Hey there. We’re psyched about Brandon Blake No 2, AKA Port City Deathtrap. In fact, we’re so psyched that we want to make sure you’ve read Brandon Blake No. 1. Port City Shakedown, so you’re ready.

So you haven’t read Port City Shakedown? No problem. Do two things. Put down a comment here and shoot me an e-mail before midnight EST, Wednesday, Dec. 22. We’ll do the random-pick thing and send the winner a signed, personalized hardcover of Brandon Blake No. 1. Read it and be ready. Or on second thought, make that two.

Blake as a young rookie cop. Blake bringing his baggage, hard-earned in PC No. 1. Blake knowing he’s going to do the right thing, no matter what, no matter who stands in his way. Blake up against some hard guys, and some not-so-hard guys who may be even badder.

Comment. E-mail. Brandon’s waiting.

A lot to be thankful for in this neck of the Maine woods, as someone very near and dear was in a serious car wreck the day after Thanksgiving. The kind where you see the car go by on a wrecker and you shake your head and say, How did anybody survive that?

In this case, the SUV spun on ice and snow, crossed the opposite lane, hit a rock wall head on at 40 mph, bounced back, rolled, and eventually came to rest on its side. The truck looks like it was dropped from an airplane. There was even a heart-stopping phone call: “This is Deputy …  of the Kennebec County Sheriff’s Department. May I speak to Gerald Boyle?”  But in the end the injuries were minor: two broken fingers and a very stiff neck.

I tell you this not just because it’s on my mind but because it has implications for my writing. It’s like this. Sometimes, mostly when I’m reading the newspapers,  I see life as one big minefield. Mudslides, floods, illness, forest fires, trucks flung off icy roads, wars, famine, packed ferries that sink in typhoons, random maniacs—there are countless ways for the plan we have so carefully devised for our time on earth to go terribly wrong. Not that the glass isn’t always half full.

So when you dodge one of the random bullets, or even the not so random ones, you have a responsibility to make everything you can of the gift that has just landed in your lap. In my case, in addition to keeping my good fortune first and foremost, I’m going to fling myself into my writing. It’s like you have to have something to show for the fact that the big boot in the sky stepped on the anthill next door and not on yours (why does that sound like a Travis McGee line?). Maybe this is some sort of survivor guilt. I’ll have to ask Clair. That’s a subject he knows well.

So what do I have to show? Well, these books are part of it so I’m pumped up. Rejuvenated (though I wasn’t really unjuvenated). Psyched. PORT CITY DEATHTRAP, Brandon Blake No. 2, is ready for the pre-publication pipeline. I’m very fired up for the next Jack McMorrow novel, NO. 10, and am planning the research. I’m looking forward to script notes from L.A. on an ongoing film project.

So it’s time to write, baby, write. And give thanks for all kinds of things. Family. Friends. The first snow of the year (well, maybe not this time).

And airbags.

Last but not least.

I can think of any number of novels that could be set in and around this story, set on the seaside north of Dublin, told by my ex-pat baker, writer, artist daughter, Emily Westbrooks. Check it out on her blog. http://fromchinatodublin.blogspot.com/ The post is called “A Big Adventure.” It’s intriguing. bewitching, fascinating. I can’t get this abandoned house out of my head.

My good friend Dan McCarthy stopped by over the weekend, driving up from the coast to visit me and my surgically repaired knee. Dan brought a growler of Snow Cone ale from Marshall Wharf Brewery in Belfast, always good for what ails your knee or any other body part. We chatted about our usual topics: books, beer, politics, family. But it was when we were talking boats that Dan dropped a bombshell.

Dan is the proud owner of a Maine-built Morgan Bay 22 center-console power boat. He keeps it at an island off of Mt. Desert where he and his wife Connie and their family have a home and spend their summers. Dan is a serious boat guy and we were talking motors, his summer’s boat adventures. “You know,” Dan said, “my boat used to be owned by Janvillem van de Wetering.” My jaw dropped.

Van de Wetering, for those who might not know but should, was the Dutch mystery writer best known for his Grijpstra and de Gier novels. He set most of his books in Amsterdam and in his hands it was an eerie and dreamy place, full of opportunistic criminals and philosophical cops. The novels are existential mysteries, short on action and long on mesmerizing conversation. I’ve read all of them (as has Dan) and they are as interesting as van de Wetering himself. He’d lived in a Buddhist monastery, and had been  a former Amsterdam cop, an artist, among other things. I met him a couple of times on my book rounds and we had good conversations, with van de Wetering tapping his wealth of experience and me offering insights into rural Maine.

