[N]ewfane writer Archer Mayor has been deemed “Vermont’s locavore novelist” for infusing what the Chicago Tribune calls “the best police procedurals being written in America” with buckets of homegrown color.
“You’re not going to find Hannibal the cannibal in my books,” the author says. “You’re going to find people you know.”
So what’s to make of his latest book’s conjecture on state government’s most intimate secrets?
A year ago, Mayor concocted a crime scenario that mixed the capital of Montpelier, political debate on social issues such as homosexuality and marijuana, and a governor with a little-reported private life. Writing for a fall 2015 statewide book tour, the novelist didn’t know the U.S. Supreme Court would rule for same-sex marriage in June. Or that the Vermont Cannabis Collaborative would kick off a statewide push for legalization in July. Or that Gov. Peter Shumlin would announce his engagement last month.
Really, he swears, he didn’t know.
Some background: Fans of the author’s trademark detective Joe Gunther — “as likable and sensitive a hero as Robert B. Parker’s Spenser,” Publishers Weekly says — have recognized many places and public events in the 26-book series. Take Northeast Kingdom natives questioning a back-to-nature church community in 1990’s “Borderlines.” Or heroin dealing and deaths in Rutland in 2003’s “Gatekeeper.” Or Tropical Storm Irene flooding the state in 2013’s “Three Can Keep a Secret.”
Mayor — touted by the New York Times as “the boss man on procedures” — also has gained real-life experience by doubling in recent years as a detective for the Windham County Sheriff’s Department and a death investigator for the state Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.
Two decades ago, he heard rumblings about Asian gangs beginning to traffic drugs and undocumented immigrants through the state. The author turned that idea into “The Dark Root,” only to see the reality of the situation hit the headlines upon the book’s release in 1995.
Mayor was working on a missing person’s investigation when Tropical Storm Irene pummeled the state in 2011.
“That allowed me access to some of the bigger damage,” he says. “I could step over that yellow tape.”
At the flooded Vermont State Hospital in Waterbury, Mayor learned that, for a few moments, a power failure opened some doors and closed others, locking in staff while offering confined patients the opportunity to flee.
“I thought, ‘How can I use the reality around me? How can I make it relevant to a detective story?’”
So what about his new 304-page Minotaur hardcover, “The Company She Kept,” and its focus on a governor juggling current events, concerns about re-election and how much personal information to divulge to the press and public?
“No, I don’t do roman à clef,” the author replies. “Please do make clear that I do not ever bring a real case into the fiction. Vermont is supposed to be filled with contented cows. I’ve always loved to mangle that image with my own vision of reality.”
In Mayor’s defense, a reporter had to tell him about Shumlin’s recent engagement, a development the author somehow missed. And the governor in his new book isn’t a man but a woman — Gail Zigman, the hero detective’s former girlfriend turned government chief executive — whose story ultimately is very much her own.
Even so, Vermont readers will find the surrounding landscape familiar.
Take page 17, with “Joe constantly on the new ‘hands-free’ phone setup they’d mounted into his car, to conform to Vermont’s new cellphone usage statute.”
Or page 52, with “Gail rubbing her forehead, thinking. ‘The hot-button issues are about the same as always: health care, marijuana legalization, farming issues, cell towers and wind turbines, school control.”
Or page 121, which notes, “The Vermont State House is a curious combination of elegance — complete with gold dome and classical columns — and lopsided quaintness, because of its small size and oddly imbalanced proportions … and is a perpetual favorite among camera-toting tourists. Unless they want to park.”
“On that score — at least while the Legislature is in session,” one character declares “the capital to be the single most irritating place in the state.”
In a book that aims a magnifying glass on Montpelier, that last opinion is one of only two passages where Mayor leans toward making a political statement. The other comes at the start of Chapter 11: “Across the board, there are roughly 1,100 fully certified police officers in Vermont — compared to some 16,000 in Massachusetts and 60,000 in neighboring New York. It’s the lowest number among all 50 states. Even largely rural New Hampshire has over twice as many cops.”
With the fall arrival of a new Mayor book as much a state tradition as laggard leaf peepers clogging traffic, the author has embarked on a speaking tour detailed on his website, archermayor.com.
He’s also finishing a new mystery for next year. The plot is set at the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in Vernon. But whether it ends with a successful decommissioning or something more sinister or disconcerting, the writer can’t say. He never follows his English teacher’s instructions to start with an outline.
“I don’t have a set idea of a beginning, middle or an end. That lack of knowledge and sureness, that ability to risk is what makes each one of these books different. As a result, I think there’s more life in the writing.”
Kevin O’Connor, a former staffer of the Rutland Herald and Barre-Montpelier Times Argus, is a Brattleboro-based writer. Email: kevinoconnorvt@gmail.com
