 Thanks for coming out during this rainy and blustery evening. It's kind of a perfect night for a Joe Gunther series, just a perfect night to curl up with this book. You're saying I'm blustery? I think so. Yeah. Just checking. I'm not quite sure how Joe Gunther managed to start in 29 novels, quite a feat, when there's only 11 homicides a year in our state. I know. Is that right? Yeah, but they're all giz. They're all giz. Oh, that seems like a book right there. Anyway, as you can see, I'm not totally caught up on all my Archer Mayer novels, because if I read all 29, I'd probably know how he does 11 homicides in 29 books. But we're very excited to welcome Archer Mayer tonight. Now, just a few housekeeping items. Please mute or turn off your cell phones. Please use the back door if you need to exit during the reading. We will lock the front door until after the talk. And it could be funny. The bathroom's located at the back of the store to the right. We do have a newsletter list going around. If you'd like to learn about future Bearpond books events, please sign up. In a few weeks, we're hosting Madeline Cunin, Vermont's first woman governor. She'll be here October 16th to launch her new memoir, Coming of Age, My Journal to the 80s. We will also have a state representative here to give an introduction. And they will talk about women in politics in the state of Vermont, a timely discussion. Other events this fall include Garrett Graf, Major Jackson, and Ed Corrin. So please follow us on Facebook and Twitter and sign up for the newsletter. I'd like to thank Orca Media. They're here tonight filming the event and the Vermont Arts Council for featuring tonight's event as a Vermont Arts 2018 program. I'd also like to thank you in advance for buying copies of the brand new Archer Mayer book, Barry the Lead. We have them here tonight. Registers are open. And if Archer's in a good mood, I think he'll sign books tonight, right? No, he won't sign books tonight. The Chicago Tribune describes Archer's Vermont-based Joe Gunther novels as the best police procedurals. Procedural? Procedural? Yes. Procedural. Procedural. It's a little bit odd, procedurals. Some words are like that, though, right? Procedurals being written in America. He's a past winner of the New England Independent Book Sellers Association Award for fiction. He got best fiction, and that was the first time a crime writer won the fiction award. In 2011, Mayer's 22nd Joe Gunther novel, Tagman, earned a place on the New York Times best seller list. So thank you all of you for getting that book. Archer Mayer is currently a death investigator for Vermont's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Over the past 30 years, he's been a detective for the Wyndham County Sheriff's Office, a volunteer firefighter and EMT, and the publisher of his own backlist, many of which we have at the counter. He's also a frequent contributor to magazines and newspapers. We are so thrilled he joins us once a year. Please welcome Archer Mayer. He always wanted to sit in that, but I refuse to. So I'll pose languorously next to the podium, but I won't move too terribly much for the sake of the camera guy who usually hate me, because I move too much. There was, in fact, many, many, many, many years ago before Vermont Public TV acquired taste that they had me on a program. And I was being interviewed by a woman whose name I forget, but she's the one with a gaff in the front teeth that we have all seen for years. Yeah, I see all of her. Yeah, Sam Starr, for whatever, anyhow. So she's talking away, charming, nice, lively conversation. And as you've already seen, I move these flappers around quite a bit. And I'm doing so. And I'm being particularly expansive. I don't know why. Maybe it was the gaff. But in any case, I all of a sudden became dimly aware, because it's a very gloomy thing, because all the spots are on you, and there's blackness all around, which is kind of cool. And we're on a raised dais, sitting in a chair and table, looking like we were oh, so cool than our living room, which we're not. So babble, babble, babble, going back and forth, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I noticed the camera guy is getting farther and farther away, and as he backs up, he keeps doing this. But it turns out the edge of the dais is right there. And he's got this 600-pound camera on all the rollers sort of threatening to go, come on, come on, I want to land on you and crush your chest. So he stops, obviously. Well, later after the program was done, and their subscription rate was canceled, and they almost went off the air, the question came up, you know, hey, Bernie, we almost lost you there. You were right on the end, and he said, hey, he kept doing this with his hands. I couldn't cut off his hands. I had to get him in the shot. You know, I thought, damn, you're a kill the camera man. So I see your back is against the wall, so obviously you guys are talking to each other. So, you know, this is a bonehead showing up, you better prepare yourself. Barry Lee, Barry Lee comes with a disclaimer and an explanation, tedious as I could possibly make it. It's, in fact, before the acknowledgments, before almost the title page, you will come upon a page that says an explanation about the, whatever that's called, title. Thank you. Barry the lead is an old newspaper phrase, okay, which probably everybody knows in this room, but obviously it says that you gotta say what you're going to say right out front before you follow with the rest of the article otherwise people are going to go, what the hell is he talking about? Or they're just going to go somewhere else and that'll be the end of it. Well, I've been burying the lead for my entire career because obviously I don't want you to know exactly what's going on immediately in these books. I want to keep the surprise until the tail end. So I've taken my journalistic background, all the training I received and I've turned it completely backwards. But the controversy is not there. The controversy came from my New York editor who said, well, I can't say I'm crazy about the title, but I can't think of anything better. So, says, yeah, exactly. So we're stuck with it, I guess. I