 They're getting testy. What's that? There was a lady I was giving that. I don't know, are you good? For the man who needs no introduction. Welcome to Arthur Mayer's. Just a few housekeeping items before we begin. Please mute or turn off your cell phones. I'd like to let you know that the restroom is at the back of the store to the right of the back door. And also the front door is now locked if you need to leave during the program, please use the back door. We keep the front door locked to keep customers from trying to come in while Archer is doing his cool show here. So thanks for coming tonight for the reading and talk with Archer Mayer. He's here to regal us with the tale of Bombers Moon. It's the 30th book in the Joe Gunther series. But I'm sure he'll have other tales for us tonight too that tends to happen. I'd like to thank Orca Media for coming and filming tonight's event. If you'd like to see tonight's video or learn about other events at the bookstore, please sign up on our newsletter, which is being passed around. We do have another author event next Tuesday, October 8th, Scattered Clouds by Ruben Jackson. Ruben was the host of Vermont Jazz on VPR for many years, and he'll be coming back to read from his new book of poetry next Tuesday. Please join us. So we're happy to have Archer back with us at Bear Pond Books. It's a great fall event that we look forward to each year. Archer Mayer is the author of the highly acclaimed Vermont-based series featuring Detective Joe Gunther. Many of you are familiar with him and his adventures. The Chicago Tribune describes the work as the best police procedurals being written in America. Ooh, wow. Yeah, that cost me 25 bucks. LAUGHTER He is a past winner of the New England Independent Book Seller's Association Award for Best Fiction, which was the first time a writer of crime literature had been so honored. In 2011, Mayer's 22nd Joe Gunther novel Tag Man earned a place on the New York Times Best Seller list for hardback fiction. And if we all buy a copy tonight, then this one will also be available. That's how it works? Archer is currently a death investigator for Vermont's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Over the past 30 years, he has also been a detective for the Wyndham County Sheriff's Office, a volunteer firefighter EMT, and the publisher of his own backlist, and a frequent contributor to magazines and newspapers. I think the man does not sleep. And so we're very happy to have him here. Please welcome Archer Mayer. APPLAUSE Thank you. Well, I said earlier you were all gluttons for punishment. I recognize so many faces here. I have no idea why you keep coming back. I haven't said anything original in years. Which, of course, then introduces the format of tonight which will, I will imitate an author for a few minutes. And then I will lapse in the silence and begin to catch questions because I, of course, have no idea why any of you would come to see the likes of me. So I'm dying of curiosity about that. And we'll get to that eventually. But first, I must pontificate a little about the oeuvre, which is French for egg. And I think, right? No. Close enough. Bombers Moon comes from a World War II phrase that I just couldn't resist. It's actually also belongs to a 1943 truly excruable movie. I don't recommend it. But it has a really cool title. And the idea being that back in those days, before infrared and fancy gizmos and seeing things in the night that you shouldn't be looking at, anyhow, bombardiers would fly overhead and they would see the Bombers Moon because it basically, it's just aviator talk for full moon. And via a full moon you can see what city you want to blow up. Because we were all a little focused in our ambitions in those days. No one quite put two and two together that if you can see them they can probably see you. So the irony of Bombers Moon was so redolent of menace that I just couldn't resist it. So I titled it Bombers Moon and I began to write and then I thought to myself, you know, I'm going to have to explain this sucker somewhere a couple of times in the book because sometimes in the past, as many of you have discovered, I'll throw in titles of my books that I don't ever allude to. For example, what was it? The second mouse. One of my favorite titles. Only because it was delivered unto me by my cherished daughter. She loved it. I loved it. I thought it was the funniest title on the face of yours. Put it on the book. But I never refer to the second mouse in the book. I have never come across so many baffled readers after that book came out, you know. Clearly one over there nodding like crazy, you know. It's like, what the hell did he mean by that? I actually put a little thing in the very beginning, you know, all the parts you don't read, and things like that. And there was an explanation. Like I said, nobody paid that any attention at all. So I don't do that. And I try to work in why the title is the title in the book. So there are a couple of times when I will laboriously lay it out until the point you'll say I'm not an idiot. Just keep on going. I'm a complicated guy. So this comes naturally. This book has so many subplots. Even I can't remember them. But somebody dies. And we have to find out why and by whom. Of course, that sort of mirrors what I do with the medical examiners. So that's easy. Not a big stretch for me. We've got a dad drug dealer. And it looks like a slam dunk. Very easy. We've got the guy who did it. And he's right there and probably named Dwayne. So it's not rocket surgery, as a friend of mine once said. My favorite expression. And he got it. A lot of people go, I've heard that before. No, you haven't. That's mine. So sooner than later, of course, since it's an archer-mare book, it ain't going to be that simple. You may think that so and so did in such and such, but now that's not