(gentle music) - Hello and welcome to Maine Public's Book Club.

I'm your host Bill Nemitz and today, we have a very special guest.

If you've lived in Maine for any amount of time, you have heard the name Paul Doiron and at the same time the name of Mike Bowditch.

This is a book called "Skin and Bones" and it is an anthology of short stories, which is a first for me on the book club.

And I really enjoyed reading it because you don't have to follow the plot.

(both laughing) - They're short.

- You finish one and you start another.

Paul, welcome.

It's good to have you here.

- Thank you, Bill.

I'm glad to be here.

- All right.

It's a real thrill.

I'm gonna start off with one question because you are so intrinsically tied to Mike Bowditch.

When did Paul Doiron and Mike Bowditch first meet?

- (laughs) Let's see.

I would say it was in the 1990s, and I was a young, aspiring novelist from Maine who realized that I didn't know anything about anything except for the Maine outdoors, as it happens.

And I also, at that point, decided that I wanted to write mystery novels.

And so I was like, I wanna write crime stories.

I only know about the outdoors.

I guess I should write about a game warden.

But at that stage, I didn't know anything about the warden's service really, aside from, you know, what I'd been reading in papers.

- Except when you're fishing, this is a guy to watch out for.

- Yeah, I've been checked by a few.

- Make sure you have your license.

- I've been checked by a few, and some of them were pretty imposing.

You know, they show up in a boat, two of the guys with, you know, side arms and things, and I was really fascinated by the profession.

But I was also knowing that I was going to be writing about a guy who was roughly my age at that stage.

And so it was going to be a young Maine game warden.

And I didn't know Mike very well, obviously, when I was beginning, of course, this is two decades later and I know him very well.

- Sure.

Tell me also, I read about the, your brush in terms of your interest in writing about the outdoors, your brush with lightning.

- Yes.

- When and how did that happen?

- So when I was, let's see, I think I was, I can't remember if I was 22 or 23, but I had spent a year in Los Angeles trying to get into the movie business as a script reader, junior, you know, on my way to becoming a screenwriter.

And it was just a disaster all the way around.

I came back.

- Hollywood spat you out.

- Hollywood spat me out in less than a year and I ended up living in my parents' basement.

And here I was, this Yale graduate.

They were like, what's wrong with you, Paul?

You're back in Maine.

And so I went camping with some friends in Grafton Notch State Park.

And it's a very long story, which I don't think we have time for.

But the upshot is that my friends and I got struck by lightning.

- You were actually hit.

- I was actually hit.

Yeah, there was a tree on the edge of the clearing in which we were camped.

It was a small clearing.

The electricity traveled through the sap in the tree.

I was burned on my side.

and a friend of mine was more seriously injured.

He was in a different tent.

And it was a very long night evacuating him off the mountain.

We were miles from anything.

But one of the people who helped was a game warden named Don Gray.

And he was probably the first game warden I've ever spoken to at any length.

I mean, I didn't realize how important he was going to be in my life in a way, but.

- Yeah, you hear a lot about the enforcement side, not so much about the rescue side.

- Right, yeah, he was the closest law enforcement officer at, you know, he was living, I think, in Newry.

And, yeah, he came up with two EMTs up the mountain, you know, to help get us.

And the other guys were all huffing and puffing, and Don was a warden, and he could, you know, climb up and down mountains all day.

So that was pretty cool.

Ironically, he was, when I later became a registered main guide, Don was on the panel that tested me.

- Oh, really?

- And passed me.

So that was- - Did he remember you?

- He didn't until I felt like I needed to come clean when we were starting out, that he knew me in case there was a conflict of interest.

And he said, oh, yeah, wasn't that a night, though?

(Bill laughing) And it was.

- Oh, my goodness.

Well, I just asked you about when you met Mike Bowditch, so to speak.

And I found myself wondering, because I sense so much of you are him.

It's pretty clear.

But not so much in other ways in terms of, you know, where you come from, your background, his background, that kind of thing.

