Maine Crime Writers

Last week Allison had a great post about research.

I’ve been drinking deep from those waters myself for a project I’m currently working on.

Picture it. Pittsburgh in the early 1980s. The steel mills have collapsed, gutting the local industry. The Pittsburgh region’s unemployment peaked in February of 1982 at 18%. An industry that provided a pathway to middle class security was gutted. From 1970-1980, the city of Pittsburgh lost almost 100,000 people, representing over 18% of the population.

Johnny LaRocca was the aging patriarch of the western PA organized crime operations. In Pittsburgh, organized crime was deeply rooted at the  neighborhood level and revenue primarily came from illegal gambling (whether sports betting or the numbers game), loansharking, extortion, and labor racketeering. When my dad was growing up, he knew the local numbers guy who owned a bar and had cash on hand. He described him as a respected guy who people went to for help.

But during the 1980s this infrastructure was also disrupted. The RICO Act (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) was passed in 1970. By 1982, prosecutors were successfully using RICO to target individual and criminal enterprises. In October of 1982, Reagan announced the creation of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (OCDETF). This Taskforce brought together prosecutors and multiple federal agencies to target the financial infrastructure of major criminal enterprises. Finally, in 1982, under the RICO Act, the federal government filed a lawsuit against the Teamsters Local 560 in New Jersey which resulted in a court-ordered trusteeship while also removing individual defendants from control.

I could get into a wild story about the origins of the Pennsylvania lottery and its connection to organized crime or the infamous “Triple Six Fix”  of 1980, but I’ll save that for another post.

Today, I’m going to focus on the largest and most famous heist in Pittsburgh which took place on St. Patrick’s Day in 1982.

The target, a Purolator depot in Brentwood, a borough just south of Pittsburgh, was a concrete and brick block of a building in a semi-desolate industrial strip.

James Powers, the single guard on duty, was in the middle of his graveyard shift when two men dressed in trench jackets and fedoras ducked under the descending door as a Purolator truck was leaving. The men declared themselves as FBI agents, flashed badges, and warned him there was a robbery planned.

The two men taped his arms, legs, and mouth and left him in the employee lounge.

They then proceeded to make off twenty-six bags of cash, totaling roughly $2.5 million and weighing around 500 pounds.

As of today, the money hasn’t been recovered and the two men have never been identified.

My parents were young and in love and just starting out in the early 1980s. My dad worked in healthcare and my mom was a social worker working with refugee resettlement. Even with everything in the major shifts in Steel City, they remember how alive things felt.

What were you doing in the early 1980s? What are some things you remember from that time?

Paul Doiron, author of the Mike Bowditch series, has been nominated for all of the big crime writing awards. The Edgar. A Macavity. A Thriller Award. The Maine Literary Award. The list goes on. And on. And on.

I met Paul when he was the Guest of Honor for the Maine Crime Wave in 2025. He read the beginning of his latest book, STORM TIDE. In the five minutes he read, I was at once struck by the voice, the evocative setting, the energy of the pacing, and the sentence-level craftsmanship of the writing.

Since its release earlier this year, STORM TIDE has become a USA Today National Bestseller, a Publishers Weekly National Bestseller, a Boston Globe Bestseller, and was named Bookbub’s Best New Mystery of 2026.

Last month, he took out a few minutes out to connect with me about STORM TIDE, craft, and his early days as a Maine Crime Writer.

GS: This is the sixteenth book in the Mike Bowditch series. In it, Bowditch draws connections between several brutal crimes and believes he’s up against somebody who is executing criminals who escaped justice. The stakes are raised when he realizes he (and his growing family) may be the next target. One thing that really impressed me about this book is Bowditch’s evolution. If you read book one and then book sixteen (which perhaps I did for this interview), the character is not the same person. How has Bowditch evolved over the series? Has it surprised you?

PD: Mike’s evolution as a character is what keeps me doing this. It’s not Maine or the outdoors or even the mysteries at this point. In the run up to STORM TIDE I remarked that I feel like I am writing the autobiography of a Maine game warden. But maybe it’s like I’m writing the autobiography of my shadow self. I think it’s also the case that telling these stories relieves me of a need to document my own life in prose—although God knows I have a lot of biographical material that doesn’t connect with the series, even indirectly.

GS: The opening of this book is dramatic. I won’t go into too much detail, but you read it during the Crime Wave’s Noir at the Bar and it stayed with me. Did you know the book was starting with that particular scene or did that come later? The details of the scene are graphic but you watch that line so carefully around which details to include and where to pull back. Can you share a little with how you layer in details and when you know to pull things back? Does that come with initial drafts or through revision?

