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.

J.K. Rowling, Fan Fiction, and Everything Authors Leave Out of Their Books; a guest blog by Paul Doiron

Kathy Reel is the winner of Anna Lee Huber's A Grave Matter! Kathy, please contact Anna at annaleehuber dot com.


JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING:  I don't have to say too much to introduce Paul Doiron, do I? He burst onto the mystery scene four years ago with The Poacher's Son, which introduced Maine Game Warden Mike Bowditch and nabbed a brace of prestigious nominations and awards, including the Edgar and the Nero.  

Fast forward to today. The fifth Mike Bowditch novel, The Bone Orchard, launches next Tuesday to rave pre-pub reviews (I can add mine to them; Paul slipped me an ARC last month and I read it in one sitting. Really good stuff.) What's Paul going to talk about? Moose? Maine state parks? 

How about J.K. Rowling and fanfiction?

Like most authors, I probably think as much about the things I don’t put into my novels, as the things I do. My new book, The Bone Orchard, is the fifth in my series about headstrong but big-hearted Maine game warden Mike Bowditch, so I’ve come to know a lot about him, not all of which has yet made it into the stories themselves. With each new novel, I fill in a little more of Mike’s unwritten history. 
 

So for instance, in The Bone Orchard I flash back to his first year as a warden to give him a friend I’d never mentioned before—a young man Jimmy Gammon, who is on his way to Afghanistan as an MP with the Maine National Guard. He returns home badly wounded and suicidal (a very real crisis among our returning vets), and the violent confrontation he provokes at the beginning of the book is the catalyst that triggers everything that follows in the story.

In my notes about Mike, I have many details about his past, but no matter how many more books I write, I know I’ll never fill in all the gaps in his back story. And that’s the way it is with every fictional character. A single author can only write so much. 
 

The emergence of fan fiction is an organic response to this problem. Readers want more Bella and Edward and so they tell stories about them set in an alternate dimension of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight universe (and some of them get quite rich doing so). The same thing happens with movies (Star Wars) and TV shows (Star Trek). If you want to bring on a case of the vapors, Google “Kirk and Spock sex scene”—or better yet don’t. Poor Gene Roddenberry is already rolling in his grave. 
 

I’ve been thinking about fan fiction this week because of J.K. Rowling. Unless you’ve been holed up in a cabin deep in the Maine woods (and if so, I envy you), you’ve probably heard that the richest woman in England has come out with a new Harry Potter story. Like most sentient beings I am a Rowling fan (No, I won’t apologize for reading the Potter books as an adult. Nor will I begrudge Rowling’s recent forays into crime fiction under the pen name of Robert Galbreith.) The story itself — set sixteen years after The Deathly Hallows—didn’t do much for me, it was fun but forgettable, but I’ve been struck by the media response to it.
 

While many reviewers found it delightful, others responded with a collective “meh.” A few, including, Esther Breger writing for the New Republic, saw the story as part of an off-putting pattern of behavior with Rowling, in which she can’t help herself from continuing to fill in the holes she left in the original books:

“Since ending the series, she’s revealed that Dumbledore was gay, that Harry and his cousin Dudley reconciled, and that Harry and Voldemort were related by blood. You don’t have to be a Barthesian grad student to chafe at Rowling’s impulse to clarify the words on the page. When writers adopt the paratextual world of fanfic as their own, they both diminish their books’ literary authority and interfere with the freewheeling spirit of fan writing.”

The language in that paragraph takes me back to my comp-lit days at Yale, but I think it roughly translates to: “Rowling should either put this stuff in a new book or keep her mouth zipped because it’s confusing for readers to learn about a beloved character’s unexpected sexual orientation from an author’s offhand comment.”

Put another way: “This new story reads more like fan fiction than the work of the genius who created Hogwarts.”

What do you think about J.K. Rowling’s decision to keep adding back stories to the characters in her books? Should she leave more to the imagination of her readers, or are you grateful for any new tidbit about the world of Harry Potter? Do you think writers should keep explaining their books by filling in information that never made it onto the page? Or should they leave these holes to be filled in by the readers’ imaginations?