went, well, fine, gosh. Good thing I called you late in the day, almost drinking time. So the point is that he said, people are going to mispronunciate it. They're going to take a look at burying the lead and they're going to say, says he buried the lead. And I paused, poetically and dramatically. And then I said, Keith, they're murder mysteries. Where's the damage? And even he got it at that point. I went, oh yeah, what the hell is he just saying? Now the only pompous subtext to this, and I say this here and now to sort of inhibit you to a certain extent during the question and answer period, which is about 37 seconds away. And that is that one can also encounter this phrase, spelt, L-E-D-E, because we classicists know that after Gutenberg went away and they came up with far more pragmatic ways of laying out type, they did so in lead. And since the first dictionary wasn't invented until the mid 1700s, lead was spelt how you hear it. And in the old days, I was L-E-D-E. I don't know why they were so fond of E's, but it is the most popular letter in the English alphabet. So I guess that's why it just go crazy. So I was informed rather archly that if you really wanted to write this properly, you should have written it, bury the L-E-D-E to which I was able to say, we ain't in England. So I'm spelling it this way because that's not the way we spell it in the United States. So here's a little flummox to spell on. I decided I would throw that out to spare all of you classicists who were going to crowd me up later. My sounding strangely paranoid. You know, aging is an odd process for me. Let's see, bury the, now the problem with bury L-E-D-E is I have to remember what it's about. I'm in the middle of, wait for it, bomber's moon. I like the response. That's good. No, don't give me no bury lead twice in a row. Bombers moon is now, when did I reach this morning? Page 335 or something like that. Yeah, I can't seem to shut up on this book. I haven't even, I don't even know who done it yet. I'm still sort that out. So a bomber's moon is what's in my head. I've got all the details there. So if you really want to know what I'm doing, that's what I'm doing. But curiously, that has nothing to do with what you are, of course, going to buy five copies of. So we're sort of stuck with my memory lapse here. But if memory has it, I think that this book starts off with an autopsy, because that's my comfort zone. I'll start with what you know best. And then sort of starts wandering on, as usual I'm wearing sort of several narratives. But I got approached by several people before this book was conjured up. And as you old timers know, who has not heard me before? Oh, wow, good Lord. So it was like jury duty. They just pulled you off the street. I'm impressed, not afraid of the book. Thank you, thank you for the management. I thought only judges did that. So a guy approached me and said that he was security, had he just been taken off of law enforcement, good pal of mine, and put his number two or three or two and a half, it depends on the structure, of security at CNS warehouse, which is a ginormous to use my daughter's phrase, organization for wholesale groceries. So that was sort of percolating in my brain because they have a huge warehouse in Brattleboro. And talk about a good place to either blow stuff up or run people over or flick a big in the wrong quarters. So my brain was starting to work along that. And this guy of course, head of security, was more than delighted to help me figure out ways to blow up his building. So my friends are pretty selected I might add. So that was the first thing that was sort of running around there. The autopsies, just as I mentioned, are natural. So that's always there from book to book. In fact, I have to sort of quell my enthusiasm for autopsies and try to get through a book without mentioning one. So, but no such like this time. The other thing was, and this was sort of a minor miracle, as you know, Willie Kunkel, to match his poor attitude has poor symmetry since he's got a bum arm. You know, when you write, you have that mirror thing going on. So that's how it's hard. As you know, as a medical examiner, it's always typical, you're looking at the dead guy and you're describing that he has a broken right arm, but it's not on your right, it's his right. I've been doing this medical garbage for decades and decades and decades. And I still have trouble with that mirror stuff. So anyhow, so I've never quite figured out which bum arm is Willie's until I check over my own notes. And this has not helped several decades ago. Brattleboro itself held a murder mystery weekend. And in part and parcel of that exercise, they got a bunch of amateur actors to wander the streets of Brattleboro Saturday and Sunday, enacting a murder and solving it. So you had Joe and Willie and Sam and all the characters up. The problem is the guy they chose for Willie had the same problem I did. He couldn't remember. So periodically, he couldn't show up like that. I didn't show up like that. I really baffled the onlookers. The other problem was the guy who was enacting Joe Gunther took his role so seriously that real cops actually had to take him aside and say, you know, you can't actually impersonate an officer. So they cut it out and stow the badge. Yeah, yeah, it was a little creepy. But hey, that's the company I keep. So somebody, a fan comes up to me and says, speaking of Willie Kunkel, and he's sort of standing asymmetrically in front of me, says, I got what he's got. Oh my God, you got a bum arm? Yeah, I was mugged several decades ago by a guy in Washington, DC, and he stabbed me in the arm after I gave him my wallet. In great. And it created nerve damage and rendered this poor guy's arm in exactly the same condition as Willie Kunkel's. And he said, given that insight, would you like me to tell you what it's like being Willie Kunkel? Come on, that's too easy. Yes, exactly right. So I said, okay, now I got an autopsy, I got the CNS warehouse to be blown up, and I've got the real Willie Kunkel. So he told me about his travails. I dug a little bit into his medical history, brought it up to my brother, the ever available retired surgeon, and then he stuck me into this whole