It was a hardcover edition of Risk by Dick Francis, a first of the U.S. edition published by Harper & Row in 1977. This was before Dick Francis hit it big in the U.S. so the book is unassuming: small with a goofy painting of two jump jockeys taking their mounts over a hedge. It  appears the artist didn’t know much about horse racing or equine anatomy, but still, there’s a nice period feel to it. The  blurbs are from newspapers like the Houston Post and Indianapolis News.

I picked the book up off the table and immediately flashed back to picking this book up from another table. I was in college and had come home for the summer. My dad, who always had a stack of books by his chair on the breezeway and in the living room, had this book open on top. I remember picking it up, flipping through the pages, sniffing dismissively and putting it back down. Fresh off a year of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, I even suggested to my dad that he not waste his time on mysteries. There was serious literature to be read!

I don’t recall my dad’s response, but he was a wise man and probably just smiled, knowing I was young and would occasionally say goofy things.

But that summer I picked up the Dick Francis book again. I flopped on the couch, skimmed a bit, decided to give it a try. It was my first acquaintance with that feeling that a good mystery or thriller gives you as you’re propelled from page to page, chapter to chapter. You come up for air to check your watch, dive back in. Sometimes you slip away to a more private place so you won’t be interrupted. You stay up too late, knowing you have to be up early in the morning. Just one more chapter. And another. And another.

And when you’ve read the last page, it’s like wrenching yourself out of a dream. You turn the book over, look at the cover once again. Maybe stare at it, put it down, pick it up again. Shake yourself, and grudgingly leave the world of the book behind.

More Dick Francis novels followed that summer. A few Tony Hillermans. Others I don’t recall. But the door opened and here we are. I hope my books give readers that feeling. When someone is kind enough to write and say they read a Jack McMorrow in two sittings, I think back to Dick Francis and his detective jockeys and the first time I knew what is meant by the words, “I couldn’t put it down.”

Do you recall when you first got hooked on mysteries? Comment here, if you’d like.

So that’s the news from this neck of Maine. A week at home and then off again in September: Bangor, Camden, Portland, a swing through Vermont. Details in the events list. Hope to see you along the way.

Anyway, it’s Sunday night, a day of working on the barn, out in the boat, one eagle (immature), a stiff southeast wind, and a good chop. Weeds out the wimps.

And I’m thinking of this story I read in the Boston Globe a few days back. It’s about my current favorite subject—arson. If I told you why, I’d have to kill you. Just kidding.

But this story has been hanging with me for a few days. This guy in Roslindale, Jose Baez (no relation to Joan that I know of) gets picked up for torching places. Houses. A hair salon. An auto body shop. Cops say he had a beef with you, he came back later, lit you up. Or at least your business. Or your house. Cops say they suspected Mr. Baez of earlier arsons because anytime he had a disagreement, later that person’s property went up in flames. No fatalities, just property, but at least one guy had to jump out a second-story window.

So the cops  put a GPS on his car, and picked him up after he was at the scene of the latest of several fires, a house in Roslindale, Mass. I quote:  “Officials said they found several one-gallon Poland Spring bottles filled with gasoline in his car. He reeked of gasoline, they said. And he had a box of wooden matches in his pocket.”
Guilty? Plea bargain? Not yet. Now, I know we are all entitled to due process, and a defense lawyer has a responsibility to do everything in his or her power to get the client off, make sure you walk. But Poland Spring bottles filled with gasoline? A box of wooden matches? What was he doing out there? Helping backyard barbecuers during a rainstorm?

Enter Baez’ lawyer, William Fick, earning his keep, no doubt, and good for him. He says, and I quote the Globe, “the evidence against him in the fire on Monday is circumstantial.”

Well, I guess to hell is is. As in, nobody light a match!

Oh, it’s a great country, isn’t it? Many years ago, I wrote a newspaper column about a most amazing defendant. I don’t recall the crime but this guy is in court (I was there, too) and he is asked what he pleads and he says, “Guilty.” The judge says, “Are you sure you want to plead guilty?” and this guy says, “Yes, your honor. I did it.”

Well, heavens to Betsy, I almost fell off my bench. Guilty because you are guilty? Have this man’s sanity checked pronto and continue this case.

An exception to the rule that says nobody’s guilty of nothing until the jury comes back in.

Come to Winthrop, Maine, Tuesday night. We can talk about arson. And guilt. And I’ll talk about DAMAGED GOODS, in which one character is self-sentenced. Then we can talk about whatever you like.

Hayes’ lawyers (he was arrested near the scene and is about as guilty as you can get before the verdict is actually pronounced; trial begins Sept. 13) don’t want prosecutors to use a list of books that their client read in prison. Speculation is that the books might include In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, the doc-novel about a similar crime in Kansas, or Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.  I assume that the defense doesn’t want the book in evidence because it will show that Hayes had been planning to recreate the book crime for some time, that it wasn’t a robbery gone awry. My prediction: the lawyers will get paid; Hayes and Komisarjevsky eventually will be executed or die on death row. Small justice for the victims’ family and friends  but better than nothing.

But in the meantime, the legal tactic raises an interesting question. By creating fictional crimes, are authors somehow planting the seed for future crimes? By inventing bad guys are we helping to produce them in real life?

