What Did I Miss?

I didn't intend to take a sabbatical from this blog, but I have been madly finishing the third book in the Mike Bowditch series, and when it's a choice between writing fiction and writing blog posts, the fiction always wins. I haven't been altogether silent on the social media front. I've been posting updates on the Facebook pages for The Poacher's Son and Trespasser, when appropriate, and I have banded together with my fellow Maine Crime Writers to start a new group blog. But I am looking forward to getting back into the swing of things here.

A Very Cool Maine Crime Blog

I've been so busy blogging elsewhere that I haven't been tending my own garden, so to speak. First, I was over at Powell's. Now I am at a new group blog that you need to add to your list of bookmarks. It's called MaineCrimeWriters.com and is a collective that includes a veritable who's who in suspense writing: Julia Spencer-Fleming, Sarah Graves, Kate Flora, James Hayman, Gerry Boyle, Vicki Doudera, Lea Wait, Kathy Lynn Emerson, and Barbara Ross. I have a post up this morning about the strange experience of discovering you have real fans. Check it out.

Guest Blogging at Powell's This Week

For the next five days I will be the featured blogger at Powells.com, the Web site of the awesome independent bookstore in Portland, Oregon. I visited the store on my pre-tour for The Poacher's Son, and it was like visiting a holy literary shrine, a cathedral devoted to the written word. The store is massive: It sprawls from room to room over an entire city block. 

I'll hope you follow my blog at Powell's this week, and please post a few comments there if the spirit moves you. 

Hemingway's Death Wish

Ernest Hemingway aboard his yacht around 1950On the fiftieth anniversary of Hemingway's suicide, John Walsh extrapolates that the famous author's entire public life was one protracted suicide attempt:

It's easy to be spiteful about Hemingway. All his posturing, his editing of the truth, his vainglorious fibbing can obscure his undoubted bravery. He loved being in the thick of the war – the tank advance through the Ardennes, the Battle of the Bulge – dodging bullets, watching men being shot to hell all around him. But it's hard to shake off the feeling that what he was doing wasn't bravery, but psychotic self-dramatisation. And when you inspect the image of Hemingway-as-hero, you uncover an extraordinary sub-stratum of self-harming. You discover that, for just over half of his life, Hemingway seemed hell-bent on destroying himself.

It was about the time he was finishing A Farewell to Arms, in 1928, when he learnt that his father Clarence had shot himself in the head with a Civil War revolver, that Hemingway's life first began to crack apart. The most obvious external evidence was a succession of bizarre physical accidents, many of which were bashes on the head. One, in Paris, left him with a split head needing nine stitches, after he yanked the chain in the bathroom, thinking it was the lavatory flush, and pulled the skylight down on top of him. He became weirdly accident-prone. His car accident that occasioned his row with Martha saw him hurled through the windscreen, lacerating his scalp and requiring 57 stitches. Three months later, he came flying off a motorbike evading German fire in Normandy. He suffered headaches, tinnitus, diplopia, showed speech and memory problems for months. Back in Cuba after the war, he tore open his forehead on the rear-view mirror when his car skidded. Five years later, while drinking, he slipped on the deck of the Pilar, and concussed himself. Why, you'd almost think he was trying to emulate his late father, and his self-imposed head wound.

I'd like to offer a counter-theory on the number of Hemingway's self-inflicted wounds that doesn't require reaching into Sigmund Freud's magical bag of tricks: alcoholics frequently injure themselves under the influence, whether their fathers shot themselves to death or not.

Trespasser Is a Bestseller

It might not be the New York Times, but Trespasser has made a bestseller list that is extremely meaningful to me. The New England Independent Booksellers Association (NEIBA) is out with its list of top sellers in member stores for the past week, and here's the list for Hardcover Fiction:

1. State of Wonder
Ann Patchett, Harper, $26.99, 9780062049803
2. Maine
J.Courtney Sullivan, Knopf, $25.95, 9780307595126
3. Caleb's Crossing
Geraldine Brooks, Viking, $26.95, 9780670021048
4. Smokin' Seventeen  New
Janet Evanovich, Bantam, $28, 9780345527684
5. The Paris Wife
Paula McLain, Ballantine, $25, 9780345521309
6. The Snowman
Jo Nesbø, Knopf, $25.95, 9780307595867
7. Silver Girl  New
Elin Hilderbrand, Reagan Arthur Books, $26.99, 9780316099660
8. The Tiger's Wife
Tea Obreht, Random House, $25, 9780385343831
9. Dreams of Joy
Lisa See, Random House, $26, 9781400067121
10. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
Stieg Larsson, Knopf, $27.95, 9780307269997
11. Ten Thousand Saints  New
Eleanor Henderson, Ecco, $26.99, 9780062021021
12. Against All Enemies
Tom Clancy, Peter Telep, Putnam, $28.95, 9780399157301
13. Sisterhood Everlasting
Ann Brashares, Random House, $25, 9780385521222
14. She Walks in Beauty  New  **
Caroline Kennedy (Ed.), Hyperion, $24.99, 9781401341459
15. Trespasser  New  **
Paul Doiron, Minotaur, $24.99, 9780312558475