engineering orthopedic research thing at Mary Hitchcock and Dartmouth College, all of which have become pals over the years. And we began to problem solve about what's happened over the years to Willie's arm in terms of development to his discomfort. How do we remedy it? And what are the choices there? And what are the end results of that? And so that's in this book too. So for the science nerds, you're gonna be delighted, hell with the murder mystery, who cares, right? But that stuff, so we're gonna see Willie go through all of that. But naturally, it's Willie. So wherever he goes to have himself treated, there's gonna be an overlaying problem. And sure enough, the hospital shuts down because of that problem, which I will mention at the moment because I can't ruin the entire book for you. But that sort of takes care of Barry, the lead lead leddie. And I hope you enjoyed it. And like I said, I hope you buy five copies. So I promise that this would be a Q&A. The old timers, unknown to some of you, know that I'm totally dedicated to questions and answers because even to this day, even with the people I should be paying because you've come up every year, right? For how many years? You can't even count. You've run out of fingers and toes. I know, that's true. But this is the drill. I still don't know why any of you come out, especially on a rainy night to see the likes of me. So therefore we open it up to questions as quickly as possible so that you can pick my brains what few are left, yes? How old were you when you published your first book? How old was I when I published my first book? Well phrased because that separates it from writing, which I began eight years before that first publication which occurred in 1988. 1988 was a good year. I was at that point had been working for eight years as an itinerant historian and traveling all over the United States, writing books for hire, which was actually a pretty good gig, except that my record for time away from home was nine weeks out of stretch. When I came home I'd have to be prepped with photographs of my child, so I'm getting a mistake or for someone else. And it was obviously not a good thing to do. And I'm telephoning my wife once, feeling quite hairy chested at the time because I had gone through, no kidding, a raging snowstorm to get to the only phone in this community, which was up in the northeast corner of Michigan, what they call the UP. And I reached this phone, which was literally in a brief about this size and slammed the door and all the howling quieted down and I dialed the phone and I picked up my wife, picked up the phone and I could hear the aforementioned now, middle-aged child howling in the background. And my wife's first comment was not hello honey, oh, I'm so impressed that you survived your odor as the owner's journey, right? She said, if you were here right now, I'd kill you. I bet I got home as quickly as possible. So those were, as they euphemistically say, the salad years. I wrote my first novel in 1975. I was working as a scholarly editor for the University of Texas Press. I too once had class and knew how to wear tweed and surrounded by what they call ABDs. How many people know what ABDs are? Yes, of course, dissertation. All but dissertation, correct, sir. So the retirement home for ABDs are university presses. At least they were in the old days. Attitude ran very thick among ABDs because now they were asked to judge on the merits of PhDs, who of course in order to publish or perish would send their impenetrable tomes to the University of Press to get published. And the ABDs then had the right to go, watch, this is completely unacceptable. So being surrounded by such people drove me to the bonkers and I would leave campus on a regular basis to research interesting projects that were not written by PhDs and bring them to fruition and publication. The end result of this turned out rather unhappily because I found a product that ended up on the New York High's bestseller list for six months. Now, all of us, non-ABD or anything else, would think that that's a good thing, right? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You forget the environment I was inhabiting. University of Presses making the bestseller list for six months results in cash. Ew. Precisely right. Ew, ew is the operative response because a fairy tacky, this is the 1970s after all, we do have principles and one of them is not to make money. I'm a scholarly press. I've got better things to do than to chase the whole mighty dollar. So I was chastised and banished to never leave my office again. In fact, I even found one that would've ended up on the bestseller list and the director took it away from me, literally said, arch, walk away. I was so tempted to take it literally, but instead I just went back to my office, took out my typewriter, rolled it in piece of paper, and immediately started writing a murder mystery with the director as the first victim. Impulse writing, what can I say? So that brought me from 1975 to 1980 because of course that was an exercise of typing followed by yet another followed by a third followed by a fourth. I have quite a filing cabinet filled with impenetrable prose of my own, thank you very much. All filled with dead directors. So once I snapped out of that habit, I realized that I just couldn't stand the company I was keeping. So I left that environment. In fact, I left full term employment altogether by meaning benefits and retirement and a paycheck and a nine to five and all that. That was 1978 and I've never looked back. I've never had a full-time job with those things ever since I've been an independent contractor, including as a death investigator, as a cop and all the things I've done. I only will take them on if the people hiring will hire me by contract. Instead of by employment. So long story short, I was unemployed. I had no money. I had no expectations, no skills, really marketable skills. So I came to Vermont. I've got to say, I needed company, like minded company. Immediately embraced as soon as I crossed the border. I was so parapetetic that from the age of zero to 30, I lived in approximately 30 different places, three continents, and God knows how many