In the days before he died, Senator Ted Kennedy — may he rest in peace — spent his time visiting with friends and family and watching every James Bond movie on DVD.
Boyle at His Best
Full disclosure: The company I work for now publishes Gerry Boyle's mystery novels. But my own self-serving interest in recommending his work shouldn't stop you from discovering one of the most consistently entertaining detective writers out there today. As a veteran newspaper reporter and columnist, Boyle understands the funny, freakish, and foul nature of crime in Maine better than anybody. Read his new blog, and you'll get a sense of his sensibility.
Welcome to the Dark Side
I'm a little late to this story, but I want to give a shout out to Malcom Jones' well-observed Newsweek piece on literary writers who "go slumming" by writing detective novels. This summer, it's been Denis Johnson and Thomas Pynchon who have tried on trenchcoats, but Jones notes that some of America's canonical authors (Faulkner, Dreiser) have dabbled in noir over the years. What these literary authors discovered, says Jones, is that writing an exceptional mystery is no easy task:
So what happens when mainstream novelists tackle noir? More often than not, they find it's harder than it looks. Mailer's Tough Guys Don't Dance contains some brilliant passages, but mostly it's a mess (paradoxically, when Mailer took on real crime in The Executioner's Song, he wrote arguably his best book). McCarthy's No Country for Old Men is also occasionally wonderful, but it might be his worst novel—who would have thought that we would ever accuse him of sounding preachy?
I agree with Jones about Mailer but not about McCarthy. That said, I read No Country for Old Men after seeing the film, and I think the book probably benefited from the vivid memory of Javier Bardem's perfectly rendered Anton Chigurh.
Berry Season
My wife Kristen Lindquist, who works as the development director for Coastal Mountains Land Trust, writes a monthly natural history calendar that's published in our local newspaper. She a far better writer than I am about Maine's natural world, as I think you'll discover if you read this. There's an archive of Kristen's essays posted at the land trust's Web site. I recommend especially the one about the mice.
A Trapper's Guide to Home Dentistry
Bob Wagg was a larger than life Maine trapper who used to frequent the area around Spencer Lake and The Forks back in the 1970s (he was a regular fixture at Berry's Store, too). He was also the unlikely star of one of my favorite documentaries, Dead River Rough Cut — about which I'll write more later. But if you want to meet the kind of North Maine woodsman who's largely gone extinct (for better and worse, some might say), this clip from the movie is pure Wagg.