Building a Mystery

loading...

Sarah Graves sees similarities between mystery writing and painting.

“The mystery form is very strict, but inside that strict form, you’re very free,” Graves said. “You’re not allowed to be boring, you’re not allowed to cheat, you’re not allowed to not solve the mystery. But as long as you follow the mystery rules, you can have as much atmosphere, as much description, as varied an assortment of characters, as outrageous a message, as normal or unconventional a style as you like. There’s a whole lot of variation you can achieve within the form. It’s like the frame on a painting.”

Sarah Graves, the pen name of an Eastport resident, is a veteran mystery author. She previously had written nine mysteries, split into two series, under a different pen name. Her latest book, “The Dead Cat Bounce,” is set in Eastport, and will be released Sept. 14 as part of Bantam Books’ Crime Line.

The title is based on stock market jargon for a small, temporary rise in a stock’s trading price, after a sharp drop. The protagonist of Graves’ latest is Jacobia Tiptree, a Wall Street refugee who landed in Eastport with her teen-age son, Sam, after a divorce from her philandering, neurosurgeon husband, Victor.

She’s busy making a new life for herself, which includes a romance with local harbor pilot Wade Sorenson, while restoring her crumbling, 200-year-old house.

Graves said there are only limited similarities between herself and Jacobia. She and her husband, both free-lance writers, live in an 1823 house, although it is in nowhere near as bad repair as Jacobia’s. Like Jacobia, she too has a dog. Also, Graves’ feelings about her adopted town of Eastport color Jacobia’s thoughts in a big way.

She explained that she and her husband, then living in Connecticut, were looking to move away from the busy, rather crowded I-95 corridor.

“We came to Eastport because it was at the very end of the road,” Graves explained. “Like so many others, we became captured by it. That part of Jacobia’s story is factual, in feeling if not in point-by-point fact.”

Jacobia’s rather peaceful existence gets disrupted by a dead body in her storeroom. The deceased was a barely lamented business tycoon who made it big and then came home to Eastport to rub everyone’s noses in it. Jacobia’s best friend, Ellie White, confesses to the murder. Jacobia knows she didn’t do it and knows she’s covering for someone, but who? She spends the rest of the novel figuring out that question, while overcoming a number of threats, real and psychological.

Graves isn’t a business expert, but her husband has been involved with Wall Street.

“He has quite a lot of experience and interest in the stock market,” she said. “We would read Barron’s and the Wall Street Journal and always had Financial News Network on. I do find people’s attitudes about money fascinating and just the way money works is a fascinating topic.”

“The Dead Cat Bounce” was to be unveiled Sunday at Fountain Books in Eastport, where Graves was scheduled to do a signing. That day was Salmon Sunday, part of the town’s Salmon Festival. The book is already selling well, both to tourists and to locals, in Eastport.

Graves’ book is set in real-life Eastport. The people are entirely fictional, she emphasized, but the stores, businesses, streets and houses are all real.

“Eastport is so beautiful and so historically fascinating,” Graves said. “It has such a strong personality of its own. It’s more than a setting. Eastport is a character in the book.”

After a visit to the easternmost town in the United States, Graves was sure that she wanted to set at least one novel in Eastport. She approached Kate Miciak and Amanda Clay Powers, her editors at Bantam, and proposed a series of novels that would be set in Eastport, featuring a character like Jacobia with a business background. The idea met with immediate enthusiasm, she said. Then she and her husband found out they were moving to Washington County.

Although Mainers have a reputation for keeping unto themselves, Graves didn’t find Eastport residents to be standoffish.

“We were welcomed so generously, so cordially, that it was just the opposite of the stereotype,” she said.

The Eastport in Graves’ novel features quite a number of transplants from away, which she said mirrors the Washington County town.

“There are more than a few people from away in Eastport, and it does make for an interesting mix,” she said. “But you don’t sense a great divide between people who’ve lived here their whole lives and people from away.”

The author writes a certain number of pages a day, based on how close she is to deadline. She also does a significant amount of rewriting herself before submitting her manuscripts, admitting, “There’s a certain amount of obsession that goes into it.”

“The Dead Cat Bounce” is the first of a three-book deal with Bantam. Graves has already finished the next novel, “A Blonde for a Shilling,” which will be out next June.

“A Blonde for a Shilling” finds Jacobia and Ellie trying to solve the murder of local layabout Ronnie Mumford.

“It’s about the murder of a local fellow who was thought of as kind of a loser when he was alive,” Graves explained. “But when he was dead, everyone realizes how important he was to the town, and how much they would miss him.”

The third book is “Triple Witch,” which Graves has in outline form. She has plans for a fourth book, which delves into a murder that took place hundreds of years ago in Jacobia’s house, which is thought to be haunted.

Graves traces her love of mysteries back to her childhood.

“When I was a little girl, my aunt had an attic room,” she recalled. “One day, I opened the door, and there, in this completely bare room, was a mountain of mystery movels. I sat down and started reading. That was the first big thing that aimed me in that direction.”

Graves has been a free-lance writer since the early 1980s. In addition to her mysteries, she has also written young-adult books on health and science topics and biographies.

As part of her series of appearances throughout the state, Graves will give a talk to new writers on how to get published.

“I remember exactly how I felt when I didn’t have the first idea how to submit manuscripts in a professional way,” she said. “A lot of people were very generous to me when I was starting out, and now it’s my turn. The answers aren’t difficult, and once they have them, they can move forward in a professional manner.”

Graves has a year to prepare “Triple Witch,” so she’s taking a little breather and enjoying her adopted town, which she said is a perfect location for a writer.

“It’s possible to be by yourself as much as you want, but when you come out of the writing studio, you can be as social as you like,” she said. “You can go out every night of the week. Also, because the population is so varied, you can get all the intellectual stimulation you want. A lot of people know a lot about a lot of different things, and people are so generous about telling me about the things they know.”

Sarah Graves will sign books and talk about writing at: Borders Books & Music, Bangor, at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 24; 7 p.m. Friday, Sept. 25, at Walden Books, Auburn; 2 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 26, at Borders, South Portland; and 2 p.m., Sunday, Sept. 27, at Barnes & Noble, Augusta.