countries. After I came to Vermont, I lived in two and I've lived in the same house for 36 years. So obviously I'm happy. And if someone says, are you a native Vermonter? I said, no, but I've arrested a few. Now I'll make some wonder if that was a relative that I arrested or not because of anything else. So having set down my roots, realized I still didn't have any marketable skills even though I was in a friendly company at long last. And everyone else around me was unemployed. So that was a comforting feeling. But how many other people's driveway do you shovel? I mean, the barter system won't go so far. And so I realized that I must have been trained in something. I had a vague memory of getting a degree from college. So I chased it up, unfolded it, took a look, and it said, history. I'm a historian. I am a trained historian. So being not shy on the bullshit factor, sorry about that, I worked the telephone called Texas because Texas was the land of the rich in the vein in those days. And I had just come from it because that's where the university press was. So I was familiar with them. And I said to the first, first new answer to the phone, you need a historian. And she said, I do. I couldn't believe it. It took me what a week and a half when I had my first job. So I was in Orden weird and utterly destabilizing to my family, but it began me down the road of writing because that's what I'd become. During the weekends, it turns out people have a deep prejudice about seeing historians. I don't know why. So I stayed in my motel sixes wherever they happened to be. And I began to work or follow up on killing directors. Only now I was no longer a director obsessed because now I was a happily employed historian. And so I began to broaden my horizon and I began to sort of think about other types of novels than the ones that I had been fussing around with. And the murder mystery seemed interesting to me for both creative reasons and practical ones. At the time, they were gangbusters in popularity. I mean, they were just rising, dare I say, with a bullet. So that was obviously something to grab hold on because at that point, simultaneously, the average income of an American writer was approximately five to $6,000 a year. Even then, that wasn't much. So you had to go for the high end. I was going to go for the full six. And that would be detective fiction. Well, I actually don't really enjoy detective fiction. I don't read it. That's always a conversation killer when they come to me and say, oh, good Lord, look what you do for a living. Who's your favorite murder mystery writer? I go, I don't know what, I don't read that stuff. I mean, look at my life for God's sake. Do you think I'm going to cozy up with a nice recreational murder mystery at the end of my day? No, I want to get rid of all that stuff. Imagine five minutes with no blood, gar, and guts on that odor. So, I ended up thinking of the murder mystery in different ways. And I think that's why I ended up writing about Joe Gunther to begin with, but also why I have never left him 30 years later. And that is that these are in a funny kind of way, not murder mysteries at all. They're cultural anthropologies. They're social histories. They're stories about us, about Vermont, about conflict resolution, about people under stress, about irrational behavior, poor problem solving skills. In other words, everything we face and deal with every day only maxed up a little bit, because I'd like to think most of you don't step over a dead body before you start out on the day's laborers or end it that way. And I do in all of these. There's only one book in the series where there's no dead body. And that's because the book is about sexual assault, which I consider a homicide. Only without a dead body, the body rises up and says, deal with me too, on top of the crime. So I didn't want to have the distraction of a homicide in traditional terms in that book. And what's the name of that one? I'm trying to remember it. Yeah, you and me both. Proofs of the poisonous tree, good memory. So, proofs of the poisonous tree is the only murder mystery without our real, quote unquote, murder. So, given that incentive, given that reflection of what it is that actually makes murder mysteries alive and function in my brain, I began to understand that I'm not writing a series of separate books. I'm writing chapters of a book without end. I'm making James Joyce, Weep and Tolstoy and all the other long-winded guys who thought they could all do it between two covers. The hell with that. You just keep going and going and going. And you tell a story of a group of people which have now so expanded that I almost need a chart to keep track of them because I rattled off Joe and William Sam and Lester and even Lester is a latecomer. And now you've got Lester's kids because one of his sons, I mean, time goes on. Joe never ages, but everyone else does. She's a good thing, imagine 85-year-old cop. Right. So, we've got Beverly Hillström. She's always been there, but she and Joe are now an item and she of course had a, well, of course, but she did have a previous marriage and had two daughters, one of whom lives in Vermont. Well, that character needs a life and now she's been employed by the Brattleboro Deformer which we locals call the Deformer. It should be Reformer. Reformer, sorry about that, but a local slip. My mom, who is unkillable, she's 98 years old, lives in an old folks home in Hanover, New Hampshire and refers to the valley news as the snooze. So, it runs in a family, right? And so the reformer has hired at Beverly Hillström's daughter as a photojournalist where you can see that, you know, I can't kill them all. I have tried to kill some of the returning characters but Sally Kravitz, who is Dan Kravitz's daughter, she's alive and well in Bombers Moon next year. So, all of you guys are gonna have to equip yourselves with a chart in a short order. Either that or I'm gonna have this palatious bus crash. And everybody's gonna die. Exactly right. My mother, back in her salad years, at one point she's reading, God knows why, except that she's a sort of promiscuous reader. She's always got three to four books on her table along with several posture puzzles. Did I mention that her mind is fine? So anyhow, so there she is, is bedover crippled old lady, you know, just reading like a stevedor. And where am I going? I lost it, damn, I always do that. It's a tradition, yes, see, every time I lose my train of thought. Is she at Kendall? Oh, all the characters. Yeah, something like that, but not when it's got an original question. No, crew, crew, are you kidding me? I don't know. You didn't answer. How old were you? You didn't answer. Oh, I don't know. She didn't ask how old I was. Yes, she did. Oh, good. How old were you? Well, you said the year. I was 25, so in 1988, I was 38. 