And for the Reds and my fellow authors out there: have you had anyone write fan fiction about your characters and if so, how did you feel about it?

No one has written fanfic about Mike Bowditch yet (that I know of, at least). If they ever do, I’m curious how I’ll respond to it. Will I feel possessive: like the fictional world I’ve created belongs entirely to me as the author? Or will I be open to letting my readers flesh it out with their own imaginings? I doubt I’ll know the answers myself until some fan writes a scene where Mike Bowditch and his beefy blond friend Billy Cronk get it on.

Gulp. 

Paul will be giving a signed copy of The Bone Orchard to the commenter who provides the juiciest answer.

You can read more about the Mike Bowditch series, including excerpts from the books, at Paul’s website. Like his page on Facebook or follow him @pauldoiron on Twitter.

The Great North Woods Park: a guest blog by Paul Doiron

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING:  Paul Doiron is one of my favorite writers. Not just for his terrific Mike Bowditch series - although I love following the Maine game warden as he struggles and grows into his role as a hero. Not just because he's a great dinner companion and stalwart tourer - ask him about our "Death to Bookstores" appearances in '10 - but because he cares passionately about Maine. From the bucolic coastal villages to the dying mill towns, from the metropolitan south to the almost-uninhabited north, he writes - in both his fiction and his nonfiction - wisely and well about the state we love.

  Who hates national parks? No one, right? According to the National Park Service, 278,939,216 people visited the United States’s crown jewels in 2011. My own state of Maine is home to one of the most popular in the East—Acadia National Park—which generally receives more than 2 million recreational visits a year. So it might surprise you to learn that one of the most controversial issues in Maine right now is whether to create a new national park in the state’s celebrated North Woods as a potential sanctuary for caribou, wolves, and lynx.

For more than a decade environmentalists, joined by entrepreneur and philanthropist Roxanne Quimby, famous as the founder of Burt’s Bees*, has been lobbying to create a new park in the vicinity of majestic Mount Katahdin—and their efforts have been met with fear, resentment, and in some cases, violence. Quimby has gone so far as to buy 70,000 acres herself to give to the National Park Service, but state politicos — and the feds, at the behest of local politicians — have so far given her the cold shoulder.

The fear in Maine is that the park would signal the death knell of the state’s wood-products industry (what most people call “logging”). And Quimby hasn’t helped matters by halting lumbering on her lands and banning access to hunters, snowmobilers, and ATV riders who had previously used it for years. Novelists know that a crisis is very often the truest expression of someone’s character. That statement can be as true of place like Maine as it is for a person.

A crisis can also be the precursor to murder, of course. That’s why I decided to focus my new novel, Massacre Pond — the fourth in my Mike Bowditch series — around the creation of a fictional Moosehorn National Park. My protagonist is no Anna Pigeon; he’s a young Maine game warden who starts the book unsold on either the virtues of the park concept (he likes to hunt and fish, after all) or the virtues of the wealthy woman promoting the radical idea. But when a seemingly senseless moose massacre occurs on her property he finds himself dragged into the debate—which escalates very quickly to human murder, as well.

These days we’ve become used to books and television shows being “ripped from the headlines,” but from the days of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, fiction has also been a useful tool to start a public debate. And that’s what I aim to do. “Sensational” and “serious” aren’t always antonyms.

I used to have misgivings about a North Woods National Park, primarily out of a respect for the small Maine communities that would be most affected by its creation. (Some sort of preserve modeled on Adirondack Park was always my preference.) When asked about Massacre Pond, I’ve said that I had to write an entire novel to get my own conflicted views on the subject on paper.

