Maine Crime Writers

It is vitally important to flesh out the characters in a novel. They must leap from the pages vivaciously like real living beings. And nobody is more important than that of the protagonist of the story. Nothing will kill a book quicker than a Flat Stanley character with no depth—physically, emotionally, or mentally.

Langdon, Clay, and 8 Ballo can’t just be PIs perusing the pages pursuing the baddies. Why? Because we, the writer and readers, must care about them. They need a favorite color. Unrealized dreams and heartache. Love, desire, and lust. Pet peeves such as people who don’t know how to use blinker signals.

Unless it is a horror book, nobody cares about a skeleton flittering through the story arc. We all know that those with no names and descriptions are going to be the first to die. To bring the invisible to visible, a character has to be imbued with traits that we associate with humanity, good and bad, and creates a sense of caring.

“I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe: Nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber, and liquids — and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, simply because people refuse to see me.”— Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

I trust that everybody agrees with my assessment of the necessity of pumping substance into a character by giving them likes, dislikes, wants, backstory, dreams, and a personality. Why, then, are these characters not allowed to have a political or social opinion?

It does not have to be infused into every page punching the reader in the face, but the reality is that human beings have opinions, and most have strong points of view regarding political and social issues.

My last three books deal with wendigos, gangsters, and cartels striving for world domination. Three things that people can come together against, even if there is a subtle idolization of gangsters throughout history, or, at least, much more than wendigos and evil cartels.

But I have also written a historical fiction castigating the anti-Black equality white supremacist attitude in much of the South after the Civil War. I’ve stepped onto a limb and suggested that in 1959, Fidel Castro was a rock star and a hero the entire world over, especially here in the US. I’ve gone after Big Pharma, cult-like religions, analyzed genome editing, and attacked antivaxxers. Not me, necessarily, but the protagonists of my mysteries. Men and women who have opinions.

Infusing my people with opinions of a political or social issue has been one of the largest pieces of criticism that I have received. “This was a good book but no reason to be stating a political belief. One Star.” That sort of thing from reviewers who also happen to be haters. And the standard advice I hear is to leave politics and social opinions off the pages.

Of course, this does not pertain to those who have reached fame and fortune in the writing world. Once you reach the top of this artistic field, it seems, you can do whatever you want. But until you reach that plateau, your art is meant to be redacted, so that political and social beliefs are left in the waste basket of editorial despair.

What say you, readers and writers? Should characters, protagonists, antagonists—have political and social opinions or should they remain a Flat Stanley in those particular viewpoints?

Matt Cost was a history major at Trinity College. He owned a mystery bookstore, a video store, and a gym, before serving a ten-year sentence as a junior high school teacher. In 2014 he was released and began writing. And that’s what he does. He writes histories and mysteries.

Cost has published five books in the Mainely Mystery series, with the fifth, Mainely Wicked, just released in August of 2023. He has also published four books in the Clay Wolfe Trap series, with the fifth, Pirate Trap, due out in December of 2023.

For historical novels, Cost has published At Every Hazard and its sequel, Love in a Time of Hate, as well as I am Cuba. In April of 2023, Cost combined his love of histories and mysteries into a historical PI mystery set in 1923 Brooklyn, Velma Gone Awry. City Gone Askew will follow in April of 2024.

Cost now lives in Brunswick, Maine, with his wife, Harper. There are four grown children: Brittany, Pearson, Miranda, and Ryan. A chocolate Lab and a basset hound round out the mix. He now spends his days at the computer, writing.

You take the Laura B from Port Clyde, as if you were going out to Monhegan, but five miles out, your captain backs the boat into a tiny wharf off an island named Allen, in a narrow cut between it and Benner Island, dodging some semi-permanent moorings. You’ve arrived at what was once the summer home of Betsy Wyeth, wife of Andrew, daughter-in-law of N.C. Wyeth, and mother of Jamie.

Betsy, who died in 2020 at the age of 98, purchased 500-acre Allen Island in 1979, then Benner in 1990. She spent summers here, sometimes with Andrew, sometimes not.

