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

A pleasant reporter at the paper there asked me a few questions and I answered the best I could, about DAMAGED GOODS, Jack McMorrow’s longevity (we’re both still kicking), an erroneous fact posted about me on Wikipedia. Does anybody check that stuff? Anyway, the resulting Current Publishing Q&A probably has more than you want to know. But I’ll let you be the judge of that.

If you’re in the area, stop in. The library is pretty cool, with a great history. It’s website says, “Robert McArthur (the founder),  was an Irish immigrant who had started working in a Rhode Island mill as a bobbin boy at the age of eight.”

Irish. Rhode Island. A mill town. It doesn’t get any better than that. Hope to see you there.

Now back to the world of crime writing.

Anyway, won’t keep you too long today but I spoke last week with someone in the audio book biz. I’m wondering how many of you out there in readerland would like to have McMorrow and Blake available in downloadable form. Something for  the commute, the walk, mowing the lawn. Me, I like to hold a book and flip the pages. But I’m recognizing that I’m becoming a bit of an anachronism. (I remember the plastic folders full of tape cassettes, numbered 1-8)

Let me know. Your response will help us decide how quickly to move on this.

Enjoy the weekend.

Exactly, I think. I’m a writer. I know.

Driving over your headlights means you’re going faster than the illuminated distance in front of you that allows you to react. In other words, you’re moving faster than you can see things coming.

I just had that feeling this week, sitting at my desk. I was flying, barely in control. I leaned back and let off the gas.

I’m writing Brandon Blake No. 2. Working title: Port City Underground. And in a week or so, I wrote 50  pages very quickly. A first draft, but most of it definitely a keeper. But then I hit a point in this high-speed chase where I was going faster than my headlights. I didn’t know where I was going. I couldn’t see the curves coming, the deer about to leap from the woods into my path. And I felt like I was heading for a stretch of black ice.

This is part of the writing process, at least for me (every writer is different). I write scenes quickly, chapters quickly. Dialogue comes as fast as I can type. I always say that when dialogue is going well, it’s like  TV. The characters chatter away and you’re just sitting there watching.

But the dialogue ends and then you come up for air. You look around and say, that was interesting. But where are we? That’s where I am with this book. Time to take a step back, look at Brandon and Mia, where they are now, where they’re headed. What is the route that will take them to the waypoints along the way?  As they say in Maine (sort of), how do you get there from here? So when I step back on the writing gas and the book starts to roar off down the road, I’m at the wheel and I know where we’re going.

But by holing up and refusing to publish, J.D. Salinger missed a lot. Now, I know, he was stalked by fans fixated on Holden Caulfield, making the trek to Cornish and having to be sent packing by J.D.’s protective locals. But still, just in the past couple of days I’ve had delightful exchanges with readers. This is one of the rewards of the writing trade that you don’t anticipate when you start out.

Kerma wrote to give me her reaction to PORT CITY SHAKEDOWN, and she apologized for taking so long to report in. She’s a feisty woman who has lived lived on a boat in Portland Harbor, had a very tough home life, knows the streets of Portland where Brandon Blake meets his friends and enemies.

“All in all I would look forward to another Brandon/Mia book, but, my heart is still with Jack, who by his nature barrels headlong into life without much regard to personal consequences in order to rescue the less fortunates of this world; guess I have always been like that in my life too, sometimes to a fault.”

I wrote back. Kerma replied. We’ll meet up again at a book signing next time around.

Mike, a reader  and longtime correspondent from D.C. ,wrote with a plot suggestion, complete with research and writing schedule. It’s a good idea so I’m not going to give it away here. Mike and I think in the same ways about these books. He’s a perceptive and careful reader. He’s an attorney, which cost the book business a good editor. We were discussing Roxanne and her future (I’m working on toughening her up) and Mike wrote: Roxanne becoming “harder” is a good move.  A “soft social worker” does not last.  They physically harm themselves (ulcers at the least, psycological problems at the most) when unable to save everybody from everything.  A close friend fell victim in this way.”