the way it turned out. And Joe Gunther in his Fearless Crew is going to have to figure out why. So, immediately having started down that road, I'm just going to move to another road and introduce you once again to Rachel and Sally, who are two best buddies. One's a private eye, and one is a budding photojournalist with an emphasis less on the photos and more on the journalism. I introduced her earlier. She's the medical examiner's daughter and she was a shutterbug to begin with, but now she's doing more writing than photography. But she's still carrying around a lot of camera gear, because I have to refer to her camera gear. And the two of them form a team and they need to find out what the hell's going on sort of on a parallel plot to the dead drug dealer. And I think we've only gotten halfway through chapter two. So you get the idea of where we're heading. So, don't read late at night. You'll fall asleep, like I continually do when I write these books. And you know, if you got any complaints write Margo. So that's kind of it. I had a good time writing it and I had a good time writing number 31, which is finished and I'm editing it as we speak. Well, not precisely. But we will be when I get back home, because you're right, I don't sleep so probably at three o'clock I'll be editing. In fact, Margo refers to my editing when I sleep in the middle of the day. That's my editing. I think you need to go upstairs and edit because your eyes are slits. That's the phraseology that I hear. You're going to strip for action here enough of the haberdashery. I only put this on for you guys. A tweed. Exactly. Eventually I'm going to get elbow patches. That'll be book 40. The book mostly mirrors what I do in a lot of these books, if not all of the books, which is to take kind of no reference to Bomber's Moon, but an airplane's view of us. Now, by nature, an outsider, I look and observe and wonder why we do what we do. In fact, we were having a dinner conversation just before coming here and there was about people doing this to that and I was saying, well, maybe they did it for that reason, but maybe they did it for another reason. I'm constantly looking at human interactions in various ways and forms and I'm always sort of really curious as to why the hell we do what we do. And this book along with all of its fellows is sort of consumed in that and there are a lot of extremes as a result. So I'll focus. There are mega-rich in here and they're as intriguing and screwed up and weird as the mega-poor that we might also treat and so we will deal with a lot of extremes in this book, but they are the same extremes that surround us all and probably I would argue inhabit us all because we have good days and bad days and we are going to express ourselves in the most curious of fashions oftentimes to our own astonishment. I can't believe I was that good I can't believe I was that bad depending on what we were doing and what the reaction is and whether we got away with it. That fascinates me to the point that I no longer refer to these not that I really ever did as who done it, but why done it. The motivations or the inexplicable motivations of people's thought processes fascinate me just made it I'm a motorcyclist and I was just thinking slow down brother you have no protection been there done that. So when I'm asked what motivates me where do I get my ideas and other questions like that I'm fascinated when I hear other authors with whom I don't hang out much answer quite succinctly they've got it all figured out it's all organized and squared away and they know how it's going to end and people write books with the conclusion first I think John Irving is the guy who said that he writes the conclusion first the last chapter first and then he writes towards that I'd sooner cut my wrists God takes all the fun out of it I mean I have no clue how these suckers are going to end up I sometimes get the wrong bad guy edit edit edit that's the clue you know you read it and you go oh God thank God I didn't send it off to the publisher yet so you twist things around you yank this out and you put this in and the nice thing is that we all have murder in our hearts whether we acknowledge it or not so it doesn't take much to take this guy out and put that guy in and it works fine and I always love when I've done that and I've done it a couple of times in this series of books when people come up to me and say God I never guessed it was that guy me neither but you know we are all not fine thread you know you're driving along someone cuts you off in traffic and what's the first thing comes out of your mouth something Willie Kunkel would say and so we're all sort of there we're not all homicidal maniacs but we have this proximity to rage and anger and free expression that we normally in more rational moments like to deny but the savage lurks within all our hearts and I may be a little more playful with that savage than most of you but I've had I'd like to hope more exposure to it than you have so that's my story and I'm sticking to it first question please you guys have you know you're used to this routine and you see there you go you clearly got the five bucks yeah no I later I was just kidding I'm a writer for God's sake I don't have five bucks oh the one that's coming out I'm calling at the moment before the editor wakes up and goes what are you on drugs I'm calling at the death watch beetle I like that I will tape that and send it to him because usually they respond the what but the death watch beetle actually exists it's primarily located in England and in northern Europe you're nodding you know your bugs good sir and it's a it's a lovely critter it's kind of a pseudo termite without actually being termite but it's a bug that likes to consume wood old British wood so you've got these nice you know 8 inch by 8 inch beams in something