Spreading Some Holiday Cheer

Take a break from the winter holiday planning. Abandon your shopping, cleaning, New Year's resolutions listing, gift wrapping, cards mailing, decorating, baking, madly running around, or smooching under the mistletoe. Swipe a cookie. Fetch a drink, and settle down with a terrific book, like one of those below:

According to Mike Bowditch of Paul Doiron's The Poacher's Son, his father Jack is a "saloon-brawling logger with a rap sheet of misdemeanors and the public persona of a Tasmanian devil." The 24-year-old Mike hasn't spent much time with Jack since his parents divorced when he was nine, and he moved to southern Maine, from its wild northern woods, with his mom. After glumly watching the pavement spreading beneath his feet and graduating from college, Mike became a Maine game warden, a cop whose beat is the forest. It's an all-consuming, poorly-paying job, but Mike loves it.

Now, Mike's girlfriend Sarah has given up on his ever attending law school and has moved out. He hasn't seen his father for several years. An angry meeting about a Canadian timber company's purchase of Maine forest land and what it means for the land's leaseholders ends with the ambush-style shootings of Jonathan Shipman, the company's spokesman, and Deputy Bill Brodeur, who was driving him. Immediate suspicion falls on Jack. When Jack escapes from police custody and disappears into the woods, Mike and his mother are the only people who think he's innocent. Mike risks his job, his friendships, and his relationship with Sarah to find and clear his father.

While we follow Mike's actions in the present, he reminisces about earlier times with Jack. The shifts in time and setting are very smoothly handled. Doiron's characterization, setting, pacing, and plotting are all first-rate. This book is a realistic portrayal of complicated relationships between a son and his father, men and women, and people and nature, as well as the suspenseful search for a double-murder suspect that reaches an explosive finish. By the end, I was holding onto my chair.

The Poacher's Son, published by Minotaur Books in 2010, was nominated for four major mystery fiction awards and received the 2011 Barry Award for Best First Novel. The author grew up in Maine and is currently the editor-in-chief of Down East and a Registered Maine Guide. During this last week, I've been unhappy about the shooting of wolves right outside Yellowstone National Park. Reading this achingly vivid book, written by a man who obviously loves the woods of Maine, its traditional way of life, and its wildlife––and who also recognizes the terrible toll of progress––somehow soothed my spirit. Shelve Doiron's Mike Bowditch books next to books by C. J. Box. I highly recommend this one, the first in the series.

A father-son relationship isn't the main focus of Canadian writer Linwood Barclay's 2012 stand-alone book, Trust Your Eyes, published by Penguin Group (USA). Instead, the center of interest is the relationship between two adult brothers: Ray is a 37-year-old illustrator who lives in Burlington, Vermont. He looks like the slender Vince Vaughn from the movie Swingers. His two-years-younger brother, Thomas, lives in Promise Falls, New York, and looks like the meatier Vince Vaughn from The Break-Up.

Thomas is a schizophrenic and maps savant. He has decorated the upstairs hallway of the family home, where he lives with his widowed father, with so many map pieces it looks "as if someone had put the world into a blender and turned it into wallpaper." Thomas spends 23 hours per day in his bedroom, and he uses almost every waking moment to memorize the world's cities, using the computer program Whirl360. According to Thomas, this is a job he does for the CIA. Thomas foresees a catastrophic global event that will cripple computers and thus create a world without maps. He'll be the only person who knows how to reproduce them. "And not just maps, but how each and every street in the world looks. Every storefront, every front yard, every intersection." Keeping track of Thomas's progress on this project and acting as his CIA liaison is former U.S. President Bill Clinton, who "talks" in Thomas's head.

Whirl360's street-view maps are made
by a car similar to this one

When Ray and Thomas's father dies in a lawn-tractor accident, Ray returns to Promise Falls to take care of his father's estate and to figure out Thomas's future. It helps Ray when he runs into Julie McGill, an old high-school acquaintance who now works as a reporter for the Promise Falls Standard. It becomes more difficult for him when Thomas's emails to the CIA cause the FBI to visit. Things get more complicated still when Thomas insists that Ray investigate something Thomas saw while "walking" through Whirl360's streets of Manhattan: an apartment window revealing what looks like a woman's head covered in plastic. Thomas believes he's witnessed a murder.

