"One of the Best Mysteries of 2010"

Kirkus Reviews is out today with its list of the fifteen Best Mysteries of 2010. I was stunned to learn that The Poacher's Son was one of the reviewers picks. When you consider that hundreds of mysteries were published this year—many by authors who are truly masters of the form—well, all I can say is that being selected is a pretty overwhelming honor. Here's the fine fifteen:

  •  Nowhere to Run by CJ Box
  • The Brick Layer by Noah Boyd
  • The Glass Rainbow by James Lee Burke
  • Worth Dying For by Lee Child
  • Edge by Jeffery Deaver
  • The Poacher's Son by Paul Doiron
  • The Crossing Places by Elly Griffiths
  • The Janus Stone by Elly Griffiths
  • The Hanging Tree by Bryan Gruley
  • Crystal Death by Charles Kipps
  • The Charming Quirks of Others by Alexander McCall Smith
  • Bury Your Dead by Louise Penny
  • Still Missing by Chevy Stevens
  • Gone 'Til November by Wallace Stroby
  • The Taken by Inger Ash Wolfe

As an author, I'm delighted to be in such distinguished company. As a reader, I'm excited to have some intriguing new books to add to my Christmas list.

Gray Ghosts

Woodland caribou. Wayne Wakkinen, Idaho Fish and GameThere is a city in northern Maine called Caribou. Most people probably assume it is one of those silly names you see on maps—like Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, or Santa Claus, Indiana. But there is actually a good reason that Caribou has the name it does:

From the end of the last ice age to the turn of the twentieth century, woodland caribou, or American reindeer, roamed the barrens, bogs, and forests of northern and eastern Maine. When they disappeared, quite suddenly according to some accounts, they left a legacy of place names (the city of Caribou, for one), and an enduring mystique. In 1908, a small herd scampering across the Mount Katahdin tablelands entered the mythology as the last confirmed sighting, but in fact hopeful reports of lone reindeer persisted for forty years...

Maine was home to some other interesting species that were extirpated by European colonists, among them the mountain lion, wolverine, and timber wolf. Mountain lion sightings have become regular events in recent years, and eastern coyotes are growing larger and more wolflike. But I doubt wolverines are coming back any time soon. Nor caribou, sadly.

How to Research a Novel

I had the pleasure of meeting Lee Child last fall at Bouchercon in San Francisco. Unlike many bestselling authors, I found him to be very accessible and candid. Our conversation focused on Dennis Lehane's groundbreaking novel Mystic River, but if we'd had more time I would have asked him to describe the process he uses to research his Jack Reacher books.

As it happens, Child has already answered that question on his Web site:

So how do I do research? Not by going to the public library for three months and taking notes in advance. Problem is, I approach writing the book with the same excitement and impatience that I hope the reader is going to feel about reading it. But I need a certain measure of technical intrigue in the story. So if I'm too impatient to collect specific facts, where do they come from? 

The answer is by remembering and adapting. For instance, in countries where the book is already on sale, reviewers have seemed fascinated with an early section where Jack Reacher is subduing a couple of protection racket enforcers in an alley behind a New York restaurant: 

'He hit the right-hand guy in the side of the head with his elbow. Lots of good biological reasons for doing that. Generally speaking the human skull is harder than the human hand. A hand-to-skull impact, the hand gets damaged first. The elbow is better. And the side of the head is better than the front or the back. The human brain can withstand front-to-back displacement maybe ten times better than side-to-side displacement. Some kind of a complicated evolutionary reason.' 

The passage neatly encapsulates Reacher as a skilled and dispassionate fighter, but where and when did I find that information? The answer is years ago, in a couple of different places. I read all the time, absolutely everything. The hand-to-skull stuff came from a Victorian text about prizefighting I bought secondhand and read a decade ago. The front-to-back vs. side-to-side stuff came from a technical article I read in an auto magazine about the need for side airbags. And later, the howdunit part of the story—and I won't say what that is now—came from a newspaper piece I read about sports injuries.

So I file away interesting little snippets—not on paper, but in the back of my mind. 

Child makes the point that all novelists approach the challenge of research differently. Some take notes for years; others barely bother getting their facts straight. Like him I don't tend to separate my creative process into two parts, research and writing, but find myself switching gears when I realize that a new chapter requires me to go out into the world and learn something new. For instance, I plan on doing some dog-sledding this winter to help the verisimilitude of my third book.

A certain amount of research is necessary up front, but given the intensity and the immediacy of the Jack Reacher books, it doesn't surprise me that Lee Child works in the headlong way he does.

Wild Justice

It's been a couple of weeks since I've blogged, but I have a good excuse for procrastinating: I've been working hard on my third, as yet untitled book, and I have a general rule that working on novels should always come first. 

I've also been catching up on my TV. The National Geographic Channel is airing a "reality television" series about California game wardens called Wild Justice. I'll have more to say about how the responsibilities of California wardens differ from those of Mike Bowditch, but in the meantime I wanted to flag this clip.

To get a sense of the strong reactions wardens everywhere get from the public, you should also scroll through these comments.

Wild indeed.