that Shakespeare was too young to appreciate been there on the sodden earth forever and ever and ever and until you push your hand against it your whole fist goes right through the 8 by 8 beam because the death watch beetle has been hard at work invisible and except in a unique circumstance not noticed at all but you can notice this beetle at night when you're very very quiet such as in the old days at a wake okay so there you are draped in black you and the stiff who's not putting up much more fuss and you hear this and you begin to think because of course the Catholic Church has beaten the hell out of you and sort of educated you and weird things that this must be the devil or God or the countdown or life ebbing out or whatever and it was long before Timex was invented so that was ruled out and so people began to think that it was God's countdown therefore the death watch beetle and of course they didn't have plumbing in those days at least not the kind of plumbing that makes noise like our plumbing does the irony of the whole thing of course is it had nothing to do with death it had everything to do with sex because the beetle was just sort of horny and that's how they express themselves unfortunately by banging their heads against wood so they're energetic little critters they're expressing themselves like many people do at night and they're kind of like they're looking for some company only they have this unique and peculiar way of doing it and so the linkage was made now how the hell am I going to put that in a book you may ask well I mentioned it two or three times in the book in context I'd like to think but I haven't gotten that part in the editing yet so right now I think it works perfectly but you be the judge we're probably all going to meet next year here and you can tell me but a terrible job I've done with my title but that's the answer to your question you see how this works one question we're here for 40 minutes we're good yes ma'am I know a character I know him well and I wondered if you had patterned him on an individual or whether this is part of you well isn't that prescient and observant and do we know each other intimately I think we do because most people have all thought that Willie Kunkel well let's be honest we all know Willie Kunkel the one phrase that I never encounter is oh I so love Joe Gunther I work with Joe Gunther he reminds me of my father nobody knows Joe Gunther Joe Gunther is so good at two shoes he's an impossibility but we all know Willie Kunkel how many people have come to me especially cops saying oh I work with Willie Kunkel I wish the hell they'd fire him you know but my daughter was once again run her up the flagpole she was the one who very very very early on said oh my god am I the only one who knows you're really Willie Kunkel yeah I would love to be Joe Gunther I would like to think that everybody in this room would like to be Joe Gunther unless you're a real heel because why not be the nicest most avuncular most you know pleasant most team player dude in the room I mean this guy is a friggin saint and uh Willie Kunkel but yeah you're right I have heart and soul I'm Willie Kunkel oh absolutely I fight to control myself on a daily basis I you know I've told Barbara so I walk a tightrope between anger and despair that sort of brings me to Willie Kunkel but thank you for keeping me on that guy wire occasionally Margot has to serve a little too much a little too much anger so far I'm keeping my balance thanks again who else well I was a buzzkill wasn't it yes sir all these people here on a beautiful night like this and I wanted to say well because of all the talks I've seen you with it's either raining or windy or it's just not over and tonight if we don't get rained after we leave this might be the second time that I've been to your talks where the weather is oh I'm glad someone's keeping track yes sir my wife was born and raised in South Amherst, Massachusetts we are both very curious about how you happen to incorporate Point Wine Lane and Mount Tom and one of your mysteries how did that happen this is the beauty of driving without a map and I would even argue without headlights at night I am a chaos driver I'm the air traffic controller with no radar and windows I don't put down a plot I don't write down notes I don't do an outline I come up with some endurance of which I have a plentiful supply and I begin to ask myself am I curious enough about the answer to the questions that I have within I spend a year researching it and answering those questions and if the answer is yeah because one curiosity is going to lead to another and whatnot then I begin interviewing people and of course they have to reside somewhere so I go to where they reside and I chat with them and I look around and I put them in the company of their environment and I begin to develop questions about what they do so maybe I have questions about a library well maybe that library is behind seven foot thick concrete lead lined walls you have to ask why well because it's an old NASA 1950s backup nuclear facility that the university just happened to buy because they're hard to sell and so the university picked it up for a song and books in there so here's something that's designed to protect the free world that's supposedly what we're inhabiting from the bad guys and instead now it has books revenge is sweet so that needle is to say gets my creative juices flowing and of course since I'm a kind of director movies of the mind if you will I see scenes as well and people interacting in these physical settings exactly so well I do too since I don't have a plot I often don't know you know are they going to survive or not and I swear to God I remember I can't remember my own titles unfortunately but somewhere in the previous books I knock off one of Joe's girlfriends and if you have