The Book for Bad Fathers

People always ask me if my dad was the inspiration for Jack Bowditch of The Poacher's Son. Happily, I can say that he was not. My father is one kindest men I know, and I enjoyed spending the day with him yesterday (our schedules were such that we had to celebrate Father's Day a day early).

I don't know where Jack came from entirely. The fathers of a couple of my boyhood friends were assholes. I remember confronting one of them over his own dinner table when he launched into a diatribe about how "the Jews control everything." I was ordered to leave the house immediately. I never returned.

When The Poacher's Son came out, it was placed on lots of those "For Father's Day" table displays you see in bookstores. This struck me as one of the most ironic acts of guerilla marketing I've ever seen. I often think about the many dads who received my first novel as a present and began to wonder, very quickly, whether their sons and daughters had just flipped them the bird. It's sort of the perfect gift for anyone whose dad was a jerk.

Full Moon

My wife Kristen Lindquist has her third poem on Garrison Keillor's "The Writer's Almanac." This one airs on Bloomsday (June 16, the date during which the event of James Joyce's Ulysses takes place).

The poem, "Full Moon," has nothing to do with Joyce or Dublin. What it concerns is the apartment we once shared in Rockland, Maine: the self-professed Lobster Capital of the World. It was the place where I started to write The Poacher's Son, in an "office" that was actually a closet big enough for me to squeeze a desk in beside the hot water heater.

Rockland was—and is—a gritty place. I had a memorable confrontation there with the city's drug kingpin. He ran the "bar that served anyone" that Kristen mentions in her poem, and I am proud to say that I did not back down from him. The last I heard he was serving a term in federal prison for his many crimes. "Full Moon" only hints at some of the nocturnal happenings she and I observed in Rockland. It wasn't Nighttown, but it was always an interesting place after the sun went down.

The World's Deadliest Animals

Over at Maine Crime Writers today I have a post about one of the most macabre books I have read in years. Gordon Grice's The Book of Deadly Animals is a bestiary of every large (meaning: bigger than a microbe) creature ever known to predate on human beings. It's full of amazing factoids like this one:

 

  • The most formidable large predator in the world is the orca, or killer whale, which has been known to rip the tongues out of blue whales for the sheer hell of it, leaving the peaceful giants to bleed to death; leap onto the land to snatch a sunbathing seal; and holdgreat white sharks out of the water to “drown” the gill breathers in the air (before eating their livers).

 

As a mystery author who writes about game wardens—and therefore animals—this kind of trivia is like catnip. Click on over for my full review of this gruesome and gripping book.