LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION?

by Steven Steinbock

I was recently scouting locations. I’m lucky that I happen to live in a region that is very evocative of fictional crime. When they’re not thinking about lobsters and lighthouses and L.L. Bean, people associate Maine with Stephen King, Jessica Fletcher, and Dark Shadows.

So I studied Google Maps for a while, then hopped in the car and drove around my little village of 8,000 souls. I took a field trip to an old cemetery overlooking Casco Bay. I took pictures and thought about the people whose names appeared on the weathered stones and I dreamed.

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I like Stephen King, but I couldn’t call myself a fan of his increasingly overlong novels. You could argue that his style is too common, and that his unrestrained writing needs an editor. You could also make the case that those are the traits that make King and his writings so popular. You could make either one of those cases, but I won’t. Not in this venue. Not today, anyhow. A few years back I re-read Salem’s Lot,. I hadn’t read it since it first appeared in paperback back in the mid-1970s, at a time in my life when I’d never been east of Wyoming. Anyhow, during this re-reading, I was surprised at the familiar place names. No fooling, according to the geographical clues in the book, I live within easy walking distance of the undead town of Jerusalem’s Lot.

(In a map on his own website, King places Jerusalem’s Lot much further north and west. But it’s interesting that in the book itself, he describes all the towns surrounding my little village, but never mentions it by name. It makes one wonder. . .)

If you’re not a fan of Stephen King – or even if you are but have never tried his short stories – I urge you to pick up Skeleton Crew, a nice collection of his tales. It includes two of my favorite King stories, and the two that I think best evoke the culture and geography of Maine. Neither story is especially scary, in fact both are pretty gentle, and one of them is downright sweet. “Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut” takes that great Maine truism – You can’t get there from here (pronounced “yuh cahn’t get theyah from heyah”) – and takes it to metaphysical extremes. “The Reach” is a story of love that transcends time and tells of an elderly island resident who has never set foot on the mainland until she decides to walk across the frozen “reach.”

But as I was saying, I was scouting for a location. I needed to write a climactic sequence that began in a quiet, isolated spot from which the bay could be seen. It was a pretty, sunny day. I was walking among the tombstones and dreaming a way. I came away with an arsenal of names, a sense of the geography and topography, visual images, and practical details.

In the next week or two I’ll share some photos and describe for you what I found.

IN CASE OF MADNESS

This very afternoon (Friday, 10/16 4:30pm) several of your Criminal Briefniks are gathering on a stage to take part in a panel with the inscrutably off-topic title In Case of Madness. It’s happening in San Francisco at Bouchercon.

I’ll be there with James Lincoln Warren, Melodie Johnson Howe, Robert Lopresti, and Angela Zeman, as well as Tim Wohlforth and Jill Amadio. Our topic is short stories, but we’ll likely wander into the topic of madness at some point. Rob’s name has been mangled so many times that it’s a wonder he isn’t suffering an identity crisis.

Hope to see you there.