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By Root 587 0

thriving fishing communities of as many as six hundred people lived on the Isles of Shoals. In the eighteenth century, American patriots, fearing that the islands harbored Tories, dismantled several dozen houses and floated them across the sea to the coast of New Hampshire and Maine where many of them still stand today. In the early twentieth century, children who were raised on this small archipelago never saw cars or trees until they were adults. On March 5, 1873, two women, Norwegian immigrants, were brutally murdered on the island of Smuttynose. A third woman fled and survived by hiding in a sea cave until dawn. When she was found the next morning, nearly frozen to death in her blood-soaked nightgown, she said the murderer was a man named Louis Wagner — a man about Portsmouth, a sometime fisherman, a journeyman, a vagabond. Wagner was arrested the next day in Boston and brought back to Portsmouth. Passions were running so high in that city that when Wagner was taken off the train, he was nearly stoned to death. Later, Wagner was tried, convicted, and hanged for the double murders. It was the last public execution in the state of Maine. Since that time, and continuing into the present, many people have speculated that the wrong person was hanged.

Captivated by the spirit of the islands as well as the details of the double murder, which I learned about when we motored into Portsmouth later that first day for provisions, I sat on a berth in the boat and wrote a six-page short story called “Silence at Smuttynose.” (A title, by the way, that when I proposed it for the name of my eventual novel about the murders, was greeted by my editor and my agent with disbelief.) The story, the first I ever wrote, was published in the Cimarron Review. I received as payment six contributor’s copies. I was as happy with that payment and the publication of the story as I have been about any publication or payment since.

Several years ago, while cleaning out a box in the attic, I came across that extremely modest short story. I opened the Review and looked at the first page, and I knew at once I was not done yet.

I was no stranger to the charms of the New England landscape when I first went to the Isles of Shoals. I grew up in Dea-ham and went to Tufts. I lived in Cambridge and in Boston. I taught high school in Hingham and in Reading. I have family in Amesbury and Milton and Duxbury. I spent many childhood summer vacations in Maine and on Cape Cod. So why this rock then and not another? Why the light on this particular window and not another? Why this woman and not another? I do not have a profound understanding as to why certain places can be triggers to the imagination, why this landscape and not another can evoke an entire narrative, why houses and sea caves and scrub pine may become characters in their own hymns and psalms. I do know, however, that I follow a long line of writers whose work was inspired, at least in part, by the place — so much so in some cases that the mere mention of a town, real or imaginary, can conjure up the entire work: Starkfield. Tarbox. New Bedford. Salem. Grover’s Corner. New London. St. Botolphs. I also know that it is folly to speculate too much about the magic of inspiration, which can dissipate as easily as fog on a late summer morning. It is enough for me that it works.

Of course, a novel, will take on ideas and develop themes and characters. It would not otherwise be a novel, but rather a sort of poem. And ultimately, the work must transcend the place. But I believe that the place tells me the story. At the very least, it makes me ask a lot of questions.

Who, for example, were the women of the Isles of Shoals? And the rude fishermen they lived with? Did these women go mad from the isolation? From the poverty? From the stink of porgies and cod and hake that had gotten into the floorboards and would not come out? Did the islands shape these women in the same way the relentless east wind seemed to have bent the witchgrass? And if so, what really happened on the night of March 5, 1873, in the cramped