If you were a character in an Archer Mayor mystery novel, what would your name be?
If Mayor were instead to use just your name, not your persona, what kind of character might he create from the name?
The Newfane-based Mayor donates about eight names per book to charity. All you have to do is be the high bidder at one of the local auctions, and he will use your name. Your namesake may end up floating face down after just a few pages, but apparently that's a gamble many are willing to take.
So, does Mayor build characters around these names?
“No, you let the story give birth to the child, and then you name the child,” Mayor says.
But because of Mayor's habit of name-auctioning, he can “get saddled with names that are real clunkers; these you need to kill off right away - instant corpse, no problem.”
Something about Mayor's demeanor suggests the distinct possibility of names clunky enough to justify extra, otherwise literarily unmotivated murders.
If so, readers (or high bidders, anyway) have a direct influence on the creative process, fitting the Joe Gunther novels snugly into the current realm of interactivity and audience participation.
More fundamentally, “you tell a story with someone,” says Mayor. “My readers are co-creators.” He tries to open the door to the reader's interest and imagination, without presenting an already-completed creation. The reader is invited to join the creative process and contribute to the picture and understanding of Joe Gunther and his community.
Much like scientists want more and increasingly better data to improve their theories, readers want more “information” on Gunther and his mate Gail - or now, the bartending Lyn - from Mayor, to develop their various Joe Gunther pictures, or “theories.”
However, just as scientific theories cannot be formally proven, a good story is never fully told. In some ways, human understanding and experiencing seem to rely on our simultaneously realizing and forgetting these “limits.”
Readers can also interact with Mayor, whose writing brings the buildings, streets, fields, and waterways of Windham County alive, by letting him share in creating our life stories (in addition to those of his characters).
Many Mayor readers will wake up each morning aspiring not only to a “Joe Gunther day” (to being fair-minded, thoughtful, and fully willing to share all credit, for instance) but also aspiring to remember, now that Mayor reminds us, to bring in those hammers and wrenches we have loose in the backs of our Subarus, before we, maybe, go off the road and down a snowy embankment, before we turn over and over in a could-have-been-fine kind of way, were it not for those tools-now-turned-lethal missiles we kept meaning to put back in the toolbox we keep in the pantry or laundry room or garage.
There's plenty to learn about practical matters - as well as about ourselves and our aspirations - while engrossed in one of Mayor's page-turners.
We might pause over our otherwise hasty pedicure-in-the-shower, wondering what life story a medical examiner (like Mayor himself) would hypothesize for us, based only on our toenails, should we end up on her or his slab today.
And as we drive by the motels on Putney Road north of Exit 3, we imagine ourselves in there as one of Mayor's characters, waiting for our fates, having chosen them.
* * *
Archer Mayor has written 18 Joe Gunther mysteries to date. The Sniper's Wife, number 13, marked the transition from first-person to third-person narrative, narratively necessitated by it being “Willy's book.” (That's “Willy” as in Willy Kunkle, Joe Gunther's “sidekick,” although the term knowingly fails to capture what Kunkle's character is and does).
The break between the first 12 and the latter 6 carries further meaning: Last year, Mayor was able to regain the rights to those first 12 mysteries from Hachette Book Group USA. These paperbacks had officially been declared out of print, and after a fair amount of administrative work, Mayor once more owns the publishing rights to these books.
In addition to a brand-new collaboration with St. Alban's Press to keep putting out one new story per year - and with Hachette still holding the rights to books 13-18 in the series, with number 18 being Chat, just out last fall - Mayor has decided to go into publishing himself and put out the first 12 under a new imprint, AMPress.
“Publishing is taking wet pasta and throwing it against the wall and counting yourself a success by how much sticks on the wall," Mayor says. "Imagine [instead] if each strand of spaghetti stuck - and they stuck because you had placed them, each one, carefully. You know, it's a thrilling idea.”
“I like to write whydunits, not whodunits,” Mayor says. Consider acts of murder. “As a species, we do that sort of thing quite naturally. I don't see most of the things we consider unspeakable as unspeakable.”
“That's what we do; that's why we're in constant warfare, that's why we've polluted our skies, that's why we misbehave so egregiously, that's why we're unfaithful to one another; that's why we're lacking in so many of the things that we hold highly, but we don't practice,” Mayor adds.
While warfare may to some extent be the norm for our species, individual members do not as a rule kill each other, at least not directly. But if formal social psychology has taught us anything, it's surely that more of us do have murder in us than believe we do - evil is banal, as the lesson goes.
But lessons, like stories, never end. Our doing wrong often stems from our being wrong, from taking the wrong thing for granted. Be careful, Mayor's writing warns, in what you take for granted. There will be a catch.
This cuts both ways. Certainly Mayor's art suggests there's a lot more stuff we're capable of, other than doing wrong, that we might not know or know how we manage, and much of it is quite beautiful.
* * *
So, Mayor's books are murder mysteries, albeit not whodunits.
The author also calls them “social anthropology and tales of conflict resolution" and "representations of geography."
"And what are the two markets my [old] publisher essentially didn't approach?" he asks rhetorically. "Those.”
With 12 books, “we're talking gigantic loans, mortgages out on the house, a hole so deep and full of red ink you can't imagine,” the author says.
“I still believe that these books will sell when they are applied to the proper marketplace, and that marketplace was barely addressed by the initial publisher,” Mayor says. “So far, so good. But it's early yet. We don't know.”
If you haven't seen the new editions and have in mind the traditional, squat, spine-breaks-right-away and pages-start-falling-out-before-you're-done-reading paperback, you're in for a nice surprise. Local graphic designer Dede Cummings' covers capture the richness, beauty, and place of Mayor's tales.
And there are numbers on the spine! Those of us who have been waiting since our Boxcar Children days for the pleasure of organizing books in numerical order need wait no longer.
The numbers on the spine literally invite new readers.
“I haven't read any of these books yet, and I want to start from the beginning," says Margaret Shipman, gallery manager at the Brattleboro Museum, who just ordered the books for the gift shop.
“While each book definitely can stand on its own, reading the books in order adds the element of watching the characters develop along with the changes in Mayor's writing,” Caryl Richardson of Heartstone Books in Putney points out.
Anyone who knows Mayor as a writer first and cop second is likely to think of his police work (and work as an EMT and death investigator) as, well, secondary, as if he really is at the crime scene or accident mainly to research his next book.
The intensity driving Mayor's literary creativity drives his other endeavors, too. He lives each job just as he lives the writing life. Writing isn't a hobby for him, nor is being a police officer.
“We're all doing [story] research all the time,” Mayor says. “Vested interest has nothing to do with being a writer. Anybody who is anywhere brings a vested interest. Even if it's just going to McNeill's [Brewery] later on and getting a better story because you were the guy at the fiery truck - you directed traffic.”
We are all storytellers. We're all doing police work, too, all the time, actually. It's no accident that Mayor's social anthropology takes shape in accounts of crime. The law-enforcement investigations are not so much metaphors for our epistemological cravings as they are literal representations of them.
We're all, all the time, trying to figure out what someone else is saying, if she means it, if he knows it, what kind of characters we are, and that's just the beginning.
The richness of Mayor's reminders proves - as much as anything can - how much we need them.
Good thing there's a new book each year.