I’m now 18 books into a career that began in a morgue – really – and has taken me to the Maine islands where my latest, AN HONEST MAN, is set. After that many books, it’s interesting to look back for commonalities. The obvious answer is that they all fall under the umbrella of suspense – the what if? – questions, but there are two other things that stand out to me:
Generous people and bad weather.
Those early days in the morgue – fear not, it was a newspaper morgue, not a coroner’s office – featured treasured journalism mentors who gave me an invaluable writer’s education that led to publication far earlier than I deserved. Once published, the writers I viewed as icons – Michael Connelly, Dennis Lehane, Stephen King, Laura Lippman, Dean Koontz, and so many more – were invariably (and inexplicably) generous. When it turns out that the books you love are written by good people, it’s both a relief and a gift. To know that they’ve read my stuff at all, let alone supported it, remains surreal. So, a big and enduring round of “thank you’s” to all those people.
Now for the bad weather.
I didn’t think about it much early in my career. After SO COLD THE RIVER and THE CYPRESS HOUSE, I was aware that I’d written about tornadoes and a hurricane, sure. THOSE WHO WISH ME DEAD featured a forest fire. AN HONEST MAN is set on a fictional Maine island in a very-real struggle with rapidly warming waters. While the plot is a crime story, the environment is very much a character, active – and aggressive.
As I set out on a book tour that began in Toronto, where forest fire smoke blanketed the country, passes through Phoenix and Houston, where heat records are broken daily, before ending in Maine, where those island communities ponder what comes next, it’s obvious why my books feature an active, aggressive climate character. We’re living with one! There’s been a lot of talk about the crime novel as a social novel, but I suspect if you analyze the past few decades of it, you’ll see a lot of environmental novels in the mix. Fiction, the famous saying goes, is the lie that tells the truth.
With AN HONEST MAN, it is once again a privilege to be in the company of so many great liars – and generous people – that we know as novelists. Keep your eye out for a truth or two in there! And thank you so much for reading.