False Harbor

A Conversation With Michael Donnelly

Where does False Harbor fit into the rather large corpus of mystery novels?

Call it a low-bloodshed whodunit with a journalist protagonist, set in the San Juan Islands situated between Washington state and British Columbia.  Egret Van Gerpin writes for the Friday Harbor weekly.

Why low-bloodshed?  Most mystery readers don’t seem particularly squeamish.

The Indian sage Ramakrishna said, 'If a man eats radish he belches radish.'  I won’t read or write books that are gory, sadistic, or primarily dark.  For me, a true mystery is not about wallowing in depravity.  It’s about the human drama surrounding crime; it’s about inexplicable events; it’s about detection; and it’s about people with the strength and decency to confront evil.  Conan Doyle didn’t need horrendous violence to rivet his readers.

 If depravity isn’t your territory, what is?

Somewhere between Umberto Eco and the Hardy Boys.  I like books with mystery, adventure, and scholarship.

Yet the convention of the mystery genre demands a capital crime.  A murder.

Not only a dead body, but a dead body in the first chapter.

If not the first page.

Happily, my publisher isn’t so locked into formulas as many publishers are.  One editor liked the book but wanted more suspects.  The story had ‘only’ 7 or 8 suspects and their guidelines called for ten.  I’ll do what the story demands, not what the formula demands.  Back to the corpse thing.  In chapter 1 of False Harbor, something horrific happens to the main character, a great sculptor, which causes him to fear for his masterwork twenty years in the making.  There are crimes and events more emotionally wrenching than murder.

Do you read a lot of mysteries?

I start more than I finish.  I’m a slow reader, appreciative of details, so I don’t have time to waste on things that bore me.  A lot of books seem knocked off to meet a deadline, with very little polishing.  For me, it’s the many rewrites that bring out the depth of the story, like the beauty of fine wood after repeated coats of hand-rubbed lacquer.  I read far more nonfiction.  A lot of research.

What background do you bring to your writing, and do you have a day job?

My dad was in the weekly newspaper business, and my first job was at the printing plant.  I was expelled from high school for publishing an ‘underground’ newspaper.  And in college…you don’t want to know.  For many years I did labor relations work: union contract negotiation, employment litigation, a great variety of issues involving people in conflict.  When my wife, Cori, and I got the house paid off, we both quit our jobs and I’m writing full time now, hoping that book sales will someday put beans on the table.  Soon would be okay.  I still serve as a volunteer community mediator, handling a variety of disputes.

Why is writing so important to you?

It just is.  Part of the answer is a raging curiosity that needs feeding.  Bagging the job frees up time to pursue whatever line of study appeals to me, the big mysteries of life.  I’m currently engrossed in the timeline of human development, trying to get my hands around archaic civilizations, particularly the fabled ‘Golden Age’ cultures.  Human history beyond a few thousand years is obscure and widely misunderstood.

Will this research show up in your next book?

One percent of it will.  It’s my daily torture to distill the key idea from each mound of source material.

Back to False Harbor.   Your sculptor, Anton Gropius, is a powerful character.   Where did the inspiration for him come from?

 A:        He’s not modeled on any single person, but the germ of the novel stems from an incident where many of Korczak Ziolkowski’s sculptures were trashed by a disgruntled relative.  Korczak conceived and began carving the monumental Crazy Horse figure in the Black Hills.  I’d spent a day with him once, deeply admired his work, and was horrified by the destruction.  That said, False Harbor is fiction and Gropius is fiction--my extrapolation of what it must be like to give body and soul to creating something extraordinary only to face having it reduced to rubble.

Not many male writers choose a female protagonist, particularly writing in the first person point-of-view.

More commonly it’s the reverse.  But why not?  One of my favorite mysteries in recent years is Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg.  Terrific female protagonist.  And if you credit the doctrine of reincarnation, we all have a rich diversity of gender and cultural experience deeply lodged in the consciousness.  Egret emerged almost without me noticing it.  In my proverbial first-book-gathering-dustballs-under-the-bed  Egret and her husband started out as a team.  Then the story took some unexpected twists and the husband showed his true colors—and he was somewhat of a growler.  Egret had more on the ball and I didn’t mind spending time in her head, so I dispatched the husband off to ego-land.  I will say that Egret has a male collaborator; you just haven’t met him yet.

One reviewer compared Egret to Kinsey Milhone, and her wry observations seem Lew Archerish.  Is there a comparison you find particularly apt?

I’ll leave that to readers who know these other characters better than I do.  Egret is a determined overachiever who rejects the ‘if it feels good, do it’ ethic of her hippie mom and commune upbringing.  But, more than she realizes, the 60’s sense of questing for the Big Answers is an important part of her character.  

Egret is based on San Juan Island.  Why did you choose this setting?

Islands hold a great attraction for me.  There’s an element of escape in one’s choice to live on an island, to visit, or to write about one.  The residents are a mostly caste-free grab-bag of eccentrics: billionaires and food-stamp survivalists, writers, artists, inventors, escapees from…whatever.  Islanders tend to prize the natural beauty around them, especially the moat of saltwater that keeps trendiness at arm’s length.  They value community spirit and reduced regimentation. For example, the Shaw Islanders resisted for years erecting road signs.  When it became necessary because of fire and ambulance service, they chucked the county’s standard green signs and carved their own wooden signs.  Each island has its rich variety of characters and its unique history.  Cori and I were kayaking on the Canadian side last year and camped on a deserted island where we found the crumbling remains of a Chinese leper colony.  Just the two of us and all those ghosts.  Did you know there have been over a hundred mystery series set in Southern California?  In False Harbor I’m inviting readers to experience a change of scenery.