Trust Your Eyes alternates chapters, in which Ray narrates his travails with Thomas, with chapters detailing a political campaign that's running amok. These two story lines, which travel back and forth in time, require the reader's attention, but eventually they connect in a very satisfying way. The whole 498-page book is satisfying; a Russian nesting doll of layer-upon-layer deception and betrayal. There's a delicious contrast between obvious blunders that just get worse and seemingly inconsequential actions that lead, step by step, to disastrous consequences. It's great to see characters with mental illnesses featured as interesting good guys, rather than villains, in books such as Franck Thilliez's thriller, Syndrome E (reviewed here); Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn (reviewed here); George Dawes Green's The Caveman's Valentine (reviewed here), and this one.

Doiron's The Poacher's Son and Barclay's Trust Your Eyes are written by talented story tellers. They feature characters who grow and change. They provide a fascinating look at relationships, the nature of love, and the expectations people have for each other. These books are a good springboard for discussions about how we make decisions and the role that chance plays in our fate. On top of this, they're fine mystery fiction. They're sure-fire holiday cheer.

Cabot Cove: Murder Capital of the World

That's the teaser on the front page of the November issue of Down East magazine. Inside, the story is just a short entertainment piece saying that the world's highest national annual murder rate––86 murders per 100,000 people––is in Honduras, but that the annual murder rate of the village of Cabot Cove, Maine, far outpaces Honduras. Cabot Cove's rate? It's a stunning 149 per 100,000 people.

Cabot Cove, as you probably know, is the fictional Maine oceanfront village that is the setting for TV's Murder, She Wrote, which starred Angela Lansbury as mystery writer Jessica Fletcher. The show appeared on CBS for 12 seasons, finally ending in 1996, when the network killed it by scheduling it against Friends.

Cabot Cove, which was supposed to have a population of 3,560, experienced 5.3 murders per year. Yikes! According to an article in the New York Times some years back, almost two percent of Cabot Cove's residents were bumped off during the show's run. Some good news for the town's endangered population, though, was that more visitors died than residents. And Jessica Fletcher did go on the road from time to time and encountered some of her murder victims away from home. I'm guessing the townies breathed a sigh of relief when they saw Jessica leaving town.

Maine coast

We all know that fictional towns in murder mysteries––onscreen or in books––don't bear much resemblance to real-life towns. And Cabot Cove isn't just unrealistic in its murder rate; it's also not very Maine. First of all, it wasn't filmed in Maine. Cabot Cove is mostly Mendocino, California. Any Mainer could tell you that the coastline of Cabot Cove looks very different from the Maine coastline.

Mendocino coastline

The Maine accents by the regulars on Murder, She Wrote make Mainers wince. The biggest offender was Tom Bosley's Sheriff Amos Tupper. If you want to learn how to talk with a heavy-duty Maine accent, check out Tim Sample.

Even the murders in Cabot Cove weren't very Maine. Not that we actually have very many murders in Maine, and certainly not many that are at all mysterious. Still, I'd expect something more in the spirit of Maine life. If I were to dream up a Maine murder scenario, I'd want it to have that certain downeast flavor.

I remember when I was in high school, a couple of our town's selectmen got into a feud. It got so bad that one of them, let's call him Mr. J, tried to run down the other, Mr. B, in the parking lot at the IGA. Luckily for Mr. B, Mr. J was a lousy driver. If Mr. J had done a better driving job, it would have made for a sensational murder story but, given that he did the deed in full view of a dozen or so grocery shoppers, not exactly a mystery. So we'd need to tweak the story.

In Maine, for almost six months of the year, about every fourth vehicle on the road is a truck with a snowplow mounted on the front. Mr. J could have waited for a time and place without witnesses (pretty easy to do in a state with our low population density) and taken out Mr. B with his truck's plow blade. Then, just plow the guy into a snowbank and months could go by before Mr. B.'s body would be found. By then, it would be pretty tough to figure out exactly when the murder occurred, and any gore on the plow blade would have been scraped off.

And there are so many other possibilities. Your average Maine home is chock-a-block with murder weapons: tractors, chain saws, mauls, varmint poison, shotguns, bows and arrows, buck knives. Disposal places and methods are everywhere: old abandoned dug wells (we have one), root cellars, compost heaps, wood chippers (I know; too derivative of Fargo), cesspits (we had one at our old house), large outdoor wood boilers. It would be a piquant touch to bury the body in one of the many old colonial graveyards that dot the countryside.

