It’s sort of like the old chicken and egg thing.  People are constantly asking me, “When you decided to write a mystery/thriller series, what came first? The character or the plot?

The short answer is neither.

What really came first when I decided to write The Cutting, was the setting.

Well before I began to dream up McCabe or Maggie or any of the other continuing characters in The Cutting, I knew I wanted to write a series set in Portland, Maine.

I don’t think that’s particularly unusual.  A sense of place is key to a lot of the best mystery writing. It would be hard to imagine James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux novels set anywhere but in Louisiana. Or Tony Hillerman’s Joe Leaphorn/Jim Chee stories taking place anywhere but in New Mexico. The same holds true for Carl Hiaasen’s Florida, Dennis Lahane’s Boston, Julia Spencer-Fleming’s Millers Kill, New York, and, of course, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s London.

I don’t know for sure but I’d be willing to bet every one of those writers knew where they wanted to set their books before they knew very much about who their characters were and certainly before they developed a specific story line.

For me the perfect place turned out to be Portland. I moved there from New York in 2001 and discovered a city that offered just about everything a writer could want in creating a new mystery series.

It had a gritty urban setting. A vibrant street life. Great architecture. A rich history. A working waterfront. Good bars. Great restaurants. A lively art scene. And not unimportantly, a police department with big-city skills and resources that was still small enough for most of the cops to know and care about each other. Portland even offers interesting and often extreme weather to set scenes in.

My editor at St. Martin’s was very upfront about it. The Portland setting was one of the key reasons he offered to buy the series.

One of my most perceptive reviewers, Judy Harrison of The Bangor Daily News recognized the importance of place to The Cutting right off. She wrote:

“Sam Spade had San Francisco.

Spenser has Boston.

Mma Ramotswe has all of Botswana.

Now, McCabe has Portland — as in Maine.

Maybe it’s the other way around. Portland has McCabe.

It’s hard to tell sometimes whether a detective in a mystery novel owns the setting or it owns the detective. What really matters is that the location becomes such an integral part of the character that it is inseparable from the gumshoe, P.I. or self-educated investigator who always, eventually, solves the crime.”

To anyone thinking about writing a new mystery or thriller series, I’d suggest trying what worked so well for me in The Cutting. Pick a place. Then make it your own.

“Where do you write?”

I’m sure most writers have been asked that question.  I know I have more times than I can count. At least once at every public event and private gathering I’ve attended since my first suspense thriller, The Cutting, leapt its way onto bookstore shelves at the end of June.  (Author’s Note: Okay, leapt is a bit hyperbolic. But, as a writer of stories involving sex, violence, murder and mayhem, I do like action verbs, and “leapt its way” seems more appealing than the more sedate, though possibly more accurate, “found its way” or the more passive, but definitely more accurate, “appeared.”)

Anyway, for me, the short answer to the question of where I write is: Not At Home.  A lot of people who know where I live find that puzzling.

Thanks to a couple of decades spent churning out detergent, car and army recruiting commercials for the likes of Procter & Gamble, Lincoln/Mercury, and the US Army, home for me is now a beautiful light-filled house set on the rocky coast of Maine. From its many windows I can watch the waves crashing onto the shore and gaze at a series of islands receding into the distance across the water.

Sounds idyllic, right?

It is.

Sounds like the perfect writer’s retreat, right?

It ought to be.

So, that’s where you wrote The Cutting, right?

“Uhh, well, no. Not exactly.”

Turns out, that for me at least, the perfect writer’s retreat only works perfectly as long as my mind is in gear, the plot is unfolding as planned, and my characters are behaving exactly as I want them. In other words, when I’m writing the easy parts.

However, when I get to one of those places where I’m not quite sure what Mike McCabe, my hero, and Maggie, his partner, ought to be doing next. Or exactly how bitchy I ought to be making McCabe’s ex-wife Sandy. Or how graphically I should describe the next slaying or autopsy, well, then what seems to be the perfect writer’s retreat unfortunately morphs into the perfect place for procrastination.

It’s the place where I can stop writing for any of a million reasons. All valid, all rational, all stupid.

“Gee, shouldn’t I be checking my emails?”

“Gee, shouldn’t I be checking that stock I bought last week and see if it’s recovering yet from its precipitous fall?”

“Gee, I’m almost out of clean underwear. Shouldn’t I be washing a load?”

Annie Dillard, a writer whose work I admire, once described the perfect place to write fiction as a small cinderblock cell without windows, without telephone and without Internet access. A place where one’s imagination can stay in its imaginary world because there are no other choices.