the awful see I had an impact it was the last page it was like right at the end that was wrong wrong and yet here you are so that works for me thank you very much I appreciate your sacrifice so I'm writing that sentence well there no someone was going to die but I hadn't quite figured out who and then you write this well I write the sentence and I stopped and went wow I didn't see that coming and then I went well but there it is so I've got to write through it that's what life does okay the screeching brakes the brakes failed he goes into traffic different story and we're all hanging by a thread and of course I see that last week I did seven dead calls as I call them all hanging on threads and I get to enjoy the fruits well when they're going to die anyhow doesn't make me particularly morbid someone's got to pick up what's left around so I do it and I enrich myself as a result I spend time with the living the dead are dead but the living are chroniclers they tell me everything about the person everything about the circumstances everything about the background everything about led up to it that's why they called me an investigator you're picking people's lives apart and finding out what makes them tick well I write the same way like a blank slate filled with curiosity and I let other voices and suggested imagery and a variety of scenarios present themselves and I sort of either pick some or I get picked by others depending on what my characters and circumstances dictate and I'll just follow the crowd if you will taking notes and writing minutes and at the tail end I've got 300 pages and it's got a beginning and a middle end because I'm actually not a bad air traffic controller I've sort of figured this out it's been 40 years so I should have some skill sets and then I do what depresses high schoolers as far as I've ever met by having to tell them that yes you finished your writing you're halfway done and that's when their faces fall because of course I'm talking about the editing and the rewriting that's where you put the polish on that's where you cut out all the dare I say crap because you've loved yourself you've been eloquent you've been curly cued with your magical words and you of course put in extra syllables into every flippin word because hmm but now you're an editor and a reader and it's all just awful so you're short and short and short and tighten, tighten, tighten and turn it into something whereby you do two paradoxical things as a writer you sweep away your readers with your language on one hand if you've paid attention but you also completely vanish this is supposed to be your gift to the reader is that you disappear when you're lost you're lost in the novel you're lost in the novel it's your novel it's your story and I don't exist the only way I'll exist is if I screw up one polysyllable too many one factoid messed up you know I put you know Montpelier I put it east of Barry and you're going to go what boom the fictional daydream stops you straighten slightly and you go archer mare what an idiot now it's my book see so that's the idea that's why you have other people reading yes that's precisely right so by the time I send that manuscript down to New York they think I'm a hell of a writer because it's been sent out to five six eight different editors one of whom is standing right there and they are the toughest bunch that I can get my hands on my mother bless her heart is now dead so I don't have to listen anymore to oh that's very nice dear no the idea of an editor is well it was okay but on chapter one page one paragraph one I that's what I want to hear because I take full responsibility for the thing if I don't actually like your comment or agree with your comment I could not pay any attention to it but chances are you're going to say something maybe even not intentioned that I'm going to go I'll be damned that makes me think that I should have done something this way instead of that way it's going to be good it's going to be improved by your comment whether directly or indirectly it doesn't matter so if I've got five or six people like that all weighing in from their different viewpoints life experience so I get cops I get editors I get generalists you know I get grammarians and they could care less what the story is they hate dangling particibles you know so they're going to jam me up for that and I will either go now I'm sorry that's in quotes Willie Kunkels allowed to speak anyway he pleases but if it's not in quotes well then okay we're going to have to fix it up and it's a fun process it's a great fun for anyone and people will come to me not terribly long and I said well I always have to keep both hands free when I read one of your books I went okay what is this martial arts you know no no no because I read with one hand and I have a dictionary in the other and I I sort of went is this good news about you no no no I love the language it's great I just don't always understand it because you use words that I'm not used to and I like the words I like I sound of the words but I sometimes have to look them up because I don't use them all the time and to me that's a magic element I remember a book reviewer a while back reflecting on one of my novels and she sort of took a break from talking about the book in general and said instead has there or I have whoever she was never or rarely read a passage about falling snow that captured it quite as well as this and she just put down the paragraph that talked about falling snow and then she followed it by saying that's wicked good writing you know and I can there have you broken the fictional daydream well kind of but it's okay because in that one you've given the reader an additional gift so if the reader pauses to go well far out that you can live with you don't want to go the the opposite direction where they just wing ding