Maine Crime Writers

In Los Angeles

I hate to admit it,  but I needed a wake up call. I got stuck in my latest crime/mystery novel and fell a bit into allowing the distraction of the world’s off-kilter, askew-ness, imbalance, WTF-ness, wake-up-and-smell-the-stinky-coffee-ness, kick-in-the-head-realization-that-the-mind-divide-of-my-fellow-human-beings-is-wide-ness to grab my attention. This has made my progress slower than normal. Distraction. I love the “work” of writing and being stuck (and distracted) is not fun and getting jolted out of it is great.

This trip to Los Angeles to see our kid has been a good and healthy thing. Let me tell you why:

My daughter, Lil, has a great sense of humor.  Dry.  Quick. Sometimes silly. Rarely cruel in her observations on life and people. She’s living in the town she was born in – Los Angeles and she has chosen a tough career – comedy. Not the stand-up kind (but I get the feeling she is moving into this (but I don’t pry – as my friend reminds me – the best after-eighteen parenting is benign neglect). In high school (in Los Angeles) she did theater (musicals, dramas, comedies) but she also started going to an IMPROV workshop and continued that in college in Boston.

She moved to Chicago and (in three years) worked her way up to the Main Stage of Second City – one of the premiere comedy sketch venues in USA.

Some of these faces above you’ll recognize as Second City former performers that eventually got national/international recognition.

Now, Lil’s back living in LA, she performed at UCB (Upright Citizens Brigade). UCB is ALL improv (not written sketches that you memorize and then might jump off from), so it’s about knowing the technique of how to get a beginning, middle and end and making a cohesive piece of comedy that will hold together just using your chops and thinking on your feet.

Now she is in the Sunday Company at the Groundlings – pretty much all sketches – it’s the other premiere sketch comedy venue in the USA. Some of the faces that have come out of the Groundlings that you might recognize:

 I’ve met a lot of her ‘comedy’ friends and, off-stage, they are a very serious bunch. They work their asses off and commit to an insane writing schedule. They’re writing/observing/working on ideas all the time, ‘cause comedy and sketches can be ephemeral – if they are topical, they may only live in one performance, if they are more based on ebbs and flows and oddities of humankind, they can last longer and be tweaked and repeated. But you always want to give the audience “the new” –

Poster outside theater where our kid and her cohorts are performing now.  Our kid is in the top right in all black.

                  Here’s her schedule at the Groundlings (there are 10 people in the comedy troupe, so each is going through/doing the same thing). You’ll see there is no time for distraction:

• MONDAY: Each comes up with 3-4 sketches (in the best possible world, sketches that have beginnings, middles and ends, last around 5 minutes and reflect on the vicissitudes and crazy, odd elements of life, ones that will make people laugh, think, hopefully see something in a new way, etc etc.). Each person writes their sketches, character bios, figure out who in the comedy team would be good in the sketch along with them, cast them, list what props/sets/costumes they will need.
  • Do “day job” work too (comedy, at the level she’s at which is quite respected, doesn’t pay well)
  • Specifically for my kid: Work on her “other” comedy show that she is contracted to produce/perform in twice a year at a cool theater near the LA River (this is a two-hour multi-cast “play” called THE BABY: RADIO MYSTERY HOUR.
  • This April trip was planned so we (hubby and I) could see the next installment of this play – it was wild fun with live “foley” (sound effects), a theatre of 200 which was sold-out (which is good because she wrote it with another person and they produced it too and thus get a cut of the house – a mini-mini-mini-ka-ching).
• TUESDAY: Polish the Groundlings work and write one more sketch in case the Monday ones don’t impress the director.
  • Do “day job” work that pays most of the rent and prepare other performance/comedy stuff.
• WEDNESDAY: Pitch day.  3 pm to midnight. At the Groundlings theatre, pitch sketches to the director and pitch why they are “worthy”.  Of course, the director (like our publishers/editors) has his/her own taste and the director now is in charge of making a choice that affects their lives and hard work. Cold-read sketches with the other actors/comedians and act in the other members of the company’s sketches.
  • Day job
  • Other comedy stuff/writing
• THURSDAY: Director (using his/her own taste) chooses the 10-12 sketches that “make the show”. He gives notes to the writers of those sketches. (So the possibility of having your sketch chosen is dear – about one in four?). The unchosen get put into the “maybe next show pile” and that can suck.
  • Day job
  • etc
• FRIDAY: Rewrite day according to director’s notes and get all the elements needed for the sketch nailed down, get the costumer/musical director (there is an in-house band), stage manager, lighting and sound people all set
  • Day job
  • etc
• SUNDAY:   ALL DAY. 10 am to 7 pm rehearsal.  Show starts at 7:30 pm and it’s always sold out (really nice theater on Melrose Ave in Hollywood seats about 150 people) and remind self that there’s no wiggle – you have to be on tippy toes of fast comebacks and fun comedy and fulfill the sketch while responding to the audience… (Basically don’t do something stupid like break up with your loved one that morning…)
• And then MONDAY is there again, and it starts all over.

