Tips and Resources From Your Paul Doiron Book Club Friends:

Paul Doiron’s first book in his popular Mike Bowditch Mysteries series earned him instant acclaim and introduced readers to his rugged and heroic games warden, Mike Bowditch. Paul has gone on to write fifteen installments and over half a dozen short stories featuring the fictional detective. 

Doiron’s own love and experience of the great outdoors in Maine (he’s a Registered Maine Guide) provides the mysteries with an authenticity and detail that readers love. With a background in journalism and being the editor for Down East: The Magazine of Maine, Paul says his first love has always been crime fiction. He says, “The crime genre was my first love — I remember devouring all the Sherlock Holmes stories as a kid — so I’m like the man who breaks up with a woman and then realizes, years after the fact, that she was right for him all along.”

He wrote The Poacher’s Son (the first Mike Bowditch novel) for himself. “[M]y goal was simply to write the book I myself wanted to read but couldn’t find anywhere else. I had no commercial aspirations for the novel whatsoever. I was doing lots of writing about Maine for Down East, but the magazine has its own voice and editorial stance, and I needed a place to record my personal experience of growing up here, a place where I could be profane and sexy and a bit of a trickster. Fiction also allows you to get past the distracting details that can bedevil nonfiction.”