the book across the room which I've done so many times I mean I know what it's like to be a reader who's been disrespected by the writer and we'll all do it but I will try not to okay that's my contract with you who else yes sir well to a limited extent I mean in terms of the grand world of technology I'm the guy with the flip phone that's turned off so technology doesn't jam me up too much because I dare I say issue it however I was one of the very first users of a computer and I'm not talking portable computer because I'm a dog of a certain age I bought one of the very first box like computers that happen to be a Macintosh I don't care about Macs and PCs it's not an interesting conversation to be but it happened to be a Macintosh it's the same Macintosh that you can now see that has been turned to fish tanks I think it's a sort of an eloquent piece of recycling but I have a woodworking shop so I like to build stuff as well it's a kind of a right brain left brain thing and I made a carrier for this non portable computer and I would travel around the United States because in those days I was writing history books and I had to do massive amounts of research for these non-fictional books unless you think that most history is fiction but that's a different topic and the reason that I committed myself very very early on to this piece of technology was because I was brought up old school I used to write books longhand on legal pads now that's fine you got to get the words out somehow or another and if technology is a pencil well then you stick with a pencil but I'm an editor and I like to get in there and change and change and change and I will through this editorial process whether it's me or all these other folks tied in with me I might do 15 to 20 edits of each 300 page book so there's a lot of repeating and going back and back and back now if you type on an old fashioned manual typewriter and I've got three in my house if you want to change something in a piece of type script then you're going to have to re-type all 300 pages so how many edits are you going to do of that book not 15 to 20 you're going to do at the most three now is that a fully edited book no you just wore out your fingertips were bleeding and you got sick and tired of it and finally you got to the point where you saw changes but you didn't make them because you don't want to re-type that whole bloody chapter so you just kind of go it's close enough it's not close enough computers allow you to edit edit edit so here's another thing that made me an advocate of computers if some of you can remember back in the days of old fashioned editing you crossed out you did arrows sometimes you might even whip out a pair of scissors and tape you know cut and paste was not of metaphor and so you would read this manuscript and your eyes were damned you're crossing because you're going okay you know he did this he went okay arrow he went there and he so when you're reading a book one of the things that's so seductive about reading is that language becomes musical or at least cadenced in your head that's one of the things that keeps you reading is that there's an expectation of rhythm so you read on and you keep turning those pages not because you're aware of turning pages or translating words in your head it's because you're following the symphony of language okay that's fine but if you're editing your own symphony you gotta see all the notes lined up well all that cutting and crossing and scotch taping and arrows and all the rest of it as an editor as a creator of that musical language if you will or languagey music you can't maintain that rhythm because it's not rhythmically laid out computers for all their approximation to coldness and distance and lacking in humanity in fact if you look at them in a paradoxical way they can make that language and that music apparent with a single keystroke because there are no cross-outs it just disappears and therefore as you look from word to word to word and that's introduced until you go oh no I want to change that one it disappears back to counting the rhythm so it's a lovely process as far as I'm concerned and I was more than willing and able to carry this this door stop of a device and then they you know they heard my complaints and they invented the portable computer thank you you're very welcome at least I could do I figured a couple of other people might enjoy that so what the hell does your wife send you upstairs so that you can read your supposedly last edited version out loud to hear it no no I don't I don't do it out loud because when I read I don't read out loud that's the funny part is that this symphony has to be silent this cadence this appreciation of music has to be inside your head now maybe you could do both and I could open this and I could read and you know it would approximate what you're hearing inside your head but it won't actually be exactly the same yeah yeah it's a more approximate experience to what you're going to I hope enjoy down the line try to put myself in your place as much as I possibly can because no writer knows what it's like to read her or his own work that's the biggest obstacle for us as writers okay so you write these things you edit these things if you're me you spend a year with these things that's not much work for a year but by God every day I'm at it I know this inside out I know everything that didn't go into it I know everything that I pulled out of it I know the wrong bad guy I know stuff you'll never know will I ever have an outsider's direction of this work no so the trick that I need to enact is to create a book that will be to the uninitiated as interesting as seductive as enticing as I hope I can make it but I can't actually share that experience because I've never read one of my books isn't that interesting yeah so that's that's a trick and