So, I found myself wondering if Paul Doiron were to walk into one of Mike Bowditch's adventures, what would Mike Bowditch's impression of Paul be?

How would he view you?

Would you be the Yale guy?

(both laughing) - I don't think so.

I wasn't the Yale guy when I was at Yale.

- Sure.

- I was the Maine guy when I was at Yale wearing LL Bean boots before they were fashionable.

I think he would be suspicious of me.

I think he would probably feel a little bit of kinship, but not in a way that he liked, you know, that he would sort of see in me the, you know, the overeducated Maine guy that sort of looked like maybe the future he didn't want for himself.

- Plus, he's the smart guy.

- But he's smarter than me.

I always say that Mike is smarter than I am, but I'm wiser than Mike.

- Oh, okay.

Okay, you mentioned, I heard you mention once that in terms of getting to know your subject, getting to know the environment in which he works, that the Maine, and I found this in my own career as a journalist, that the Maine warden service, I think the word you used was impenetrable, you know, in terms of you don't just show up with a notebook or a tape recorder and say, "Hey, tell me about your life."

Were there times when you were actually saying, "Hey, leave us alone, we don't want the attention?"

Or did you just kind of decide to come in a side door in terms of understanding what they do?

- Well, when I first started speaking with wardens and researching that world, it was during a troubled period in the warden service history.

They had a lot of scandals back then.

Many of which were coming up in the Press Herald and the Telegram.

- That's right.

- And some of the people that I knew who were introducing me to the wardens were gadflies, you know, so, and I was a journalist, even though, you know, it was down east, which wasn't the most heavy-hitting as far as they were concerned.

They were pretty closed mouth.

And, you know, I would go to interview somebody and, you know, I would ask what I thought was an open-ended question and they would find a way to turn it into a yes or no.

And I would realize they're answering me as if they were in court, you know, having to give evidence or something.

And I think in general, you know, law enforcement, especially when you're new, is taught maybe never explicitly, you know, that speaking with a journalist never ends well.

- I had a similar experience with the military when I was embedded with the military.

And, you know, you're trying to ingratiate yourself, anything you can think of.

And some cases it worked great.

It depends a lot on the personalities.

But other times you just bam, right into that brick wall.

You know, they're not going to let you through.

- No, I think that it's one of those, these are relationships, you know?

I've done a lot of ride-alongs, you know, which are great for, as you know, for open-ended conversations.

And you kind of drift all over the place.

And people will begin to talk about things and then say, oh, I like this guy, so I said something to him.

Maybe I shouldn't have said it to him.

And as you establish yourself, as the wardens who have spoken with me realize, hey, those things don't get into the books, you know, or they get in in a very oblique way.

- And that builds trust.

- That builds trust, exactly.

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Now back to the episode.

Are you a legend in the Maine Warden Service now?

- I have no idea what they think of me.

I can't help but think you are.

They've never had their own superhero before.

- Well, I think Mike is, you know- - Although he's not a superhero.

- He's only a superhero in the sense that he can get, you know, shot and knocked around and still survive and have a career.

You know, it's important to me that, I want to deal respectfully with the warden service and the profession of being a conservation law officer.

I want them to feel like I'm getting most everything right and the things I'm fictionalizing, I'm fictionalizing for good stories.

But, you know, my wife once reminded me, she said, "You know, Paul, you're writing for 125,000 people, not 125 game wardens."

- And you have to slap yourself once in a while and say, "Wait a minute, who's my audience?"

- Yes, yeah.

- I'm sure.

- But it's nice for me to get, you know, to get emails from wardens all over the country, you know, who are responding to it one way or the other.

- I'm curious before I move on, what was your reaction to North Maine Woods?

This was the show about- - The show, yeah.

- Well, it premiered after my first couple books had come out.

And so there was this question in my mind, well, which came first here?

(both laughing) And I got to know the wardens who were stars of the show.

I got to do a ride-along for a filming of an episode once, too.

So, that was really interesting to get that take on it.

You know, what you realize is that reality TV is not reality.

And that even though, that these were versions of the real wardens that I was meeting.