38, that's your answer. 19. What's your time in? How you doing? You're going guilty, you're feeling hopeful. I'm feeling hopeful. Oh, well, there you go, see? Forever 22. Excellent. I don't know. Just like childhood. They ever got a chance. Yeah, I'm sorry about that. Yeah, good catch, good catch. Yes, no, no, but you remember that was a lot more than I'm going to do. So you say that one has like three or four books always going? Yes, I know that one, but I don't remember where I was heading with all of that. You don't know why. Well, she doesn't want to be your book. No, she does read my book. She calls me up very politely and says it was a nice read. Nice read. Notice that the hostess of the evening didn't quote my mother. An OK read. Didn't kill me. No, my mom's really good. I actually, to my father, who died at 99, I dedicated more than one book. So they're good folks. And they stood by me in tough times. So at one point, needless to say, in all this pursuit of art, I ran very shy of funds. And my old man floated me for a loan. And it was a loan shark's loan. No kidding. I mean, the idea was that if I got published, blah, blah, blah, I mean, this wasn't very long alone. But for various reasons, as you'll soon discover, that if I was successful, he would get 50% of the proceeds. Well, hell, I'll take my leg while you're at it. For the rest of your life? But yeah, I was too stunned to ask for details. And I agreed. I took the money. I was just good. So for the short interim, I floated. But because I was just trying to hit this deadline, I hit the deadline. Book was rejected. And I went back to the old man. And I said, guess what? You put your money on a dead pony. And he gave me that eyeball and said, this is an old New Englander. And he said, did you discover that this is what you really want to do? And I went, oh, absolutely. And I was just, bought me the time to do nothing else. But he said, well, then I've been repaid in full. Oh, wow, really? That's a good story. I know he made that up. Yeah. It felt good at the time. Wow. I was a total buy-in. He's a good guy. Who else got a question? Somehow, AI forgot the first one and I ignored it. So it doesn't really matter, but I'm trying to be polite here. Yes, sir? How tempted are you to kill off recurring characters? Oh, I've done it. I've done it. Yeah. Now, much to the irritation of some of my readers, I must say I've gotten my share. You would never call it hate mail, but I would call it ticked off mail. Why did you do this to so-and-so? The funny thing is that I guess once I actually got, I sort of ran out of gas on a character. This is in the first two, three books, four books, something like that. And he just didn't come alive enough for me, and I knew that he was not going to survive. So I could absolutely set him up to be knocked off. And I even had Willie standing in line to do the proper gesture, which was cop to cop. Just before they sealed the coffin, Willie laid a donut on his chest. That's a really moment, if ever there was. So I knew that. I saw that coming. That was cool. Thereafter, I never see that coming. I write the books, and all of a sudden, there may be a magic moment whereby the termination of a regular might present itself. And I'll go probably at the writing of the sentence in which it happens is where I'll get the memo that this is going to happen. And it's odd. There's one particular one I'm referring to, which I really don't want to get into details to screw it up for other people. I get in trouble for that, too, because I babble too much about these books. I figure everyone knows what I know, which they shouldn't in more ways than one. So the punchline was that I dispatched this person. I stopped in the midst dry, because there was a choice. Absolutely. It didn't need to happen, and this person didn't need to be on the receiving end of a bullet. I mean, there were a variety of choices available. And I stopped dead in my tracks. And I went, oh my god. Why did I do that? And do I survive that? Does Joe survive it? It was someone very close to him. And I realized, you know what? That's the life I inhabit. I mean, for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times, I mean, I'm not kidding. I go into people's houses where someone just died. And only rarely have they said, yeah, this turns out. Just the way I wanted it to. That usually then involves people being arrested. Generally speaking, they're heartbroken. They're stunned. They never saw that freight train coming. And here I am at my own death, if you will, my own conjured-up death of someone else. Thinking to myself, god, I didn't see that coming. Precisely the point. So instead of going, oh, well, that was crazy. I went over that. Now I'll bring her back to life, and we'll continue. I went, nope, I'm going to live with the consequences of this. This is what happens. And so I continued writing. And everyone else survived, more or less. Hearts damaged or broken, just like in real life. So in a funny kind of way, everyone's got the dropsies. I feel like I'm left out. It was a perfectly good glass of water. I could do some sear to stab at you. Anyhow, that was my book you dropped. It was. And it's a library book. Exactly. I had a very eccentric grandmother who also died, and she used to label everything. And one of the labels on her favorite dictionary was, if this book gets dropped one more time, the spine will break. I mean, can you imagine a sign that big? And she couldn't see very well. It covered the entire book. It's probably Webster's International. She's been dead for 20 years. I've