Notes from the Bench

September brings the rain back, and the whole region turns over with it. It is my working weather, and it is the weather my first novel happens in, because it is the weather I wrote it in.

Late August in the town I made up. The river is down to its gravel, the evenings are coming in earlier, and everybody is waiting on the wet half of the year to start.

A repair café is a hall, some borrowed tables, and a line of toasters waiting to be fixed for nothing. They are the most cheerful rooms I know, and I gave my fictional town one and put my sleuth behind the counter.

June brings the estate sales out along the Sound. I go for the small broken machines, and I come home with something harder to price, the arrangement of a whole life laid out on card tables.

A well-made machine from the last century outlasts the household that bought it. The old ones were built to be opened and kept, and I try to give the ones I write the history they actually have.

A mill town does not empty all at once, and the mill itself goes last. This is what stays, and why I built my town to keep it.

Gault Mills is a town I am inventing for the mysteries I write. The first fact I settled about it is that it starts at the river.