I liked it, though, because it was kind of a low-stakes show.

I mean, game wardens get involved, as you know, with every crime in Maine.

They were involved the, you know, deeply in the Lewiston mass murder.

- Right, right.

- But, you know, Northwood's Law was focusing on them rescuing loons.

- It's more the stereotypical stuff.

- Well, it was soft stuff.

And, of course, the other thing that I found really funny as somebody who has to tie stories together, I mean, this is what mysteries do, right?

Is so many of the episodes were very open-ended.

You never knew what happened to the guy who, you know, was caught with 20, you know, undersized trout or whatever it was.

That was probably not an episode, but.

- Yeah, it's also where, speaking of reality meeting fiction, I was thrilled when I started this book and realized right off the bat that I'm going to be reading about the North Pond Hermit.

- Yes.

- Sergeant Terry Hughes, I think it was.

- Terry Hughes, yeah.

- Called you, and- - He did.

- Probably before anyone else knew, I assume.

- Yes, so I had met Terry much before that period, but we'd had a conversation, and when he called me, it was, I think he was a little bit in disbelief himself because people didn't remember that this hermit was literally legendary.

Nobody was sure if he was one guy, you know, where he was located.

I mean, so Christopher Knight had been all over the Belgrade area for decades, essentially.

So Terry Hughes, but he had a, Terry knew where he might show up and had set out to capture him and captured him.

And then Knight took him to his camp, and Terry was blown away by how close it was to the road, how well camouflaged it was.

- Couldn't see it from the air.

- Everything that was there.

So he called me up and said, I have a story for you.

And I knew immediately that it was gonna be an international sensation.

That was the journalist in me.

- Yes, yes, and it was.

It produced a nonfiction book, of course.

But you nevertheless felt this urge to take it on with considerable massaging.

For example, making the protagonist Charlie Stevens.

And as I read that, and I thought, well, Charlie's perfect for this.

But why not Mike?

- Why not Mike?

Because the whole story of the North Pond Hermit was larger than life.

It felt like a tall tale.

And I thought, well, this seems like the kind of thing an old man tells a young man, and the young man's like, no.

I know you're exaggerating this.

And I don't like to spoil my stories.

But at the end, Charlie reveals something that's physical proof, no, this actually happened.

But, yeah, and in fact, I modeled that short story, which is called "The Bear Trap," on a Mark Twain story.

It's my take on something Mark Twain would have written.

That period of where everything was, you know, a yarn.

You know, I was spinning a yarn kind of thing.

- Oh, and the stakeouts and the- - Yeah.

- I mean, parts of it are hilarious.

- Good.

- The extent that he went to to try to outfox this guy who was obviously pretty canny himself.

A lot of people have talked about this, and I will add my voice to it.

Your description, your descriptive power in your stories is just perfect.

- Thank you.

- It really... Anybody who knows Maine and has been around the woods is instantly transported.

But I also liked your turns of phrase.

The one that made me laugh out loud, and I can't remember, it might have been... I can't remember which one it was, where you liken an Airstream camper to a suppository.

(both laughing) And I laughed- - I'm sorry, but it's wrong to laugh at yourself.

- And then I laughed and then I said, wait a minute, he's right.

Where does that stuff come from?

Were you driving through the countryside one day and saw one of those?

I mean, it's an unlikely comparison, but it's a very apt one.

- Yes.

Well, I think my imagination and my, you know, sort of verbal intelligence always goes in that direction.

So I probably stylistically, my greatest influence is Raymond Chandler.

And, of course, you know, Philip Marlowe's world is completely different from the backwoods of Maine.

So I get to use all those metaphors and symboles in a different way, you know?

- But you can still wisecrack.

- I can still wisecrack.

Yeah, Mike is not personally much of a wisecracker in his dialogue, but he has some asides here and there and his descriptions.

- Now, as I said in the opening, this is an anthology.

And I found myself, you know, as somebody who wrote for a living wondering what it was like for you to, in your mind, the difference between short stories and novels?