PD: The strength and perhaps weakness of my writing is that I visualize everything and want to describe it. I don’t naturally think of scenes or sequences or chapters. It all unfolds for me as if I am a passive viewer of my own imagination. When I am writing, I struggle to keep up with what my brain is showing me. Over my career I have had to learn to be more disciplined and deliberate about the storytelling aspects of this — being attentive to what the reader wants and needs on their end. Describing a fatal fire becomes a great test for me in striking a proper balance. The details give life to the scene, but putting in too many sights, sounds, and smells risks making readers close the book in horror.

GS: In STORM TIDE, Bowditch suspects he is up against a vigilante. Without giving too much of the ending away, I’d love to hear a little about what you think about justice, of systems, and the idea of vigilantes. 

PD: What interested me is how omnipresent vigilantes are in popular culture but how rare they are in real life (Luigi Mangioni proves the rule). A large percentage of murders go unsolved. As many as 40% depending on the place and the year. These insights gave me two thoughts. Justice doesn’t exist in a meaningful way even within the narrow framework of the law. And that someone intelligent and ruthless (or perhaps just sick) could easily exploit the weaknesses in the system to kill people they deemed as deserving of death. Why more people don’t do this is another question. I’m just glad that actual vigilantes are not as widespread as they are in television and movies.

GS: The setting always places a crucial role in your books in some ways because Bowditch is a game warden. In this story, where Bowditch’s personal life is changing, you take him to very isolated places in search of answers. Did you have these isolated, remote places in mind when you started writing, or did they surface for you as Bowditch began the investigation?

PD: I still travel around Maine far more than most people do. There are few public roads I haven’t driven and few private ones, too. I suppose I want to describe unfamiliar places and communities out of personal interest and because I want to share them with my readership. But I don’t think about settings in a Hitchockian sense (i.e: wouldn’t it be cool to have someone get shot at Mount Rushmore?) Of course I have set books in dramatic locales like the Hundred Mile Wilderness, but that’s become less compelling to me because it feels too stage-y now. I can’t seem to do high concepts. A portion of my 2027 novel COLD FRONT takes place around Acadia on Mount Desert Island but in lesser-known corners, and I never contemplated a big action scene atop Cadillac.

GS: What was something you really enjoyed about writing STORM TIDE?

PD: One of the pleasures of writing STORM TIDE was that, because it’s takes place over a year, the story demanded I bring in Mike’s friends and family. It wasn’t just about creating cameos. I wanted to show how Charley and Ora and Kathy Frost and the Cronks were important parts of his and Stacey’s day-to-day lives. In the future I would like the supporting cast to play larger roles. But that will depend on the needs of the individual stories.

GS: You wrote for the Maine Crime Writers once upon the time. I’d love to hear a little about your journey to where you are now. And for those of us who are just starting, any wisdom you think it’s worth imparting? Lessons learned or things you wish you’d known?

PD: Maine Crime Writers came into my life at a key point of my career. The Mike Bowditch series was existing book-to-book back then. There was no guarantee my current contract wouldn’t be my last. I feel like every author in that situation is preoccupied by the question: how can I keep doing this? Or do it better? Or do it more? A group blog is the perfect place to have that conversation with other writers because you are all trying to figure out what will work.

GS: You have been a professional writer for some time now. What are the things you really enjoy about the job? What are some things that make it challenging?

PD: The best thing without a doubt is connecting to my readers. There has been nothing more meaningful in my life than knowing my work has profoundly affected other human beings. (A married couple recently got tattoos of quotations from my books for their anniversary!) I wouldn’t write at all if the pages were only going in a drawer. I am not that kind of an obsessive. This is all about communication to me. The challenge is that, as a way to make living in twenty-first century America, writing fiction is incredibly hard. Our country puts up roadblocks for freelancers and the self-employed. Entrepreneurship is celebrated for setting up organizations (or returning strong share prices), not for being creative or genuinely improving anyone’s quality of life.

GS: What are some books that have recently (or continued to) inspire you? What pulled you into the genre? What are some books you picked up that made an impact on you? 

PD: The last author whose work that I devoured was Mick Herron. I’m glad I read his novels before I saw any of the episodes of Slow Horses, which is good but not half as funny as his books. Reading him (as well as Tess Gerritsen’s THE SPY COAST) was what made me want to add Cold War elements to my upcoming novel COLD FRONT—which remains very much a Mike Bowditch story, I hasten to add. Like I said, I can’t seem to do high concept. Everything I write can’t help but take very strange, personal twists.

GS: Thank y0u so much for taking the time out to connect, Paul. And really looking forward to the next Bowditch.