been dropped 40 times since then. It's still very solid. I digress. I'm sorry. I don't know what you're talking about. I don't know what you're talking about. I don't know what you're talking about. I know that answered a question about killing somebody all. Was it to your satisfaction? Sure. Sure. That's a mercy killing we'll leave you alone. Yes, sir? Can you make a living writing or why are you doing all the other things that you do? Well, because from the get-go, I never wanted to look in the mirror and see just a writer. I wanted to see someone who could contribute to society and work for the better good, be of use to my fellow human being on a daily basis. And an author is not that. No. An author is not that. An author supplies comfort, perhaps education, perhaps a shared experience of the human condition, but in terms of putting your hands on other human being and improving their day in an extraordinarily direct and visceral way, now, writers are useless. Now, I love being a writer, I'm on earth to be a storyteller. This works for me and I, in fact, sort of migrated from thinking of this as a craft into admitting that I actually practice an arch and I'm now comfortable with that, although I haven't found a beret that sits my fat head yet. So we're not probably going to end up going there, but it is important to me and I don't belittle it or diminish it or anything else. What writing you're going to get out of me is the best goddamn writing I am capable of delivering. I work very hard because that's what you deserve. But having said all that, I want to be a constructive part of the human race and that means that I've got capabilities. I've got stamina. I've got a demeanor, if you will, about other people's chaos and that allows me to get into the down and dirty, ugly, smelly, bloody, messy stuff and not have it affect me. So why not take a personality of that sort and put it to use in that arena? Very quickly and early on I joined the fire department. We already touched on the fact that I was traveling everywhere, moving, moving, moving all the time. You don't belong anywhere when you do that. You're too busy acquiring languages, customs, and habituating to cultures so that people don't beat you up for being the outsider or the weirdo. So that's my entire youth, I figure all that out. I come to Vermont and I finally lay that out below a relief and I go, okay, so everybody else has their youth in one place, everybody else. Most people have their youth in one place and they see the fire department or the police department or whatnot, they know the people who are around them doing this kind of stuff. I don't. So I get to use or live my life upside down and backwards. And now I get to embrace my youth whereas I was born an old man, if you will, okay? So I joined the fire department, I began responding to that area, immediately became an EMT, shortly thereafter became the captain of the rescue squad just because I can't get enough of that kind of education and being self-employed, I essentially was born with a pager on my hip when I came to Vermont and I was still alive. So that readiness, that availability, that eagerness all conspired to make me Johnny on the spot when everyone else, they were at work or they were doing something else, you know, driving an 18-wheeler or whatever they were doing and I was available in town. So I got a lot of early experience in emergency responses and it wasn't long thereafter, part and parcel of my research course I'm spending, shall we say, an embarrassing amount of time at the medical examiner's office learning how they do what they do and when they shifted their organization to non-MD death investigators, which was a mess and not working better and medicine was getting more and more and more paper-bound and complex and doctors were going, look I don't have the time to be a death investigator on top of everything else so I'm out of it. Then they switched over to people exactly like me, guys that were getting up in the middle of the night responding happily and eagerly to all sorts of chaos and they just said, you want another pager? And you don't even think, oh sure what the hell, what's another one? At the peak I had three pagers on my belt, one of whom had two separate channels so everyone was paging and beeping and I loved it because this was ketchup, my entire life was spent avoiding all of this kind of involvement. I was the outsider's outsider, one of the reasons I became a writer is because that's what writers are, they're observers, they stay out and to this day when I go to a death scene and there is all this stuff in the air and on the floor and underfoot and all of everything else, I'm an outsider, I'm watching, I'm taking notes, I'm remembering stuff, I'm dealing with crisis, I'm applying the bomb such as I have it to bring people back down to earth and steady their nerves, but I have to frankly say, does it strike me emotionally? No, it does not. I don't have that kind of background on that level, we all have baggage, we all have school of hard knocks that we encountered, I've got mine which I earned at a very early life and that protected me to this day against other people's chaos and misery. I watch it, I calm it down, I address it, but I don't feel it and this allows me to document, to remember, to recall, to analyze, to balance all the stuff I see. So going back to the little brief life history, the medical examiner's office created this new system whereby they used non-MDs and within two months I started getting phone calls. We changed the rules, where the hell are you? It's literally with the chief ME at the time set. Okay, so I drove up there and they run you through a battery to have to make sure you're psychologically balanced, obviously they made an exception for me and I went and that was, I believe something like 18 years ago now, time flies. So thereafter you were of course interacting with law enforcement every time you go out because that's the rules of engagement in the state of Vermont, is that there are three offices that need to be represented at every investigation of a death and that is the local law enforcement, whoever that may be, medical examiner's office and the state