You know, somebody might look at this and say are these, you know, novels that didn't (Paul laughing) yet reach enough altitude or what differentiates these stories from the ones that turned into full blown books?

- Oh, that's a good question.

Well, you know, when you're studying to be a creative writer, they have you write short stories.

So it wasn't a form that I was unfamiliar with.

It was something I'd done never successfully, you know, in my 20s.

- In fact, wasn't the "Poacher's Son" a short story?

- No, it wasn't originally.

That I knew was going to, it had to be a novel.

- It was going to go full length.

- Yeah.

But the short stories, they always have started as stories.

They were intended, honestly, to kind of amuse me more than anything else because I never knew how they were going to be published.

And the fact that my publisher wanted to bring them out, you know, in print as this anthology was a great surprise to me.

They're all filling in gaps of what I call the Mike Bowditch fictional universe.

So, you know, there's the characters that are in the novels like Charlie Stevens and Kathy Frost and some of the other ones who appear in the stories and it fills in background.

You know, here's something I've never told you about Charlie, about his history, as, you know, an episode in his life.

But- - Yeah, Charlie has some pretty powerful moments in these stories.

- Yeah, I wanted to explore him a bit because I always go into anything that I write not knowing what I, you know, don't know.

And I write the story and I discover something about Charlie, you know, his history in Vietnam and that sort of thing.

And that's part of the pleasure for me is just, you know, allowing myself to be surprised by whatever it is that I'm writing.

- And I found at the end of many, several of them, it's not the classic tie it up, boom, we're done.

It's just kind of like they're going along and you know they're going to keep going, put the end.

And is that part of trying to create bridges between your stories?

You know, so many times at the end of one of these, I wanted to say, no, no, keep going.

- Well, that's good.

Yeah, I think it's because I, even though I write mystery novels and I love the way that detective stories, you know, open and close and I never think of what I'm writing in those terms, you know I do feel like I'm getting these brief windows into the lives of these characters and that they do have, you know, stories that are continuing after the, you know, I've written the end.

- Yeah, life goes on.

- Life goes on, yeah.

So that's just the way that I approach stuff, it's different I think from a lot of mystery writers.

- Have a favorite quote from this book?

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Now back to the book.

I want to talk about them and your choice of locales.

Again, not to keep citing my own experience, but I found a lot of parallels between what we've done over the years.

And I remember that feeling of going into a small town, really, you know, Piscataquis County, Rostock County, Penobscot, way out in the middle of nowhere.

And some story has drawn me there.

And you go in and you kinda park your car outside the diner, take that deep breath.

Stuff your notebook in your back pocket, hoping nobody will see it when you first walk in.

And there you go.

Was that hard for you?

How did you do it?

How did you soften up a diner full of disinterested people?

- I don't know that I always do still.

I feel like a lot of times, and I'm sure this was your experience as well, you know, you're visiting some town and you go, as you say, to the place where all the guys are getting breakfast before they go off to their contracting jobs or whatever.

And you're sitting there with your cup of coffee and you're the only person that they've never seen in that establishment.

- And things get a little quiet.

- Things get very quiet, it's like, who's he?

What's he want?

But- - Until one of them finally says, oh, what brings you here?

- And, you know, a lot of times people are really eager to talk about what makes their community special, let's put it that way.

You know, sometimes it can be the, you know, the unflattering story that they really wanna talk about.

And that's where you get windows into the community.

And it's like that's- - And leads.

- And leads, right, who to talk to next.

And twists and turns, things that you would just never imagine.

- Right, right.

How do you find your characters?

Becca is a good example.

- Which one?

The Becca, the one who owns the store in Kent's- - Oh right, yes, Becca Bray.

- Yeah, Becca Bray.

And so many of these people, and I'm sure you've heard this before, I came across and I said, oh yeah.

She works down at the corner store.

In mine, I live in Buxton.

- Yes.

- Do you catalog these encounters?

Do you go through a normal day?

You don't have a specific objective, but you come across someone and say, I got to file that person away.

- Sometimes.

I think a lot of it is just having lived in Maine almost my entire life, you know?

