Mark Arsenault is a reporter for The Providence Journal, Providence, Rhode Island. His first novel, Spiked (2003), about a murder inside the Lowell, Massachusetts heroin trade, was a finalist for the Shamus Award for Best First Mystery. His follow-up novel, Speak Ill of the Living, was inspired by two years of jailhouse interviews inside Rhode Island's more notorious prison. Gravewriter is the first in a new series featuring obituary writer Billy Povich.
JB: You've said that nobody outside the newspaper industry has ever wanted to hire you, but did you know from the time you delivered that first paper that you wanted to be a reporter? How did your journalism career evolve from that point?
MA: Growing up, it never occurred to me to be a reporter. I thought reporters were the people who followed families in a pack after tragedies and yelled rude questions after them. That's true, of course, but that's just one ugly slice of the business. Real reporters are the ones who go where the pack does not, finding the stories nobody else gets. Very late in my college career, I decided I might like to be a writer. Taking a newspaper job was, I thought at the time, a way into the writing business. I didn't expect to stick with it, but I didn't know how satisfying journalism could be. My meager résumé lacked academic pedigree and elite internships, so I had to spend several years near the bottom of the profession, writing for small daily papers nobody has ever heard of, in Massachusetts. The work was hard, there were few editors who could help you improve, and the paycheck could actually make you laugh. But I wouldn't trade the experience. In 1994, I caught a break and got a job at The Sun, in Lowell, Mass. That was my first mid-sized paper with editors who could help me improve. I joined The Providence Journal in 1998.
JB: Tell us a little about what made Lowell, Massachusetts the inspiration for the setting and characters in Spiked.MA: During my time at The Sun, in Lowell, I was dispatched to cover a body found under a railroad bridge, just outside of downtown. By the time I got there, the action was over, but it was obvious that people had been living under that bridge. There were makeshift tents, piles of clothes and blankets, crates of canned food, and all varieties of trash. Working with the local homeless shelter, I tracked down the girlfriend of the man who had just died under the bridge. Her name was Julia. She was a heroin addict, like the rest of the community who lived under the bridge. I interviewed her at length. People who have nothing to lose are the most honest people you'll ever meet. She told me all about being addicted, and how much it hurt to lose her common law husband to an overdose. I remember she told me, "We weren't hurting anyone but ourselves … why couldn't we just have our little lives?" Heartbreaking.
I raced back to the newsroom with thoughts of the story (and the Pulitzer banquet) in my head. But my editor was not impressed, and he killed my story – spiked it, in the language of the newsroom. Why? I don't know. He just didn't want to hear about heroin addicts in his city, I think.
This was around the time the political book Primary Colors was in the news, which was originally published anonymously. I thought maybe I could write a mystery book, telling the story of the addicts under the bridge, do it anonymously, and get around the shortsighted editor without getting fired. So I started to write fiction. The project quickly outgrew my original intentions, and became a new career for me. By the time my book was published in 2003, I was already working in Providence.
I never knew what happened to Julia. I don't even know if she is alive … or if she ever realized my first novel, Spiked, is dedicated to her.
JB: On writing novel-length fiction, you've been quoted as saying, "Writing a novel is a matter of mind over ass. You have to put your ass in the chair and type." You've also said it's like long-distance hiking, "like walking fifty miles. No one part of the walk is itself very hard, but taken in total it's a tremendous amount of work." Great philosophies, and dead-on accurate. When and why did you "shed the myth of the muse" and stop waiting for inspiration? Is this strictly a by-product of your being trained as a deadline news writer?
MA: There is no muse. I am the muse.
When I come back with the results of the gubernatorial election, I can't tell my editor that I'm blocked ... and I need to take a long walk among the lilac and wait for inspiration. No, no. They'd have to peel the poor guy off the ceiling.
If I have 45 minutes to write a story before deadline, it has to be there in 45 minutes. If you can't do that ... then you can't do this job.
Writing is not alchemy. Writing is more like carpentry. This is the lesson of deadline writing. Bang it out, push the button.
Now, when I write off-deadline profiles or news features, I write them slowly. I'm a pretty slow fiction writer, too. But when I sit down to write, I never, ever get up with nothing done. When it's time to write, that's what writers do. [I think I may have said that very thing recently ...]
JB: Last year you did an interview with your friend Andrew Galarneau with the Buffalo News, and I'm borrowing a bit of what you posted on your blog back in August. Tell our readers about your personal rules for writing thrillers – the Message in a Bottle Rule, the Taunting Rule, and the Hindsight Rule.
MA: In order:
The Message in a Bottle Rule. One coincidence per novel, and it has to be at the beginning. Such as, your hero finds a message in a bottle that opens the story. That's the coincidence: that the hero happened to be at the beach to find the bottle. Or your detective gets assigned a routine investigation that turns out to be the case of the year ... the coincidence is that YOUR detective got assigned the case, and not some other plainclothesman.
No Taunting Rule. Don't taunt. If your character looks inside the moldy old cedar chest and sees the clue for which he or she had been searching, then the reader gets to see it, too. Don't you hate when writers taunt? Such as: "And as she threw back the creaky lid and looked inside, all became clear and she knew who was behind the murder of the 16 polo players!" Then the chapter ends, and some other scene begins. GAAA!!! What was in the blasted chest?? I hate that.
The Hindsight Rule. Clues should be scattered in plain sight. If someone were to read the novel a second time, the identification of the killer, in hindsight, should be head-slappingly obvious.
Occasionally, smart readers will figure it out ahead of time. That's okay. The irresistible human need to see how things end will pull them through the story.
