I’ve been thinking this of late as the release of PORT CITY BLACK AND WHITE looms. (Sept. 16). Port City is Portland, Maine, where I nearly always have a good time. Last weekend I went to dinner (the restaurant Grace), a concert (Emmy Lou Harris), visited my daughter, and got up at 5 a.m. to take a bike ride around the downtown. The city was quiet but for the gulls calling overhead. The bay was covered in rising mist. I had the downtown to myself, except for the people picking bottles from trashcans and the homeless guys still asleep on benches in the park across from the Courthouse. I rode down Congress Street to Longfellow Square, not as far down as where the guy was shot in the chest and killed the other morning. You read about that? No arrests yet. He died in the parking lot of a convenience store at 4 a.m.
And there I go again.
When you write these books (in my case set in Portland or Waldo County, Maine, or even Boston or New York), you take a perfectly nice place and put it through the wringer of your imagination. It’s not that you’re inventing the bad things that happen. People are murdered in these places most days. There are drug dealers and drug buyers, thieves and gropers, people who are just generally rotten. But there are thousands of good people, too, and most of them go about their business and only read about murder and mayhem in the newspaper. Those people don’t play prominently in books like these.
It’s an odd thing. I had a reader show up at a book signing for PORT CITY SHAKEDOWN, listen to my reading, and say, “But I thought Portland was such a nice place.” Well, it is. Very nice. You’d be hard pressed to find a nicer place to live. But that’s not the side of the city I write about.
It’s an odd thing, this need to insert evildoers into a story, only so you (or your heroes) can vanquish them. I find it hard to write any other way.
I was driving through Waldo County on Sunday, coming back from a weekend away. We drove from Belfast west, up over Knox Ridge, and it was a beautiful view from the top. Rolling hills, and woods, and pastures. We remarked on how lovely it was, and then I said, ‘This is McMorrow country.” The lovely setting in those books is populated by some good people, but a lot of people you wouldn’t want to meet on a dark country road.
I love what I do. I love writing about people who do bad things. I love the push and pull of good and evil. I write about a Maine that you won’t read about in travel magazines. I long ago resigned myself to the fact that I’m not going to be the darling of the Chamber of Commerce. I once had an idea to have a book signing for passengers getting off cruise ships in Portland. I proposed it but it never happened. Go figure.
In PORT CITY SHAKEDOWN, the first Brandon Blake novel, Brandon gets a full dose of bad guys. A brawl in a funeral home introduces him to Joel Fuller, a sociopathic hustler. Fuller is fresh out of jail and determined to take Brandon out—after Fuller and his sidekick Kelvin shake him down.
Rocky isn’t a tough guy. He’s a skinny little kid with crooked glasses, and he shouldn’t be homeless in Portland, Maine. When McMorrow and Roxanne pluck him from under the stomping feet of a gang of street kids, Rocky latches onto McMorrow–and drags him into a world of murder, both old and new. Why is McMorrow protecting Rocky? The cops want to know. Why is Rocky on the run? McMorrow wants to know. Why does death follow in Rocky’s wake? Jack and Roxanne need to find out before they’re added to the list. 
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