Best Mystery Lists

In November and December just about every newspaper, magazine, and Web site seems to come out with a best of the year list. It's an amusing annual tradition. Even the writers who create these lists (whether for movies, music, or books) seem to realize that these things are so subjective as to be pretty useless.

Still, I find myself enjoying these late-year round-ups. At the very least, they remind me of what I might have missed. Since I write mysteries, I pay particular attention to the crime novels getting the most buzz (Megan Abbott's End of Everything seems to be showing up almost everywhere). Today, I got a pleasant surprise from Omnimystery News which listed Trespasser as one of its favorites (although with some qualifications that kept it from the top of the list):

Trespasser by Paul Doiron. Minotaur Books (June 2011 Hardcover). Atmospheric with a well-crafted plot and a strong lead character … but not quite as polished as it could have been.

As the author, I can't really take issue with this assessment. Honestly, I'm not sure that any of my books are as polished as I would have liked them to be. At the moment, I am completing the copy edits on Bad Little Falls (which will be published in August) and desperation has set in with the ticking clock: I know that this my last chance to shine and buff the story before it goes to print.

No pressure at all!

Thoreau: A Fabulous Animal

"The moose is singularly grotesque and awkward to look at. Why should it stand so high at the shoulders? Why have tail to speak of? For in my examination I overlooked it entirely. Naturalists say it is an inch and a half long. It reminded me at once of the camelopard, high before and low behind,—and no wonder, for, like it, it is fitted to browse on trees. The upper lip projected two inches beyond the lower for this purpose....The moose will perhaps one day become extinct; but how naturally then, when it exists only as a fossil relic, and unseen as that, may the poet or sculptor invent a fabulous animal with similar branching and leafy horns,—a sort of fucus or lichen in bone,—to be the inhabitant of such a forest as this!"

—Henry David Thoreau 

Fire at the Topless Donut Shop

Over at Maine Crime Writers today I have a post about a strange fixture in the Maine landscape: topless donut shops. There's currently a lurid trial under way in Augusta that is about as strange court cases get here. It gave me the idea to use one of these rural strip clubs in my new book. In the process of adapting fact to fiction, however, I learned an important lesson from my editor: just because a story happens to be true doesn't mean readers of a novel will necessarily believe it. Check out the post, and you'll see what I mean.

Making a Living in Maine

We devoted the January issue of Down East to the theme of "Making a Living in Maine." As usual, we take the optimistic approach, but I tried not to pull any punches in my editor's note:

Like many young Mainers, I left the state to go to college, not sure if I would ever return. I wanted to explore the world, but I also worried that my career choices would be limited if I stayed. Even after I had returned to Maine for good, I continued to fret that I was giving up financial opportunities for the privilege of living in a naturally beautiful state populated by fantastic people — and that some day I would regret my choice.

Was I right to be concerned? Maybe. It’s no secret that many jobs in Maine pay less than the exact same positions in Boston or Seattle. And networking is certainly easier in places where energetic and ambitious people are concentrated in city blocks and not spread across a mid-size, rural state. Every week, I seem to meet Maine natives who worked out of state to build a nest egg or acquire professional credentials before they dared to even contemplate moving back to Maine; in their minds they needed to leave the state for a while before they could actually afford to live here. I understand and respect their thinking. Making a living in Maine...involves real trade-offs, and anyone who tells you differently is selling something.*

What I left unsaid in my column is that, for reasons hard to fathom, Maine is a fantastic place to be a young novelist. When you think of some the bestselling authors who rose to prominence while living here—Stephen King, Tess Gerritsen, Richard Russo, Carolyn Chute, Julia Spencer-Fleming, Lily King, (even Elizabeth Gilbert wrote her first novel here)—you have to wonder if there's something in the water here that nourishes the imagination.