that's why I depend on you guys and I depend on reviewers and people don't know how to read bad reviews oh God I sure as hell read bad reviews I want to find out what it's like because I have no clue yes ma'am well could I say that find Joe Gunther to be the way you described him absolutely how do you find him I like him a lot because I find him very down to earth and not a saint good so him as being a good guy I thought of him as being very realistic with his pluses and minuses and handling women was good good I'm delighted I'm delighted part of what I say is for effect you know there is a I'm a bit of a showman I'm also I know I'm sorry I didn't mean to be so brutal I sprung that on you I'm a covert guy so I'm often going to speak other than how I feel or what I truly believe I sometimes get on a roll so I'll describe Joe Gunther in the way I just did I actually feel about him more as you do I designed Joe Gunther from the very first book with one among many but one primary characteristic and that is that he would screw up always he knew how to atone he knew how to say he was sorry and that was key you know why he's named Joe because it's the most boring name I could think of I wanted him to be Joe really? really? keep going just walk on by walk on by so Joe was a regular Joe remember when I was brought up that was the phrase a regular Joe and Willy remember from Malden that ages me so that was the image I wanted to get I couldn't use Bob that was just too much but Joe had paid to it after all so there you go you're close by and you have a cane so I'm going to suck up a little bit I don't want to get hurt so I think in the first book I have him commit a number of not egregious errors but it was important that he do so and on the second book borderlines he's already had a major fallout with his girlfriend Gail and this was a key part of his personality now he's been with us for so many years that I allow him to fade a little bit more into the background because now we've established his personality to such an extent that I wanted the stage to be a little more populated by tangential characters and so I've done that and I've also widened the cast of characters accordingly and introduced some younger, fresher blood but Joe is always going to be there so I actually thank you for suggesting that correction that was a good call you had a question in the back yes well yeah thank goodness there is as I referenced earlier an approximation between the inner reading and the outer reading by sheer definition they're going to be somewhat proximate but when it comes to who reads my books aloud I am not Stephen King who picks up the phone and he says that person is going to read my books the phone goes dead if I do that a lot of this is unbended me and please understandable we don't ask for impossible bars Marlowe is really good at this she pursued this with some vigor and we've gotten much better readers as we've progressed through the series but this was on the coattails and you can still get these audible books I can't remember his name now I won't even say his name because then of course you're going to skip buying these audible books but there's one guy who literally exemplifies why certain actors are called hams oh my god you know my name is Gunther Joe Gunther so I don't listen to books on tape you know and of course not of course but I don't read fiction I read history or science books or technological books and that's just to get out of my own head so when I late in the game discovered this guy for some reason popped him into the CD player and Damier left the road just like oh my god you know who is this clown and so Margot made that threatening phone call tough woman on a phone and this individual stopped recording for us and now we've got another guy his name totally escapes me I don't know the slightest idea but I think the majority of the books are read by people you know closer to the mark but you know what's her name J.K. Rowling yeah okay so Rowling she can buy the best the British theater has ever produced I can't but we can get a decent reader and I guess having cut our teeth on Mr. Ham we had only up to go and so we've gone up and I think that's that's a good deal I share your pain I was trapped in traffic on my way to Philadelphia which was the 412 hour drive and I had heard about this Da Vinci book okay so I popped that into the machine and thought well what the hell everyone's talking about this thing and so what we'll give Mr. Brown here now the recommendation for this book and I don't mind dissing him because he's richer than Creases so you know sue me baby you can have my old truck I was recommended the Da Vinci code by a bookseller who said you just can't put it down it's a complete and utter turner oh it's terribly written by the way it reminded yeah well it reminded me of when an ex-mother-in-law of mine as a gift bought me a subscription to Reader's Digest you know as well as thank you but no thank you so emasculating books is really not my strong point so so I popped this thing in okay so that's just Mr. Brown and my opinion of his purple prose but this was an audio book and with all that money because it had already become a bestseller so it was a big deal and there was cash to be spared now I don't know how many of you I'm really belaboring the hell out of this but hey it's my evening so as you may recall a good part of the da Vinci Code takes place in France the Louvre Paris Villeneuve words like that okay the Reader didn't speak French had no clue how to pronounce anything in French yeah I was stunned really so that was sort of an education in the audio arts so I think we've done gooder than that yes well I you know I cut my teeth on that a long long long time ago I haven't read fiction in years so I don't really have the slightest idea what's going on nowadays but I was