JB: Speaking of your blog, what happened to "Smart Mysteries"? Do you blog somewhere else now?
MA: The blog was on hold as I finished another manuscript. But it's coming back. I'm starting a new regular column on mysteries for The Providence Journal, and I'll shortly be posting them on the blog, too. Please bear with me.
JB: What's next for Billy Povich? And is there a chance we'll see Eddie Bourque again at some point in the future? How did the decision to pursue a different series come about?
MA: The next Povich adventure is done. Billy, Bo and the Old Man will be back to figure out who paid off the shooter of a well-known judge.
I was a little burned out on the Eddie Bourque character after two books, maybe because that character is more autobiographical than Povich. I switched publishers after my second book, Speak Ill of the Living, was published in 2005. It was just easier to start with a new character.I have plans for several more novels in my head, and Eddie is not among them. Who knows, though? I would never rule out a third Eddie Bourque book. My fiancé is after me to consider that character again.
JB: Let's talk a little more about your work at The Journal. The paper was honored as a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2003, in part due to the series on the fire at The Station nightclub and the overhaul of the Rhode Island state fire code, of which you wrote two of the eight installments. Can you share your thoughts on that experience with us?
MA: The Station fire in 2003 killed exactly 100 people. In a small state, nearly everybody has some personal tie to someone who was killed or hurt, or to the families of a victim. I remember working some crazy amount of hours the first few days after the fire, just chronicling unimaginable pain and suffering. On maybe the third or fourth day, I was sitting on a bare concrete floor at a National Guard building, waiting with maybe 100 other journalists for the governor's daily press conference to begin. I could barely keep my eyes open and I didn't know how I'd be able to write. I just wanted to go to bed. But then the governor came in, the action started, I instantly popped awake and I said silently in my own head: "There is no place I'd rather be right now than here, doing this work."
I covered the fire and its aftermath, full-time, for 10 months. There is no place I would have rather been.
JB: You also wrote a three-part series on Craig Price, the maximum-security inmate in the Rhode Island prison system who murdered four people in the late 1980s, when he was a teenager. [The series, entitled "Into Another World", was published in The Journal in March 2004.] What kind of influence did delving into the mind of a killer have on your fiction writing? Did it also affect you personally?
MA: I met about 50 times with Price over two years in preparing that story. We also exchanged long, long letters. It's hard to explain to somebody outside Rhode Island how despised Price is in this little state. He committed his crimes in the late 1980s, but if you say his name out loud in a crowded restaurant in 2007, you will get dirty looks from all the locals.
He is widely considered to be the embodiment of evil; easily the most hated person in modern state history.
He never told his story to anyone, and I was surprised in 2002 when he responded to my letter and agreed to tell his story to me.
I wrote my piece for the newspaper in 2004. The stuff left over in my imagination became my third novel, Gravewriter.
In the newspaper series, we started with a real-life character who had done something monstrous, and who, in telling the story, was trying to reclaim his humanity. He was the monster who wanted to be a man.
The book is the mirror image: We start with a character who is basically a good person (though flawed). My character, Billy Povich, is consumed with fantasies of revenge, and he wonders if a monstrous act could somehow be considered justice.
If the experience at the prison taught me anything, it's that characters (both real-life and in fiction) are complicated, deeply layered and evolving.
From a technical standpoint, the prison escape scene in Gravewriter is based on conversations with Price, as he told me of a legendary escape from that SuperMax facility.
JB: Fascinating stuff, Mark - thanks for sharing that with us. Okay, that's probably enough of the heavy, probing questions – we can move on to something a little lighter. What do you like to do when your tail [ahem] isn't in the chair?
MA: I hike. My soon-to-be wife, Jennifer, and I collect U.S. national parks. We have backpacked above 14,000 feet, and my collection of hiking guidebooks probably weighs more than I do. Establishing the national parks was the second-best idea this country ever had, after the First Amendment.
JB: Let's say you and I are going to meet at your favorite hole in the wall for lunch. Where would we go and what would you recommend off the menu?
MA: We'll meet at AS220 on Empire Street, downtown Providence, after 1:30 p.m., when the rush slows down. I'll pay the extra dollar to have chicken added to the vegetarian burrito. We'll sit outside on the sidewalk. A waitress with a British accent will call you "my love" and "my darling," as if you had been dining there all your life. [Sounds fabulous. I can meet you and Jennifer there by 1:30!]
JB: Last question, Mr. Reporter. If you could have covered any event in history, which one would you pick and why?
MA: Interesting question. I've thought about this for a while. What is the better story? Victory or tragedy? The Wright brothers or the Lincoln assassination? The Hurricane of '38 or the moment of inspiration in which Einstein discovered that time was flexible?
What I like best are stories of hope. So I'll pick July 1939, at the New York World's Fair. My Polish grandparents have arrived on their honeymoon at the park themed "The World of Tomorrow." They don't realize a world war is about to begin, or that my grandmother would lose a brother in it. They're just two children of immigrants, both shop workers with little schooling, newly married, with $100 in wedding money in their pockets, and they have hope.
JB: What a great story that would have been. Congratulations, Mark, on your upcoming wedding, and thanks so much for taking the time to chat with us in the Lunch Room!
MA: My pleasure.
A Massachusetts native, Mark Arsenault has been a reporter since 1989, working at The Gardner News, the Marlboro Enterprise, and The Sun (Lowell, Mass.). He currently lives in Rhode Island and has been at The Providence Journal since 1998. Visit Mark's website at www.markarsenault.net.