So this trip to LA has been great for me. To see how hard these young comedians work, how many ideas they have to generate and commit to and write, to see them work together, and see them always pushing forward and supporting each other and then blowing off steam at local bars or gatherings.

Back to not letting the grass, fertilized by a world I worry about, grow under my feet.

Her writing life is  really a lot like we go through.  Not that week to week “end of a project” (we tend to take 6-12 months  for a full project?) – but it’s the same sort of grind, excitement, generation of ideas and support  –

Speaking of support – MAINE CRIME WAVE is May 30!!!  Saturday!!!!  Mechanics Hall in Portland Maine. 8:30 for coffee/gather and then 9 -4:30 or so.  So many great panels and workshops and chance to talk to fellow authors!  SIGN UP NOW!   And consider starting the “gather days” on Friday night – May 29th  –  NOIR AT THE BAR at Bellflower Brewery (66 Cove Street in Portland)-  Maine Writers reading from their work and prizes and a lot of fun.  Info at the website below!

https://www.mainewriters.org/maine-crime-wave

April Fools!

There will be no ultimate happiness here. This is an April Fools post, as this is the one holiday perfectly suited to a group of crime writers. Pranks, shenanigans, jokes, hoaxes, hijinks, and general all-around tomfoolery. Maine Crime Writers will share their favorite April Fools’ antics of misbehaving. Pranks played on others, clowning they were the victim of, ones they have written or read about, or capers burbling in their minds, ready to come out.

Matt Cost went through a spate of five or six years where he was the victim of a cruel and vicious prank played upon him by his wife and four children. Imagine the scene, if you will, four giggling children at the breakfast table, a wife studiously avoiding eye contact, and a bleary-eyed Matt stumbling into the kitchen to get the day started. To the cupboard for a coffee mug. Giggle-giggle. Open the fridge. Creamer. Giggle-giggle. To the coffee pot. Pour a cup. Giggle-giggle. The dog’s water bowl is low, so Matt reaches over to pick it up. The tittering at the table is about to explode. Matt puts the bowl in the sink, hesitates, ponders some thought of the day, and then turns the faucet on. Immediately a spray of water jets horizontally across soaking his pants. Pandemonium erupts behind him. Matt has fallen, once again, to the classic April Fools prank of a rubber band around the kitchen faucet sprayer, so that when the water is turned on, it comes from the sprayer and not the regular faucet. Silly Matt. Six years in a row.

Kait Carson Not an April Fool’s joke, but a cat who dialed 911. Meet Starlight – and note the double dewclaw that provided her with the means to commit the crime. Late one night, the unmistakable sound of humans in my backyard woke me. I reached for the bedside phone, a landline, and heard dead air. My cell lived on its charger in the kitchen. I belly-crawled through the house, grabbed the cell, and called 911. The dispatcher insisted that the people in my backyard were cops responding to a 911 call. The resulting conversation bore more resemblance to Who’s on First than What’s your Emergency. By this time the cops were in the house and I noticed the kitchen landline was off the hook. When I replaced it, Starlight jumped on the counter and walked over the phone, hitting a speed-dial button with her sixth toe and knocking the handset from the cradle. Mystery solved, and the joke was on me.

Kate Flora: Not an April Fool’s joke but a longer running one. In the small Maine town where I grew up, there was a drug store with a lunch counter where people gathered in the morning for coffee. One gentleman who was rather a blowhard was always holding forth about something, and evidently someone else (all unnamed, of course) decided to play a trick on him and see how he’d react. So, for months and months, said gentleman would receive postcards from all over the country. Unsigned, they would only say: Your sand is coming. When a card was received, he could be relied on to come to the counter and rant about it. After many months of cards announcing that the sand was coming, he came home from work one day to find his driveway blocked by an huge pile of sand.

John Clark: My favorite AF experience came when I was the librarian in Hartland. Beth and I had recently returned from a trip to California. At the time, I was writing a weekly library column about the library and for the first one in April of that year, I wrote about smuggling a rattler egg I’d bought in a curio shop on the trip. My assistant loaned me a baby rattle and we put it in a cardboard box with a blanket overt it and a sign inviting patrons to view a baby rattler. Someone read the column, panicked and called both the sheriff’s department and the local game warden. When they entered the library, serious as all hell, one dad who was reading to his toddler and had already been ‘had’ by the prank, was laughing so hard, I was afraid he was gonna drop his child. I explained to the two officials that nowhere in my article had I mentioned snakes, only a baby rattler. They left and it was difficult to tell if they were more amused or embarrassed.