introduced to this kind of fiction early on much like anybody else but I you know my taste buds were such to find Agatha Christie of no particular interest good puzzle maker you know but but to my taste buds a crummy writer perfectly efficient she got the job done but I didn't care about any of the characters because they were in fact who done it not why done it and that just that's my taste buds so I would go to I guess what was then called a sort of a darker Dashel Hammett Raymond Chandler his real name is Kenneth Miller what's his fake name he wrote the Lou Archer books damn that's pretty ironic the guy writes under a pen name and I can only remember his real name nobody knows him by his real name but anyhow Ross McDonald Ross McDonald I read everything by Ross McDonald that's why I'm such a success I read nobody's but he wrote something like 18 to 20 books and he was he had a voice that I really appreciated and he talked much more about what people come from and what motivates them and that kind of stuff so I read those guys more than I did you know the real the problem solvers I was impressed by them I won't take that away from you one of the biggest challenges of writing these books sometimes is coming up with a really neat you know pull the rabbit out of a hat thing I stink at that I'm not a magician and I don't know how to confabulate a plot so that Mr. Jones walks in at the tail end and goes voila and we all go oh my god I never would have guessed I just can't do that I'm just thinking that so I'm a retired cop for God's sake I plot along I follow the evidence the facts and I put it together and that's what I write now every once in a while in the real world we get surprised so these guys will get surprised too but I'm not a big magician as a medical examiner what was your background to qualify we needed a background? who knew? I don't know yeah it does sound reasonable doesn't it well in fact it's not particularly so there are two systems in the entire United States one's a coroner system and one's a medical examiner system you are all blessed my children you have a medical examiner system count yourself lucky of course you'll all be dead but don't worry about it medical examiner systems are in fact confabulated you're pyramidically out from doctors so when I ship one of you north which I hope I don't have to do soon you'll be autopsied by my boss the chief medical examiner or one of his deputies or what not a coroner doesn't even need to be a doctor much less a pathologist a coroner just comes from an old fashioned system they need to hire forensic pathologists to do the autopsies so they're just politicians which is fine and some coroner systems work fine like the one in Las Vegas but they oftentimes are prone to being cumbersome and inefficient medical examiner systems work better so here we've always had a medical examiner system now you got the doc he she or it is in Burlington and we don't have too many of them about two or three at the most right now two and therefore they can't go out on the scene because there are lots and lots of people dying every year and they need to be looked at by the eyes and ears of the medical examiner's office that's me so somebody quite wisely in the midst of all this process because you're right it used to be doctors doctors doctors and so someone would die in Montpelier for example and the phone would ring and Dr. Bob would pick up the phone and they'd say Dr. Bob someone died under his tractor could you check him out and declare him dead because that was the letter of the law and so he would then five hours later because he had a room full of patients so he had to process patients and see Bob I mean the farmer Fred who's rather colder and stiffer than he was when the phone call was made and he goes yep he's dead you can imagine what the surrounding cops said in response to that begins with no that was okay so somebody whispered into the chief's ear they're dead they don't need a doctor so they went back to the wording of the legislation and nowhere does it say that this needs to be investigated by a doctor so they no longer are people who have a fondness for putting things on their belts kind of like this they were dragged off of paramedics hospitals nurses EMTs people with medical background people who are predisposed to helping people out in the streets in the snow in the middle of the night and who come on to a scene and rather than saying where's my white gown they just roll up their sleeves get dirty and get to work that's who the medical examiner went I want these guys on board so the whole system was reconfabulated in 2001 everyone was asked to come on board of the likes of me we now I believe have no doctor investigators left we have the two guys Elizabeth Bundock and Steve Shapiro in Burlington and then the small army of about 35 to 40 of us and we're sprinkled all across the state and we're the guys who respond 24-7 and figure out why you died what happened here we need to explain what was unexplained so okay you may be 104 years old you got a pack of cigarettes in one hand and a bottle of bourbon in the other well golly gee you're also 109 years old so what killed you yeah but then I rolled you over and you got a knife in your back someone needs to roll them over and that's us okay and we find them every once in a while some nephew got ticked off you're gonna live forever okay I want to inherit that truck people kill each other for the damnedest reasons yeah there you go exactly yes ma'am I have a lot of really good reasons to get depressed to have nothing to do with my writing so trust me I can go there anytime I want no the writing is you know with all due modesty I'm a pretty good sheet rocker okay I know how to tape and float and by the time I've hung the room for you yeah I may have messed up the rug a little bit and maybe