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Check out this interview with Bill Eidson about
his new series: Partially for marketing reasons. A series gives readers the comfort of knowing what kind of characters they’ll be spending time with. But more than anything, I liked the way Jack Merchant and Sarah Ballard turned out. Merchant is a genuinely laid back guy in most ways—until he’s not. And Sarah is someone I’d like to know, even if she’s not the easiest personality. How did you get the idea of repossessing boats as a jumping off point for a story? A friend was telling me about a sailboat he bought from a marine repo company. After listening to a few of the stories my friend picked up, I was intrigued. I interviewed the owner of a marine repossession business down in Connecticut, and it struck me that there really was potential here. People do sail away to escape problems in their lives—and the people who repossess their boats must act very much like detectives in finding them. Mind you, Jack Merchant doesn’t own the marine repo business, Sarah does…and in my future books, the repo business will only apply in only the most tangential ways. Essentially, Jack is a guy on the waterfront who repossesses what has been lost: it could be a boat, money, a reputation—or a person. Areas around Boston play prominently in The Repo. Aside from its beauty, what made you select Boston’s waterfront as the setting for The Repo? I always knew if I started a series, it would be set in this marina in Charlestown. Years ago, I considered buying an ageing wooden boat to live aboard until the marine surveyor pointed out the dry rot. He calculated that I’d be swimming the first hard blow in January. So I let the moment slip by, but not the idea. Around Boston Harbor I’ve got access to just about any kind of person I can imagine, criminal and otherwise. And the visuals are something else—I’ve got the light and motion of an active marina and the backdrop of the Boston skyline. It’s just a great location from which to tell a story. Jack and Sarah also find their way to a number of other locations, such as Portland, ME; Portsmouth, NH; and other points west of Boston. Sarah’s repo yard is down in New Bedford. So did the Charlestown location give you the idea for the story? Well, I came up with the story at a rather strange time in my life. About five months before I began The Repo, I was diagnosed with leukemia. I was very lucky, the chemo worked, my cancer went into remission immediately (and has remained so since). So around January of the next year, I started drafting ideas for my next book. I had about four solid ideas that I was discussing with my agent, with The Repo being one of them. Then I had one of those days that just seemed to point the direction. Almost on a whim, I grabbed my camera one bitterly cold morning and headed out. I went down near the Portsmouth Naval Yard and back to the Charlestown Marina…and I ran into a guy who was heading back to his boat. I’d been sailing since I was a kid, but I’d never actually been on a live aboard boat during the winter. He was kind enough to show me his boat. And then I went to the Charles River basin and looked at those powerful locks used to balance the tidal flow between Boston Harbor and the Charles River. I got to talking with a state police officer in the Marine Division there. And I just got that feeling that I’ve come to recognize—when ideas gel and a story is ready to begin. So I drafted the first couple of chapters and told my agent, The Repo was the story I’d write, and that I wanted it to be a series Your stories almost all have some influence of the sea. What’s your sailing background? Nothing dramatic. Just messing around with boats since I was about ten years old. My father loved sailing. I grew up in Rhode Island about a mile from Narragansett Bay. When I was sixteen, a friend, Jim McNeil, and I bought an absolute hulk of a Beetle Cat sailboat. It took us almost two years to rebuild it. Then we sold it and bought a much nicer boat, a nineteen-foot Hampton, and sailed all around the bay, camping out on some of the islands. Then I worked at a local marina for a couple of summers—I painted docks, and did some scuba diving to clean boat bottoms, and I help set moorings, all that kind of stuff. As time went on, my family got a very nice forty-footer and a mooring in Newport. We did a lot of cruising. My wife and I chartered a boat for our honeymoon in the Virgin Islands, and then came back and did it again with my son. And I’m still sailing with Jim, only now on his thirty-footer up in Maine. Basically, I’ve put in lots of time sailing small boat and I’ve got an abiding love for spending time on the water. Photography seems to play an important role in several of your books and it’s an element in The Repo. Why? That’s true. Jack Merchant is sort
of adrift in life. Now that he’s out of the DEA, he looks
into turning one of his previous undercover roles into something
real—a pro photographer.
This will be a stronger element in some of the upcoming books.
When I was researching my fifth book about a photojournalist, Frames
Per Second, I got into photography. I’ve done a little bit
of pro work since, some weddings and brochure work. I was impressed
with how photographers see the world. They really have to be sort
of artist/adventurers—able to go out and interact with the
real world and capture their “story” at 1/1000th of
a second if need be. I thought that was pretty remarkable. I also
found that as I wrote from the point of view of a character who
was a photographer, I could convey imagery just a little more sharply—without
burdening the story with too much unnecessary detail. Do you see movie potential for Jack and Sarah? I’d
be delighted, naturally. Three of my books have been optioned
for movies Can you tell us a little bit about your next book involving Jack Merchant and Sarah Ballard? I had The Mayday open aboard a sloop beating along the Rhode Island coastline. The father of a young family is at the helm while his wife and two children sleep below. He feels in control even as the wind increases—but minutes later, a hidden weakness in his boat is revealed, and he finds himself desperately trying to save his family. Weeks later, he arrives at Jack Merchant’s marina in Charlestown with a story about his boat sinking and about waking in the hospital alone. He has only the most fragmentary memories to suggest that anything more than a simple tragedy had occurred—including scattered thoughts about a power yacht that responded to his Mayday. Even he can’t be sure if the memories are real or created out of his own despair. Jack’s task, if he’s willing to take it, is to find a yacht that perhaps never existed, and a family that is almost certainly gone forever. I’m still deep into writing this story right now, but so far, so good. I’ll tell you this—I’m enjoying putting Jack and Sarah back to work. |