Sherlock Holmes & Jaycee Dugard

I have a post up at Maine Crime Writers today about crime in isolated places and how it's different from the atrocities that occur in cities. Arthur Conan Doyle identified the phenomenon in one of his eerier short stories, "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches," but you can see its manifestation in contemporary criminal cases like that of Jaycee Dugard which is more horrifying than anything Sherlock Holmes ever faced.

C.J. Box and I

We'll be talking about game wardens—those from the Wild Wild West and those from the Wild Wild East—tomorrow (Thursday) September 29 at 7 p.m. at the Blue Hill Public Library. I've heard the New York Times best-selling author talk about his novels before, and he's great. I'll do my best to hold up my side of the conversation!

Oh, Yes

I probably should have mentioned this before now. Bouchercon in St. Louis was a fantastic experience, and not just because I won an award, but also for the many new people I met and for the friends who aren't quite old enough to be old but whom I definitely look forward to seeing each year now. 

Grand Lake Stream

I am back from an always-too-short annual pilgrimmage to Grand Lake Stream (pop. 130), way Down East near the New Brunswick border. The third novel in the Mike Bowditch series is set in Washington County so I justified this trip, to some degree, as research. But in reality, I've spent too many hours this past year behind a desk, a podium, or the wheel of a car, and I needed some time on the stream to clear my head.

Grand Lake Stream is famous as a destination for fly-fishermen and, oddly, economists. I belong to the former category. The weather was unseasonably warm, and the land-locked Atlantic salmon (which are fall spawners) have just started to drop down from West Grand Lake into the river itself. But I brought four salmon, two smallmouth, and a fat fallfish (known in Maine as a chub) to hand on my first afternoon.

And for a while I forgot all those worries that had seemed so important the day before.