Over at Maine Crime Writers today I have a post about a strange fixture in the Maine landscape: topless donut shops. There's currently a lurid trial under way in Augusta that is about as strange court cases get here. It gave me the idea to use one of these rural strip clubs in my new book. In the process of adapting fact to fiction, however, I learned an important lesson from my editor: just because a story happens to be true doesn't mean readers of a novel will necessarily believe it. Check out the post, and you'll see what I mean.
I Will Never Lack for Material
If one is writing a series of crime novels set in the Maine woods, there will never be a shortage of mysteries to explore:
A little-touted fact come fall in Maine: It turns out hunters here stumble upon an average one to two decomposing bodies in the woods each deer season.
So three is a lot.
Officials say they can’t in recent memory recall hunters finding three in one season, and there’s still four days of firearm hunting left.
“This is my 21st fall as a game warden. Every year it seems like it’s two. Usually we know who the person is because they’ve been missing, ‘Oh that’s so-and-so,’” Major Gregg Sanborn, deputy chief of the Maine Warden Service, said Tuesday.
“It surprises me every time we find one because the state’s so big — I’ve also learned that nothing really surprises me anymore.”
First, hunters found a man in Stacyville on Nov. 4, along with clothing, a briefcase and a hat with the name “Chris.” On Nov. 15, they found a body in Vassalboro later identified as 60-year-old William Stein. Then on Nov. 20, hunters found a third man in Belmont. He was identified Tuesday as 68-year-old Charles Springer, who had wandered from home.
Maine Department of Public Safety spokesman Steve McCausland said it’s likely Stein, a convicted child molester due to serve prison time, died in June; that Springer likely died in May 2008; and that the unidentified Stacyville man likely died in September.
None of the deaths have been labeled suspicious.
But they could have been suspicious — and in a novelist's imagination they always are.
The Homicide Student
It would be tempting to say this true story was stranger than fiction except that I'm almost certain I've read it before in a novel:
In a grisly case that British newspapers have compared to the Yorkshire Ripper murders of the 1970s, the police on Thursday charged a 40-year-old man pursuing a Ph.D. in 19th-century homicides with the murders of three women identified by the police as prostitutes.
One victim was caught on closed-circuit television last week being killed with a crossbow shot to the head before her dismembered body was dumped in a nearby river.
Think for a moment about the diver assigned to recover that poor woman's body parts from the River Aire. The newspapers are likely to obsess over the warped psychology of Stephen Griffiths, the man accused of these gruesome crimes. But the inner lives of psychopaths have never held much interest to me. It's that brave diver and what he must have been thinking before he climbed into the water that fires my imagination.