Hope your holidays were good ones, filled you with enough good will to power you through the winter. That’s the case in my neck of the woods. No big news. Continue to work on McMorrow No. 10, ONCE BURNED, and to follow the case of still-missing toddler Ayla Reynolds. Her dad, Justin DiPietro, has been talking to my alma mater, the Morning Sentinel. Something he said rang very true: “The truth is patient,” DiPietro told the newspaper. “It will come out.”

Just a matter of time.

One last thing. I’m blogging over at Maine Crime Writers today. A bit of musing on creatures of the night. You might enjoy.

It’s all pretty horrible. And familiar.

I say this, not because I’ve seen other kids snatched from their beds, but because I’ve written about one. A lot. His name was Lincoln and he was almost a year old. He disappeared from the bedroom of his mother’s apartment in Portland. Mom was a drug addict and for several hours didn’t notice he was gone. When it sank in, she freaked.

This was in my last crime novel, PORT CITY BLACK AND WHITE. My fictional cops converge on the neighborhood. They bring in tracking dogs. They interrogate the mom, her boyfriend, the child’s father, all of the neighbors, a homeless woman who roams the neighborhood.

Nothing.

Days go by. The mom and her family accuse the police of dragging their feet. The dad beats the boyfriend to a pulp. The neighbors say they’ve seen nothing, heard nothing, know nothing. The child has simply vanished.

Of course, he hadn’t. And some of the people in the book know where he was. Even as the cops speculate that little Lincoln has been snatched to leverage a drug debt, or maybe has been sold on the street. I knew what had really happened. I’d made up the story.

I had someone tell me just last week that they couldn’t read my book because it involved a crime against a child and they didn’t have the stomach for it. I was surprised because as the author, I hadn’t found the story terribly disturbing. But then again, I knew how it would end.

That’s not the case with Ayla Reynolds. I walk out to the mailbox to get the paper every morning and, with trepidation, open the front page. (Today was a $30,000 reward). I don’t want to see bad news. Like everyone else, I want to see the story that says the blonde, smiling innocent toddler has been located and she’s live and well.

As I write this, I’m still hopeful. As a crime writer, I can come up with any number of scenarios that involve all sorts of deception—and no violence. I can envision any number of ways this all could play out, and end with the child safe and sound. I know the tangled webs that people weave, how one lie leads to another and before you know it, every investigator in the state is at your house. I know that because I’ve invented those stories. I can invent one with a happy ending for Ayla Reynolds—but I can’t write it.

It’s an odd feeling, seeing things happen that are right out of my book, but knowing that this case has a life of its own. Something happened to this little girl last week and the dominoes continue to fall, day after day, cold night after cold night.

It’s made me wonder why I invented such a story—a child snatched from his crib, his mother distraught, racked with guilt—but  in the end, it’s just that—a story. And just as I have the power to imagine such a mess, I have the power to clean it up. I can put little Lincoln in harm’s way, but I can also save him.

Not with Ayla. I just follow this story like everyone else, with the hope that she is fine and the guilty parties in the case will be brought to justice. It happens in books. Let it happen one more time.

I swiveled my study chair, reached for the shelf. Books and writers 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 UNDERGROUND, 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?

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.

I’ve been doing this for 18 years now and PC B&W, out in September, is my 11th book. No small number, but not up there in the ranks for somebody like the late Robert B. Parker, for example (whose endorsement I still wear with pride). But you’d think that after nearly a dozen books a bit of the thrill would be gone. No way. I picked up the package at the post office, saw the Down East Books label. I tore it open in the car outside and held the galleys up. Flipped through the pages. Read a passage or two or six. Recalled when all of this was just a few scrawled notes on a legal pad. And it wasn’t all that long ago.

Something there is about the printed word. I got that jolt daily when I was newspaper columnist. Now I get it in Colby magazine, where I write stories. I have to wait a bit longer for the bigger bang, the delayed gratification of an actual book.