I went away for college.

- You grew up in Scarborough- - Scarborough, yeah, Sanford originally.

But it's just knowing Mainers so well and my family is, you know, my dad was the first one in his family to go to college and so, you know, I used to joke all the time about having cousins who were professional dishwashers that sort of thing.

And I just, I really like Mainers.

You know, but I will have an idea for a character, there's a character in one of the stories named Ricky Elwell, who's the teenage deer cutter.

He's a butcher of deer.

And I just knew what I wanted him to be from the beginning.

But I got his wardrobe from Walmart.

I mean, I was in Walmart one day, and I saw this guy going by in flip-flops and white socks and gym shorts.

And it was just, that's how Ricky dresses right there.

- So it connects.

- Yes, and so that's where that came from.

- We're running out of time, and there are a couple of questions I really wanted to ask.

Beyond the obvious, given your experience with them, beyond the obvious, which is enforcing Maine's hunting and fishing laws, what do you think sets Maine game wardens apart from other law enforcement?

- Perspective.

I think they have a broader perspective on their community than many do.

And I don't wanna damn anybody, but I think it's because, you know, I've often said that if you ever want to talk to somebody who knows about rural poverty, talk to a game warden.

And, you know, police often do, of course, but usually, you know, they won't be thinking about how is this family eating necessarily.

Wardens do because, of course, they're dealing with poaching.

- Right, but they're thinking about evidence.

- Right, I mean, they see the broad scope of a life.

- And that segues into another question, and it plays off what you just said.

A few times in these stories, the whole concept of, I guess you'd call it backwards justice, if you will.

Charlie keeping his secret in skin and bones, Violet Baker getting away with murder in "The Caretaker."

As Charlie told Mike at the end of one story, sometimes justice is revenge served in a three-piece suit after Mike insists that all criminals should be brought to justice.

What is your concept?

How do you describe justice in the rural sections of Maine?

- Well, I think it's just an acknowledgement of the reality.

You know, I have a novel out now called "Storm Tide" and Storm Tide is about murderers who got away with it until a vigilante decides that no, they're not going to get away with it.

- And some would call that justice.

- And some would call that justice, you know?

I think it is just, you know, it's a fact of life that people do.

We want that closure.

We want that fairness, right?

People who did wrong should be punished.

- Even if it's not always delivered by the system.

- No, and of course, I know, I think that's one of the pleasures of crime stories is, you know, typically they do get punished.

But I suppose it's just my, you know, even though I never think of my stories as being hyper-realistic, I think maybe the realist part of it is, hey, they don't always.

And so you have to look for whatever consolation you get.

- That visceral relief.

- Right, the relief that, you know, yeah, they got away with it, but they're miserable.

- Well, we have just enough time for me to ask the obvious question, and that is what's next for Mike Bowditch?

- Well, so the 17th novel will be published next June.

It's written, it's edited.

I haven't seen the cover for it yet.

I will tell you that it's titled "Cold Front."

- Cold Front.

- Because it features a KGB general, of all things, a defector.

Don't ask me where that came from.

(laughs) - I'm thinking Canadian border.

- But it's a Mike Bowditch story.

You'll have to read it to find out how.

- And beyond that, there are others planned?

- Yes, so I have books contracted through 2029.

- Oh, okay.

- And they're still selling- - Oh, I'm sure your fans will be relieved to hear that because, you know, this guy just lives on and on.

How old will Mike, well, how old is he in your- - In the book that I just finished writing, he turns 35.

- [Bill] Oh my, so he's 35, you're outpacing him.

- Yeah, sadly.

- With all due respect.

- No, but it's actually, it leaves me a lot to write about still with his life.

- Yeah, that's fantastic.

Well, I have other questions, but we don't have any more time.

So I really appreciate your coming and joining us today.

And I'm sure there are a lot of people out there who will be waiting with bated breath for the next one.

Keep up the great work, Paul.

- Thank you, Bill, appreciate it.

- And thank all of you for joining us.

And we'll see you next time.

(gentle music)