Allison Keeton: My favorite practical joke is one that needed help from my Swiss pen pal, Beatrice. She was here in the U.S. visiting one August when I was in college, and UConn had announced there was a shortage of dorm rooms. Another friend of mine and I decided to play a joke on our boyfriends who had an apartment. Beatrice stayed in the car while we went into the apartment. Then she, in a country-bumpkin costume, knocked on their door, holding a suitcase and a flyer we had made with their information on it, advertising a room for sublet. Of course, they had no extra room. They were quite concerned about how many of these flyers were out there,  who had distributed them, and how many more people would come knocking. It was very difficult not to laugh. We did not confess to the joke, and, in my generosity, I offered to take the poor foreign college student home with me for the night. Almost forty years later, is it naughty that this story still brings a smile to my face?

Beatrice in her “poor little ol’ me” costume, 1986

Today’s post is by Maine writer Tim Queeney, author of the fascinating book ROPE- How a Bundle of Twisted Fibers Became the Backbone of Civilization. You can learn more about Tim on his website.

TIM QUEENEY is the former editor of Ocean Navigator magazine. Tim’s work has appeared in Professional Mariner, American History, and Aviation History magazines. He has had short stories published in the crime anthology Landfall, Best New England Crime Stories 2018 and in the speculative fiction anthology A Land Without Mirrors. Tim has been interviewed on BBC Radio London, Maine Public and Connecticut Public Radio, The World on NPR, Talk Radio Europe, Late Night Live on Australian ABC radio and on podcasts like Decoder Ring from Slate.com, History Unplugged, Something You Should Know and GarageLogic with Tommy Mischke. Tim lives in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, with his wife and a rescue dog, Frankie. A life-long sailor, he has taught celestial navigation, radar navigation and coastal piloting ashore and at sea — where he tied plenty of knots and handled many a rope.

At the End of Their Rope – The Death Penalty in Maine

By Tim Queeney

In mid-April 1885, two men stood on the gallows at the state prison in Thomaston amidst the splendor of a Maine spring morning. A newspaper reporter present recorded that, “A bright sun shone upon the scene, the green grass was showing itself, the birds outside the prison walls were chirping and everything spoke of life.” For the men on the scaffold, however, the day would prove a short one.

Neither Raffaele Capone nor Carmine Santore, two immigrant railroad workers from Italy, spoke English and so the proceedings of their two-day trial for the shooting and bludgeoning murder of Paschual Coscia, a fellow immigrant, had been translated for them by “a man from Camden.” The state’s newspapers had trumpeted the details of the case and following Capone and Santore’s speedy conviction, the Kennebec Journal ran the ghoulish headline: “Hemp for two.”

At the appointed time on that spring morning the executioner threw the lever that released the trap door. For the briefest of moments, the men fell free in the April air — until the coiled slack of the two ropes ran out and the twisted hemp fibers brought the two convicts up short.

Legal procedures for trying and convicting murder suspects in Maine evolved from the 17th century and the jurisdiction changed from Massachusetts to the new state of Maine in 1820, but one aspect of capital punishment remained the same: rope. Every convicted criminal in state history, from “Goodwife” Cornish in 1644 to Daniel Wilkinson in 1885, was dispatched by the noose.

We don’t know the first name of first person to be hanged in Maine for murder. She was only listed in the records using a common term for married women in that period: Goodwife. Married to a man named Richard, Goodwife Cornish and her husband lived in the prosperous town of York, one of the larger Maine towns in the 1640s. It was not a happy marriage, with the couple said to argue in public and with Goodwife known to engage in affairs. One day Richard was found floating in the river. His abdomen had been pieced by a wooden stake, his skull was bashed in and his canoe sunk under a pile of rocks. Suspicion first fell on native Americans, but they pointed out that no native man would destroy a perfectly good canoe. Goodwife and her lover Edward Johnson became the next likely suspects and were brought to trial. During the proceedings they were forced to touch Richard’s remains under the mystical (and not a little bit crackpot) theory that if they were guilty, their touching of the body would make it bleed. Apparently at the laying on of hands, Richard’s rotting corpse effused blood. As a result, Goodwife was convicted and hanged in York in 1644 (in a sadly classic case of patriarchal sexism, Johnson was acquitted).

It’s unlikely that Goodwife Cornish ever trod a purpose-built gallows for her execution. It was probably done using a rope and a few local men. The concept of hanging as a short, sharp shock resulting in immediate death via the “hangman’s fracture” of the neck vertebrae is a surprisingly recent development. For most of history, hanging was not thought of or administered that way. Most hangings resulted in a gruesome, twitching dance of strangulation by the rope. At Tyburn, the famous execution place in London, it was common for the executioner and a few others he’d enlist from the overflow crowds, to hoist the convicted into the air as the condemned kicked and swung in eye-popping agony. Friends of the condemned would often grab the poor soul’s legs and pull, adding their weight to speed the deadly process.

