Winners will be announced in Portland May 31. Brandon Blake will see if he can get the night off at Portland P.D.

I’m calling this the Summer 2012 Maine Library Tour. Libraries are special places for readers and writers and I’m going to hit a few in coming weeks.  Here’s the latest:

May 24, 7 p.m., North Gorham Public Library.

June 7, 6:30 p.m., South Portland Public Library.

July 2, 6 p.m., Auburn Public Library.

July 14, 12:30-3:30, Boothbay Harbor, Books in Boothbay.

July 17, 6 p.m., Rangeley Public Library.

July 25, 5:30 p.m.,Tenants Harbor Public Library.

Aug. 9, 5:30 p.m., Newport Cultural Center.

Hope I see you along the way.

Highlight of the night in terms of police action was when the police apprehended a guy who had reportedly threatened people in an Old Port bar with a knife. He was arrested a few blocks away at gun- and K-9-point (is that a word?).

Highlight of the night in terms of writer action was sitting in a parking lot at 10 at night–cruisers pulled up side by side–while a couple of officers walked through the tentative opener for my next book (Blake No. 3). Good news: they didn’t laugh at my original idea. Even better news: they came up with ways to make it a lot better.

Young officer Brandon Blake is in good company.

I’m talking about the Gerry Boyle cover photo of the February/March issue of Northern New England Journey magazine. I wondered if it would be noticeable.

The cover photo was taken on Custom House Wharf in Portland’s Old Port. I like it down there and so does my series protagonist Brandon Blake. I walk the city’s streets and docks. Brandon walks (and drives) the beat. He also lives on a vintage Chris Craft cabin cruiser in Portland Harbor.

When photographer Nance Trueworthy called to schedule the photo shoot, she asked me to take her to all of the places my detective (patrolman) hero goes. We wandered around the Old Port, where Brandon helps keep the drinking crowd under control. We explored the Parkside neighborhood, where Brandon searches for a missing baby (pre-Ayla Reynolds) and comes up empty for more than 300 pages. (More to come on the Ayla case). We tromped around Munjoy Hill, the Eastern Prom, where Brandon is given a hard time for being a cop. We walked Upper Congress Street in a blisteringly cold wind.

But we settled back into the waterfront because that’s where Brandon is most at home.

There’s nothing like the film noire feel of a working waterfront, especially at night. The photo was shot after we asked a guy working at The Comedy Club, which was closed, if he could do us a favor and turn on the outside light. He thought about it for a minute, then helped us out. Thanks, bud.

We shot in a brick-lined alley. On the edge of the wharf. With boats in the background. But it was the hollow-sounding boardwalk, the purple wall with the hole in the siding, the vintage signs that kept pulling us back. We wanted to get the half-wild wharf cats in the shot but they were too elusive.

So do I wander the wharves in a Sam Spade overcoat, my fedora pulled low? Well, maybe not. I prefer a baseball cap and leather jacket. But we were trying to capture the spirit of the nighttime city streets, the mystery of the darkened wharves. I hope that when you look at the photo you feel a little of that.

I sure did.

Catch you on the streets.

Next week I head for Portland to hit the streets in preparation for Brandon Blake No. 3. My friend Officer Christian Stickney of the Portland P.D. and his K-9 Taz have graciously allowed me to ride on the 5-12 p.m. shift. Always an interesting time and invaluable to getting in my Brandon Blake vibe.

I’m working mostly these days, when I’m not suffering through this snowless Maine winter. One event planned. April 14 at 2 p.m. I’ll be speaking at the Stockton Springs Library in Stockton Springs, Maine. If you’re in the area …

Lastly, I’m writing today at Maine Crime Writers. The post starts like this:

Gerry here, reporting on what I did last weekend. I went to a funeral. I actually enjoyed it. I didn’t expect to but I did. Every minute.

This was in a small town in northern Somerset County (redundant, I know), in a chapel off of Main Street. ….

Hope you enjoy, friends. Enjoy the weekend.

And lastly

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.

Digging up the past in the back forty

I digress, but there’s been a lot of that in the past few days, thoughts and conversation leading us rather than the other way around. Good fun but it ends this weekend, with trips to the airport, Portland, etc. And then it’s back to the writing desk for a good long stretch with ONCE BURNED, McMorrow No. 10. Very different from PORT CITY BLACK AND WHITE, which was a strap-yourself-in-and-hang-on kind of book. McMorrow, Roxanne, daughter Sophie and “Uncle” Clair are in deep in this one. The danger is simmering, smoldering and suffocating.

More to come … In the meantime, all the best to you and yours from my neck of the snowy Maine woods.

And in book-related news, I’ll be making a couple of pre-holiday stops:

On Dec. 3, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., I’ll be at the Mr. Paperback store at Elm Plaza in Waterville. Signing and general chit chat.

On Dec. 9, 4-7 p.m., I’ll be at the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport, Maine. A book signing and a great museum for all things nautical and historical. I guess they thought my boat bum Brandon Blake was the right fit. This is a big day in Searsport. Tree lighting and related festivities, so come and check it out.

And lastly, if you’re headed for the New England Crime Bake in Dedham, Mass. this weekend, I’ll see you there. Should be a good time.

And truly lastly, don’t forget to check out the Maine Crime Writers blog. Me and a bunch of other mystery writers sounding off on all sorts of things.

Take care,

Gerry