One irony to the present situation is that it was Henry David Thoreau himself — the popularizer of Mount Katahdin (and the effective creator of Maine’s tourism industry) — who was the state’s first advocate for a Maine woods national park. He wrote:

“The kings of England formerly had their forests ‘to hold the king’s game,’ for sport or food, sometimes destroying villages to create or extend them . . . Why should not we, who have renounced the king’s authority, have our national preserves, where no villages need be destroyed, in which the bear and panther, and some even of the hunter race, may still exist, and not be ‘civilized off the face of the earth,’ — our forests, not to hold the king’s game merely, but to hold and preserve the king himself also, the lord of creation,—not for idle sport or food, but for inspiration and our own true recreation?”

How this crisis will all play out is unanswerable by my Magic 8 Ball. The political winds aren’t currently in favor of the park, but we know how quickly those can change. And the fate of the American woods-products industry depends less on what happens in the Maine capital of Augusta — or even Washington, DC — and more on what’s going on in South Africa and the Amazon and Indonesia.

One of my newest concerns is this: By the time Mainers finally decide whether they want a North Woods park, will global climate change have already transformed our beautiful boreal forest into someplace subtropical? Instead of the Canada lynx will we have the feral pig, and instead of the sugar maple, will we have the pecan?

I call this dystopian vision of the future: “No Country for Old Moose.”

*By the way, did you know that Taiwain has a national holiday devoted to Burt Shavitz, the namesake of Burt’s Bees. Yep, they do.

The fourth Mike Bowditch mystery, Massacre Pond, comes out on July 16th. You can find out more about Paul and read excerpts of his novels at his website. You can read more of his thoughts at his blog, friend him on Facebook, and follow him on Twitter as @PaulDoiron. Paul is also a contributor to the Maine Crime Writers blog. 

I've Got A Little List!

Hank Phillippi Ryan: Summertime! And soon…the summer reading lists will be out! But hey, why wait for the Times or the News or People--when we have the Reds? What are you reading--right now? (Come on, be honest.) and what're you reading next?

I'll admit it--I'm reading Dan Brown's Inferno. And okay, fine, it's a page turner. Irresistible! I'm also reading Joe Hill's NOS4ATU. Which is creepy as pie and just as delicious.  And Bruce DaSilva's new PROVIDENCE RAG. He's good! Sort of if Spenser was a reporterand lived in Rhode Island.

 Next is Jon McGoran's DRIFT. Or maybe ...Susan Elia MacNeal’s HIS MAJESTY"S HOPE.(She’s so terrific. I am hooked on her books!) And Catriona McPherson has a new one, AS SHE  LEFT IT. Sigh. And I SHOULD be writing!

 How about you?

LUCY BURDETTE:  I'm reading a romance by Nancy Herkness called TAKE ME HOME. It's about a woman who goes home to West Virginia from NYC and finds both a "whisper horse" (a horse who will listen to your troubles) and a romance with a sexy vet. It's light summer reading that seriously sizzles....

 And next up, KNEADING TO DIE, by our friend Liz Mugavero. And after that, Erica Baumeister's THE LOST ART OF MIXING. But really, seriously, need to be finishing MURDER WITH GANACHE...

HANK : Oh, me, too. (and Lucy, I cannot wait to read it!) LOVE Liz Mugavero!   Ah, I’m at 50,000 words—hurray! Of a book that has no title, boo. Soon, I’ll be coming to you to ask  for advice. How can you write a book that has no title? Well, I secretly  have one. (Is it: The Last to Lie? One False Move? No Good Deed? As Good As True? What do you think?)

Rhys is en route from London, Julia has a big deadline, Ro is doing something glamorous,  and Hallie’s writing, too, I know…and she’s just back from vacation.

HALLIE EPHRON:     My TBR pile is topped by Jess Walter's "Beautiful Ruins" -- I'm a huge fan since he blew me away with Edgar winner "Citizen Vince." Like Roberta I'm behind on my

deadline so reading for pleasure is on the back burner--temporarily at least. 

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING:  Hallie, I'm so happy to be (temporarily) able to read for pleasure! I'm still recovering from the Best Novel Edgars, and as such, I've been reading a lot of romance, womens fiction, etc. I just finished the latest Nora Roberts stand-alone, WHISKEY BEACH. Always a good read. When you're in a Nora mood, nothing else will suffice. 

