What Happens When He Returns to the Scene of the Crime?

Such a great launch! 

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: There’s nothing more enrapturing than a wonderful book launch—with cheering family and friends and the special joy that comes from knowing you have hit it out of the ballpark with a terrific book.

For his new mystery DESERT REMAINS, the amazing Steven Cooper hosted such a shoulder-to-shoulder launch at Barnes & Noble in Framingham Massachusetts, and an equally wonderful one at New England Mobile Book Fair. We’re colleagues—he’s a journalist, too, and now lives in Atlanta. (As I once did. Small world!) 

Plus, he’s clever and smart and a brilliant writer. And thoughtful, too, as you can see from what happened when he took what he thought was a predictable journey—and it turned into a completely different experience. 

(And see below for a giveaway!)

Returning to the Scene of the Crime

Steven Cooper

Flight 144 glides into Sky Harbor International Airport. And I’m back. Mountains to the left, mountains to the right, and a valley, as flat as a warm tortilla in the middle. Phoenix doesn’t change, but it changes dramatically. New buildings have sprouted like industrial saguaro. New highways loop around the suburban sprawl, and old highways have been extended to bring people home to their increasingly distant subdivisions.

And yet, there is South Mountain, Camelback, Squaw (Piestewa) Peak, and the Estrellas. They have not moved. Not for centuries. They remain stalwart guardians of the valley. I’m grateful for their constancy.

To set a novel, and in my case a series, in Phoenix and its surrounding desert, is to remain fundamentally aware of the constant tug of war between man and nature. 

Between the appetite for development and the preservation of beauty. It can get ugly. As it did when I returned to the scene of the crime. I drove over to a neighborhood that sits on the south side of Camelback Mountain to snap some photos of a shallow cave where I placed one of the murders in Desert Remains, my series debut. It’s an open cave, a small yawn in the mountain, which sits on a low ledge of Camelback. When I lived in Phoenix I would often bring visitors up to the ledge to show them the grand view of the valley.

 Sadly, the cave was often filled with empty beer cans and cigarette butts in the aftermath of teenage partying, but the view was sublime. I say “was” because the view is no more. The cave is no more.

At first, I though I was lost. The roads that climb Camelback meander precariously. I drove up and down, back and forth, and then I realized a house, an expansive, obviously expensive and princely house, had usurped the ledge! It had blocked the cave! I had no access!

 I looked around and recognized what I did not recognize: construction everywhere. New homes crawling up to even higher tiers of Camelback. In fact, a Phoenix friend, hearing my dismay, informed me that not only had the princely home usurped my ledge (my ledge!) it had also annexed the cave for its own audacious use: the owners are now enjoying it as their private wine cellar. (Maybe I should have told them that I murdered someone there). Oh, sure, it will win design awards and be the envy of aficionados everywhere, but no. Just no.

Please don’t build on Camelback. Leave the squatting giant alone.

 Soon you will not be able to recognize the beast for what it is. Let nature run its course. As much as the guardians of the valley are constant, they do in fact change. I acknowledge erosion even when I can’t see it. The wind reshapes the desert every day, but the changes are nuanced and might take several lifetimes to notice.

I don’t think you have to live in a place to write about a place. I do think you have to be familiar and return to the scene of the crime often enough to make sure your caves aren’t wine cellars. 

The landscape matters. 

In Phoenix it conjures up mystery and intrigue with so many places for danger to lurk—behind those muscular mountains, beneath those craggy ridgelines, in the cradle of the valley. If that’s not absorbing enough, watch how the scenery changes from hour to hour as the sun and the shadows mingle with the topography.

The desert is like a muse to me, particularly for the current series I’m writing. In fact, I only recently discovered, in the weeks since Desert Remains was published, that my title had a hidden meaning, hidden even to me until now: Once you live in the desert, the desert remains with you. I guess you could call it a retroactive epiphany.

Here’s hoping nature wins the war, and that the desert remains.

HANK: Here’s where I usually say something to encourage conversation. I bet, today, I don’t have to.  You all take it from here.

And a copy of DESERT REMAINS to one very lucky commenter!

 Steven Cooper's latest novel, Desert Remains, is the launch of a new crime series published by Seventh Street Books. 

A former investigative reporter, Steven has received multiple Emmy awards and nominations, a national Edward R. Murrow Award, and many honors from the Associated Press. He taught writing at Rollins College (Winter Park, FL) from 2007 to 2012. He'll be teaching at Kennesaw State University (Kennesaw, GA) in 2018.

Born and raised in Massachusetts, Steven has lived a bit like a nomad, working TV gigs in New England, Arizona and Florida, and following stories around the globe. He currently lives in Atlanta where, when not writing, he spends most of his time in traffic.

Desert Remains is his fourth novel.

In a world of Long Island mediums, “dudes who cross over,” and horoscopes that auto-Tweet, Gus Parker is the real deal. His visions might be murky, but they mean something. That’s why Detective Alex Mills needs his help. Someone is filling the desert caves around Phoenix with bodies—a madman who, in a taunting ritual, is leaving behind a record of his crimes etched into the stone.

Set in the rugged, majestic landscape of the Valley of the Sun, Desert Remains leads Mills and Parker into the mystical world of petroglyphs—crude drawings from an ancient civilization that seem to have inspired the dark, haunted mind of a serial killer.

When Parker sees the crime scenes, he sees visions of a house on fire and a screaming child.  With no leads and no suspects, Mills sees a case spinning out of control. City leaders want the case solved yesterday, and another detective wants to elbow Mills out of the way. As the body count rises, Gus Parker struggles to interpret his psychic messages, knowing that the killer is one step ahead, knowing that in this vast desert, the next murder could happen anywhere. Mills suspects that with every news crew, every bleeding headline, and every dead end, he is one step closer to reassignment. It doesn’t help that a family crisis almost pushes him to the breaking point. Nor does it help that Parker, who’s always been unlucky in love, finds himself the prey of a lovelorn stalker who is Fifty Shades of Crazy.

Desert Remains swerves past the gloriously scenic, ricochets off the darkly absurd, and hurls Gus Parker and Alex Mills into a trap they may very well not survive.

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.