I was in a black mood when I left the store that afternoon, angry at Marina and sore from unloading stock all day. If I’d been smart, I would have headed straight back to my house and stayed put. But my mother was there, waiting like a broody hen, ready to ask how my day had gone.

I wheeled my bike into the street and pedalled away, feeling his cool gaze on my back.

A group of younger boys was in the field beyond the school whacking a baseball around and whooping it up. They’d been in the store buying sodas earlier, where they’d been warned to keep their voices down and wait their turn at the counter. I knew every one of them by name, such is the closeness of a small town, and now, hearing the crack of the ball on the bat, and their shouts, a darker feeling swept over me.

I was trapped in this place. While Marina visited Harveston and Boston, meeting up with the world, I hauled pickle barrels in Riley’s back room, where not even my father looked in on me anymore. He’d given up trying to make me into something he could like.

I set out toward the back country, down a road I’d seldom biked which wound away from the sea, past rocky farmland and shrub-clogged forests. The November daylight began to fade and still I went on, furiously at times, suddenly in a rage that even one-eyed Tom Morrison was no longer specially mine. He was Billy Brady’s friend, and Billy’s father’s before that. The free life he led came out of weakness and retreat, not anything strong he could pass on to me. He was as likely as anyone to bend before the wind.

I rode on through the darkening landscape. Over an hour passed before I thought of going back. My legs had begun to ache. The sun was down by then, and the road dim. An eerie silence rose on all sides and I was suddenly aware that I was far, far out in the country. I was turning to head home when the sound of tires came from the bend ahead. I flicked on my bicycle lamp and drew to the side.

The vehicle, driving without headlights, rode toward me with a ghostly quiet. As it passed, I recognized the whir of a muffled engine and glanced back over my shoulder. It was a Ford coup, one tail-light out.

The vehicle braked, stopped, and began to reverse direction. A moment later the car came up in back of me and I squeezed over a second time to let it by. But it hung back and, little by little, moved up closer until I felt the heat of the motor on my legs.

“Come ahead!” I yelled, gesturing for the driver to go past. He would not. When I looked back to see what the trouble was, a face pushed up close to the windshield and broke into a toothy grin.

Fear spiked through me. Even so, I couldn’t believe that anyone could mean me harm. A game is what I thought, and for another hundred yards, I played my part by riding as far to the left-hand side as possible without going in the woods. Finally, with a roar, the big roadster pulled out to pass and I thought I’d be left in peace. But that was not to be. With stealthy calm, the vehicle moved up until the broad side windows were abreast of me. Out of the corner of one eye, I saw faces through the glass.

“Hey! Give me some room!” I called out.

There was no response, and in the next second I saw that I wasn’t to be allowed even my slim edge of road. The side of the car moved closer until, with a last impatient swerve, it struck me. I lost my balance and went flying into the woods where a darkness darker than night dropped over me.

Lots of adventure and mystery. (VOYA)

Riveting mystery and nonstop adventure. (School Library Journal)

In the Notes of Black Duck, you stated that the story came to you through a memory of your father’s and that the story is based on a true event. Tell us more about how this true story was relayed to you to enable you to tell it so vividly—your father’s input? through your own research?

My father was eight in 1929, the year the rumrunning boat Black Duck was fired on by a Coast Guard cutter across our bay, near Newport, Rhode Island. He knew little of this particular incident first-hand. Stories of smuggling and rum runners were everywhere in his coastal community, though, and he and his pals had sharp ears. A few hundred yards from Dad’s family house, at the end of a rural lane, lay a beach where he often swam and played. The place was visible from his bedroom window, and it was here, he later told me and my brothers that, waking late one night, he saw an eruption of lights and action. Rumrunners! He knew them at once and never forgot the dark thrill of watching that secret, illegal landing.

If I were to point to a single spark that ignited the writing of the book Black Duck, this would be it. My father’s memory touched my imagination in a most visceral way. As a child, I knew the lane and the beach. (I know them today.) I saw the dark figures my father described, the incoming boat, the flickering headlights. I felt, and never forgot, his excitement.

A few years ago, I became interested in the Black Duck shooting as a part of Rhode Island’s colorful Prohibition history. After reading newspaper articles from those times, I knew I wanted to write about them. But history, even if it has taken place just across the bay, is a distant thing. Live memory is quite another. In the end, it wasn’t the research I did, but the landing my father witnessed as a child that made this story luminous and real in my mind. Armed with his eyes and memory, I could write the scenes close up, as if I’d been there, because in a way I was.

Since your career began as a journalist it’s not surprising tha the premise of this story was very appealing: a budding journalist hunting down a story, and the use of articles about the event interspersed. How did you come to use this approach?

Actually, Black Duck was written unframed in the first couple of drafts. That is, the character of the young would-be journalist David Peterson didn’t exist, and neither did the old Ruben Hart. The novel opened with the boys Jeddy and Ruben discovering the murdered body on Coulter’s Beach, and the story proceeded as a straight, third-person narrative. Three quarters of the way through the writing though, I ran into a dead zone. Every writer knows these places. They’re where the tension collapses, the story’s forward motion stops, the characters droop and the writer falls asleep at his/her desk out of sheer boredom.