you're going to notice a piece of tape curling over there and there might be a few wrinkles that could have benefited from some extra sanding but by and large it's going to be a pretty good room I write pretty good books before I even start the editing process I'm an old dog I've been at this for a long time if I wasn't pretty good at it I should change careers so you know oh I won't now oh my god what the hell am I going to be good at well I'm not bad at the dead thing but yeah well that's actually true so what do I have very near where I write in my office is an annoying cabinet drawer that is approximately that full of the most unreadable tripe known to literature my early purple prose back in those days I would write a manuscript and of course just like any budding writer you know I'd pull it out of then the typewriter and neaten it all up and think to myself 250 pages and not one looks like the other that's cool I've done good typing here send it off to the manuscript to the editor or the agent or wherever it is because Johnny Depp watch out you're about to get a neighbor who's going to own the island next to yours okay I'm hot this is good and I routinely got rejections along the lines of Dear Mr. Mayor this is close to the worst book I've ever read you know well it wasn't the worst no no exactly see see see for all this presumed pessimism for all this font of willy conchalism I had hope I was an optimist god forbid you know so I would look at a response I'd interpret it first like that and then this idiot editor agent whoever it might be who was very well brought up would always put in that phrase along the lines of but you have a nice voice that's all I wanted to hear I was good to go for another 250 pages of typing you know so I did it again and I did it again and I did it again now that's just drive finding what you need to do in life you know I have a friend of mine who's a car mechanic this guy is wicked smart but he loves being a mechanic I mean you just you look at him in a car and he's at one with that thing that I can't stand around it has blood gushing from my knuckles written all over it but not him he's good he knows every bit and part of it well that's me with these I can't write an email without thinking about how I'm picking and wording the sentence and then I hit send it matters to me it's music to me and sometimes my emails will be yep but I thought about the impact of that one word or I wouldn't have written it and then I would have written a full sentence but who's getting it what's the context what sentence am I finishing that came at me that I respond with a yep writing is in fact not an isolated sport you conducted in isolation but you don't write in order to be isolated you write two people you write if you're lucky to lots of people so there's an exchange going on it's odd because the audience your performance is a year out and they'll be reading it in your absence but nevertheless it's a performance it's a delivery of of artistic competence that you want your readers to appreciate so there's back and forth part of my writing is based on the principle that you are all storytellers all of you have imaginations all of you have stories in your head part of my job is to give you three quarters of a story that you can fill out and fill in with your own imaginations that's what makes a book hard to put down is because of your personal investment you've supplied the voices you've supplied the descriptors you've supplied the all that extra stuff comes from your creative minds and thus we're doing it together it's a cool process you have to be just a little bit nuts however to do it okay one more one more yes are you seeing it in your head like a movie? I do have a visual imagination you have a visual imagination yes that's true because along with all the sound stuff that I've alluded to I actually started telling stories photographically my father took photographs all the time he was a shutter bug not a great shooter but he had that eighth of a second there's lack which is he could see in the future by an eighth of a second he could see something coming so if there was that photograph of that guy doing this he would grab the camera and click just then he was very good at catching the picture sometimes we're out of focus he was lousy in the dark room but he had that and I like that at an early age so I began to steal his cameras which in my case are brownies and god knows what you start in the 50s and that was my first storytelling but I discovered eventually that I was a better writer than I am a photographer I can only take my photography so far and then I realize it's okay it's not bad but it's no way close to those photographs that people take really know this stuff and it just pops out they're nice they're okay but my writing I hope is better than my photography but I never gave up the visual self with which I entered the creative world and before I went to writing from photography I used to draw terrible stuff nothing impressive and I was on the road all the time so everything had to be small so I would write comic books that were that big I sometimes I run across some of the writing I did at the age of 9, 10, 11 it's like micro print it's crazy and I would do it with fountain pens I mean I was a deeply strange child and I really liked fine tip things because otherwise it smudge so storytelling served its function in any number of ways both as a survival technique as a way to escape reality as a way to bring foreign cultures to other people's attention all of that stuff as a kid the writing serves different functions now but that's the provenance it's been a continuum I can cast a look over my shoulder and see that the writing or the expression of storytelling has pretty much always been there but I wouldn't have done it without all of you so I thank you very much