My choice of the perfect writing place isn’t as extreme as Dillard’s. I chose a fifth floor carrel in the library of a nearby university. Once there I can’t log on to the Internet because I’m not registered as either a student or a teacher. I can’t stop for a snack because there are no snacks to be had.  I can’t even go to the bathroom without lugging my laptop with me.

Yes, I miss the view of the waves and the islands, but my carrel is ideal. Without it I wouldn’t get the next book done.

As one of my favorite sister-in-laws (sisters in law?) recently put it, when one receives extravagant praise ,”Don’t hide under a rock. Wallow in it.”

Here forthwith is some unabashed wallowing, a complete reprinting of today’s excellent review of The Cutting from my hometown paper, The Portland Press-Herald:

Detective gives depth, life to Portland murder-mystery
By NANCY GRAPE August 2, 2009

When author James Hayman moved on from a full career as a creative advertising director in New York, he packed his bags for Maine. And he didn’t come alone.

With Hayman came his wife, artist Jeanne O’Toole Hayman, and his fictional creation, Michael McCabe, a high-level police detective eager to turn his decaying cop’s life in New York City into a new life in Portland for himself and his young daughter.

Hayman has done him proud. In “The Cutting,” he gives readers a suspenseful police procedural whirling around a character who has the brains, courage and human concern to be the reader’s hero from start to finish.

All in all, if that sounds like a rave review, it’s because I intend this to be one. Rarely does a new novelist make a debut, in Maine or anywhere else, as polished, well-paced and plotted as this one.

Even less often does a writer create characters as well-drawn and centered as Hayman gives us with his Portland Police Detective Sgt. Mike McCabe, three years into life in his new city.

The book piqued my interest from the first page, and I didn’t stop thinking about it until the tale was told and the book was done.

The story centers on young athletes, busy and strong, who disappear from their lives in Portland only to have their bodies later discovered – hidden away except for their hearts, which have been painstakingly removed.

Hayman sets McCabe on the case. So does Portland Police Chief Tom Shockley, a man with a sharp eye for the media and a taste for public news conferences.

“McCabe, we’ve just had a horrible murder of an innocent teenaged girl. On the very same day, another young woman is kidnapped,” Shockley tells him. “The public has a right to know what’s going on. What we’re doing to catch the killer. The media expects you to be part of the briefings, and so do I.

“Cases like these don’t happen in Portland – at least not very often – but they’re part of the reason I pushed back against both the union and department tradition to offer you a job.”

All was not nobility of purpose in this order to share the stage, however, and McCabe knew it. “He knew it wasn’t the need for a press briefing that was bugging him. That was a given,” he thought.

“What was really (bothering) him was his feeling that, deep down, Shockley saw Katie Dubois’ murder as an opportunity to generate headlines that’d make him look good, headlines that might even lend traction to his rumored run for governor.”

So, Hayman’s new hero comes to Portland with more than courage and compassion; he comes with city shrewdness and big-time smarts.

It is part of the richness of “The Cutting” that McCabe also humanizes his environment, bringing it both honor and depth.

Hayman gives him a first-rate portrait of Portland in which to enact his manhunt. And, in addition to the daughter his ex-wife left behind, he gives McCabe a credible romance and a second waiting in the wings – this one with his police partner, Detective Maggie Savage. All are part of a large and credible cast that enhances this book.

But it is McCabe who brings its pages to life and gives it depth. “Standing here in a scrap yard in Portland, Maine, McCabe suddenly had the feeling he was back in New York,” Hayman writes. “It wasn’t like he was imagining it. Or remembering it. It was like he was really there. He could hear the rush of the city. He could smell the stink of it. A hundred bloodied corpses paraded before his eyes.

“His right hand drew comfort from resting on the handle of his gun. Mike McCabe once again lured to the chase.

“He knew with an absolute certainty that this was his calling. That it was here, among the killers and the killed, that he belonged. No matter how far he ran, no matter how well he hid, he’d never leave the violence or his fascination with it behind.”

Readers can only hope those words also frame a promise to them from Hayman. Mike McCabe emerges from “The Cutting” a detective many readers are going to want enriching Maine for a long, long time.”

Here’s a link to the review as it appeared in the paper:
http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=274367&ac=Audience&pg=2

Having just returned from my first reading/signing tour of bookstores, mostly in Maine but also the Water Street Bookstore in Exeter, NH and Barnes and Noble in Paramus, NJ, I thoroughly enjoyed Joe Queenan’s essay in the July 16th edition of the NY Times titled “Escort Service.”

