Shameless Commerce Division

As many of you know, Islandport Press will publish the second in the Ardmore Theberge series Hard as a Headstone in September. Here is the cover.

The web page for the book is here, if you’d like a glimpse. And if you are so inclined, would you also please press the Notify When Available button on the page? This helps the publisher gauge interest—you are not committing to buying the book (though of course I would love you to).

Islandport is also re-releasing The Last Altruist in September. More on that later. And thank you for your support, as those great winemakers Bartles and Jaymes used to say.

Return to Regular Programming

Having spent much of the last eight weeks with my toes above my nose—physical therapy speak for how to ice your new knee—I’ve had a fair amount of pondering time. As usual, nothing earth-shattering or lifechanging came out of it; too much time inside a writer’s head can be dangerous, even to the writer himself. What I did realize, after finishing the third Ardmore Theberge book (currently untitled), was that I wanted my next project to be something lighter.

Part of the feeling came from an experience I had at the Noir at the Bar put on in conjunction with last fall’s Crime Wave. (This year’s is scheduled for Saturday, May 30, 2026; details here).

A section of Ardmore three that I thought worthy of reading got unexpected laughs. Laughter is the sweetest music I know. I love to make people laugh. But I was surprised because the humor, which I only saw afterward was there, was more or less unintended.

Here in our part of the world, humor often means sarcasm. When we lived in the Pacific Northwest, one of the first things I learned in that other far corner of the country was that people there, for the most part, don’t get sarcasm. I was at a cocktail party celebrating my wife’s hiring at a private school and unleashed a comment that here in New England would have gotten a solid chuckle, at least. Blank faces and looks between my listeners as if asking each other “What did he mean by that?” Which is why we eventually came home.

In the 1982 movie My Favorite Year, Peter O’Toole delivers the line “Dying is easy, comedy is hard.” I’m not convinced being deliberately funny isn’t one of the most difficult tasks in writing there is. Which is why I’m in awe of writers who can do it, comedians who can tap into whatever receptive vein we have with humor. I suppose it could be a learnable skill—you can learn to dance, even if I haven’t. But the downside of failed humor is that, when it falls flat, it’s not only sad, but it annoys. And the last thing any of us wants to do is annoy our readers.