Slaughter and Screwdrivers

From the time novelist Sarah Graves (aka Mary Squibb) and her husband drove down Route 190 into Eastport, she knew she wanted to write about this easternmost city in the U.S. Almost immediately, the “wonderful, old architecture” and “amazing amounts of history” coalesced with the not-quite-two-century-old fixer-upper they bought, to create the Home Repair Is Homicide mystery series.

Now 13 books later (Crawlspace will hit the shelves the end of the month) the series is a mover in the world of cozies—mysteries that take place in a self-contained location among people who know each other. According to Graves, “domestic mayhem is really what a cozy is at heart.”

Graves is no stranger to small towns, having grown up in the country, near a small town in northern Wisconsin, a place she says is very much like Maine, without the ocean. Summer and winter, she lived her days outside in the natural world—exploring, sledding, turtle-spotting—and is most comfortable there.

Today, in Graves’ real world she lives on Key Street in a house built in 1823; in amateur sleuth Jacobia (Jake) Tiptree’s fictional world, so does she. Both frequent the Peavey Library, drive by the East Motel, shop at businesses along Eastport’s Main Street, can see the scallop dredgers and tugboats in the harbor, and are generally privy to the intimacies of this small coastal town.

And both arrived after lives in big cities, although Tiptree’s past includes a life on the streets and work for the “mob,” and Graves was a respiratory therapist and freelance commercial nonfiction writer, living in New Haven, Connecticut, when she played the get-out-of-the-rat-race card and moved to Eastport.

The first book in the series, The Dead Cat Bounce, was published in 1997, and since then Graves has written a book a year following the intrigues of Jacobia, her family, and her friends as well as the ongoing home repair projects that propel each book and continue to be a part of Graves’ real life.

A hands-on do-it-yourselfer, Graves is skilled with scrapers and hammers, keyhole saws, whirring tools, and knowledgeable about the intricacies of windows and floors, wood finishes, door jambs. In the winter, when many of the projects now occur, she is happy to write five days a week and work on home repair for two, each a welcome respite from the other.

A rarity in the world of writers, Graves has been with the same editor, the same publisher, the same publicist for all the books. It’s a team she credits for the success of her series. She’s been featured on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, in the New York Times, and in USA Today, among others. The Boston Herald calls her a “genius” for her ability to “mix slaughter and screwdrivers.”

How dicey was it moving to this small town and writing about it the minute you arrived?

Well, it depends on whether you’re the writer or the “writee.” After the first book [The Dead Cat Bounce] people realized I was not out to skewer Eastport or anyone in it. Quite the reverse. I had fallen in love with Eastport and had written the book from that point of view.

Do most people who write a series like this actually plant it in the place they live in?

If you live in a big city, it’s more common and also less risky. I can’t think of anyone who does their own small town.

Anybody could find you in a heartbeat.

That part was not particularly planned. I could have engineered it a little better were I less of an innocent about it when I began. But there it is. It’s done now.

Do you write every day?

Just about. I have a page count. I do think that it helps to keep a schedule of pages per day. You get a rhythm. It’s pretty consistent. If I get ferociously energized, the page count goes up. But it never goes down. Somewhere between six and 15.

Tell us about the home renovation projects in the books.

Well, we got involved in home repair projects right away in real life. Our house is old and had been neglected for quite a while. Almost immediately I realized how funny home repair is, and then I couldn’t resist. You want to know what’s real in those books? If Jacobia hits herself on the thumb with a hammer, that’s real. If she starts out trying to replace a toilet seat and she ends up having to call both the plumber and the electrician, that’s real. In general, no project is made up completely. I would say the one thing you can depend on is that I’ve tried really hard not to steer the reader wrong in terms of how to do something.

Why did you begin to write as Sarah Graves?

This was a brand new series, set in a brand new place. It just felt natural to have a brand new name.

Growing up, did you have any idea you’d be a writer?

The concept of being a “writer” was not something I understood as something that people do. It’s a very unusual job. You don’t run into role models.

So what did you think you would grow up to be?

If I thought about it at all, I thought that I would grow up to have the same kind of life that my mother and her sister and my cousins and my aunts did—everybody was involved in one or another type of a service or caretaking profession. There were a lot of nurses on the girls’ side. The boys all knew how to do one trade or another.

You’re working on book number 14 in this series. Does it ever feel like a struggle to come up with the next story line?

No, it doesn’t. So far, I’m not running out of juice in that department. I think when you work in the mystery genre, there are so many kinds of evil that it’s not a struggle to come up with a new angle on what somebody could be up to. I doubt that the human race is going to stop coming up with new types of criminality anytime soon. I think I’ll be OK.

What is your biggest challenge as a writer?

Resisting the temptation to rewrite too soon. I’m one of those people who want to rewrite every sentence as I go along. The biggest challenge is to just keep pushing forward, no matter what it feels like on any given day. Good or bad. You have to believe that it will work out all right. It doesn’t matter if I have no idea how that clue got there on page 247; by the time I’m on 400 for the third or fourth or fifth time, I will know.

You use so many actual place names. How often do readers get confused between your fictional world and real world?

I don’t think they ever do. I trust them completely. People know they’re in a fictional universe and assume that some things are made up out of whole cloth. The murders, for instance. Extrapolating from that, they realize that this is fiction.

But Jacobia’s house and your house are on Key Street. Both were built in 1823.

Yes. But it’s a fictional universe. I may not be so careful about my own house, but I’m careful with others. So if you’re driving down the street and the book says turn left, it might be in real life that you turn right—or [she laughs] not turn at all.