After living all over the world, he settled in Surry, Maine, at the head of Blue Hill Bay. He was a big deal in Europe but less known here and my guess is he liked the anonymity. He also liked the ocean and boats, and had the Morgan Bay 22 built by the boatyard down the road from his home. He named it Toshiwonikti. Dan thinks it’s from the Native American name of a stream in the Blue Hill area but he’s not sure. I tried to look it up but couldn’t find it.

Van de Wetering (who died in Surry in 2008), sold the boat to a fellow on Swans Island, moving up to a lobster yacht. Dan and Connie bought the boat, renamed it Medric, after a fictional island and character created by Ted Holmes, professor of literature at University of Maine, and a writer. And Connie’s dad. It’s a name that the writer van de Wetering, who cruised beautiful Blue Hill Bay, might appreciate.

So that’s today’s installment. If you haven’t read Van de Wetering’s books, I recommend them. If you haven’t taken a boat cruise on the Maine coast, I recommend that, too. And the Snow Cone ale from Marshall Wharf.

Maine, the way life should be. Indeed.

Hey, a plug for a writer friend of mine from Dublin, Ireland, AKA” the Dubs.” I’ve known her pretty much her whole life. Good writer. Good baker. If you’re more interested in the crime side of things, I should tell you she sends me the best crime tips from from the North Side. And nobody does crime quite like the Irish. I say that with affection.

Check it out.

http://fromchinatodublin.blogspot.com

Living the Hitchcock movie this week. Or I would be if anything suspicious happened in the village where I live. Stuck in my chair with the healing knee hooked up to my friend, the Iceman, looking out the window at the occasional passing car. Very exciting when someone actually walks by, especially when it’s someone I don’t know.

The key to Rear Window, the thriller, was that the people who were on the other side of the window were strangers. Watching strangers is a wonderful pastime for a writer, who can imagine all sorts of  lives for someone whose life is a blank. Sitting in a restaurant, a cafe, even in line at a stoplight, we fill in all of the blanks with our imaginations. Who is that woman? Why is she with that guy? Husband? Brother? Ex? Did he pressure to meet? Does she wish her life had taken a different turn? Were they in love once? Are they both married to someone else? Have they lost a child? Their house?

There are some benefits to going on the DL and having your world suddenly shrink to a couple of rooms and the view from a window. Time to think, reflect. May be a lesson there for us, that we need to take a breather once in a while, step off the treadmill. I don’t recommend this particular way of making that happen (Crutches are no fun, the ice machine is getting old, the meds made me loopy, my caregiver is a saint but may be reaching her limit) but there’s something positive to come out of it. Read The Dramatist by Ken Bruen, which I’d somehow missed. Very good. A book about doing business in China. Reread ms. of Brandon Blake No. 2, before sending it off. Interesting guy, Brandon. Easy to like. Not easy to be with. Letting it percolate now considering titles. Port City Death Trap … Port City Black and White … Port City Deception … Thoughts?

And watching from the window. Of course.

“No blood from a knee. Just a big bundle of bones.” — Joel Fuller, PORT CITY SHAKEDOWN

Thinking a lot about knees last couple of days. Pondered diagrams of the whole mechanism: femur and tibia, patella floating out there on its own like a little desert island. Tendons stretching all over the whole bundle, connecting quad muscles with the calf. The knee is the largest joint in the body and not a bad design at all, with all sorts of ways to operate, like a crane with many cables. Muscles contracting, relaxing, tendons connecting one side to the other, legs moving in required directions and combinations so we can walk, dance, stumble but not fall. But when one cog in this little lever machine is suddenly disconnected, the whole thing becomes a less useful appendage. Something to drag around in a cast, swing between crutches like a big bag of sand.

So it was this week. A slide down a mud-slicked slippery slope (there are good reasons they are so often invoked in warning) in a driving rainstorm. Still in mid-air when the left quad tendon abruptly became separated from the rest of the mechanism and that, as they say, was all she wrote.  Next stop the O.R.

A long way of saying I won’t be at Lithgow Library in Augusta, Maine, this week, or the New England Crimebake Conference in Massachusetts Nov. 12, or any other place other than the couch. The best laid plans …

But there are some glimmers of silver lining in this cloud. I can still write, I think. I don’t seem to desperately need the drugs so little risk that I’ll be knocking off Rite Aids this winter. Lots of good people around my small-town home, including a friend in her 80s who asked if I needed her walker. (It takes a village to raise a 50-something writer).