I'm also backtracking to read Lee Child's THE AFFAIR; after I bought it in 2011, Ross grabbed it off my pile and read it and for some reason, I never got back to it. I want to catch up before NEVER GO BACK lands at the beginning of September. A couple of summer books I'm REALLY looking forward to laying hands on: William Kent Kruger's TAMARACK COUNTY and Paul Doiron's MASSACRE POND. Both faves of mine in the "Rugged men sleuthing in places that can kill you" genre. Seriously, I may have to hit up their editors for Advance Readers Copies.

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Whew, Julia, now I feel a bit better (grovel, grovel) about admitting the fact that until now I had never read a Lee Childs' novel. Not a deliberate oversight--I've had two in my TBR pile for donkey's years-- just too many books... Anyway, I'm reading the very first Jack Reacher, KILLING FLOOR, while alternating hitting myself on the head for not having read ALL of them sooner.  Halfway through, I could write a dissertation on Reacher as the iconic hero in literature, but suffice to say it's a cracking good story.

Also part way through the 75th anniversary edition of THE HOBBIT (a birthday gift from a friend,) which I hadn't reread in years. And THE HOBBIT: THE CHRONICLES, a gift from my publisher--a fabulous coffee table book on the art and design in the film. Then a good bit more non-fiction: THE POSSIBILITY DOGS by Susannah Charleson (out yesterday!), THE TRAIN IN THE NIGHT by Nick Coleman (a book about music and hearing loss,) and THE MURDER ROOM, by Michael Capuzzo. Then more fiction; a galley of MIDNIGHT by Kevin Egan, who will be my guest on JR in July. And somewhere there is a new Jo Bannister novel, if only I could find it... I think we will all be buried in books...

(Oh, and I LOVE William Kent Krueger, so the new one is going on the pile, too.)

RHYS BOWEN:  I'm on a plane as you read this, finishing up Deb's No Mark Upon Her, which I had had on my Kindle for a year and never had time to read. I was interviewed by a woman who belongs to Leander Club so that was fun. And I'm no longer sure what lurks in the TBR pile at home. I know I have to blurb Hannah Dennison's new one, and definitely want to read Catriona's (she'll be our guest next week) and the latest Kate Morton is waiting for me and I confess, I'll have to read Dan Brown as I was just in Istanbul.

LUCY BURDETTE:  Could I just say that I was on the Edgar committee that chose CITIZEN VINCE as best novel that year? I was very proud of that one!

HANK: See, Lucy/Roberta? You know your stuff!  It’s very gratifying to be on that committee—ours picked Mo Hayder’s GONE. A fabulous book! I smile every time I see it in a bookstore.

So how about you, Readers? Tell us your then, now, next! We’d love to hear what you’re reading! There are SO many wonderful books!

(And yes, indeed! One lucky commenter wins the ARC of THE WRONG GIRL!) Yesterday's winner: Katie Baer! Email me h ryan at whdh dot com with your address!

Thrilling Weather, a guest post by Paul Doiron

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: In the interests of full disclosure, as they say, I gave Paul Doiron's debut mystery, The Poacher's Son, an enthusiastic blurb. That was after it had gotten starred reviews from every major reviewer, but before it had been nominated for the Edgar, the Anthony, the Barry, the Macavity, etc. etc. Further disclosure: Paul and I blog together at Maine Crime Writers, which is a group of...well, the title really says it all, doesn't it? And a bit more disclosure: we've done enough library and bookstore events together to have our own little act going.

Final, fullest disclosure: I love crime fiction set in small towns and deep woods, in places where the weather can kill you if you're not careful - and sometimes even when you are. If you're like me, you're going to love Paul's upcoming thriller chiller.

