Brenda Buchanan: There are Places I Remember...

 

Breaking News! Congratulations to our own Hank Phillippi Ryan for 2(!) Anthony nominations!

 
Hallie Ephron: It's always a special pleasure when a writer we've gotten to know through Jungle Red publishes a debut novel, and today it gives me great pleasure to turn the "mike" over to Brenda Buchanan whose novel Quick Pivot was just released by Carina Press.

I've had the pleasure of reading it, and she sets part of it on my favorite Maine Island (Peaks!)

Take it away, Brenda!

BRENDA BUCHANAN: Thank you, Hallie, for inviting me to Jungle Reds today to chat about Quick Pivot. It’s the first in the Joe Gale series, featuring a contemporary newspaper reporter covering Maine’s crime beat.

At its core, Quick Pivot is about a 1968 murder that remains unsolved for more than four decades. Before I wrote the first word, I knew that on page one, a long-dead body would be found in a defunct textile mill. In my writer’s mind, the mill looks something like this.

I also knew the story would move back and forth between the late 1960s and the present day. And while it was clear the story would take place near Portland, that lovely city by the sea would not have worked as the primary setting for Quick Pivot. The central events in my book—especially the murder—had to unfold in a smaller, grittier community, someplace in upscale Portland’s shadow.
Westbrook, where I live, would have been a logical choice. Located just west of Portland, it has a proud industrial past and is the right size to make the everybody-knows-everybody aspect of Quick Pivot’s plot believable. But it is a delicate thing to kill someone on the page in a real town, especially when the fictional murder causes economic and personal pain to reverberate through the community for years to come.

Because it would have felt wrong to do that to Westbrook, I invented Riverside, an on-its-way-back mill town populated by folks with long memories.

However, all of the secondary settings in Quick Pivot are real—Portland, Peaks Island, Cape Elizabeth and Kennebunkport among them. Readers familiar with Southern Maine will find landmarks they know and love when reading the scenes set in these places.

One of my favorites occurs at Crescent Beach in Cape Elizabeth, in a picnic grove perfumed by beach roses. Since writing that chapter I cannot go to Crescent Beach without strolling past the spot where newspaper reporter Paulie Finnegan and his lover Joan Desmond had an explosive conversation in the early summer of 1968. This is how it looked on the late-April day I was writing this post. Spring still is making its way north, so you have to imagine the beach roses.

Several key scenes also take place on Peaks Island, the Portland neighborhood where I lived for a dozen years. Brave, vulnerable Helena Desmond fled to Peaks shortly after her brother disappeared in 1968, and it’s been her safe haven ever since. The passages that occur at Helena’s home in the middle of a spruce forest wrote themselves, because I know so well the slant of the afternoon sun in that beautiful place, and the birdsongs that fill the air at dusk.

Cape Porpoise is an iconic village within the town of Kennebunkport where I lived when, like my protagonist Joe Gale, I was a newspaper reporter. I had a blast writing about Joe taking a retired State Police detective out for supper at a clam shack at the Cape Porpoise Pier, plying him with lobster stew to find out what went on behind the investigative scenes 46 years earlier.

Another restaurant—one I’d driven by a thousand times but had never visited—also wound up in Quick Pivot. I needed a place for a cop and a reporter to hold a surreptitious meeting on a hot summer night in 1968. After doing some research, the obvious choice was an Italian restaurant that's been in continuous operation on the edge of Scarborough Marsh since the1950s.

Because it was one of those rare scenes that required almost no revision, the restaurant became associated with my hope for Quick Pivot. My spouse and I made a pact—if I sold the book, we’d go there to celebrate.

Stepping through the door for the first time last September, I found my intuition about the place had been spot on. I could almost see Paulie Finnegan and Tom MacMahon sitting in a booth with a view of the door, one of them smoking, the other asking questions that had to be asked.

I ordered what they did—Johnny Walker Black and a steak, medium rare.

It was fabulous.

So, Reds, do you prefer real settings or made-up towns? If you read or write stories set in real places, do those scenes fill your head each time you pass by? What rituals to you have for celebrating your accomplishments?

Quick Pivot is available in digital format wherever ebooks are sold. Here’s a plot summary:

In 1968, a cunning thief skimmed a half a million dollars from the textile mill that was the beating heart of Riverside, Maine. Sharp-eyed accountant George Desmond discovered the discrepancy, but was killed before he could report it. After stashing the body, the thief-turned-killer manipulated evidence to make it appear Desmond skipped town with the stolen money, ruining his good name.

In 2014, veteran journalist Joe Gale is covering a story for the Portland Daily Chronicle when a skeleton falls at his feet: Desmond’s bones have been found a basement crawl space at the long-shuttered mill. For Joe, digging into the past means retracing the steps of his now-deceased mentor, Paulie Finnegan. The same people who bird-dogged Paulie four decades ago are watching Joe now. As he closes in on the truth, his every move is tracked, and the murderer proves more than willing to kill again.