Summary
First, back to the mystery. After his tennis novel, [Don Bredes] dtafted one based on his post-college expetiences teaching high school in the Northeast Kingdom. But publishers weren't interested - the "back to the land" experience was considered hopelessly retro in those days, he says. New York editors didn't seem any more intrigued by his new novel about murder at the height of foliage season. Bredes showed the manuscript to his longtime friend and fellow NEK writer Howard Frank Mosher, who told him, he recalls, '"You know, Don, I think what you have here is a genre novel. It's a detective novel. You're writing an atiti-gtnre novel. What you've gotta do is introduce a sleuth character and have him solve the crime.'"
"I thought, Damn, he's right," says Btedes, now 61, who has flinty blue eyes and speaks with a raconteurs unhurried cadences. In his new version of the novel, he gave his daily farmer a half-brother - town constable Hectot [Hector Bellevance], a ex-Boston cop with dark memories. Bellevance, who describes himself in the first few pages with the memorable announcement, "God-fearing and decent weren't attributes I'd lay claim to," became Bredes' sleuth. "I invented him to solve a problem I didn't realize I had," the writer says. "Someone else had to point it out to me."Bredes' life has mirrored his older friend Mosher s in a startling variety of ways: They graduated from the same college, both taught at Lake Region Union High School - a job Bredes took in '69 to obtain a draft deferment - and lived a mile apart on a Barton back road. Not long after Mosher drove out to the University of California at Irvine to study creative writing - and discovered he hated the climate and "turned around and went right back," Bredes recalls - Bredes made the same pilgrimage. He ended up completing the program and connecting with a literary agent who would eventually get Mosher's first books into print, too. Later on, Bredes wrote the screenplays for Jay Craven's film adaptations of Where the Rivers Flow North and A Stranger in the Kingdom. He sees his work and Mosher's as complementary: "His stories are about the Kingdom that used to be, at least in the imagination, and mine are about the contemporary Northeast Kingdom."See the full content of this document
Extract
North Country Noir
Don Bredes didn't set out to write mysteries. But one fall day in 1984, a mystery found him. On the tennis court, a friend told the Wheelock wtiter that a couple from Canada, mutual acquaintances of theirs, had been slain in their Jay ski chalet. Bredes' tennis partner had, in fact, discoveted the bodies. But what he saw so distuibed him that he waited a day to report it, casting potential suspicion on himself.
The case stayed with Bredes. When he began turning it into a novel, he focused on his friend's dilemma. In the book, originally called The Sugar Woods Murders, the witness became a dairy farmer "who finds himself a suspect in a double homicide just because he reported the crim...See the full content of this document
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