I have a friend named Earl Smith who just sold his first mystery novel, THE DAM COMMITTEE. I’m going to remind Earl (and the same goes for any writer just setting out) to savor every success because each one follow a lot of very hard work. When the book is sold. When you see page proofs for the first time. A cover design. Galleys. Your first good review (Negative ones we dismiss). That first carton of books. Pulling them out and seeing your name on the cover. Opening it up and seeing the words you wrote.

This craft can very quickly become a business. There’s the money side of it. The marketing side. The slog of copy editing (OK, it’s a slog to me, maybe not to everybody). But I always tell myself not to become numb to the pure joy of doing this, the absolute privilege that it is. You invent characters, draw a place on a blank page, tell a story. And once published, the book has a life of its own. That’s very cool.

If you’re a published writer, you know what I mean. If you’re still working toward that goal, let this be an incentive, something to encourage you on one of those dark days. Opening that box—it’s a blast.

This week we launched Maine Crime Writers, a group blog that features 10 writers from the mystery/crime genre, all based in the lovely Pine Tree State. Maine Crime Writers features me, Vicki Doudera, Paul Doiron, Kaitlyn Dunnett, Kate Flora (who spearheaded the project), Sarah Graves, James Hayman, Barbara Ross, Julia Spencer-Fleming, and Lea Wait. It’s a great representation of the various niches in the mystery/crime genre, with books set in different parts (in style  and geography) of Maine. This is a great crew, excellent writers and good people. I think you’ll find them interesting, fun, surprising. We’re all very excited about this new venture and we hope readers will be as well.

I have my first post up this morning. It’s about shooting video for PORT CITY BLACK AND WHITE with videographer Curt Chaput, and the effort to find the scenes from my imagined world of Brandon Blake. Interesting process! And some surprises along the way.

So check it out. We’re each writing three times a month, with guest bloggers and group blogs in the rotation. I’ll continue to write here (I have more to say than can fit in three blogs a month) but this will be a good way to add other mystery/crime writers to the mix. And please comment. We want to make this an ongoing conversation about a subect we all hold dear.

Birds, I mean. Not kids. Kids are pretty independent. Birds on the other hand …

Back off!

There are robins nesting in the lilacs on the north side of the house and in the lilacs at the south end of the barn. Last week I awoke to an awful screeching, chattering, general bird mayhem. I looked out, saw robins, grackles, a catbird, all circling the lilac, diving in, flying up for another run. So I pull on some shorts, go out to enforce the peace. The perp is a black and white cat, a stray. hanging by three paws, the fourth paw on the edge of nest. One baby has made a run for it, is flopping around in the grass. The birds are doing the kamikaze thing, dive-bombing the cat. I shout and he drops to the ground, heads for the woods. The birds give chase. I go back to make a cup of tea.

The next day it’s three robins chasing off a kestrel, a small hawk, jousting from above and below. Just one more example of the way parents will do anything to protect their young. Fight against all odds. Risk their lives. Save the kid or die trying.

I’ve kept this in mind as I sit in the study, the windows backing up to the edge of the woods, birds calling all day and into the night (Right now I can hear a cardinal, a catbird, a hairy woodpecker.). I’m writing Jack McMorrow No. 10. Sophie is almost five. She has a pony. Roxanne is hanging out. Jack is cutting wood, doing his freelance reporting gig. It’s all very idyllic—until someone threatens Sophie. And Jack and Roxanne turn into those dive-bombing robins. Clair is a screaming eagle.

Different species. Same instinct.

Over my dead body.

It’s been a bad few days in my neck of the Maine woods. A couple of weeks ago a young man named Gordon shot and killed his wife in front of their two children, then shot himself at the end of a police chase. Then, yesterday, a man named Lake killed his estranged wife and their two young children. Then he killed himself. Police came before he could torch the house.

In both cases,  marriages that had begun with joy not so many years ago, were in tatters. Children lived amidst anger and, at least in the second case, threats of violence. And then, in a last convulsion of spite and twisted logic, the families were destroyed from within. Survivors are shattered and will carry this horror with them forever. There’s no way to rationalize it, make it make sense, make it better. It is done. It cannot be fixed. Oh, the horror.

