PaulDoiron.com

Barnes & Noble Online Book Club

Paul Doiron — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 11:17:15 +0000

For the next three weeks I'm participating in Barnes & Noble's First Look book club. It's an online discussion of The Poacher's Son with a select group of volunteers who were sent advance galleys of the book. Each week the group reads a series of chapters (they're up to Chapters 8 through 18) and posts reactions to the characters, story, and issues raised by the novel.

The conversation has been going on since the beginning of March so I'll be showing up fashionably late. This week my excellent and perspicacious editor Charlie Spicer will also be there.

Unless you're part of the club and were selected to get an advance reader's copy of my novel, I'm afraid you can't post questions or replies to the board, but you can eavesdrop on the discussion. One word of warning, though: The Poacher's Son is a mystery and I expect that as readers near the final chapters, the ending will become a hot topic. So if you don't want to see a spoiler that ruins the novel's surprises (and I'd rather you didn't), I suggest you browse carefully.

Great Mention in Library Journal

Paul Doiron — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 04:23:43 +0000

I haven't blogged much yet about The Poacher's Son because very few people have read it at this point, and I think there will be time enough for me to talk about the book after it finally gets into bookstores. That said, in addition to the early reviews, my novel has started to get other mentions as more advance galleys make the rounds. This one, from Chris Vaccari, at Library Journal, really made my week.

I also picked up a great new mystery, Paul Doiron's The Poacher’s Son. A Maine game warden navigates strained relationships with the woman he loves and his father, who has been suspected of murder. Think Skink from Hiaasen’s books except as a mean, alcoholic, manipulative troublemaker. OK, maybe don’t think Skink—Skink is fun. This guy ain’t. Anyways, you’ll feel like there’s a black bear in the room while you chase through the woods to find a man who may or may not be getting framed.

I’ve never been to Maine, but now I feel like I have. Twigs were cracking underneath my feet as I settled in to read this one. Doiron creates great scenery to surround an impressive debut. Well done, sir.

Being compared to Carl Hiassen in any way shape or form is pretty cool, I have to admit.

Alligator Attacks

Paul Doiron — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 14:12:38 +0000

Following up on Monday's post, it seems that Sanibel Island has a very complicated history with alligators, at once noble and tragic.

Please Don't Feed the Gators

Paul Doiron — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 04:02:06 +0000

American alligators were widely poached in Florida until the 1960s, but their numbers have rebounded to the point where the state has to actively mediate human interactions with the more than 1 million gators residing in Florida. Still, you'd think a word to the wise should be sufficient.

Evidently not according to this sign on Sanibel Island.

The King Died and Then The Queen Died

Paul Doiron — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 03:07:57 +0000

In his book Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster writes:

"The king died and then the queen died" is a story. "The king died and then the queen died of grief" is a plot... "The queen died, no one knew why, until it was discovered that it was through grief at the death of the king." This is a plot with a mystery in it, a form capable of high development.

To that I would add, "Everyone thought that the queen had died of grief until they discovered the puncture mark in her throat." That is a murder mystery, and it too is capable of high development.

—P.D. James, Talking About Detective Fiction

The Power of Twitter

Paul Doiron — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 12:15:06 +0000

Last week it looked like Walter Kirn, who wrote the novel Up in the Air, upon which the hit movie was based, would be watching the Academy Awards from his living room. Kirn, you see, hadn't been invited to the Oscars, despite the fact that screenwriter Jason Reitman was up for a Best Adapted Screenplay award. Kirn retaliated against Paramount Pictures, who should have issued the invitation, on Twitter:

In a message Kirn posted on Wednesday (17Feb10), Kirn wrote, “Caution to writers: Don’t expect that because you write a novel that becomes an Oscar-nominated film that you’ll be invited to the Oscars. Novelists are like oil in H’wood (Hollywood): they drill us, pipeline us, pump us and then burn us.”

But movie bosses have moved quickly to settle the issue, giving Kirn a prime seat next to the film’s star, [George] Clooney.

Kirn confirmed his invitation via Twitter.com on Friday (19Feb10), writing: “Thanks to Paramount Pictures for coming through with Oscar tickets and proving true to its word, which I shouldn’t have doubted.”

Whoever said that all publicity is good publicity was wrong—at least in the era of Twitter.

How Do You Pronounce Doiron, Anyway?

Paul Doiron — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 23:14:29 +0000

When you grow up with an uncommon surname, mispronunciation is a lifelong companion. Doiron is a French name. There are lots of Franco-Americans in my home state of Maine. No Boyardees, though. Not so many Doirons, either. The name refers to the village of Oiron in the Poitou region of France. Long ago, one of my ancestors somehow acquired the surname d'Oiron. In the language of Michel de Montagne, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Chevalier this translates as "from the flyspeck of Oiron." Somewhere over the centuries, the apostrophe was misplaced, and we all became Doirons. I doubt it ever occurred to the original Monsieur d'Oiron that his American descendants would spend their lives suffering through endless mispronunciations of his elegant monicker.

In my life I've been called just about everything: Doron, Dyer, Drier, Dye-run, Dry-run. The most common variant was, and is, Dorian (as in Gray). The American tongue has difficulty wrapping itself around the French diphthong. I am sympathetic to this handicap although I sometimes wonder how Agatha Christie managed to create a world-famous Belgian detective with a surname almost identical my own, and yet somehow hostesses in restaurants continue to page me as, "Darren, party of two."