Queenan riffs on a little known niche profession which serves the literary industry by schlepping established authors around strange cities on their frequent book tours. Here’s an excerpt:

“I have always loved book tours. I became a writer only so I could go on book tours. I have done tours as small as four cities and as large as 16. They have taken me to places I never expected to visit — Iowa City, Coconut Grove, Hay-on-Wye — and introduced me to passionate book lovers I will remember forever. Among these book lovers, the most memorable are the “literary escorts” who ferry authors around town.

Literary escorts, by and large, are middle-aged women who make a living by picking up authors at the airport, shuttling them from one media outlet to another, filling them in on the next interviewer’s background, buying them lunch, telling them where the liquor store is, preventing them from having nervous breakdowns. Some do it as a job, some as a hobby. Escorts are always smart and invariably funny. A lot of them smoke.

Escorts immediately make you feel as if you had known them for decades. Their duties range from bypassing pileups on I-95 to purchasing double soy lattes to explaining why only one person showed up at your reading in Winnetka. In Los Angeles, where your first interview might be in Malibu and your second in Pasadena, no author could function without them. The same is true in Kansas City, a burg the size of Asia. But literary escorts are not simply chauffeuses; they are coaches, reconnaissance experts, debriefers, psychologists, comrades in arms. With few exceptions, they adore writers, and consider themselves lucky to ply their arcane trade.”

Needless to say my only escort on my recent book tour was my wife. After reading Queenan’s essay she informed me, in no uncertain terms, that regardless of future fame or fortune as a writer of thrillers, things would stay that way.

You can read Queenan’s entire piece, “Escort Service,” at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/books/review/Queenan-t.html?ref=books

The standard advice for writers regarding reviews and reviewers is ignore ‘em. Some writers claim they don’t even read the reviews of their books.

I don’t see how anyone could possibly have that much self-control.  It’s just too interesting and exciting for me to find out what people think of the project I’ve been working on for the past couple of years. 

So far, thank goodness, the reviews of The Cutting (with one notable exception) have been very good.

Yesterday, Sunday, July 28th, the first review from a major daily newspaper, the Providence Journal, came in and it too was positive.

Here are some of the highlights:

“Recommended
“The Cutting”: Bright, appealing hero carries gruesome thriller.

…You will suspect the motivation behind the crimes before McCabe, but your insight was intended. Bookstores have been looking for a writer of popular fiction who can reliably produce a bestseller. James Hayman, a Brown grad, has invented a cop with sophisticated tastes. If your summer reading includes a psychological thriller, this one’s for you.”

Obviously not all reviewers will be as positive about my books as the reviewer for the Journal.  Still, for me, one of the great pleasures of producing a novel is seeing what people, including reviewers, think of it. 

Ignore reviews?  No way. I shall await the next, whether from a newspaper or an individual reader, with baited breath.

It’s hard to believe but The Cutting goes on sale everywhere today, June 23rd. It’s been more than three years since I wrote that first line, Fog can be a sudden thing on the Maine coast. Waiting for this day, I’ve felt kind of like a kid waiting for both Christmas and his birthday rolled into one!  And now it’s here.

While I’m sure I’ll be thrilled if the book sells well, I think my greatest pleasure will come from hearing from readers who have truly enjoyed the story.

So please, if you have a chance to read The Cutting, let me know what you think. I’d love to hear from you.

Jim

Maine literary blogger Amy Canfield who’s an editor for Islandport Press when she’s not reading and reviewing books just gave The Cutting a terrific review where, among other things, she called the book “…suspenseful, intelligent and smooth, everything a good thriller should be.”

Read the entire review at:

http://islandportpress.typepad.com/pagingamy/2009/06/i-finished-james-haymans-the-cutting-more-thana-few-days-ago-but-as-i-usually-do-when-i-review-a-book-i-like-to-have-some-t.html

You can read a new online interview about The Cutting  from writer/reviewer Patrick Shawn Bagley.

Go to:  http://patrickshawnbagley.blogspot.com/2009/05/author-interview-james-hayman.html

It’s getting close and it’s getting exciting. June 23rd and the official launch date for The Cutting are right around the corner. Reading and signing events have been scheduled for a bunch of bookstores in Maine and in the region. I’ll be doing an interview for 207, an NBC talk show that follows the evening news with Brian Williams in Maine markets.

All of this is new to me. All my years in advertising and I was always on “the other side of the camera.”

Everyone tells me I’ll be fine and I’m reasonably sure they’re right.

Trying to spend as much time as possible on McCabe #2, as yet untitled, but there’s enough to do preparing for the launch that it’s tough to get in the hours.