I read these stories with a sort of  dread. I looked at the photos of the families in happier days. The picture of the Lake family in the Bangor Daily News shows the family on vacation. They’re smiling, entrance stickers to a museum or something stuck to their shirts. From that happy day to this.

I’ve written about domestic violence before, in my newspaper days, of course, and in a novel called LIFELINE. In that book Jack McMorrow befriends a woman who has come to court to seek protection from her abusive boyfriend. Her name is Donna Marchant. McMorrow tries to help her. It doesn’t work out very well.

Of all my books, LIFELINE has the most realistic conclusion. In the end, there is no knight in shining armor. McMorrow tries to salvage a bad situation. A child is spared. A bad guy is hauled off in handcuffs. The plot twists and turns and, in the end, snaps your head back. This is one where even I didn’t see it coming.

But there is no real justice in these sorts of cases, not in real life. In hindsight, these tragedies seem both avoidable (oh, if only we’d known) and inevitable. Protection orders issued by courts are just pieces of paper. They don’t stop bullets. They don’t stop someone bent on self-destruction.They have little effect on someone who wants to die and take others with him.

This is why I don’t write true crime books. In the fictional world of my novels, there is justice. There are bad guys but they usually get what’s coming to them. In the end, there is order, or at least a semblance of it. In real life? Not so much.

So after I read about true crimes like these, I retreat to the refuge of my made-up stories and my made-up friends. There are good guys and bad guys but good guys usually win. McMorrow is funny. Clair is wise. Roxanne is courageous. Brandon Blake is sincere and earnest. Mia is writing it all down.

If only s real life were like this. As Hemingway wrote, “Isn’t it pretty to think so.”

It may be a bit presumptuous to invoke Leonardo  but his alleged words came to mind this week as I took another look at PORT CITY BLACK AND WHITE. The manuscript is in the pipeline at Down East Books, but we’ve been requesting blurbs of writers and one writer friend, Kate Flora, came back with, not only some kind words for the book, but a timeline question.

I’ll be honest, as this is just between us. Plotting is work for me. I can write dialogue with a smile, describe the Maine landscape, explore motivation for behavior, both good and bad. No prob. But weaving the plot? Getting all the pieces to fit together. That’s when I feel like I’m earning my money. I mean, if writing a crime novel were painting a house, plotting would be the scraping. Dialogue is the finish coat.

So when Kate came in with that question, I went back to work. Sure enough, she was right. In the cutting, trimming, compressing, I’d lost a few hours. No small thing in a book that takes place in about a week. So I needed to move a scene around, change a conversation. A little disconcerting at this stage in the game (this is between us, right?) but no big deal. But getting back to Leonardo, that brings the art (if I may call it that) back from abandonment. And once that happens I can’t help but start reading from the beginning, tweaking the dialogue, finding phrases that aren’t quite right. And that’s in a day or two. If I had a week I’d start dismantling, reassembling, adding a character here, a scene there. Not what your editor wants to hear, with galleys going out and publication just four months away.

I don’t think this is commentary on this particular book as much as it is about the creative process. When I read my books aloud, I revise on the fly. I’ve had people reading along in the audience look up in surprise as I’ve cut a line, added a few new words. This has a lot to do with the passage of time. I’m not the same writer I was a year ago, five years ago. Your experiences change you, sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes substantially. That’s reflected in the work you produce. And in the case of rookie cop Brandon Blake (in PORT CITY BLACK AND WHITE)  I’m still learning from him and about him.

In a way, a crime novel, or any novel, is a snapshot of a moment, a screen grab of your thoughts at the time. You write it and let it go. Then it’s on to the next book (I’m well into McMorrow No. 10), creating new characters, finding you have a new take on the old ones.  So Leonardo was right, no surprise. I picture him considering Mona Lisa years later. Too much smile? Not enough? Too mysterious? And then back, as they say, to the drawing board.