Much is made of the fact that the Wyeths were not the “typical” summer people, whatever that means in an age when people work remotely and the season extends from Mother’s Day to Thanksgiving. Betsy did create a lobstering wharf on Allen, which is still in use today. She also expended a great deal of money and effort on restoring the buildings found on the island, creating splendid gardens and pastures, dug freshwater ponds. And she was notoriously protective of her solitude on both Allen and Benner, where she lived. (Not all Betsy’s impulses were pro-preservation. She allegedly built a long straight road the length of Allen so she could drive her Mini from one end to the other.)

The islands were originally “owned” by the Abenaki. A British explorer landed on the island in 1605, and a cross with his name commemorates the site of one of the first Anglican church services in North America. Allen Island supported a vibrant fishing community for many years, until the resident population declined.

In 2022, Colby College acquired the islands. I got to visit them a couple of months ago, and listen to the college’s Island Fellows talk about their work. Vaults for Andrew’s paintings are now laboratory space for trematode research, and while I’m not completely sure what they are, they’re not as cute as the puffins. Another researcher is cataloguing the soundscapes of the wind and the water. But since the Gulf of Maine is warming so rapidly, Allen Island is a useful place for environmental research.

While I appreciate Betsy’s preservation instincts, something in me quails at the notion that this beautiful land, the views, the harbors, were the sole preserve of one small privileged family for so long. It pleases me that the arc of Allen Island’s history is bending back to a communal respect for its possibilities, not a restrictive ownership. And what makes me struggle a bit less with the notion of private ownership is that you cannot truly own an island, can you? Long after you’re gone, the granite, the trees, the birds, the wind, and the water, abide.

I just got back from an adventure in the UK, my second this year, all in aid of narrative accuracy.

For the past year or so, I’ve been writing the third installment in the Aventurine Morrow series, Aventurine on the Border. The first part of this book takes place in The Kingdom of Hay, which is a town straddling the border between Wales and England: the River Wye cuts right through the middle of it.  Hay is the Used Book Capital of the UK, with bookshops lining the streets, inhabiting the Back Fold near the castle, and with the Honesty Bookshop (where one pays £1 per book into a self-service receptacle) tucked up against the bailey walls; it was declared its own kingdom by the original Hay bookseller, Richard Booth, who became its self-styled king. I’ve visited a number of times, but most recently spent time there in February, which, in the UK, is when the world is waking up from winter: warm breezes, daffodils, and mud–lots of mud. Because my characters need to navigate this town realistically, I did things they would need to do. I bought books. I squelched the public footpaths along the river and through the hills. I found the most wonderful coffee shop, next to the Buttermarket, and bought coffee in one to drink in the other. I wrote in pubs, drinking pints by the half, because I’m a lightweight. I was there on Pancake Day (the day before Lent begins), so the proprietor of the hotel in which I stayed–shoutout to The Swan!–made me pancakes with sugar and lemon. Aventurine made adventures; Anne made memories.

Hay-on-Wye appears in many many books. Lady of Hay by Barbara Erskine is one of the first I read, ages ago, and possibly one of the most famous. It’s the story of a journalist doing hypnotic regression, and finds she may or may not be the reincarnation of Matilda, the Lady of Hay in question; the present, in this novel, is interwoven with the past in a way that’s curious and fascinating. Another book, in the Merrily Watkins series by Phil Rickman–one of my favorite authors–is The Magus of Hay, which has his main character, the deliverance consultant for the Diocese of Hereford (read exorcist) investigating weirdness in Hay. It was Phil who made me want to visit originally, but I will freely admit: the Honesty Bookshop became the main draw for me. When I was there in February, I spent ages trolling the shelves–all in the open air, under a slanting roof to keep off the rain–and bought a number of paperbacks that grabbed my fancy; the £1 charge per book goes to help maintain the castle. In Aventurine on the Border, Avi picks up some books there, as does her twin sister Micheline; those books lead them on a series of adventures which may or may not have something to do with the disappearance, in an earlier book, of Mick’s husband.

The glory of visiting a location like Hay-on-Wye is that it’s a great place to give inspiration to a story. Actually, that’s the glory of visiting nearly every place I’ve ever gone in the UK. I have lots of stories of my adventures there–including blowing out my knee in Whitby this past summer (that’s another story, never mind–to paraphrase the Witch in Into the Woods)–and many of them make their way into my books. Perhaps I’ll tell you another one another time.