I could go on with more from Kerma and Mike, and other readers who weigh in on the books, the characters. These readers, most of whom I’ve never met, are insightful, surprising, good company. Writing can be a lonely craft and your notes are a good reminder that it doesn’t take place in a vacuum. So keep the comments coming. Sometimes they make my day. I may be having a J.D. Salinger moment but it soon will pass.

And then there was the chair.

It was on top of a knoll, overlooking a clearing that probably was wet in the spring. The chair was blue, one of those folding things people bring to soccer games or the beach. It had a foot of snow on top of it, probably hadn’t been sat in since deer season ended in November. I snowshoed up to it, looked out at the view the person had when he or she eased back. What would it be like to be walking in these woods in the summer, to look up and see someone watching you from a chair? A baseball hat. Sunglasses. Would you stop and go the other way? Go over and try to strike up a conversation? Would he have a rifle across his lap? What if the next time you were in the woods, he was watching again. From a different place. By the time you got to the chair, he was gone, slipped back into the trees and brambles without a sound. And it kept happening until you felt you were being stalked. It was so unnerving you stopped going into the woods. You walked on the roads. You stayed close to home.
And then one night the phone rang. You picked up and nobody spoke. You were about to hang up when someone, a man with a voice like a ragged whisper, said, “Where have you been?”
“Who is this?”
“You stopped coming.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“Are you afraid of me?”
“No.”
A long pause.
“You should be.”

Now crime novelists are acknowledging that Bob Parker kicked open the door and we all followed him through. In the 1970s, he was a devotee of Raymond Chandler, who had been shoved by most of the reading world into a dusty storage closet. Parker was an unabashed fan and when he created Spenser, he not only paid homage to Chandler but refined the genre in the most captivating way. Dialogue that sang, descriptive phrases that were as spare and concise as the jazz he loved. When I picked up The Godwulf Manuscript, I knew I couldn’t go back.

I was a cub reporter when we met the first time. Parker was at Colby College, our alma mater, doing a speaking gig. I sat in the audience and mustered the courage to ask him a question. “If one has written a mystery novel, what is the next step?” I said.

He saw through my smokescreen, I’m sure, but he offered his advice, which I remember and have passed on myself. “Don’t show it to your mother,” he said. “Don’t show it to your girlfriend. Get it into the hands of someone who can tell you whether it’s publishable.”

So I did. The book was called Deadline and I gave it to a small regional press in Maine. They liked it, published it, and afterward I went to Parker again. I had written a sequel and I wanted to know how to find a literary agent. I wrote Parker and he wrote back. I’m sure I still have his note, which, like his prose, was spare but complete. “Send your book to my agent, Helen Brann. Tell her I sent you. Good luck.”

I did and Helen Brann took me on as a client. Doors opened and my tenth novel will be published this spring.

Along the way, I had only a few glancing interactions with Bob Parker. I went to dinner with him once. I would hear news of him from Helen. One time she called to say Bob had supplied a blurb for my McMorrow novels. I know it by heart. “Tense, convincing, and gracefully told. Gerry Boyle is the genuine article.” That blurb is on the jacket of my next book, the ninth McMorrow. It meant a lot way back when. It carries a different meaning now.

Bob Parker was a good guy to help me out when I was starting out. In a modest way, I’ve tried to do the same for aspiring writers. But what I admired most about him was that he was secure in his place as a writer. He knew what he did well and he practiced his craft for a half-century. He wrote most days, all day, devoting himself to his work. He published more than 50 books—three crime series, westerns, young adult novels—and in them you will be hard-pressed to find a word out of place. He wrote by example. He was the consummate professional.

When the last Spenser is published (of course, there was another  in the pipeline) it will be the end of an era. The rest of us will continue on but there’s nobody I know of writing now that will take Parker’s place. He set the bar high early on and he never looked back.