The great Maine outdoors offers almost limitless places to commit unobserved murder and hide the body for a good long time, if not forever. Forests during hunting season, abandoned quarries, deep lakes, ocean waters, farms, snowmobile trails, ice fishing huts come to mind.

Just a couple of years ago, a man down the road was facing trial for embezzling funds from a company he'd started with a friend. He disappeared, and all that was found of him was his car, parked near a hiking trail in the Mount Washington area. Did he have a hiking accident, kill himself, or stage the scene and go on the lam? Or was this a murder staged to look like that?

I'm relieved that despite all the excellent weapons and circumstances to hand, and the best efforts of Murder, She Wrote and Maine mystery writers like Gerry Boyle, Paul Doiron, Sarah Graves and Lea Wait (check out the Maine Crime Writers blog, by the way), real-life Maine has a murder rate of two per 100,000. I don't have to flinch whenever I hear a chain saw start up, or lock my doors if I hear that Angela Lansbury has crossed the state line.

The Most Dreadful of Mornings

Everybody who dreads Monday morning and has trouble sleeping on Sunday night because of it, raise your hand. According to a 2008 survey by the online employment site Monster, most of those raised hands will be American (72.6%), British (72%), and Hungarian (71%). The fewest raised hands will be found among the Spanish, Danish, and Norwegians. We Monday phobics are encouraged to take up a Sunday sport that leaves us tired, to schedule something pleasant to look forward to on Monday, or to see a therapist. Then again, we could embrace this sleeplessness. How about some milk and ginger cookies? Here are some accompanying books:

Anthony Berkeley, Trial and Error. The terminally ill Mr. Todhunter decides to do something good for humanity by murdering someone who deserves it. After investigation, he settles on a victim. A problem arises when Todhunter does the deed so well that someone else is arrested for his crime. This is a great 1937 Old Bailey trial novel enlivened with Berkeley's sense of humor and irony.

James D. Doss, Three Sisters. In a departure from his usual style, Doss tucks his tongue very firmly in his cheek in this twelfth book about Charlie Moon, a Ute tribal investigator. Very wacky characters and author asides abound when Moon looks into the death of TV psychic Cassandra Spencer's eldest sister. Grandmother Spider, The Night Visitor, and The Witch's Tongue are some other entertaining books in this series, which combines a mystery with colorful characters, a Colorado setting, and Native American mythology.

Stephen Gallagher, The Bedlam Detective. Former Pinkerton agent Sebastian Becker is back in England in 1912, investigating wealthy property owners for the Lord Chancellor's Visitor in Lunacy office. Is the owner so loony that the property should be confiscated? Now Becker's job sends him to the small town of eccentric scientist Sir Owain Lancaster, back from a terrifying trip to the Amazon. Gallagher knows how to spin a tale, and this 2012 book is a great genre-straddler of mystery/thriller/horror.

Ismail Kadare, The Successor. A 2003 novel by the Booker Prize-winning Albanian writer. The designated Successor to the Guide (the "guide" being Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha) is found dead in bed on a night in December, 1981. The question of suicide or murder is explored with a wealth of suspense and surrealistic black comedy. Kadare is one of those not-to-be-missed authors.

William Landay, Mission Flats. Landay is a former Massachusetts prosecutor, and this book is his 2003 debut. Narrator Ben Truman has been forced by his mother's illness to quit his graduate studies and take the job of police chief in his hometown of Versailles, Maine. After he discovers the body of a Boston D.A. in a cabin by the lake, Truman journeys into the shadowy world of Boston crime, where sometimes it's hard to distinguish cops from criminals. This is mesmerizing storytelling, and I quickly added Landay's 2012 book, Defending Jacob, to my pile of books to read.

Ngaio Marsh, Final Curtain. Artist Troy Alleyn has been commissioned to paint a portrait of a great English actor, Sir Henry Ancred. She is staying at his country estate, surrounded by his squabbling family members, who somewhat unite in their opposition to Sir Henry's plans to marry a chorus girl. A murder doesn't spoil Troy's reunion with her husband, Scotland Yard's Roderick Alleyn, who finally returns from the War in time to investigate. This 1947 book is one of my favorites in this traditional series.