Sometimes a novel has its beginnings in a question. Bad Little Falls began when I asked myself: What if Jack London had written a mystery novel? I was culling books from my overloaded bookshelves last year when I came across a paperback collection of London's short fiction. I flipped through the yellowed pages until I found "To Build a Fire" — one of my favorite short stories — and I started to read. Within a few paragraphs my fingers began to go numb from the killing coldness of the Yukon setting. By the end of the story, my heart felt as heavy as a block of ice.

"I want to write a book this cold," I thought. I've spent a lot of time outdoors during the winter, and my ears sometimes ache from a bad case of frostbite I suffered as a boy (I bet you didn't know there are long-term side effects from the condition). I've had low-grade hypothermia a few times (another experience I don't recommend) and been caught outside during freezing rain storms. To paraphrase Wallace Stevens, living in Maine has given me a "mind of winter," and I know what it means to "have been cold a long time."

Maine isn't the Yukon, of course, but parts of my state do get pretty damn cold. The lowest temperature ever recorded here was -50 degrees Fahrenheit, not counting the wind chill. "He knew that at fifty below spittle crackled on the snow," Jack London says of the luckless chechaquo in his story. 

My novels are about Maine game wardens who spend most of their lives outdoors. Cold weather is a condition of their employment. When a snowmobiler is late returning home after a snowy night on the trails, a warden must go looking for the missing man. When a fisherman falls through the lake ice, Maine Warden Service divers must retrieve the corpse from the murky, viscous depths. And when a murder is committed in the frozen woods, guess who gets to investigate the crime?

In Bad Little Falls the duty falls to my beleaguered young game warden, Mike Bowditch. For his sins in The Poacher's Son and Trespasser, he's been transferred to desolate Washington County, on the Canadian border. It's February, the dead of winter, and Mike is experiencing a coldness that penetrates all the way through his soul. He's living alone in a backwoods trailer, broken up from his longtime girlfriend, far from family and friends. And as Mike observes about his new posting, "when you are reassigned to the easternmost county in the United States—a place known for its epidemic drug abuse, multigenerational unemployment, and long tradition of violent poaching—it's pretty clear your career isn't on the rise."

Things end badly in "To Build a Fire" because the unnamed chechaquo doesn't appreciate the extreme danger of traveling alone through the cruel wilderness. Mike Bowditch's own wilderness has always been internal as much as it is an actual place he is charged with policing. The drug dealers and rogue hunting guides who torment him in Bad Little Falls are dangerous, but the loneliness that drives him to make bad personal decisions is an even greater threat.

 
Settings have always played important parts in my books. In The 
Poacher's Son the setting was the vanishing North Woods in an era of massive clear cutting and real estate development. In Trespasser it was the maze of muddy all-terrain vehicle trails leading from one hopeless crime scene to the next. Here it is the snow-covered heaths of Down East Maine: miserable, desolate places that are the source of the English word "heathen," since they were places of exile for society's outcasts.

Most Americans are used to living at a comfortable remove from the extremes of the natural world. But we are beginning to see the growing shadows of the future in the derechos that tore recently through the Eastern Seaboard. Heat waves are withering our midwestern corn crops and sparking wildfires that burn up our Rocky Mountain cities. Scientists predict that global climate change will usher in an age of newly wild weather, of higher highs but also lower lows. That record low Maine temperature of minus 50 occurred just three years ago. That's probably no coincidence. 

In Bad Little Falls, Mike Bowditch—struggling to solve a puzzling murder before he freezes to death— knows what Jack London's chechaquo doesn't know: that nature is indifferent to the plans and priorities of human beings.

Nature just is. And, ultimately, that's what makes it so terrifying.


If you're interested in being chilled and thrilled, hop onto the back blog and tell us about the most dangerous weather you've ever encountered. Three lucky commentors will receive  a copy of Bad Little Falls!


You can find out more about Paul Doiron and read excerpts from his Mike Bowditch series on his website. In addition to blogging at Maine Crime Writers, he also has his own blog. You can friend him on Facebook and follow him on Twitter as @PaulDoiron