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Yeah,
Baxter McLean will be back, this time our unlikely folk-singing
sleuth getting tangled up in the messy revolutionary politics of the
1970s, specifically the so-called United Freedom Front, which, in
1976, decided that bombing our happy little town, Newburyport
Superior Court, was an interesting and effective way to protest
whatever it was they were against (it seems so foggy now, like a bad
dream) in the next Libertyport murder-mystery — Libertyport being
that quaint, fictional-but-oh-so-familiar New England community where
everyone knows everyone else, and their business, “an idyllic
vision straight out of Norman Rockwell, but gay-friendly, with hybrid
cars and flat-screen TVs,” as Joel Brown, the author, puts it. But
you won’t find him, Baxter, kicking around the Rum House, or
fending off the ferocious queries of local gossip/blogger Abigail
Marks until next year. “If I make good on my promises,” says
Brown, a North End resident, Boston Globe scribbler and author
of “Mirror Ball Man” and “Mermaid Blues,” the two
Libertyport/McLean mysteries. And he pretty much has to follow up on
the series, seeing how he promised to kill off some lucky fan as a
reward in his Kickstarter campaign to help finance “Essex County
Byway Guide: History, Culture & Nature on the North Shore,” his
current project, which has its coming out party next week at Plum
Island Coffee Roasters — and his third book in as many years.
They say you can't just a book by its cover. Which is bunk. Just ask Joel Brown. Last year, right about this time, the Boston Globe scribbler and Port novelist was in Carriagetown, trying to score some of that fancy, super-nutritious and undoubtedly horribly expensive food for his dog Buffy. All his Port connections had gone dry. That's when he spied Bertram & Oliver, a book store that had just opened a couple of months before. Brown had just self-published "Mirror Ball Man," a mystery set in a little seaside community very much like Newburyport and had a couple of copies with him, and when you self-publish, you also self-promote and you develop a thick skin. You learn that cold-calling bookstores is no worse than, well, stopping strangers on the street and asking them what it's like living in a city that's being overrun by bloodthirsty zombies, activated by a mysterious cell phone signal, like in "Cell," a Stephen King book based in real-life Malden — a fun, goofy assignment for the Globe that is responsible, in a way, for Brown's being able to come to terms with his secret desire: Writing fiction. So he swallowed hard and took the plunge, pitching to B&O owner Joanne Wimberly. She cooly assessed the cover, a picture of the Plum Island Lighthouse with a disco mirror ball shining from inside, and bottom-lined it: "Right cover, right price. I'll take six."
In downtown Libertyport the other day. You know, that achingly familiar, desperately quaint and picturesque and oh-so-hip New England seaside community? Ran into Joel Brown, the Boston Globe scribbler sidelining, these days, as a crime novelist. He was hanging in Foley’s, the iconic newsstand/coffee shop with the red and green neon sign and the old-time soda fountain, the funky rival the evil corporate bean-roasters just a couple doors down the street. Near, um, the Thirsty Lobster, that "defiant anomaly among the art galleries and boutiques?" Just across the street from the gently curving red-brick blocks of Dock Square, a mixed-use landscape of stores and restaurants on the ground floor and offices or apartments above, with awnings, signs and flower boxes adding color and variety, a public space that “just worked in a way that was hard to explain, like Fenway Park,” as the Port resident writes in "Mermaid Blues," his latest Libertyport mystery. But it doesn't work that well for Joey Durst, the hard-partying, not-so-hard-working son of a local fisherman, who turns up sleeping with the fishes in one of those surprisingly seedy walk-ups above the Whale — I mean, the Lobster.
Caught up with Joel Brown at Fowle's. He's a regular, stops in every day after an solo sunrise bike ride on Plum Island, and, closer to home, a bit of exercise with his dog, Buffy. Yes, named after the vampire slayer. He confesses to being “a little uncomfortable on this side of the pad.” You know, answering the questions instead of asking them. He's an old-school ink-soaked wretch. Moved to town in 1998 after landing a gig as television editor at the Herald, became executive arts editor, got voted off the island about five years ago, another casualty of print journalism's sad, long-running decline. He's still in the game — freelancing, poor bastard. Running a blog, Hub Arts, which has a wider view than its name might suggest. We're sitting at a table on State Street. Everybody seems to know him. Then again, he is a regular and this is Newburyport, or Libertyport, as Brown calls a somewhat fictionalized city in “Mirror Ball Man,” his first mystery. It's an “old-fashioned New England small town where everyone knew everyone else, an idyllic vision straight out of Norman Rockwell, but gay-friendly, with hybrid cars and flat-screen TVs.” That vision is shattered when Jules Titward, a local developer who has stirred up a lot of ugly emotions in his bid to build a hotel on the central waterfront, turns up dead, face first in the gravel parking lot, the proposed project site, next to his Beemer, in a pool of his own blood.
