Art and Murder on Cape Cod

The first novel from Boston native Stephen Anable, The Fisher Boy (Reviews, Mar. 3), provides a vivid picture of the Cape Cod resort community of Provincetown.

What prompted you to set your mystery on Cape Cod?

My grandfather—nine or so times removed—helped found the town of Barnstable in the 1600s, and I’ve visited the Cape since I was a child. Resorts intrigue me. They can be places where people live a little dangerously, have the extra drink, buy the wacky T-shirt, get a tattoo and generally push the envelope. Wherever people take risks, there’s always the chance for drama—or worse. I spent lots of time in P’town walking Herring Cove beach at night so that the place where Mark Winslow, my lead character, finds the body of his ex-schoolmate, Ian Drummond, would be accurate and recognizable.

You’ve spent much of your career writing business articles for companies like Digital and HP. Was this background any help in writing fiction?

My work in corporate communications involved writing speeches and video scripts using another person’s “voice” for executives, actors and narrators. Then, like Mark Winslow, I joined an improv comedy troupe, creating characters onstage at a moment’s notice, all great preparation for writing The Fisher Boy.

Your title refers to a nearly century-old painting of a nude teenager holding a giant halibut by a fictional artist named Thomas Royall. Did you have a real painting in mind?

I had no actual painting in mind for the fictional Fisher Boy, although many wonderful artists depicted Cape Cod fishermen at the turn of the last century (always with their clothes on, by the way!). I’ve always been fascinated by artists’ communes like the one I portray in the novel, because writers and artists are often so solitary. When they get together, I wonder, do they collaborate or clash, “cross-fertilize” or get on each other’s nerves?

Are you raising social and political issues in The Fisher Boy?

My improv comedy troupe played a couple of clubs in Provincetown and we were heckled one night like the scene in the book depicting a dispute between Mark and Ian. Some of the novel’s characters have strong political beliefs, but I’m more interested in the personalities that underlie and shape those beliefs rather than their politics. Politics should be something we participate in but not read about in literature.

What’s next?

I imagine I’ll write more mysteries. Right now, I’m working on a novel about a family in Massachusetts during the 1920s and how we use the past—which memories we retain and which we revise, and why.