attorney's office, always available by phone, unless there are press photographers in which case they show up in prison. So, you know, gotta be practical. So one of these cops is also talking about a case to me over lunch after the fact and we're just sorting out a few details and he looks at me and he says, you want a job? We're actually hiring at the Bell's Falls Police Department, Bell's Falls. I mean that's like a stand-up joke in those days. Of course, if you do what I do, you got to work at Bell's Falls. I mean it's chaos central. That was the bad newsbear's capital and statistically there's a guy named Max Schluder who kept the number crunching for the state of Vermont and lovely guy and he was the one who told me that his personal nickname for Bell's Falls in those days was Dodge City. I'll give you an idea. Now that's all per capita obviously, you know, Burlington is the mothership of bad news but on a per capita basis nothing beat Bell's Falls in those days. So this guy said would you like a job there and I went in a heartbeat. Not before I looked at him and said, do you know how old I am? This was not all that long ago, it was about 17 years ago. So and he said that's exactly why we're asking you. Which I thought was remarkably insightful on their part and really devious. I thought that was elder abuse to be perfectly honest because it got me in my weak spot. Of course I'll work with you now. So they put me to work and that's what started the other ball going in terms of that employment. Now obviously the firefighting EMS was by and large volunteer. Some of the EMS jobs I do national ski patrol, I ran for ambulances and rescue squads. I had four or five EMS jobs simultaneously at one point every year for all the pages. And some of those pages because you don't have a choice and not volunteer organizations. But most of that was volunteer. Then obviously law enforcement, medical examiner, those are just regular jobs. So at my peak, I had three simultaneous full time jobs, which was great because at that point I could give 18 hours a day to these various occupations. And of course it's mostly their emergency driven. And of course I'm a contractor also. So you know, I can always say, Hey, you want to fire me? Fine. You know, but I'm not going to sit around to do nothing in your office on a nine to five basis. I'm going to show up at your office, do work and leave. I'll put in my hours, but I'll put them in when I want to put them in. So it's 2am, I might be in the cop shop doing stuff that other people would only do from nine to five. So it all worked out. And it all fit my rather bizarre panic driven personality. So long story short, I felt that I was finally being of use to my fellow citizen along my guidelines. I was writing books, which I was in fact doing for a living. Answer this question, didn't I? So now that average income of 6000 bucks, I do a lot better now. And I know Stephen King, but I've been making a living at this for now since 1980. Except for that one time with my father. But otherwise, and of course, you know, it helps in Vermont. Vermont has also trained me as did my Yankee father. Don't get greedy. So our expectations are lower than they might be in New York City or elsewhere, you know, where people say, Oh, well, the cost of living is such. Well, all of us look at that cost of living go, What do you want smack? You know, you don't need that much to live. You can live on a lot less. So that's what I do. And it works fine. But I do count myself along the lucky, because if someone says you're making a living as a writer, well, you must be Stephen King. There is a middle class of writer. And I'm happy and proud representative of that. You can make it happen. And for all of you, just in case you want to know, just got another contract for three more books more in the pipeline killable Joe Gunther three more. Yeah, yeah, that three more after the one you're already writing. Let's see. No, God, what is it? Margot's the boss. She actually knows. Margot's my wife. Bombers. Bombers moon number it's their number 30. So no, no, we got three more after bombers. Bombers moon is next year's book is the end of that's the 30th. So I've got three more after that. Thank you. Good body. Yeah, yes, sir. I enjoy your description of Brattleboro and Spock communities and the people in them. Do you get pushback from some of the people in those communities? No, no, the crazy thing is instead of pushback, they actually asked for their community being included in the next homicide. Particularly bloody minded librarians. They all want their patrons dead in the aisles. Really weird. I think people, they understand that even the residents of Alice Falls, about which I can be a little tough. Everything I learned about Alice Falls, I learned in Bellas Falls from residents of Alice Falls and the more honest among them will recognize that fact. So yes, the Chamber of Commerce may not be crazy about me in Bellas Falls. But funnily enough, there is a I think she's retired by now. But for a long time, one of the selected Bellas Falls was fresh to the neighborhood. I don't know where she came from, somewhere away. And she came into Vermont, came into Bellas Falls, decided, wow, I'm bored, I need something to do. And since I got no job, and I can do this, I'm going to run for select person and win. So she won. So she comes to one of these, which I call an author imitation. And I don't like the real version. So I make these up. And she raises her hand, and she says, Hi, I'm so and so and I'm on the board of trustee bells falls and I think what you did in your book Bellas Falls was excruble and demeaning and insulting. Basically, using my words, not hers, I think you're a toad. So I went, did you read the book? I ain't a cop for nothing. And she said, I'm not going to read a book like that. Everybody else start laughing. It was like when I want to make this political, but it was like when Trump stood up in the United Nations and made that one line, or don't start laughing. It was saying kind of like, Are you kidding me? You know, you're going to criticize a book you never read. So that sort of quelled her enthusiasm on the conversation ended on went off to the