By the mid to late 19th century, however, the idea of a more “humane” instant death began to be adopted. In 1866 an Irish doctor named Samuel Haughton published a formula, based on the condemned’s height and weight, for calculating the right length of drop to induce the hangman’s fracture. A British executioner named William Marwood took the idea further by publishing tables for finding the right length rope to achieve a quick death. This approach was dubbed “the long drop.” In the U.S., the long drop caught on more slowly. Eventually, the idea was accepted and an executioner strangling a condemned person was considered a bad day at the office.

Between 1644 and 1885, 21 people were hanged in Maine. Twenty of those were for murder or for the combination of murder, rape and/or robbery. Included in the 21-person total were two women, two native Americans and three black men. One young man, Jeremiah Baum, accused of aiding the British in 1780 during the American Revolution, was the only one hanged for treason.

An early case of crime scene forensics occurred in October 1834, when Joseph Sager’s wife Phoebe died after eating a mixture of eggs and wine (!) given to her by her husband. A doctor called in to administer to Phebe noticed white powder smeared on the egg and wine pitcher. He took a sample of the powder and later analyzed it: arsenic. Sager swung the following January.

Probably the most incongruous of the hangings was that of Samuel Hadlock in Dresden in 1790. On the first attempt, the noose slipped off Hadlock’s neck and he fell to the ground. The executioner, perhaps feeling a little hangdog at the miscue, promptly repositioned the rope and the second time was the charm.

The last person hanged in Maine, a British immigrant named Daniel Wilkinson, was dispatched in Thomaston in November 1885, only a few months after Capone and Santore.

Wilkinson was a habitual criminal who had been arrested for robbery early in 1883 but he managed to escape from the Bath city jail. On the night of September 4, 1883, a Bath policeman named Kingsley was on foot patrol along the waterfront when he saw Wilkinson and an accomplice named John Ewitt breaking into the D.C. Gould ship chandlery — inside of which were many valuable items, including, ironically, numerous spools of rope. Officer Kingsley shouted at the pair to stop but they took off at a dead run. Blowing his whistle, Kingsley drew his revolver and fired a lone shot at the fleeing duo.

Another policeman, William Lawrence, was on patrol on nearby Front Street as the two robbers emerged from an alley. Alerted by his colleague’s whistle and the gun shot, Lawrence was able to grab hold of Wilkinson. The criminal, however, was armed with a .32 caliber revolver and had it at the ready. Wilkinson brought the gun up into Lawrence’s face and fired. Lawrence collapsed to the street, a bullet in his brain. Wilkinson and Ewitt split up, disappearing into the night.

Wilkinson was later apprehended in Bangor by a Boston private detective hired by the Bath Police Department to hunt down Lawrence’s killer. After his trial and conviction, Wilkinson took his place on the gallows at the state prison at Thomaston. Once again, as it seemed so often was the case with hangings, things went awry. The noose was poorly tied and the rope slipped from behind one of Wilkinson’s ears, leading to a slow, choking death.

Although capital punishment was outlawed in 1876, the Maine legislature later reversed itself, reinstating the practice in 1883. In 1887, however, a bill was passed that once again ruled out the death penalty. Despite numerous attempts, that bill has never been overturned.

For more on the history of rope and its development as one of humanity’s greatest tools, see my book Rope – How a Bundle of Twisted Fibers Became the Backbone of Civilization.

Author’s note: One valuable source for this piece was Portland writer Troy R. Bennet’s excellent 20-part series on the death penalty in Maine, published from February to December 2022 in The Bangor Daily News.

Sources:

Bennet, Troy R. “Maine Death Penalty,” Bangor Daily News, https://www.bangordailynews.com/topic/maine-death-penalty/?_ga=2.63800108.24668731.1657053362-236464136.1654195228 Retrieved February 24, 2026.

Executions in Maine – 1644-1885 – DeathPenaltyUSA, the database of executions in the United States. deathpenaltyusa.org. Retrieved February 24, 2026.

Hearn, Daniel Allen (2015-08-13). Legal Executions in New England: A Comprehensive Reference, 1623-1960. McFarland. pp. 11–12. ISBN 978-1-4766-0853-2. Retrieved February 24, 2026.

Queeney, Tim. Rope – How a Bundle of Twisted Fibers Became the Backbone of Civilization. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2025.

Schriver, Edward. “Reluctant Hangman: The State of Maine and Capital Punishment, 1820-1887.” The New England Quarterly 63, no. 2 (1990): 271–87. https://doi.org/10.2307/365802. Retrieved February 24, 2026.

Wikipedia contributors, “Capital punishment in Maine,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Capital_punishment_in_Maine&oldid=1338469670 Retrieved February 24, 2026.