On Dec. 10 at Baxter Memorial Library, North-Woods-themed mystery author Paul Doiron offered a fascinating glimpse into his writing and described some experiences he had while researching his books. For his fans, probably the most compelling item came near the end when he announced a successful outcome after years of unsuccesfully shopping his “Mike Bowditch” books to the Hollywood entertainment industry.
Doiron said two well-known producers had recently had a “bidding war,” and one had emerged with the television rights to all the books, planning a TV series using “Pitch Dark” and other books. While unable to offer additional specifics, he expects an official announcement very soon. Before this surprise announcement, Doiron spoke at length about his writing process and research experiences, and read an excerpt from his latest book, “Pitch Black.”
Since the first book in the series, Doiron has sought to envision Mike Bowditch as being much like a real person, someone with positive traits but also noticeable flaws that evolve. Doiron allows “Bowditch” to evolve from book to book, just as real people do as they age and have various life experiences. He consciously avoids making Bowditch conventionally heroic, or perfect.
Doiron acknowledged that obviously the Bowditch character has experienced and survived far more than most real people, (including physical traumas like being punched, kicked, and shot). In contrast, their job requires real Maine wardens to be heroic fairly often, like disarming an angry person or carrying an injured hiker off the mountain.
Because Doiron prefers to write without a strict format or outline, there are more opportunities for the Bowditch character to evolve more naturally. The main structural underpinning begins by determining what the “big crime” is, and who the main charac- ters are. Then the story unfolds as he writes, waiting to see how each character is related to the “big crime,” and the main protagonist and antagonist.
People often ask if he “is Bowditch,” or vice versa. His usual response is “Mike is smarter than me, and braver than me.”His wife once overheard someone ask him if he “is Mike Bowditch?” He was surprised when she told the person that “if Paul were twenty-four and a Maine Game Warden, he would be Mike Bowditch.”
While Doiron has never actually been a game warden or worked in law enforcement, he appreciates the opportunities he’s had to go on “ridealongs,” most recently with one of the Warden Service’s newer women officers. This more diverse hiring trend has been a positive development.
More of his readers have become more interested in a non-human char- acter, the wolf/dog hybrid “Shadow” than in almost any other character. He then described a fascinating but somewhat scary experience years ago, when he and a friend visited an unof- ficial wolf-dog hybrid sanctuary in the White Mountains just across the state line. He described the personalities of several hybrid animals, as well as that of the cantankerous but fascinating old man who founded and ran the place.
Doiron thinks a lot of his readers imag- ine that he writes in a rustic cabin some- where in the Maine woods. While that is not actually true, he does have to leave his house and go somewhere else to write.
Answering a question/comment, Doiron said he deliberately tries to make his locales and descriptions as realistic as possible, and to pay atten- tion to Maine cultural geography. The audience complimented him on this.