The S. L. Wadsworth & Son store in Eastport has a prominent display of books by local mystery writer Sarah Graves. The display, offering copies of all her novels, has resulted in the sale of 500 books since the display was set up last June, according to Wadsworth’s staffer Alan Foster.
Now Wadsworth’s is many things. It’s a hardware store where you can buy anything from a handful of nails to a mackerel jig. In a neighboring annex, it’s a gift shop. And it’s the nation’s oldest ship chandlery.
What Wadsworth’s is not is a bookstore. But then Sarah Graves isnt an ordinary mystery writer, either. Her eight novels – a ninth will be published in January – are set in Eastport and its environs. They’re all part of a series called “Home Repair Is Homicide,” and they actually include house repair tips.
In fact, Graves and her husband live in and are restoring an Eastport house not unlike the 1823 Federal occupied by Graves’s fictional sleuth Jacobia Tiptree. Wadsworth’s often appears in print as a resource for Tiptree. And Graves allows that she and her husband have paid a visit or two to the store as well.
“We’re not involved a project at the moment,” Graves said early in November. “We’re contemplating what the next project should be to take us through the winter. There are, as you can imagine, plenty to choose from.”
Asked how she came to write murder mysteries, Graves goes back to her childhood in Oconto, Wisconsin, “When I was a little girl, about 10 years old, I visited an aunt who lived nearby. She an attic room, and one day I opened the door. The room was completely empty except for this enormous pile of books. Being a bookish child, I investigated and discovered it was a pile of mystery novels. This was the golden age of mysteries – Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Mignon Eberhart, Josephine Tey – and that was just the top layer.”
Graves continued, “I started reading, and something must have sunk in, not that I would ever compare myself to these greats. I’m only saying that some little influence must have rubbed off. Later when I began to write seriously the influence reappeared.”
She makes it clear that she lives in Eastport by choice.
“We had lived 90 miles from Manhattan for a long time,” Graves says. “So we began looking for a place to relocate. It was getting very crowded and very expensive – and getting more so all the time.”
She didn’t hit on Eastport right away. “We looked around: Colorado, Kansas, Missouri – and of course I’m from Wisconsin so we looked there – Maryland, Delaware, up and down the East Coast even all the way down to Key West and all the way up to Maine, right up to Eastport.”
Graves continued, “We had to see what was at the end of this road. When we got here, we found this big old house. Well, things kind of fell the right way – we got a couple of lucky breaks, plus a wonderful coincidence that enabled us to move.”
She paused, “It was a couple of days before Christmas; it was snowing hard, and we were here.”
Graves says living in Eastport and dealing with a New York publisher has not been a problem.
“There are two ways to deal with the business end. There are people who live within commuting distance, and they probably have more of a physical presence in the business, but I think there’s something to be said for writing in ignorance of it. When you come right down to it, I’m just a regular person with an unusual job. In any event, it has turned out right for me personally and creatively. And of course it helps that you can now email a whole book to your publisher.”
Graves has received her share of critical acclaim. The Boston Herald stated: “Anyone who can mix slaughter and screwdrivers is a genius.”
But how many mystery writers have books on sale at the nation’s oldest ship chandlery?