace for which I am thankful.

Have any of you experienced a similar epiphany through writing or reading fiction? Has a character changed you? What novels have given you new insight?
Brenda can be found on the web at www.brendabuchananwrites.com, on Facebook at and on Twitter at @buchananbrenda TRUTH BEAT is available in digital format wherever fine ebooks are sold.

Brenda Buchanan: Maine, winter, and COVER STORY

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Delighted to introduce novelist Brenda Buchanan, author of the Joe Gale Mystery series, talking about the approaching winter. (Cue the scary music!) She's from Maine, so she (like our Red Julia) certainly knows cold, snow, and ice. So, enjoy fall, maybe some apple cider, and the last of the warmth and colorful leaves and read her post on her newest Joe Gale mystery, COVER STORY....


BRENDA BUCHANAN: Have you noticed the signs?

That little eddy of cool air that lurks near the floor early in the morning? The chilly breeze that pushes through the screens at twilight? The swamp maples showing red?

Ready or not, here comes winter.   

It seems quick, no? Wasn’t it just a few weeks ago we dared to put the shovels away? After the record-setting (and not in a good way) winter of 2015, this year’s autumnal equinox is the equivalent of the ominous music that presages a scary scene in a movie. 

There’s a saying about Maine having only two seasons—winter and three months of poor sledding. Often, it’s only a slight exaggeration.

This year, after a hellacious winter, spring was an eyeblink, but summer was long and luxurious. We even had a post-Labor Day heat wave, allowing us to swim in the bracing North Atlantic well into September. Then poof! The warmth went away, and now it’s fleece season, soon to be replaced by heavy-duty fleece season, and, ultimately, wool and goose down season.

Most years, autumn is quite popular here at the very crown of rugged New England. We boast about the beauty of our foliage on our way to pick apples in our all-wheel drive vehicles, chuckling at the notion that winter is on the doorstep.

This year, nobody’s laughing. It doesn’t matter a whit that those in the know say we can look forward to an El Nino (mild) winter. Those who dread paralyzing snowfalls, brutal cold and tundra-like parking lots are freaking out.

I know we are not alone. The whole eastern seaboard was gobsmacked last winter. Boston’s statistics: Total snowfall, 110.6 inches, 94.4 of them during a 30-day period from late January to late February. Along with the incessant storms came bitter temperatures. Across southern New England, pipes broke, roofs collapsed and snow blower-owning neighbors became the most popular folks on the block.

During that same period, parts of Washington County, Maine got 122 inches of snow. I’m guessing there were fewer broken pipes and caved-in roofs, but that’s only because people who live in Downeast Maine bank their foundations with bales of hay (it’s cheap, effective insulation) and are old hands with the roof rake.

This is not Maine one-upwomanship. I’m simply setting the scene to talk about my just-released book Cover Story—the second in the Joe Gale Mystery Series.

The story takes place in January in Machias—the shire town of coastal Washington County and a mere 50 miles from the Canadian border. Joe Gale, a reporter at the imagined Portland Daily Chronicle, has journeyed five hours northeast of Portland to cover the trial of a man accused of killing the younger brother of Maine’s most high-profile politician.

In the local barbershop and the gritty townie bar, the prosecutor’s boast of an open-and-shut case doesn’t fly, especially after the defense lawyer starts picking at the state’s witnesses like a crow on carrion.  When Joe writes about the disconnect he finds himself in the crosshairs of somebody who doesn’t appreciate his diligent reporting. 
Then a nor’easter roars up the coast, and his shadowy nemesis schools him in the dangerous ways of winter in Downeast Maine.

On a warm, muggy night a couple of weeks ago I opened my pre-publication file of Cover Story to begin prepping for a round of post-launch readings. I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt. The hair at the nape of my neck was damp with sweat. But the cover itself and the opening lines cooled me right down, better than the ice water at my elbow or the ceiling fan spinning overhead.

The evergreen boughs glittered in the setting sun, but I couldn’t afford to even flick my eyes at their beauty. A cold front had chased the morning’s freezing rain out to sea, and the following wind was brutal, scouring sand off the icy two-lane highway as fast as the road crews could spread it. Five miles south of Machias an oncoming Jeep slewed sideways through a curve, righting itself an instant before we scraped paint. 

Downeast Maine—dazzling and treacherous in equal measure. It would be a fitting slogan for the remote stretch of coastline that winds the hundred miles between Bar Harbor and Canada.

I hope Cover Story will serve as a creative way for readers to heal the lingering pain of last winter, especially those cursing the seven o’clock September darkness and the sudden need for a quilt on the bed.

Here’s my therapeutic advice: read a few chapters, then look out the window. Exult in the reality that the morning glories are still blooming, leaves have yet to fall, and it’ll be months before the  first snowfall.

Probably.

So, Reds and lovely readers, how are you preparing for the season ahead? With dread or delight? What are your season-in-transition rituals? Let us know in the comments!

Brenda Buchanan is a former newspaper reporter with a deep reverence for small town journalism. Her Joe Gale Mystery Series features an old-school reporter with modern media savvy who covers the Maine crime beat.

Brenda holds a journalism degree from Northeastern University and a law degree from the University of Maine. She writes and practices law in Portland, where she lives with her spouse.

Brenda can be found on the web at www.brendabuchananwrites.com and on Twitter at @buchananbrenda

Cover Story is available in digital format wherever fine ebooks are sold.

Here’s a plot summary: Maine newspaper reporter Joe Gale is at his best when covering the crime beat for the Portland Daily Chronicle. In the dead of winter he heads Downeast to cover the murder trial of fisherman Danny Boothby, charged with burying a filleting knife in the chest of politically well-connected social worker Frank O’Rourke.