Baroness Emmuska Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel. No list of bedtime reading is complete without a dashing masked hero, and here's a 1905 book for today. An English aristocrat has a secret other identity: he's the elusive Scarlet Pimpernel, who risks his life helping French aristocrats and avenging victims of the French Revolution.

Ali Smith, There But For The. Genevieve and Eric Lee have an annual “alternative” dinner party in Greenwich. After this year's party is over, they discover that one of the guests has locked himself in their upstairs guest bedroom. After weeks of reading the notes he slips under the door (requests for vegetarian meals), Genevieve begins an investigation into Miles Garth's identity by tracking down one of the names she finds in the address book he left on their living room sofa. This 2011 book is a witty postmodern fable; it contains wordplay and shifting points of view.

Tom Rob Smith, Agent 6. This 2012 novel completes the trilogy begun with Child 44 and The Secret Speech. Former KGB agent Leo Demidov's wife Raisa and their daughters are invited to New York City on a cultural mission in 1965. Tragedy ensues, but Demidov is denied permission to travel to the U.S. to investigate. The decades that follow are hell for him. In his desire to see justice done, Smith's heroic character trudges from one continent to another in this gripping thriller. I'll miss Demidov, but I won't forget him.

Spokane, Washington

Jess Walter, Citizen Vince. Laid-back Spokane, Washington, is a far cry from New York City, but it's where the U.S. Witness Protection Program delivers the newly named Vince Camden. Vince settles down to a life of baking for Donut Make You Hungry during the day and romancing several women, gambling, and credit-card crime at night.  It is now 1980, and Vince is excited about voting for either Reagan or Carter. His decision-making is interrupted when his local crime partners grow restless and a Mafia hit man arrives. Spokane resident Walter won the 2006 Edgar for this book. His obvious love of the city, the dialogue, and the characterization make it an entertaining read.

While these books are suggested for reading on a restless Sunday night, they're fine reading for other nights as well. Sleep tight. Maybe next Monday won't be so bad.

Book Review of Stephen King's 11/22/63

11/22/63 by Stephen King

11/22/63 is a quest story; the type of mythic tale in which a hero leaves his home and battles through daunting trials as he seeks his goal. Jake Epping's quest in this story is to travel from current-day Lisbon Falls, Maine, back in time to prevent the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, in 1963. As in any good quest story, from The Odyssey to The Princess Bride, Jake's journey is also a search for meaning and self-discovery. Does that sound high-falutin'? Don't worry; this is also a page-turning adventure with laughter, tears and thrills.

Jake Epping is an English teacher at Lisbon High School, where he makes extra money teaching GED students. Jake ends the school year on a high note, attending a GED awards ceremony and congratulating his favorite GED student, the school's janitor, Harry. Jake was moved to tears by Harry's essay describing the Halloween night in 1958 in upstate Derry, when Harry's father attacked his family with a hammer, killing Harry's mother, sister and two brothers, and leaving Harry crippled for life.

After the GED ceremony, Jake unwinds at Al Templeton's diner on Main Street, across from the long-closed Worumbo Woolen Mill. Later on, Jake receives a call from a desperate-sounding Al, who begs Jake to meet him at the diner. Al shows Jake a "rabbit hole" in the diner's pantry that pops up next to the Worumbo Mill––in 1958. Al mysteriously appears years older and is suddenly near death from lung cancer. He won't be able to complete his self-appointed mission to use the time portal to prevent JFK's assassination.

Jake agrees to take Al's place and, in nothing flat, he steps into 1958 Lisbon Falls, where everything seems peachy, except for the pollutants pouring from the Worumbo Mill and the creepy wino at the gate who accosts him. Jake now has five years to kill before Al's zero hour. He decides to spend his spare time preventing a couple of other past tragedies; one local and the other, Harry's horror story in Derry.

Jake's journey moves on to Florida and then to Texas, where he lives for a time in Jodie, a small town not far from Dallas. There, he teaches at the local high school and forms important relationships with teachers, students, other townspeople and, most notably, the new school librarian, Sadie. Life in Jodie is an almost idyllic interlude in Jake's quest. He introduces his students to The Catcher in the Rye and inspires jocks to be in the school play.