next question. And I'll be damned if within six months, she didn't contact me personally, asked for an inscribed book, one an auction where her name could be used in a future book. And it's been talking me up ever since because guess what she did? So even in a case like that, they come to realize, okay, it's a tough town. But the conclusion of the book Bella's Falls ends on a note of hopefulness. It's a hard locked town. I'm not going to tell you otherwise. But I'm not so not going to say that they don't try like crazy to make it a better place to live. And it certainly was. Since when I first crossed its threshold. So most towns see that Brattleboro, you're right. I write more about Brattleboro because it's the town nearest where I live right outside of town. And they sure can't get enough of them. They've taken them in stride. They like them a lot. I get you know, run up the flagpole in the newspaper in a positive way, versus the art arm, and all as well. And like I said, I really have gotten, gosh, I'm hard put, other than what I just rattled off of those walls, I'm hard put to think of anybody who's really come back at me. There was this one guy who didn't like he wrote a letter to me with no return address. The real cranks always do that. And said, I hate what you did with this one character. You gave him an Irish last name, and said he had a drinking problem. And I'm sick and tired of the Irish all being reduced to drunks. And as it turns out, if you again, if you read the book, he didn't have an Irish name, his nickname sounded like an Irish name. So it was just a complete I was like, I can't even respond because there was no return address. But over 30 years of cranking this stuff out, that's all I can remember. So either someone's burning my mail doing okay. Not sure which. Margot would know she would burn my mail. Anyone else? Yes. Have you ever been approached about adapting any of your books for TV? Well, I have TV and movies. It comes up now and then we're under contract right now, fingers are crossed. And we'll see what happens. You know, it has always struck me as a natural thing to do. One of my 433 previous lives was as a photographer. I'm very visually oriented for a writer. And when I write, I have in my head the same movie I hope you end up with when you're reading. Because I was I never forget that you always write for readers. And you as a writer are reader first and foremost. I mean, in other words, don't forget your roots. You came into writing as a reader, and you're delivering your product to readers. Never forget that. Repeat your question, though, because I don't want to this one I can read. Yeah, yeah. So therefore, you can see where I think this is a natural segue to go from these books, which I wrote visually to end up visual. And like I said, you know, we're arm wrestling over contracts and doing just the standard stuff that you always do. But all what's that? Which will all of them now I mean, I started the beginning of the series. And that's all we sort of talk about that the understanding might be that if we actually get lucky with this one, and you don't always I mean, I've had those a couple times before and it falls through for whatever reason. Some of them really petty, I'll share a story that just is over the top dumb and I've probably already told it to you before. But there was a long, long time ago. There was a bunch of folks in an office in Hollywood, the real Hollywood, and there were like nine of them. And they were literally there to sign a contract for Joe Gunther series or movie I can't remember what it was. And the last guy to arrive sees like the third guy to have arrived. And they're all just whatever they're doing or playing with their ties. And he stops dead in his tracks. And he says, I didn't know you weren't on this deal, talking to the third guy arrived. He says, remember how you screwed me over. Three years ago on that other deal. Well, paybacks a bitch and he turned on his healing walked out. And the guy who called me up was literally crying on the phone because he said we had a deal. But we can't do it without this one guy. And it had nothing to do with the series. It was just welcome to Hollywood. You know, very strange time. I'm going to live as far as far away from Hollywood as I can physically get for probably good reason. All that having been said, I think we're in cahoots with saying people. And we're just gonna see where it goes. So I can't answer you flat out because it's in development. If you feel like I'm floating in hypo or something. But yeah, you know, fingers crossed. Can you tell a story last year about a son, a producer and a t shirt? Yeah, that's him. That's him. Yeah, it's the same thing. He seems to take a long time. Yeah, no, it can be a very formal thing. But yeah, the story, I don't know. Did you hear that one? He didn't. Okay, it's actually fairly sweet. So my son lives down in Texas. And and he does things like habitat for humanity. And I don't understand where he gets all this altruism help your fellow human being stuff. Total nonsense, but he does it anyhow. And so he's off there helping to build houses. And there's this young man there. And indeed, there was a t shirt be the my son or he had had Vermont. And so there's my son the Texan, so to speak. And he looks at this guy goes, my God, you know, who knew my father, you know, lives in Vermont. And I goes, Oh, my favorite author is from you could fill in the immediate link link on and then my son of course, very politely says so what do you do for living in the guy says I make movies. That's that's where this started out. But but it's a tough road. Oh, I really feel badly for these guys. Because God, the nutty people they need to deal with and wrestle with and contract with a number of frustrations they have to encounter. And of course, I'm just writing books. I don't worry about what their lives are. It must not be enviable. But it's alive. And we'll see if it's well. Next year, ask me the same question. Anyone else? Oh, she seems to be rising to her feet. Okay, I guess. Oh, yeah, good Lord. Very impressed. You didn't throw something hard at my head. Ladies and gentlemen, it's been a pleasure. Thank you very much.