O’Rourke held a thankless job in a hard place. Many locals found him arrogant, but say he didn’t deserve to die. Others whisper that O’Rourke got himself killed through his own rogue behavior.

After Joe’s hard-nosed reporting provokes someone to run him off an isolated road, he realizes his life depends on figuring out not only who committed the murder, but who’s stalking him—O’Rourke’s prominent brother, friends or enemies of the dead social worker or members of Boothby’s family. As he digs deeper, Joe uncovers enough secrets and lies to fill a cemetery. He'll have to solve this one fast, or his next headline may be his own obituary.

Brenda Buchanan: There are Places I Remember...

 

Breaking News! Congratulations to our own Hank Phillippi Ryan for 2(!) Anthony nominations!

 
Hallie Ephron: It's always a special pleasure when a writer we've gotten to know through Jungle Red publishes a debut novel, and today it gives me great pleasure to turn the "mike" over to Brenda Buchanan whose novel Quick Pivot was just released by Carina Press.

I've had the pleasure of reading it, and she sets part of it on my favorite Maine Island (Peaks!)

Take it away, Brenda!

BRENDA BUCHANAN: Thank you, Hallie, for inviting me to Jungle Reds today to chat about Quick Pivot. It’s the first in the Joe Gale series, featuring a contemporary newspaper reporter covering Maine’s crime beat.

At its core, Quick Pivot is about a 1968 murder that remains unsolved for more than four decades. Before I wrote the first word, I knew that on page one, a long-dead body would be found in a defunct textile mill. In my writer’s mind, the mill looks something like this.

I also knew the story would move back and forth between the late 1960s and the present day. And while it was clear the story would take place near Portland, that lovely city by the sea would not have worked as the primary setting for Quick Pivot. The central events in my book—especially the murder—had to unfold in a smaller, grittier community, someplace in upscale Portland’s shadow.
Westbrook, where I live, would have been a logical choice. Located just west of Portland, it has a proud industrial past and is the right size to make the everybody-knows-everybody aspect of Quick Pivot’s plot believable. But it is a delicate thing to kill someone on the page in a real town, especially when the fictional murder causes economic and personal pain to reverberate through the community for years to come.

Because it would have felt wrong to do that to Westbrook, I invented Riverside, an on-its-way-back mill town populated by folks with long memories.

However, all of the secondary settings in Quick Pivot are real—Portland, Peaks Island, Cape Elizabeth and Kennebunkport among them. Readers familiar with Southern Maine will find landmarks they know and love when reading the scenes set in these places.

One of my favorites occurs at Crescent Beach in Cape Elizabeth, in a picnic grove perfumed by beach roses. Since writing that chapter I cannot go to Crescent Beach without strolling past the spot where newspaper reporter Paulie Finnegan and his lover Joan Desmond had an explosive conversation in the early summer of 1968. This is how it looked on the late-April day I was writing this post. Spring still is making its way north, so you have to imagine the beach roses.

Several key scenes also take place on Peaks Island, the Portland neighborhood where I lived for a dozen years. Brave, vulnerable Helena Desmond fled to Peaks shortly after her brother disappeared in 1968, and it’s been her safe haven ever since. The passages that occur at Helena’s home in the middle of a spruce forest wrote themselves, because I know so well the slant of the afternoon sun in that beautiful place, and the birdsongs that fill the air at dusk.

Cape Porpoise is an iconic village within the town of Kennebunkport where I lived when, like my protagonist Joe Gale, I was a newspaper reporter. I had a blast writing about Joe taking a retired State Police detective out for supper at a clam shack at the Cape Porpoise Pier, plying him with lobster stew to find out what went on behind the investigative scenes 46 years earlier.

Another restaurant—one I’d driven by a thousand times but had never visited—also wound up in Quick Pivot. I needed a place for a cop and a reporter to hold a surreptitious meeting on a hot summer night in 1968. After doing some research, the obvious choice was an Italian restaurant that's been in continuous operation on the edge of Scarborough Marsh since the1950s.

Because it was one of those rare scenes that required almost no revision, the restaurant became associated with my hope for Quick Pivot. My spouse and I made a pact—if I sold the book, we’d go there to celebrate.

Stepping through the door for the first time last September, I found my intuition about the place had been spot on. I could almost see Paulie Finnegan and Tom MacMahon sitting in a booth with a view of the door, one of them smoking, the other asking questions that had to be asked.

I ordered what they did—Johnny Walker Black and a steak, medium rare.

It was fabulous.

So, Reds, do you prefer real settings or made-up towns? If you read or write stories set in real places, do those scenes fill your head each time you pass by? What rituals to you have for celebrating your accomplishments?

Quick Pivot is available in digital format wherever ebooks are sold. Here’s a plot summary:

In 1968, a cunning thief skimmed a half a million dollars from the textile mill that was the beating heart of Riverside, Maine. Sharp-eyed accountant George Desmond discovered the discrepancy, but was killed before he could report it. After stashing the body, the thief-turned-killer manipulated evidence to make it appear Desmond skipped town with the stolen money, ruining his good name.

In 2014, veteran journalist Joe Gale is covering a story for the Portland Daily Chronicle when a skeleton falls at his feet: Desmond’s bones have been found a basement crawl space at the long-shuttered mill. For Joe, digging into the past means retracing the steps of his now-deceased mentor, Paulie Finnegan. The same people who bird-dogged Paulie four decades ago are watching Joe now. As he closes in on the truth, his every move is tracked, and the murderer proves more than willing to kill again.