As November, 1963 draws near, Jake must return his focus to his mission. Jake is willing to sacrifice almost anything to prevent the tragedies in Maine and the catastrophe in Dallas, but he finds that time travel is a strange and complex thing. Weird associations, duplications and "harmonics" keep popping up and, as he puts it, the past is "obdurate," resisting change with a force of its own. Every effort to alter the past creates another thread in the fabric of the future, and some of those threads can become hopelessly tangled, threatening to tear that fabric beyond repair. The responsibility of his quest and the need to keep it secret is a crushing burden to Jake, like being J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye for all of humanity.

Despite the fantastical premise of the book, Stephen King has heartfelt and human points to make about interconnectedness: how people and events interweave, with the threads coming together in a pattern that persists in our lives, long after those events and people have passed. That theme plays out for Jake through his experiences in Maine and then in Texas.

I can't help but feel that the theme of interconnectedness was very personal to King himself. I'm no expert on his work but, while he's made fictional small towns like Castle Rock, Jerusalem's Lot and Derry famous, I think this is the first of his books to feature a real Maine town as a primary location. Jake's––and Stephen King's––Lisbon Falls is very real. Most of the places and institutions King describes actually existed and some still do: the Worumbo Mill, Saint Cyril's, the Kennebec Fruit Company, the Lisbon Enterprise newspaper, the Jolly White Elephant, the Red & White grocery store, the Hi-Hat Drive-In, Baumer's Barber Shop, Dunton's Jewelry and the Holly. And many of the people he places in Lisbon Falls are (or were) real, like Frank Anicetti (Senior and Junior, former and current proprietors of the Kennebec Fruit Company), John Gould (former editor of the Lisbon Enterprise) and many others.

King grew up in Durham, Maine, across the Androscoggin River from Lisbon Falls, and went to Lisbon High School. He was a high-school reporter for the Lisbon Enterprise, he worked for a time at the Worumbo Mill and, like Jake, he had a credential to teach English. He probably ate at the Hi-Hat, got his hair cut at Baumer's and bought groceries at the Red & White. (I won't speculate about whether he frequented the Holly, a dive bar and one-time strip club.) I think King broke from his prior practice in using a real location, Lisbon Falls, so that he could acknowledge the part the town's places and people played in his life.

Even when King moves on to the fictional town of Derry and then to Texas, King's personal connections are evident. When King uses the fictional Derry in this book, he incorporates so many of the places and characters in Derry that have been a part of his past writings that it's like a reminiscence. King's chapters on Jake's time in Jodie, Texas, are a kind of love letter to teachers, which reflects King's own background,  his longtime advocacy for literacy and his support for community. And King's choice to make the JFK assassination the linchpin of the time-travel story is appropriate for a man born in 1947. No matter what your politics are, if you were an American in 1963, the assassination was a cataclysmic event. It was a kind of end of innocence and it split our lives into a before and after. For King, 16 years old at the time, it must have hit hard.

In 11/22/63, Stephen King has used time travel, a classic device of genre fiction, in service of a larger theme that is both personal and universal. But the fact that he has a serious point doesn't stand in the way of the sheer entertainment value of his story. He paints a vivid picture of this country in 1958-1963, with 10-cent root beer, cream-topped milk delivered in bottles, yogurt as a new and exotic food, everyone wearing hats, The Blob playing at the drive-in, cruising in a Ford Sunliner and being able to leave it unlocked. But he doesn't overlook the negatives: overt racism, general acceptance of spousal abuse, people smoking everywhere and polluted air and water.

King's storytelling is absorbing and his characters, compelling. Some, like Jake and Sadie, you'll miss when the story is over, and others you'll be glad you'll never meet in real life. This is a riveting and fully dimensional story. I could have wished for a little more detailed and lucid dénouement, and some editing of the Dallas chapters, but those minor flaws didn't mar an overall terrific read that I'll be thinking about for quite some time.

Friday Fun Fact: In 2001, one of those flaky conspiracy-oriented websites reported that the government had packed up all of the alien technology and bodies from Area 51 in Nevada and moved it to Maine, trucking it in the dead of night into storage at the shut-down Worumbo Mill in Lisbon Falls, Maine. When the local media heard the story, they asked for a comment from Stephen King. King's reaction: "If ever there was a place to stick aliens, Worumbo Mill is it." What do you think; was this what first put the idea in his head to use the Worumbo Mill in 11/22/63?

Note: A version of this review appears on the Amazon product page for the book, under my Amazon pen name.