And when PORT CITY SHAKEDOWN comes out in paperback, I may edit Joel Fuller’s reference to the knee as a preferred target when he wants revenge. Fuller likes knees because they don’t bleed when struck with a bat. No blood, no DNA evidence to tie him to the victim. He  thinks about these things strategically. But I may add to the advice he gives his sidekick Kelvin.

“No blood from a knee,” Fuller said. “And when the tendon goes, it hurts like hell.”

For a writer, everything is research.

This question has come up as I make my rounds, usually as I’m explaining that Galway, Maine (DAMAGED GOODS) is fictional but modeled on Belfast, Androscoggin (DEADLINE) is modeled on Rumford. So where is Prosperity?

The town where Jack McMorrow lives (with Roxanne and Sophie, down the road from Clair) is in Waldo County, a very real place. Some people will know Waldo County from the county seat, Belfast, beautifully situated at the north end of Penobscot Bay and recently gentrified. Prosperity hasn’t been gentrified. Ain’t gonna happen. It’s inland, about a dozen miles to the northwest. It’s surrounded by real towns like Freedom and Brooks and  Liberty, where I’ll be this Friday, Oct. 8, at 7 p.m. at the Liberty Library. I just had to accept an offer to visit McMorrow’s backyard.

This is a part of Maine that most people don’t see because you don’t go through it to get anywhere else, at least not a touristy place, like Camden or Bar Harbor.  And passing through on Route 3 just scratches the surface. To see the real Waldo County you have to go inland, and wander.

McMorrow and Clair found Prosperity years ago and they’ve settled in, taking on the feel of the place, finding that they’re not truly at home anywhere else. They live on the dump road, a back road off a back road winding between hardwood-covered ridges. A hundred years ago the ridges were cleared for hay and pasture but the small farms died off, like their owners, and the relentless brush and trees shouldered their way back in. Now the ridges are all wooded, with the occasional massive maple or oak the only sign that once a single tree stood in a hedgerow springing up from a stone wall.

McMorrow and Clair (and to a lesser extent Roxanne and Mary) like the people in this eddy of a place. It’s insular, like most country places, but the people are hardy and resilient and they don’t much care what anybody thinks, about them or anybody else. They work hard, have no use for slackers or posers, and fight their own battles. This is important in a place where the nearest deputy might be twenty miles away. You settle problems yourself. If they can’t be settled peaceably, then you go to Plan B.

But McMorrow and Clair most like Prosperity because it’s on no one’s radar. It doesn’t appear on many maps, on Google Maps only if you really zero in. And then it’s a dot where two dirt roads intersect. This is a place where you can disappear, if that’s your intention, a place where people don’t ask questions, if you’re respectful and mind your own business. In Prosperity, they don’t care much about how much money you have, or whether you know famous people or even if you are one. If they like you, they’ll do anything for you. If not, you’re done.

A word to the wise.

Well, not really, but I saw a few in my book trek around New Hampshire and Vermont last weekend, crossing the White Mountains and closing in on the Green Mountains (very different geological formations) before I headed down the Connecticut River Valley, where the foliage was ripening here and there like tomatoes in a garden. Highlights: a biker bar in White River Junction, Vermont, called The Filling Station. White River Junction in general, which had a gritty sort of downtown, underneath a thin veneer. Ditto for downtown St. Johnsbury, where I felt at home. The place was tired but trying, people cheerfully hanging in.

But the highlight was my stop at Kingdom Books, Beth and Dave Kannell’s shop in East St. Johnsbury. There are a few of these mystery specialty shops around the country, with a fantastic selection of books and proprietors with an encyclopedic knowledge of mystery and crime fiction. I picked up a new Tana French mystery, set in Dublin, Ireland—near and dear—and highly recommended.

Beth wrote an interesting  blog post about PORT CITY SHAKEDOWN, my first Brandon Blake novel. She observes that this book and the series are way darker than the McMorrow books, and Brandon an evolving character. I read her piece and considered Brandon Blake No. 2—and immediately got an idea for the next plot twist. Now that’s a good bookseller.

Tomorrow, Tuesday, Sept. 28, 4:30 p.m., I’m at the University of Maine at Orono, 402 Neville Hall. I’ll be talking about Brandon Blake and some of the bad guys who surround him—literally. Hope to see you there.

Nearing the end of the DAMAGED GOODS TOUR, 2010. A couple of events in October, one in Mass. in November. Then time to sit by the fire and have a Ballantine Ale, in honor of my good friends, Jack and Clair.Places like Kingdom Books are the future of bookselling, I hope.