When you conjure up people who do bad things, you ponder just where the motivation to do those things comes from. Bad upbringing? Childhood abuse and neglect? Genetic malfunction? Pure malice?

And then I’m reading the paper this morning and there’s a story about a 20-year-old guy who allegedly stabbed three people to death, including a 10-year-old boy. And the story says the guy stayed with local clerics in this part of Maine, that he could be nice but sometimes he was “like a person possessed.”

By the devil, of course. An alien being that would take over your body. The stuff of movies. Or medieval times. Or any situation where there is a belief in evil as a condition unto itself.

I’ve always stayed away from books about deranged serial killers. Boring. So the explanation is that the guy (almost always) is whacked out? What’s interesting about that? Unless you fully explore the real reasons people become serial killers. Still I see those two words and I put the book aside.

But evil. As something engendered, planted, encouraged by the devil. Now that’s more interesting. Not just because it might happen, but because some people fervently believe in it. Irrational but explicable badness. In DAMAGED GOODS, there is a Satanist villain. I always added the adjective “deranged Satanist” in discussing the book. But some would see that as redundant. Read the story linked to above. Was Thayne Ormsby possessed by “a demon right out of Hell?” Or is he just a screwed up guy with anger management issues.

Interesting.

I’ll be at Boothbay Harbor, Maine,  Saturday for the Maine Summer Book Fair. I’m talking at 1 p.m. Chatting until three-ish. Forty authors assembled in a great Maine coast town. I hope I see some of you there. We can continue the discussion.

This Saturday, June 19, 11 a.m to 1 p.m., Mr. Paperback, Waterville, Maine. Father’s Day signing. DAMAGED GOODS for your dad. And also ….

Dave at Kingdom Books in Vermont asked if I’d write a bit about my influences, some favorite mysteries. So I swiveled my chair, reached for the shelf. Books I really like—they get to stay in the study. Others are vanquished to bookshelves elsewhere in this rambling old house.

So what did I come up with? It’s an eclectic mix:

• The Laughing Policeman by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. First published in 1968 by the husband-wife team from Sweden. Their Martin Beck mysteries are solid police procedurals. You can’t go wrong with any of them.
• Just a Corpse at Twilight by Janwillem van de Wetering. The Zen master of mysteries, van de Wetering wrote mysteries set in Amsterdam. They have a dreamy quality to them that I find beguiling. A brilliant guy, van de Wetering lived all around the world before settling on the Maine coast. He died in 2008.
• Farewell My Lovely by Raymond Chandler. Enough said. I turn to these from time to time to witness wonderful writing. Every page has a sentence you feel you should remember. This one, picked because that’s where the book fell open. “He lay smeared on the ground, on his back, at the base of a bush, in that bag-of-clothes position that always means the same thing.” Nice
• God Save the Child by Robert B. Parker. Chandler’s only true heir. I read the last Spenser, then reread some of this one, his second, published in 1974. I like the early books best. Parker was a gifted writer, known for his dialogue, but his descriptive stuff, which fell away over the years, was very good.
• Blitz by Ken Bruen. The UK’s master of dark and gritty crime novels set in South London and Galway. Inspector Brant, his amoral London detective, is a masterful creation.
• The Deep Blue Good-By by John D. MacDonald. I’ve read everything MacDonald wrote and have a collection of his Travis McGee paperbacks with their quaintly lurid covers. A great storyteller, skilled at narrative, powerfully descriptive. “She was a tall and slender woman, possibly in her early thirties. Her skin had the extraordinary fineness of grain, and the translucence you seen in small children and fashion models. In her fine long hands, delicacy of wrists, floating texture of dark hair, and in the mobility of the long narrow sensitive structuring of her face there was the look of something almost too well made, too highly bred, too finely drawn for all the natural crudities of human existence.” Is that good or what?

So these are a few of the influences. Reading the work of writers like these, and spending more than a decade as a newspaper reporter, landed me in this chair. Today I continue with PORT CITY  BLACK AND WHITE (working title), the second Brandon Blake mystery. I’m pondering a character whose biggest flaw is a highly developed sense of right and wrong. Could that flaw be fatal?

I’ve been pondering that age-old question lately: are people born rotten or do they turn into dirtbags later? Maybe this is an age-old question only for crime novelists and psychologists but I find it fascinating. Take a class full of 6-year-olds and statistically, one are two are going to end up in prison (especially in the jail-happy U.S.) Why can’t Johnny obey the rules? Why does Janey stab Susie with a pencil? Or why do good Johnny and Janey end up going bad many years later.

I think it’s 10 percent nature and 90 percent nurture, which is why I like to give my villains a developed past. When Brandon Blake or Jack McMorrow square off with a bad guy or gal, it’s usually the result of decades of complex dirtbag development. Of course, there are exceptions, where characters are just bad to the bone. But sometimes I think that’s more for plot expediency than it is reflective of real life. I like to think that there are reasons for most behaviors, if you dig deep enough. It takes a messed-up village to screw up a child.

So this week I’m mulling a certain sort of criminal: the embezzler, often a woman of a certain age, steadfastly responsible, a broad-shouldered caregiver who has never shirked responsibility. Until she starts to skim the receipts, fiddle with the books, funnel off in small bits what ends up being a pile of money. And when the crime is revealed, no one can believe it. “We trusted her completely,” is the quote you see in the stories. So what happened? A slippery slope, stealing once, stealing twice. But where does it lead? What would someone like this do to keep from being unmasked, to keep the facade of the trusted bookkeeper, accountant, manager in place?

***

Also, I’m speaking Friday, March 12, 11:45 A.M., Boothbay Harbor (Maine) Memorial Library. For more information, call 207-633-3112 or email  barbh@bmpl.lib.me.us