So Hercule Poirot has been of no help. (Sometimes, I fancy that if ever I have a son I will name him Hercule. Either that or Elvis Aaron. One or the other.) The truth is I respond to nearly any sound that roughly approximates the six letters in my name. Shout Doo-run-run! and I'll know you mean me.

In fact, my name has been mispronounced so regularly, in so many different ways, that I have stopped bothering to correct people. What does it matter, after all? I know you bear me no malice when you call me "Paul Do-iron." That pronunciation isn't so far off the mark actually. I'll take it over most of the alternatives.

My great aunt Oline (pronounced O-lean, like the no-fat cooking oil) used to pronounce our last name Dwerron. Being much older and Frencher than me gave her considerable authority on the matter. But asking your average American to look at the name Doiron and make that mental leap—"Oh, of course, it's Dwerron, like that dwarf from Middle Earth!"—seems like an unreasonable expectation to me.

Truth be told, not all of us Doirons pronounce our names the same anyway. I’m sure I have a distant cousin who calls herself Darien, like the Connecticut township. And who am I to say she's wrong. It's her name as well as mine.

For the record, though, it’s Dwarren.

The Murder of René Descartes

Paul Doiron — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 14:13:04 +0000

Someone please turn this into a mystery novel:

For more than three and a half centuries, the death of René Descartes one winter's day in Stockholm has been attributed to the ravages of pneumonia on a body unused to the Scandinavian chill. But in a book released after years spent combing the archives of Paris and the Swedish capital, one Cartesian expert has a more sinister theory about how the French philosopher came to his end.

According to Theodor Ebert, an academic at the University of Erlangen, Descartes died not through natural causes but from an arsenic-laced communion wafer given to him by a Catholic priest.

Historical fiction isn't my forte, or I'd be on it in a second.

Faulkner's Inspiration

Paul Doiron — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 01:28:03 +0000

Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Van Vechten Collection, reproduction number LC-USZ62-110952.Artistic inspiration is overrated as a subject of study, if you ask me. (And I say that as a Yale English major.) I understand the eager experience of reading a book and wondering where the ideas and characters came from, even sometimes rushing to an author's biography in search of clues. It's natural to assume that a story had to have been modeled closely on some real-life incident—how else could it have been so detailed and deeply felt?—when in reality the business of a novelist is to make shit up. Of course, writers mine their own lives for material all the time. But usually there's no smoking gun to connect an author directly with the object of his or her inspiration.

Well, according to the New York Times, someone just found a smoldering pistol tucked under William Faulkner's metaphorical bed.

The climactic moment in William Faulkner’s 1942 novel Go Down, Moses comes when Isaac McCaslin finally decides to open his grandfather’s leather farm ledgers with their “scarred and cracked backs” and “yellowed pages scrawled in fading ink” — proof of his family’s slave-owning past. Now, what appears to be the document on which Faulkner modeled that ledger as well as the source for myriad names, incidents and details that populate his fictionalized Yoknapatawpha County has been discovered....

The original manuscript, a diary from the mid-1800s, was written by Francis Terry Leak, a wealthy plantation owner in Mississippi whose great-grandson Edgar Wiggin Francisco Jr. was a friend of Faulkner’s since childhood....

Names of slaves owned by Leak — Caruthers, Moses, Isaac, Sam, Toney, Mollie, Edmund and Worsham — all appear in some form in Go Down, Moses. Other recorded names, like Candis (Candace in the book) and Ben, show up in The Sound and The Fury (1929) while Old Rose, Henry, Ellen and Milly are characters in Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Charles Bonner, a well-known Civil War physician mentioned in the diary, would also seem to be the namesake of Charles Bon in Absalom.

Faulkner evidently spent hours poring over this diary taking copious notes, and it's clear that it fired his imagination in untold ways. I'll confess to being intrigued to learn of its existence, and I bet scholars are salivating at the thought of reinterpreting Faulkner's entire opus in light of this discovery.

But knowing Faulkner got the names Candis and Ben from some dusty ledger doesn't change the memories I have of being blown out of my chair by the sheer brilliance of The Sound and The Fury. Nor should it, in my opinion. Faulkner's genius isn't that he recognized great source material when he saw it; it's that his singular imagination transformed a dead man's diary into universal statements on the human condition.

Manly Books

Paul Doiron — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 22:13:39 +0000

One Web site that I really get a kick out of is The Art of Manliness which bears the slogan "Reviving the Lost Art of Manliness." The site combines Teddy Roosevelt-style injunctions on how to live a virtuous life (e.g. take cold showers, split firewood for exercise, emulate Chuck Yeager) with sometimes silly, sometimes useful advice (e.g. how to shave with a safety razor, how to tie a half Windsor knot, how to make your own bay rum aftershave). Having just watched a Super Bowl in which half the television ads seemed largely devoted to contemporary emasculation, I would describe The Art of Manliness as a beacon designed to lead men out of the spreading scourge of twenty-first century wimpdom.

Some time ago, the Web site released its life of 100 Must Read Books: The Man's Essential Library. Many of the choices are appropriately hirsute (For Whom the Bell Tolls, Call of the Wild), while you'd be hard pressed to locate a single chest hair on some of the others (Catcher in the Rye? The Portrait of Dorian Gray?). We're talking manliness here, not literary merit.

I won't make any claims for The Poacher's Son being an essential book, but I think it deserves consideration for future lists of manly fiction. How much more testosterone can you pack into a book title?