Dead zones mean something is wrong with the plot. To go forward, you may have to go back and rework things. When I went back, I saw that what my story needed was more perspective. It was too one-dimensional, just a bunch of episodic adventures, like a comic book. I experimented around and finally discovered that if I reframed the narrative, I could move it again and give it deeper meaning. So David Peterson was born, and I was able to use my own experiences as a young reporter to fill out his character. With him also came the old Ruben Hart, a character who immediately fascinated me. His voice became the voice of the novel. From there on, I had clear sailing to the end.

The main difficulty with writing historical fiction is the danger of historical fact pile-up. A lot of historical fiction I read seems to suffer from this. After reading about and researching an era, a writer tends to want to put everything he/she has learned into the book. I’m no exception. I want to show off what I know and make sure my readers “get the feel” of whatever olden time I’m into.

That’s the trap. Too much historical detail is a killer to a novel. (Too much contemporary detail would have the same effect on a contemporary novel.) Facts weigh down fiction. The characters can’t move; they’re crashing into the set design and wearing too much period clothing. I’ve come to believe that readers can get more history from the voice of a story than from larded-into-the-text descriptions of old-fashioned ways.

I do the research and take the notes and revel in the amazing details of history as much as anyone, but when it comes time to write, I try to put all that aside. The story comes first. I let the scenery fade into the background, where it belongs.

One of the strange truths I came upon growing up is that the rock-solid, old-fashioned Truth I was taught to admire and aspire to as a child doesn’t really exist. There is no truth, no law, no absolute understanding of a situation that is always right. Exception is continually tempering the rules. If you are a realist, you must pick and choose your moral high ground, and even then be ready to shift as new facts come in.

Many of my books are woven with threads of these human dilemnas: What is right? What is wrong? What to do when two rights collide? In my novel Afternoon of the Elves, Hillary steals food from a store to help her friend who is in need. Is this right? In The Art of Keeping Cool, Robert reports suspicious spying activities of the German painter Abel Hoffman to the police. But man is innocent and this action leads to his death. How should Robert feel?

Black Duck paints the problem of belief in Truth, the Always-Right kind, in starker colors. Ruben’s friend Jeddy commits a betrayal of the most egregious nature because he can’t see how to shift his ground, how to weigh truth against truth and come out on the right side. It’s Ruben’s special agony to have to witness this failure and the havoc it causes, and to try to forgive his friend.

This story is very visual. Do you have thoughts about your books becoming or compared to films?

If Black Duck were to become a film, I’d go to see it and probably be disappointed. Books often don’t translate well to the silver screen, at least in the eyes of their authors. This is understandable. We writers have an array of voices, pacing strategies and literary techniques we use to bring our stories to life, and these are very different from the camera angles and editing techniques a film’s director must employ to get his screen effects. These differences affect the content of a work as well. Subtleties of plot and characterization that I might consider essential to my novel might be scrapped or reinterpreted by the film’s scriptwriter or director in the interest of making a box-office success. Even if I were the script-writer, there’s no guarantee my novel would remain intact, as many authors have discovered. Occasionally a novel is translated well into film. I think the movie To Kill a Mockingbird is tremendously evocative, and a fitting extension of Harper Lee’s novel.

How did you become an author of juvenile fiction?

There really isn’t much difference, in my mind at least, between writing ‘juvenile’ fiction and writing all the other kinds: say ‘literary’, ‘romance’, ‘science fiction’, ‘experimental’, ‘confessional’, etc. These are categories that marketers of books have cooked up to identify certain groups of readers and sell to them more efficiently. Readers themselves are notoriously free-wheeling when it comes to what catches their attention.

As a child, I read the books my parents left lying around, with no particularly bad effects. As a mother, I read books my daughter was reading in her 4th, 5th, 6th grade classes, and wasn’t disabled either. In both cases, I found interesting books and boring ones, stories that gave me something and others I didn’t bother to finish. Because the main characters in BLACK DUCK are 14-year-old boys, the book marketers have targeted the book to kids who are around fourteen, or perhaps boys who aspire to that age. I didn’t write the story to fit into that category. I’d hope that all different kinds of people would read the book, for all different kinds of reasons, and that some, from the depths of whatever category they’ve been shoved into, would come away with a feeling of satisfaction.

My favorite writers as a kid were: Beatrix Potter, J.R.R. Tolkien ("The Ring Trilogy". Back then, it wasn’t famous. Tolkien was a little-known British author.) William Pene DuBois (especially,The Twenty-One Ballons). Elizabeth Speare (The Witch of Blackbird Pond.) Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped and The Mysterious Island.(Our dad liked these last two and read them to us.) Margaret Rawlings’ The Yearling. It’s great that so many of these wonderful authors’ books are still around and being read.

Now I read and admire: Cather, Woolf, Italo Calvino, Marquez, Alice Munro, E.B. White, Muriel Spark, Rumer Godden, Eudora Welty, Joan Didion, and many, many others. I also like to read poetry and biographies.

What projects do you have on the horizon?

I don’t like to tell what I’m working on. As in any good plot, there’s nothing like the element of surprise.