I think back to some of the villains that have come from my imagination. Fuller and Kelvin from the Brandon Blake novel Port City Shakedown, for example. Fuller is a sociopath with delusions of grandeur, at least when it comes to crime. Assault, extortion, kidnapping–Fuller is a schemer and if he has to kill you to make the scheme work, so be it. At one point, he’s trucking a kidnapping victim around in a suitcase. Confronted, his first impulse is to shoot the woman dead.

Could this happen in real life? I suppose, but a criminal-minded reader might want to read Port City Shakedown all the way to the end to see the payoff for this life of crime. (It ain’t pretty).

There are some gruesome crimes in fiction and film, of course. But most crime novels don’t glorify or glamorize the crime. When I create villains, it is with the express purpose of having my characters (Brandon Blake, Jack McMorrow, Clair Varney) defeat them in the end. In the world of my books, good defeats evil, or at least keeps it at bay. In this world, justice does prevail, or at least some form of justice. In order to create a world where good triumphs, you need some bad stuff for the forces of good to defeat.

I suppose that prison inmates reading my books might get an idea or two. They may even see themselves in my fictional criminals (Actually, I hope so). But I’d like to think that readers (incarcerated or not) will be inspired by my fictional heroes as well. When Jack and Clair get locked and loaded to defend someone helpless or vulnerable, when Brandon risks his own life to save another– maybe that will rub off somewhere.

Guys like Hayes and Komisarjevsky don’t need Stieg Larsson to inspire them to commit atrocities. These sorts of criminals have something missing inside, a lost piece of the puzzle that makes us human. They’re broken, for reasons of nature or nuture or both. They appear in crime fiction mostly to be shot down to reassure us that there is a world where people don’t get away with murder. Unfortunately, it’s a world we crime writers make up.

Thoughts on any of this? I’d love to have readers weigh in.

My next stop: Charles M. Bailey Library in Winthrop, Maine, in the lake district west of Augusta, Aug. 17, 6:30 p.m. The complete list is here, under events. Hope to see you along the way.

Next week, headed back to my roots in R.I. Weaver Library in East Providence. Monday, Aug. 2, 7 p.m. If you’re in R.I. or southeastern Mass. please stop by.

Working on Brandon Blake No. 2, working title, PORT CITY BLACK AND WHITE. What do you think of that title? Weigh in, if you like.

talk soon.

We would have made the run to the river’s mouth but ran out of time and swung around just after we were passed by the Marine Patrol. The officers did not give chase.

Thoughts from the river:

* Spotted eleven bald eagles along the way, including two recently fledged, squabbling over lunch on a riverbank. You’ve got to like a place where the eagles outnumber the ospreys.

* Thirty years ago, this river was an open sewer, with paper mills, slaughterhouses, and everything in between dumping their waste in, letting it be carried to the sea. No more. Thanks to George Mitchell and the Clean Water Act, the Kennebec is clean and thriving. Striped bass, sturgeon, trout, alewives. People, too, swimming, diving, kayaking, sailing. A little good news if you need a break from BP.

* Marine Patrol is a very cool job. Big boats, twin-engines, guns on their hips.  I gotta get out with these guys (non-gender use). Another mystery series? Would you read it?

* Bath, Maine is a nice town. Pubs, boats, BIW, boats, the Maine Marine Museum, more boats. Life is good.

* Felt a little guilty running up the river at 30 mph when Benedict Arnold and his men had to slog in their overweight bateaux. Passing Swan Island, where he met with his generals, I wondered if they were still optimistic at that point, not knowing that the winter was closing in and disaster awaited in Quebec.

* Jack McMorrow loves a good news story; Brandon Blake loves to be on the water. Both are protagonists from my own heart.

Speaking of the water, I’m signing Saturday July 24, noon to 1 p.m. at the Bucksport Bay Festival in Bucksport, Maine.  Word has it that Linda Greenlaw, of sword boat fame, will be there, too.  I’m looking forward to meeting her. Come by and you can do the same.

.

I’m off to Castine, Maine Tuesday night to speak at the Witherle Memorial Library’s Maine Writers Series. Castine is a beautiful town with a long and storied history (I’d rather be arriving by boat, as we have in the past). Hope to see some of you there. Castine is well worth the trip.

And don’t forget what I said about the Parker story. Is all fiction autobiographical? Perhaps.

Speaking of Holland (was I?), DAMAGED GOODS was noticed by a Dutch noir reviewer, Jochem Van De Steen. He liked it, and made the Robert B. Parker comparison. It’s global, I guess. Check out the review and leave a comment so he knows he’s being read by McMorrow’s readers here as well.

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.

Nothing like a good book on good boat in a sheltered Maine harbor. Set the hook, make a drink (maybe a Boodles in memory of my hero, Travis McGee), and settle in. For that reason, this comment is one that warms my heart. Check it out. I especially appreciate the  kudos for my good friend, Clair. He’s a good man to have around, Clair is, especially when someone is trying to take you out.

This is the assessment of reviewer Carol Standish:

“He’s a Vietnam vet with more skills than any human being can use in a lifetime unless you’ve fought in Vietnam and live next door to Jack. In every book he gets progressively slower, quieter, more deliberate and more deadly.”

Any other Clair fans want to weigh in?